Ghazzy, Truditoru and others have finished the spectre spreadsheet

The crab isn't surprising in the least, the number of times that literal villain has killed me.

The games early access it’s almost like they’re testing the game lmao. Everyone acts like it’s full release.

Guess this feature comes in pre-nerfed. Excellent friction.

i spectered a quil crab as soon as i could and used it ever since. those fuckers way too strong.

Hilarious, it's a shame though that kind of gameplay could have been fun.

That's crazy. Less than 0.5% viable. I would like to say it's exaggeration, but these guys definitely know their stuff. Ideally it would be like at least 50% viable? Man.

SOOOO much work for such a trash outcome

well done GGG dev time well spent

Now that qa testing is done by the community , they can start working on fixes.

100% expected this and not surprised. What a bummer

Faridun Impaler is the most aesthetically pleasing. Really wish they buff specters as some of the abilities don’t do damage at all.

The video showed name mobs with unique abilities. Not sure what happened to that.

Imagine putting a considerable time and effort from the devs on this skill gem to make only 2 out of 425 viable. A questionable decision at the very least

Hopefully theres a team member who gets assigned to pokemon duty, who just balances and makes each of these a proper spectre eventually. Its a cool feature but if it works perfectly it would be an actual selling point to many new players

Time to nerf those crabs and guards.

Vaal Guard is probably the best one DPS-wise, but range is quite meh and the damaging grenades take 1.5s to explode which is sad (the oil ones take 1.3s and can also detonate on contact with enemy, but the high damage ones don't). Storm Mages are still the best by far for clear. Crab is ok for clear but cannot compete with storm mages sadly.

I wouldn't say this is 425 'tested' to be endgame viable.

Just looking through the spreadsheet there are a lot of monsters highlighted in yellow that come down to 'more testing required' and 'looks really promising'. Much like the weapon swap skill set system, I think build creators will need to cook a bit longer before we write it off.

Spectres don't have cold/lightning/fire tags, right? So they aren't really an option since you need to maximize their damage for endgame and there are really nice options for that - +4lvl shield, +1lvl rings. I guess storm mages are the only viable minions atm.

I just watched that Ghazzy video on it, thats just insane to think they are all that bad. it’s basically only 1 that’s good for maps and the other being too slow.

The flying mosquito and utzaal raider, terracotta warriors, lettered monstruosity are endgame viable as per video posted here.

So it really questions the conclusion of this massive spreadsgeet

Yeah,the devs are not playing their own game,no auction house in order to hide what a garbage game it is behind unobtainable gear. I hope the law against coins in game comes faster to the eu so these so called devs can feel some financial presure. I cannot even understand how stupid you have to be to turn a game with overwhlmingly positive on steam ti a mostly negative. But did they realise or do something about it,YES,thhey reset recent reviews ok steam. The game was advertised as a huge amalgam of skills and weapons that work on any class,but now you can only use skills based on the weapon u have so it leaves so so many comboa unobtainable. All in all,it was and still is falsw advertising and we should all mass request a refund.

This spreadsheet just confirms specters are a meme.

Scarecrow Beast is my Amazon's best buddy. His attacks and the way he slow shuffles around is badass.

Tame Beast, you can check all 'Beast' spectres And apply same conclusions to it.

Except, its way worse as your spirt increases.

Beast tanks a bit, provides some minor utility (ice path, temporal buble,..). But deals 0 damage even with full investment into all companion nodes on tree.

To make it work as damage, you probably need full minion damage gear. But in that case, you're better off with just a spectre of same beast... or you know, anything else.

(PS. minion damage doesn't transfer to player via Loyality* node that says all Companion damage also affects player).

The quill crab is slow, while the Vaal Guards get stuck in each other a lot. Oh, and that stupid transformation to that soul form, when they REFUSE to transform back to attack or even MOVE unless you go right up next to them for some reason.

Any good supporting spectres like Solar Guards and Arena master from poe1? Or are these companions only mods?

no one complaining about the FPS drops with Vaal Guards? makes them unusable in a party.

Well this sure is good data for GGG. Nerf the remaining 2 to achieve BaLaNcE.

Just like there are 400 skill gems and only 4 are end game usable

Im playing cultist archers and having a great time, can do most content, might struggle with higher lvl arbiters, still got gear to upgrade tho

I tried using the quarterstaff that reduces reservation of everything to 50%. Then i use gear that grants me lots of spirit + reduced spirit reservation for undead minions + reduced spirit reservation from the tree. Turns out i can literally have armies of spectres.

Tried using these mushroom wizards that they spawn tons of explosions on the floor and it seems really good, clear and damage. The only bad thing is the bug that they stay in wisp form sometimes.

I still have to find a +3 lvl to minions amulet +2 lvl to minions helmet and that unique jewel that gives +3 more lvls to spectre skill. That way playing spectres might be endgame viable.

It’s actually missing the Archer Transendant that fires lightning arrows

Thank you for posting!

Huge props to Truditoru and all the guys who commented/posted on that excel file.....massive community effort.

There are other viable specters for endgame....it's just.....why bother making a build and posting it.....if LS has 10 times better damage, clear, speed etc....

So what's the TLDR: minions still suck ass, or just spectres?

your summary is wrong

also Ghazzy didnt actually participate much at all to be credited specifically imo.

Quill Crab is not good, it is one of the better spectres but nowhere near comparable with Vaal Guards, I took part in this sheet and Cultist Archers are better than Quill Crabs in most circumstances and especially once you have enough spirit to run an amount of Cultist Archers that negates the cooldown window on their Toxic Rain.

Trudi specifically asked me if I think the Crab should be marked the same as the Vaal Guard and my initial though was yes after seeing the coverage it achieves. But further using it and playing with it myself completely reversed my opinion.

Cultist Archers imo are the best spectres at least with late game gear. I am not going to consider Vaal Guards, I did play with them a lot but I could not take the visual polution they cause as well as maxing out my 4070 fan speed constantly.

Vaal Guards are not even strictly better than Cultist Archers. Cultist Archers are really strong at map layouts that do not block off the toxic rains, maps that have open spaces and long corridors.

Vaal Guards do not have that problem, but Vaal Guards are bad against bosses that move a lot.

Spirit needs a rework as well.

Both as a resource and as a cost.

Well we only have the first 3 acts available, it does make sense that a lot of the monsters in the early acts wont be as strong for endgame. Its also early access and it was introduced a couple weeks ago. Jonathan said that they have hundredss of monsters in the later acts that arent in the game yet.

Most of the issues with spectres I think is the cost but GGG just relied on a single algorithm to to create the cost for each one.

It'll take time but either GGG has to fine tune the algorithm over several passes or they needs someone fully dedicated going over the results from the algo and adjusting individually. A good in between I suppose is to have spectre cost looked into in batches per update but there are clearly major flaws in the rules the algo used to make up the spectre cost

Thats cool now they know which 3 to nerf to make them all equally bad!

A spreadsheet for a game... just go play and have fun. Shits sad

Pretty sure they could literally half all the spirit costs and there still wouldn’t be many viable

that's 2 too many, deserved for playing minions lol

I wish there were ways to make most spectres viable. I would like a faridun bladedancer army.

now with beast, serpent chaman with additional projectiles and increased aoe is 5 gigantic Aoe with overlap

The problem with the spectres isn't the cost, it's the scalling. a level 20 gem gives a level 40 monster (some people in the ghazzy discord confirmed that via .gpk), which is waaay too low. The gem itself doesn't have explicit values to scale anything and just scales the level of the monster. So you have base value of damage that is absurdly low and no multiplicatives to scale it. Even if the spirit cost is lowered, we can't scale the damage anyways

I just wanted to use skeletal mages and 3-4 of the Trex guys in act 2 /-:

I know it doesnt feel great - but Im happy they undershot instead of overshot the power level of spectres. Which generally aligns with this most recent balance pass.

Given how they wanted Spectres to work - im actually shocked they bothered to implement them at all, it seems like far too much work for the payoff in my eyes. Could have just added more minion types - and not need to balance 400+ individual monsters all the time.

So what is the best go to spectre?

Monster balance won't be good for players, not really a big surprise in my opinion. If the mobs had the type of power, speed, damage distribution, etc that players want as spectres then mobs would be 10,000x more frustrating. There's no way they were going to do a full player balance pass on every single monster type at this point in early access, it'll take some time to tweak things into place and it's probably not very high priority. I say this as someone that mains minion builds in everything I play, it's not like I'm stoked on it but it's just the obvious reality of the situation. It makes way more sense for them to focus on other stuff before they commit a few hundred hours of labor to getting one skill perfectly into place that will undoubtedly get thrown out of wack every time they add new support gems, new ascendancies, new skills, and of course even more monster types.

I personally like having a couple Undertakers with my cold skeleton mages build, especially playing on controller where it's not easy to aim the command skill into the center/back of packs, they help penetrate groups and clean up stragglers with their cold soul rend type skill. The DoT from it doesn't stack but I have plenty of skeletons and spirit that the increased coverage from having a 2nd spectre feels worth it. They're also nice because they don't completely shit up my screen.

They feel like regular minions doing cosplay.