Install Steam
login
|
language
简体中文 (Simplified Chinese)
繁體中文 (Traditional Chinese)
日本語 (Japanese)
한국어 (Korean)
ไทย (Thai)
Български (Bulgarian)
Čeština (Czech)
Dansk (Danish)
Deutsch (German)
Español - España (Spanish - Spain)
Español - Latinoamérica (Spanish - Latin America)
Ελληνικά (Greek)
Français (French)
Italiano (Italian)
Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian)
Magyar (Hungarian)
Nederlands (Dutch)
Norsk (Norwegian)
Polski (Polish)
Português (Portuguese - Portugal)
Português - Brasil (Portuguese - Brazil)
Română (Romanian)
Русский (Russian)
Suomi (Finnish)
Svenska (Swedish)
Türkçe (Turkish)
Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese)
Українська (Ukrainian)
Report a translation problem
Discussions Rules and Guidelines
2 
Report this post
Yes, generally, the description of a Power (like Buff, Minion, Projectile) is a good guide to know what modifiers affect it but clearly it's not the case here because Shadow Clones actually DO scale from Minion modifiers. I don't have a proper build to test if Minion Damage works too but stacking gear with Minion Health and Additional Minions multipliers caused both the health and amount of Shadow Clones to increase.
------
Wow, testing this skill was actually really interesting. I've just had to rewrite a bunch of things. First I noticed that my maximum hp, maximum mana, attack damage and skill damage were all going down per clone summoned and I did some math to work out how much by per clone but I just realised that if you stack all 8 Buff Strength modifiers found in the Feral class to Shadow Clones, you can completely negate the stat reduction. So for a Shadow Clone build the Feral class appears essential (unless you can stack 160% buff strength multiplier on gear / glyphs?)
What I am now unsure of and unable to test right now is if that negation holds as you increase your clones to 4,5,6,etc but for now with 3 clones at least there is no stat penalty with 8 Buff Strength modifiers (160% buff strength multiplier).
Someone should also test if Minion Damage and Skill Multiplier works as well.
Honestly there is a lot more to this skill than meets the eye
Wow I didn't even realize that the buffs took all of that from you. I am at 200% summon so I get 4 clones when I am actually doing things, so watching the health (still Hell 1 on this build, hit 50 about 20 minutes ago from me posting) going from 2.8~ k to 1.4 to 600 with no buff mult. made me realize why I felt so squishy in some scenarios. Thanks for the information.
I've been doing some tiny tests (Feral, Hashashin, Adept) to try and see how my build is currently, and it's kind of tough to get the numbers to be as baseline as possible. I removed as much fury as I could and am testing minion damage between 259% and 321% (not too many glyph choices for me atm, too many compounds needing specific types, etc) and the numbers do sometimes look a bit higher on the 321%, but the difference is a bit too close to tell properly. I also have to deal with multiple elements proccing and trying to guess if the hits and crits are from those are the minions attacking while I'm hitting target dummies is annoying.
---
Alright, tried to make some adjustments as I went back and tested, still a bit hard to tell, but full buff multiplier is essential to 1) Keep your stats where they are. 2) To by extension scale the abilities of your summons. You're doing triple DPS in the best case when you hit 100% clones in their stat bar.. 3) Keep your Shadows around as long as possible. Realistically you probably have skill triggers of some kind ( I Use on transform, damage taken, and crits, and more to keep the charges up on my skills if anything).
Also fun fact, having Tiger proc while in the form through this increases the duration, not refresh. Very neat.
My personal belief is that if Minion health and Additional Minions stack for the minions you're summoning, it stands to reason that minion damage should do so as well. Its hard to tell where the fine line is of course between making yourself more powerful, but I will say 8 buffs does too much to ignore putting on your shadow clones. Best case scenario, your skill if not linked to any other skill you'll need only 160% buff strength from the 8 skills to have no drain from shadow clones. If you have your skill in an optimal position with no other skill piggybacking off the modifiers, you should have access to 17 total mods. This means taking the 8 buff str's into account you'll have 9 other mods to play around with. With Were Tiger on mine, I'm looking at 16 mods and needing to get buff strength from something else.
Also right now my clones are not at cap and so have 98% stats of my stats. I have checked my health. 4 clones leaves me at 2391 from my original 2593 health. Dividing from 2593 gives me a result of 92.2%, meaning each clone takes about 2% of my stats from my character. If you have no buff strength they sit at about 70% of your character's abilities. This means that each clone is taking 30% of your stats when active. Buff Strength is top priority for clones.
As well, I'm on the fence for thinking that Skill Multiplier might also be increasing damage, but again, hard to tell between skill sharing. It does list it as a gray stat when you place it in line with clones, but I don't know if it does the same thing with the minion buffs from exorcist or sentinel for instance. If shadow clones gray out that as well, then it's open season on someone better at building than me to add skill multiplier and see for themselves.
======
For what I'm doing, I think the best choice is 160% buff from any source, skill procs to keep Clone and Weretiger charges up. Next is additional minions to whatever 100+% you can hit to have more clones on proc, 200% for 4 Clones, for instance. Would be cool to see how high you could hit while still keeping max output. Minion Damage and health for better attacks and survivability of clones, though the buff means you and them are already going to be better off. From there, a few skills to proc on hit (psychic roar and bloordreave, though I do want to have unleash just to have more skills going, but I think two combo skills might be enough).
Obviously this also comes with balancing you to be as strong as possible, but I think this is a good springboard.
Good post.
Learning about this skill gave me inspiration for a Shadow Clone basic attack build so I've currently got a Sentinel / Hashashin / Adept. The idea is to use a bow with many shadow clones to spam a huge volley of arrows stacking attack speed and it is fun so far. I've discovered you can get buff strength and buff duration multipliers anywhere from 2-18% and 5-63% respectively on lvl ~50 compound glyphs but it has been super painful grinding the buff strength to 160% all the while with Feral looming in my mind with that nice and neat row of multipliers
It just doesn't make a whole lot of sense for this build idea to go with Feral since I will be attacking from range so wont really be taking damage and Sentinel has the benefits of minion modifiers and passives like "Sharpshooter: 50% more damage at 2 range." Which honestly is an interesting subject in itself since it's one of the few, maybe only modifiers / passives in the game that words things in such a way. "50% MORE DAMAGE." If it was just a basic attack boost or some other specific thing why didn't they call it that? It almost sounds like a true 50% all damage source multiplier (who knows at what step of the damage calculation it comes in though) which was interesting enough for me to take on the headache of not taking Feral.
Since you can stack buff strength multiplier on gear and food and glyphs and Hashashin + Adept are necessary for Shadow Clones it does seem like Feral is the one class you can switch out as needed, even though it is a very attractive option obviously with not requiring grinding.
I can confirm that the "Trigger on Minion Attack" modifier from Sentinel also works in conjunction with Shadow Clones like regular minions and as far as your suspicion around modifiers listing as gray on Shadow Clones, I can confirm Minion Health (+25% more minion HP, +10% additional minions multiplier) from Sentinel indeed does list as gray when on Shadow Clones, yet it does work on it.
This is pretty important. It means we really cant trust the game on what it's telling us without testing ourselves, at the very least in regards to Shadow Clones if nothing else.
So with this new bow character I was able to do some tests.
I used my Sentinel / Hashashin / Adept and removed every single piece of gear except for a common rarity bow with no affix or suffixes. Removed all modifiers from the Shadow Clones skill except for 2 trigger on movement skills and 2 trigger on critical which together let me recast the clones for free whenever I wanted for easy testing. I removed every glyph equipped. Using a bow was helpful in testing because I could position my character such that only one clone was hitting the dummy making it super simple to test.
So at baseline I was hitting the training dummy for 133 to 161 per hit (purely from the bow). Then when I summoned 2 minions that went down to around half of those values (no buff strength multiplier bonuses obviously) and stayed consistent around 60 to 70 per hit.
Then, I added a bunch of Minion Damage glyphs to get me from 100% minion damage base value to 354% and started hitting the dummy again. There was no damage difference.
I then did the same thing but instead of minion damage I stacked skill damage glyphs. For good measure I also added as many Skill Multiplier modifiers to Shadow Clones as I could. There was no difference.
As far as these are concerned I can fairly confidently say:
Minion Damage - Does not affect Shadow Clones.
Skill Damage - Does not affect Shadow Clones
But we've also discovered:
- Minion Max HP
- Additional Minions
- Trigger on Minion Attack
- HP steal
DO affect Shadow Clones.
I'm sort of satisfied at this point and I guess the OP has a real answer now if anyone else in the world apart from us are even reading this Dizzy, but if you wanted to do some more Shadow Clone tests yourself I'd be interested to hear if Fury on Hit modifiers applies or not. Minion avoidance is a question mark but who cares about that stat really when you're recasting the clones all the time it doesn't matter.
So it seems in terms of Shadow Clone builds the most important thing to do is get your buff strength to 160% and buff duration up in whichever way you can. The easiest being just taking the Feral class. Then as far as damage goes you would simply build your character normally as if the Shadow Clones weren't there at all and they'll just scale 1:1 with you. The only other multiplier you'd want to focus on is additional minion multipliers to get more clones = multiplies your damage and potentially minion health if you are fighting close range.
The other thing I noticed about Shadow Clone builds which is in the description but I never really appreciated until I experienced it in practice is you're effectively immortal because if you die you just take over a Shadow Clone and keep going. This is even more powerful in my ranged build since an attack that killed me likely didn't touch my clones so it's not like a big cleave will completely wipe the "party" out in one go.
Anyway, this was fun. I'm gonna main this character for a while and I'll let you know just how far it can be pushed in terms of summon limit at least or if I notice anything cool. Every +50% minion multiplier you hit is 1 more clone and you can get additional minion multiplier on glyphs at 26% max per glyph if you get a god roll and I mean there's 60 glyph slots.... can you imagine having ~30 clones of yourself on the screen. Each one attacking at 100% of your power, each one proccing skills. If your character dies you have 30 other copies to instantly respawn into like some God. That's actually busted
I was hoping to do something a bit similar, only using exorcist and talismans to create a ghost hunting machine gun, shadow clones didn't even occur to me, but I'll have to see what my other class was going to be in exchange. The Weretiger was my attempt to make some nutty basic attack/skill build where you hit as hard as possible and then use dispersion + piercing mods and glyphs to clear rooms just from sheer overkill. The shadow clones and messing with them have now taken up more time than that original machine gun character who is still gathering dust on the shelf. [/quote]
Awesome! See, this is what my friend and me were arguing about when it came to the clones and minion stuff. I figured if they are summoned, they have to be categorized as something, which mean testing minion things, while my friend took to the opinion of everyone else in the thread about its a buff so add buff strength. He was right in regards to the buff strength, but it's interesting to see minion attack works perfectly fine.
Thank you going through all that work to get it set up. Though it does weird me out that minion and skill damage don't affect the clones. I guess that does open up using the glyphs for something else (though I still think two or three kulupu with some help to push to 200% is still a decent idea.
Again, thanks for laying all this out. Since I had homework to do, I instead spent an hour messing around with my build and testing it on 4 dummies in a cube layout. EDIT: I didn't mention how I tested this. Had weretiger on and off, and placed fury more on clone procs. I attacked for 1 minute on both and looked for max buffs. By clones alone I was hit no higher than 31 fury stacks, with 4 clones I was closer to 40 or 50. END EDIT. It turns out that fury on hit seems to modify only on other skills, rather than on shadow clones itself. The clones CAN proc it, but I think it's more the attack speeds, gear with fury, and whether your skills have fury proc. On the one hand, it means you're kind of more limited (depending on class) for what you can place to modify shadow clones. On the other, you're still experimenting with 9 free mods in the best case scenario.
Thanks for that. I thought it was at 100% increments so thought it was weird that you mentioned three clones in your original post. Never occurred to me to go and see why. I guess I had sub 150% minions and just jumped right to 200%+? I would like to see a clone army though, I think if you just had fury stacks on your gear and skills and went all in you'd be hitting good numbers, though certainly going your archer route with it would be much better I think. Hopefully some more people see this and test out other skills like this. Thanks again for all the help Chazz.