AUtomulch would be GREAT.

"Sedna is useless against queen since her pounce is shielded off and her AA is so pityfull we don't even have to take that in the picture. Also she is easily outdamage by spikes +shamblers."

Only time Sedna is pouncing is if you open to do ground spikes. This has the dual effect of stopping your spikes while bursting through your shield. I can't say I always and forever intreppt ground spikes but do think I get it a decent amount of the time. Even when I don't I just pop a Heal III and I'm good to go again. (Of course early game like levels 1-4 you'll be me fair and square, most poeple know Queen has a strong early game. I'm saying mid game so levels 5-9 or so)

Plus, Sedna has a stronger DPS than Queen..... so can I like, not take your AA into account? So if I pounce your spikes do you cease to exist?   That would be a pretty awesome ability for Sedna.

So lets say you are level 7. You've got Spikes III and Shield III and then Shamblers I. Not sure if that is exactly your build but that is one of the more common builds so I'm going to use it  I've probably only shopped once as Sed and I'll have gotten currency for sure, then Scaled Helm-Banded Armor-Scailmail.

If you didn't get currency you will probably most likely be able to bully me out of the way because you'll have Vlemish which means you are actually able to spam Shield and Spikes since Vlemish basically gives you 2 ability uses.

Going to also assume you have Cloak. Don't know if that is your build or not, sorry if it isn't. So you have 2500 Mana (youg et Scaled Helm-Banded Armor-Scailmail as well) which is enough for 4 of your abilities. (You summoned your shamblers at the crysatl). Anyway, this is what I'll do;

I will walk up to you engage. After you take some damage you'll shield (because you're smart and letting your monks heal you as much as possible). Then I walk away. Seriously.

I wait 20 seconds. Then I walk up to you. Engage. You take some damage, shield maybe. I walk away.

That's all I do. If you don't have Vlemish I will oom you. It takes about g'damn forever but I can do it. Once I shop a second time, hit level 9 then I say fuck it. I have counter healing, your monks are useless (mine are too mostly, since you will typically AoE them down but at least it is worth a try). And I have silence and heal III. [/quote]

 Pouncing groundspikes is a fair amount of luck... they both have a .5 sec time so the queen always have the advantage. 

Queens dps far outweighs sedna's, more and better minions(like you'll ever use yetis;-)) and can aoe most of your minions and creeps to give a massive damage boost. 

You gave the standard queen build which I personally consider poop and no I wont disclose my build. I don't see how you'll Oom me in midgame. For one with a sedna on the enemy team I'll probably have double helms, and with your particular build the queen also has around 8 mps from cloack which adds to around 55 per second. Even with this awfull build the queen will just outshield you easily.

Silence is a bitch as is heal III, but at that time queen has spikes IV(queen levels faster than sedna) and will most likely beat the shit out of your towers, in addition this is a teamgame and spikes stack immensly.

• (rephrased) The 15% damage reduction from Goddess of thorns should be put on shield instead.
  • I've looked into this. The problem is that shield absorption occurs before damage reduction (which occurs before armor mitigation). This means that there is no effect while the shield is up (it takes full damage) and when it drops the damage reduction goes with it. I could alter the damage code to have damage reduction occur before shield absorption, but then why don't I just increase the amount of damage shield soaks. I could also create another buff to be applied at the same time as the shield effect or to trigger when the shield drops.

• Also getting a new rank of mulch at 15 is massive. 2250 is a huge heal.
  • If you consider shield a heal (which it kinda is, it just creates health that does have any damage reduction), you can consider the two skills complimentary. They might then also do comparable amounts of "healing" per cast and by mana efficiency.

• Shamblers spawning with low HP means they can die to AoE right after you summon them before you can mulch, which shouldn't be happening
  • I wrote a patch for this that should hopefully be implimented into the next Demigods release.

• Players just potioning or teleporting in your face is a bit silly
  • I do like the idea that the QoT doesn't have an interupt. I know it isn't balanced in some sense, but I also like the diversity. <insert more whining about unique gameplay>

• Targeting mulch can be a bit impractical. Is it possible to make the Shamblers light up when you're casting it instead of just providing a targeting pointer?
  • Hmm. I'm not sure. I don't know if it is possible. I know there are some thing that are possible given the demigod only selection key. However it is straightforward to make it auto-mulch an existing shambler without having to click on one.

• Shamblers require too many points to max. She breaks from the other DGs here by requiring two minion stat trees, and that's not even counting morale. Either Entourage or Compost need to provide a meaningful benefit independent of Shamlbers the way Inspiring Presence does.
  • I addressed this somewhat by making Shamblers much more viable with only a single skill line. With both skill lines Shamblers are really powerful. I've never really been sold on Morale being useful for the QoT. It would be best for Lord Erebus, but he has so many good skills he doesn't typically bother with it.

• Personally I think changing Entourage into an aura would be the ideal solution, you could  pad QoT's low stats a bit with it with it and provide a unique team buff, but since Compost has a cool animation it'd be neat to see that worked with as well.
  • I've still mixed feelings on morpheas768's Nutrient Extraction revision of compost. I like my scaling debuff/buff aura idea better, but I'm not sure what would be best.

• There's just not enough mana for everything necessary to make QoT a force to be reckoned with. I'd like to see a rank IV shield cost reduction, but that's problematic since you don't really have a static mana cost on the ability the way rook towers do. I don't have a good solution.
  • I've been lowering mana costs for skills. Hopefully some of it will help out. Increasing her mana regeneration rate may be necessary. How does given her a +5 mana/second regeneration sound? (at level 1: 300 per minute, 450 per minute while in closed)

• Honestly negative armor's functionality is a bit outrageous. I know this is a QoT nerf, but it would probably make sense to give structures some armor as you rank up fortitude for them, it would help with minion swarms and Trebuchet too.
  • I replaced the static armor reduction ability of Ground Spikes with a percentage reduction. (Although it should be noted that if Erebus reduces armor into the negatives with a bite, if the target is then Ground Spiked it will actually gain armor, or lose negative armor). I'm not sure that the replacement will work out (the percentage drop needs to definitely change). It also might make more sense to make it more like Penitence and just increase damage taken by a certain amount.
  • I like the idea of giving towers armor, but I'm not sure it has a real functional purpose that couldn't be accounted for by simply increasing the health of towers. Uproot/Structural Transfer/Spit are the skills that come to mind and wouldn't be effected by the armor increase. Ground Spikes is the only structural armor reduction skill.

Didn't you just say yesterday in the General Discussion thread on Buffing the QoT in 30 minutes or less, that you would write a guide about your build?

Automulch is problematic though because you've gotta send in shamblers manually to get them into damage range. Great for healing but limits the functionality of the skill quite a bit.

Shield

You half to remember though shield is 30 seconds for a reason, and that is because it is breakable within 2-3 seconds of its cooldown. Within that time an enem can get 300-400 damage in before a second one is put up and then repeat. Shortening shield's life is not the best idea.

Shamblers

A max of six shamblers is basically an improvement than just four; she is closert to actually having an actual army while still having the quality to try and fight off others. Let's not forget while erebus night walkers are melee; they also up show shamblers in ever wa but range. I still say she need abilities that actively effect shamblers; like a skill that will shift all current shamblers on field into some different, and stronger minion. Used again it changes the shambler back to its original state.

Uproot

ou mean just to enemies in the area or to everything including the tower? Because the damage and heal was fine for towers; just not creep waves.

True, but if our using shamblers than the should already be somewhere near the frontlines attackingAnd not just behind you. If an enemy demigod wants to kill ou they literally (not counting kiting) has to run past the shamblers to you; and you not only now have hthe enemy in position but also will heal and extra damge when needed.

• Shield
  • I'm not sure where you are getting the idea that I want to shorten shield's life. I've increased lifetime to 60s and increased the amount it absorbs. The additional or replacement boosts would only function to buff it.
• Shamblers
  • v1.20 Shamblers are weak. I think you'll find these shamblers more of a match, especially with the upgraded skills. I'm not saying that we shouldn't raise the number, I am however suggesting we experience the current buffs before doing so.
  • Also if Entourage and Compost are modified we will have to go back and modify the basic shambler.
• Uproot
  • Current Structure damage and heals would remain constant. It would only be the AOE damage that would change.
• Mulch Shambler
  • Positioning of Shamblers for key mulching damage may be a useful strategy. I've never been able to reliably pull it off in game, but others may be able to. I can see how it would be useful for creeping multiple waves and for assisting in combat, 750 damage makes a difference.

Uproot

Than that should be fine than.

Mulch

positioning is key, but in a pile up where a mulch could mean life or death targeting to try to find a shambler can easily lead to our death. Especially if you are already running away from an attacking demigod.

Shamblers

I'm going to do a pure closed form build next dedicated to building qot's army while using the AI skirmish mod in an online game; you can join if you wish.

• Mulch Shambler
  • How do you guys feel about taking the AOE away from the Shambler that is auto-mulched, and instead to focus it on the QoT's current location -or- to have all shamblers produce the AOE effect (Keep the damage the same, but distribute it out among all living shamblers. So that you would have multiple weaker AOEs that do the same damage (approximately))

The PBAoE around QoT doesn't appeal to me, she already has so much of it. Spreading it out amongst shamblers is decent, but is it possible to divide a flat amount amongst remaining units so that you don't have to have four shamblers active when you use it to get the full damage?

Lastly it's a bad idea to make more Shamblers. Shamblers aren't nightwalkers or spirits. They're bulky, awkward minions that already lose large amounts of damage while they spin in circles trying to get around each other. Also they do splash damage. If you want to make them more effective increase their range or the total area hit by their splash. Range would be ideal because it would kill two birds with one stone; you would increase their DPS by allowing them to hit more targets (because their splah hits in a straight line I think) and increase their DPS by not requiring them to manuever so tightly to get in range and thus spend less time doing the aforementioned spinning in circles.

No, That seems even more situational than actually having summon, find, and mulch shamblers. Also if I am reading it correctly it seems the aoe to work would have to put QoT in damn near suicidal positions.

You over look the fact that theAuto mulch is random; while doing what you said is devastaing it can still be done in qot current form and much more accuratly than with auto mulch. With auto mulch only way to me sure that the one you send out will be the one to explode you would have to leave 1 point in shamblers which at higher levels would be very unwise. Suicide bombing using automulch just isn't a viable build as you are giving up a valuable tool which could be used for later survival or just plain exp farming.

While Shamblers aren't night walkers or spirits they already have the longest auto attack in an unmodded, and while they are alittle bucky in game quantaty will be quality. Shamblers may attack more enemies at once, but spirits and night walkers have numbers on their side, and those numbers will block out the sun over shamblers sadly ripping them to shreds.  Thus making them a shitty quality, and lets not forget unlike shamblers and yetis; night walkers and spirit require no mana to spawn putting QoT in a mana and cooldown problems to fight the swarms of minions.

They hardly 'block out the sun.' QoT can get 10 minions, EB can get 16. A full minion QoT will grind up a full minion EB or Oak in a slugfest.

Right now you are trying to add idols to the scenarion and even still A fully built minion night walkers will rip a full built shambler qot. For shamblers to actually win they would actually have to be suicide bomb like ou said.

"

You gave the standard queen build which I personally consider poop and no I wont disclose my build. I don't see how you'll Oom me in midgame. For one with a sedna on the enemy team I'll probably have double helms, and with your particular build the queen also has around 8 mps from cloack which adds to around 55 per second. Even with this awfull build the queen will just outshield you easily."

I wouldn't be able to do that to you after second shop, which is when I would start being aggressive. I would only be doing that after first shop when you (probably) don't have 2 mana helms unless you didn't purchase Currency. You could probably get just Vlemish but not sure.

I'm also not sure how you are going to be leveling faster than me... assuming we both stick on our lanes and none of us shop neither of us are going to level :significantly: faster than the other assuming the xp flag is neutral or swapping sides since you get the same amount of xp if you kill a creep or not (you do get less gold however). You would clear creep waves faster than a Sed so you would have that 10,15 second advantage. You could also probably get 1, maybe 2 flag-caps ahead of me.

If you don't get currency and I do, then yes, you will have a decent level advantage because a Queen can probably take a Sed who has shopped once (esp if she purchases cur) with a 1 level advantage + HP flag. You'd probably end up roughly half a shop ahead or so.

You don't really need to mess with QoT too much to fix her.

Am I correct is thinking these are the agreed outstanding issues?

1) Mana usage

2) Too many shambler based skills

3) Siege is bad, but you make it too good and it is a problem for Rook

4) No way to prevent item usage

5) Doesn't scale well into the late gane

Just throwing out some stuff I mentioned in other threads. They may or may not be good ideas in hindsight.

1) I don't necessarily want her to be able to spike/shield/wave/shambler twice as much. She is already pretty decent at turning a battle right from the start with some well focused AA. Maybe just give her a chance to recoup mana after a fight if she in able to farm.

I've always liked the idea that compost will give her some mana steal as the kills go up, so after a battle she wins she can recoup mana by farming. If she can't farm, (opposing DG with mana etc..) too bad so sad, go to base.

2) That leaves entourage and mulch if you like the above compost idea. Can these skills be reworked to be usable by queen is she doesn't use shamblers?

I always liked the idea of entourage displacing some damage inflicted on queen. (her minions fearlessly jump in the way of harm for their goddess) Doesn't necessarily need to be massive. Think of it as sort of working like parasite egg, except the damage is reduced on queen and sent to minions. As in, the more minions in play, the more damage reduction she gets. eg: At max level say damage is reduced by 2% per minion. 10 in play? Queen takes 80% damage and the minions take 20%.

Not sure what to do with mulch except leave it as is.

3) Cut the duration in 1/2 and double the damage. (DMG remains the same but is applied faster) Leave violent siege the way it is. Flat mana usage it good too.

4) When under spike armor reduction, a wave should disable item usage. Nothing rediculous. 3,4,5 seconds per respective level? This will stop goofy 2 second item casts in battle. (PS This is my favorite :D)

5) Goddess should scale queen into a goddess. You could take the scale shield/spikes to level 5 power. Or buff queen, like give her some improved stats too.

Then it isn't the strength of your shamblers that are winning, but just you spamming an ability. It would be much more effective than if you just have shamblers attack and you ground spikes. That way if your are out of mana then you still have some support.

I agree with most of this but part I disagree with are

Compost and entourage; while I do understand where you are coming from these two skill actually makes complete sense to me. It all fits into the "Open form destroys armies; Closed form build armies." Which some people on the board doesn't seem to understand (I gave my understanding of the phrase in another topic, and will find it if you wish.) Meaning unless you are going a minion build than you shouldn't even bother looking at these skills. And mulch, the effect of mulch sould not be changed but the whole 3 second wait for the damage to enemies does need to be changed and greatly. I also still stand behind the auto mulch idea. When it comes to seiging I think just like the cetidale that the towers all should grow stronger automatically with each war rank. That would show qot abilities a bit more love, which is currently being taken by ub, tb, and reg.

Screw rooks I got Queens

Maybe make entourage add an additional minion with each level of shamblers. No I don't mean just another shambler but something new let her be the only general with 2 types of minions. Make it a bit stronger melee tanking minion. Also distributing damage throughout the shamblers and qot could make mulching hard when she needs to do it if she is about to die and he last shambler just died. And within that split second it takes her to re-summon them she could be dead already.

Finally how about making QoT only access Assassin items, artifacts, and favor items in open mode. And access only general items, artifacts, and favor items in closed form.

@Hedgie

Queen does way more damage than you, can mitigate most of your damage and usually has fairly high mana regen. She'll also level faster than you since her aoe will rip through creeps and this will mean she can sometimes even double farm.

3 different lines of morale is not exactly build diversity. Would you really consider compost for siege alone?

This is sort of the point I am homing in on here. If shamblers become good, then there is always going to be a line of abilities that are much more useful or much more useless if so many trees are for shamblers. 

eg:  Shamblers? So what's better... morale, entourage or compost. Does taking ground spikes make shamblers better than taking entourage or compost? What if spikes/entourage/compost/shamblers become so good that you are an idiot for taking shields?.... and so on.

Then rework each to do different things as I am saying have abilities that effect each minions in a multitude of diferent ways

Entourage focus on their hp, armor, and AA in exhange they can longer melee and become mini versions of a tanking UB without the spit and skills.

Compost ups their AA little by little, but mostly focus on their AI side increasing their range and with of the attack as well as their attack speed.  That right there will create Two different shambler builds alone we could chose from And even give mulch dual effects so it want do the same thing for both.

• Auto-mulch
  • I should be able to scale the damage based on the number of living shamblers. When Mulch Shambler is used, one shambler will be destroyed. All shamblers will produce an AOE Attack. The total damage done by all AOEs combined will be equal to the original damage done by Mulch Shambler. This will reduce the ability to pinpoint sucide bomb shamblers. It will make mulching faster. It will keep the same damage if your shamblers are all in a group. It will allow you to spread out low level damage in a wider area. The damage for Mulch Shambler is 250/500/750. With 4 shamblers the individual AOE damage is 62.5, 125, 187.5. I need to look at the death animation a bit more, but I should be shortening the delay between Shambler death and damage resolution.

• re: Lord-Orion: "You don't really need to mess with QoT too much to fix her."
  • Without a more quantitative measurement, I'm not sure what you mean. In your list you include most of her skills, her mana pool, and her late game scaling as being problematic. The only skills that seem to be okay by these standards are early levels of Bramble Shield, Spike Wave, and Ground Spikes. As I understand your post, there is still a large amount of things to adjust.

• Compost as Life Drain, Mana Drain, or healing.
  • I want to be careful in not duplicating the Oak's effect for making kills. This is why I've been considering other possibilities.

• Entourage displaces damage
  • The net effect would be to either give the queen a 20% damage reduction or to give her a 25% health buff. (This does assume she has maxed shamblers, etc. at all points of combat. Given the large health value of minions, unless the enemy is AOEing the shamblers won't die). Shield already gives her a 1450 hp boost. This would be giving her an extra shield that is essentially mana free. To get it however, she has to spend 4 more skill points to get Entourage, plus another 3 (or 4) to get Summon Shambler. That's almost half her build in skill points. It however, isn't as versatile as Bramble Shield, and is effectively less efficient than Bramble Shield. It would require a base health of 5800 gain an effective health bonus of 1450. Although to be fair she would also increase the effects of friendly healing targeted at her by 25% percent.

• Tribute
  • Consider the following replacement power inspired by Voltron and Starcraft's Archon and Ultralisk.
  • Ent Merge
  • The QoT directs the evolution of her Shamblers to mature them into the adult form of Shamblers, the Ent. All active shamblers are merged together to create a single, stronger unit, the adult Ent. The Ents stats are based upon the number of Shamblers used in its creation. The Ent loses the ranged attacks of its youth, but becomes a larger, tougher, and stronger melee attacker.
  • To create the ent model, the Shambler model is rescaled approximately four times larger, and recolored. All of the animations should stay consistent and they are useable. The stats of the Ent would be roughly equivalent to the number of Shamblers used in its creation plus the effects of the buffs from the Entourage chain (Since they are not shamblers, they would not benefit from the skill line. However, all levels of Entourage are required to have the skill, so including the bonuses into the base stats just removes the necessity of having to change the Entourage buffs or create a new one to have the same effect) The skill would be thematically more appropriate than Tribute as the end of the Entourage chain.

• Uproot Changes
  • At this point with the proposed ability changes to reflect the Circle of Fire, I want to have the skill tested more before additional changes are consider. More game play testing and less hypothetical crafting is necessary at this point.

• Ground Spikes Buff
  • I'm not sure if I can add a item use disable. It provides a pseudo-interupt to the queen, which I'm not sure is something that should be done yet. I still like the idea of an interupt-less queen. I'm also not sure it can be done. I think it could be achieved by adding cooldowns to all items, but I'd have to look into it. Otherwise it would require adding a new function to basic game mechanics.

• Goddess of Thorns
  • It is currently under-utilized. However, I don't want to make any drastic independent changes without having a better grasp on how Bramble Shield and Ground Spikes will be modified. The effect of Goddess of Thorns should reflect the upgrades and enhance her. I like the idea of boosting her stats, but also fear it would be somewhat like the stats line on Assassin demigods, a very under utilized skill line.

• QoT Form Shop Changes
  • If I'm not mistaken there are only different Achievement items based on what type of demigod you are (plus minion idols). I'm not sure what this would accomplish.

• Different buffs specializations for Entourage, Compost, Morale
  • I'm not sure about this one. The pre 1.19 patches did do something like this. Compost did damage & life, but only while the buff was active. Morale did all stats. Entourage was a constant damage & life buff. I'm not sure if Entourage is Shambler only, I know Morale is all minions, and I think Compost is Shambler only. The problem was that Shamblers were rather unappealing. As a dps focused game, you want to focus on skills that give damage. If your Shamblers die, you can always summon more to replace them. I'm cautious about the range increase enhancements because that would effectively result in QoT having 6 Siege Archers. That's a lot of damage that outranges towers. It is also several few bodies between her and the tower.

Also I updated Uproot for version 1.01. Try it out. It is linked in the original post.

Clarifications: I meant that she needs minor tweaks to the undesirable skills. Some of the stuff is too radical, like 14 to 60 damage for compost. I don't understand how you think you can get proper balance by changing multiple things so drastically. Something will be missed, like, having 3x QoT rape everything in one shot in the AoE DMG zone.

Thanks for the mod though, the discussion has helped clarify and reinforce what is wrong with QoT, and where she needs to be and not be.

(QoT Form Shop Changes)

Some favor items are assassin or general only, qot open form would give her access to assassin favor items only, and closed form would give her access to general favor items only.

(It is currently under-utilized. However, I don't want to make any drastic independent changes without having a better grasp on how Bramble Shield and Ground Spikes will be modified. The effect of Goddess of Thorns should reflect the upgrades and enhance her. I like the idea of boosting her stats, but also fear it would be somewhat like the stats line on Assassin demigods, a very under utilized skill line.)

Just like every other general.

(I want to be careful in not duplicating the Oak's effect for making kills. This is why I've been considering other possibilities)

For QoT to kill a demigod other than Rook alone; she would have to be playing against a really stupid opponent even before level 7. Give compost the ability to still both hp and mp with each attack.

(

Consider the following replacement power inspired by Voltron and Starcraft's Archon and Ultralisk.

• Ent Merge
• The QoT directs the evolution of her Shamblers to mature them into the adult form of Shamblers, the Ent. All active shamblers are merged together to create a single, stronger unit, the adult Ent. The Ents stats are based upon the number of Shamblers used in its creation. The Ent loses the ranged attacks of its youth, but becomes a larger, tougher, and stronger melee attacker.
• To create the ent model, the Shambler model is rescaled approximately four times larger, and recolored. All of the animations should stay consistent and they are useable. The stats of the Ent would be roughly equivalent to the number of Shamblers used in its creation plus the effects of the buffs from the Entourage chain (Since they are not shamblers, they would not benefit from the skill line. However, all levels of Entourage are required to have the skill, so including the bonuses into the base stats just removes the necessity of having to change the Entourage buffs or create a new one to have the same effect) The skill would be thematically more appropriate than Tribute as the end of the Entourage chain.

)

Stronger shambler good, but one shambler bad. Unless you are making it a bit weaker than say ub. Look at giants out of all creeps they are deadly together, but alone they are a joke. Shamblers are ok now but making them grow into one would make them a yeti; unless you giving them a demigod type stt build. If the are going to mature and grow like plants then they should multiply, and if you want to still give them the base stats of UB than I am all for it.

(The net effect would be to either give the queen a 20% damage reduction or to give her a 25% health buff. (This does assume she has maxed shamblers, etc. at all points of combat. Given the large health value of minions, unless the enemy is AOEing the shamblers won't die). Shield already gives her a 1450 hp boost. This would be giving her an extra shield that is essentially mana free. To get it however, she has to spend 4 more skill points to get Entourage, plus another 3 (or 4) to get Summon Shambler. That's almost half her build in skill points. It however, isn't as versatile as Bramble Shield, and is effectively less efficient than Bramble Shield. It would require a base health of 5800 gain an effective health bonus of 1450. Although to be fair she would also increase the effects of friendly healing targeted at her by 25% percent.)

In this game ways to reduce damage taken is better than gaining more health; their are too many ways to increase the damage a demigod can take for damage for a hp buff to matter.

(I should be able to scale the damage based on the number of living shamblers. When Mulch Shambler is used, one shambler will be destroyed. All shamblers will produce an AOE Attack. The total damage done by all AOEs combined will be equal to the original damage done by Mulch Shambler. This will reduce the ability to pinpoint sucide bomb shamblers. It will make mulching faster. It will keep the same damage if your shamblers are all in a group. It will allow you to spread out low level damage in a wider area. The damage for Mulch Shambler is 250/500/750. With 4 shamblers the individual AOE damage is 62.5, 125, 187.5. I need to look at th)

I'm not budging on this; auto mulch!

When I modified Entourage & Compost, I wasn't doing quite as randomly as it apparently seems. Compost and Entourage are weak skills. Shamblers are weak minions. I wrote up a small essay describing the differences between Night Walkers and Shamblers a while back. I now provide a small essay comparing the Unclean Beast versus a QoT Minion Build.

First off, as a base comparison I use an Unclean Beast Ooze/Spit Combo Build. It is recognized as a good solid build in the community. As it is well known the UB has a health, armor, and speed advantage, I will ignore all of these and focus purely on DPS. It is also well known that the UB is a DPS machine, unless the QoT can out damage the UB gameplay should be more or less balanced. For Unclean Beast Ooze/Spit Combo build I do not account for any items. You'll also notice that I only calculate skill damage up to level 10. After level 10 build diversity is a bigger issue, so I left it open to interpretation. I did calculate the DPS increase in regular attacks due to leveling. I also assumed that all characters would have sufficient mana to meet all of their casting needs.

The chart should be fairly explatory. All damages are converted into DPS for easy comparisons. The First column (Unclean Beast) is the level of the Build. The Attack DPS column is the amount of physical attack damage done. The Ooze column is the amount of damage Ooze does per second. The Spit column is the damage done by Spit (assuming no removal). The Spit DPS column is the total damage dealt by Spit divided by the duration of the skill (10 seconds). This damage is higher than Spit's on screen damage becaues it also incorporates the initial hit damage. Attack DPS is the amount of armor mitigated damage the Beast does (this is simple for the UB, it is just his auto attack damage, for the QoT is is more complicated). The Skill DPS is the amount of damage done by skills. Total DPS is the sum of the Attack DPS and Skill DPS. Build is the build used to calculate the numbers.

Some highlights

• Each skill point adds over 25 DPS
• The UB's natural attack goes up by ~10 DPS per level
• Physical damage starts out with a lead, but is quickly overtaken by the amount of skill based damage

Now, to this we compare a variety of QoT Minion Builds using Demigods version 1.20 (the current patch). I selected three builds to represent this. The first is an all Entourage Build, the second all compost, and the third a combination. After level 10 the builds have all the same skills so I have only presented the stats for levels 15 & 20 in the first build section.

The columns should be relatively straightforward. I'm going to skip typing here becaues I don't think much needs to be said. The damages are presented in DPS form. I did not calculate the cost of losing a Minion while mulching and then having to resummon it. I included the Level 1 Priest Idol since that is a common initial Item for QoTs. At level 15 I switched it out for the Level 4 Priest Idol. I'm ignoring any issues with the Shambler pathing finding and aiming. I'm also ignoring the possibility that the Shamblers and Priests could die and reduce DPS. That sort of calculation would only make things worse for the QoT. I also am assuming that Compost is at is maximum functional level (this takes 2 creep waves) and does not drop down during combat.

Some important Highlights:

• QoT Minion builds are bad
• QoT Minion builds have roughly the same DPS
• QoT Minion builds offer very little skill damage
• QoT Minion builds are mostly armor mitigated damage
• At level 1 the QoT is comparable to the UB.
• At level 5 the QoT is down 50 DPS.
• At level 10 the QoT is down 100 DPS.
• At level 15 the Qot is up 15 DPS, but the UB gets to add 5 skill points worth of extra damage to his total.
• The QoT gets between 2-12 DPS per skill point. Break point skills (Summon Shambler 3, Compost 1, Entourage 1) offer up to 30 DPS per Break Point (although there aren't very many, and they require the other skills).

Now let's look at what happens when we use my modifcations. The was created the same way as the above chart.

The Focus Mod treats the QoT Minion Builds somewhat better. However, there isn't the huge onslaught on damage that everyone was expecting.The optimal build is to focus on Compost first. That gives you a 50 DPS boost at level 10. At level 15 there is a 100 DPS boost compared to the 1.20 QoT. This is 100 more DPS than the UB at level 15, as long as he doesn't spend 5 skill points nor invest his gold into anything that boosts DPS. Additionally, 80% of this damage is armor mitigated. This damage can't be increased by Ground Spikes because the QoT doesn't have any free skill points. Nor does she have any life preservation skills besides Mulch. She has no real burst damage. She is also having to fight amidst the Ooze which reduces both her attack speed and her minions attack speed. Lastly the Ooze will be killing off minions, and she would have to lower DPS to resummon them.

To make this change I changed the boosts from Entourage (3 + 3 DPS per skill per Shambler) and Compost (4 + 1 DPS per skill point per Shambler) to be closer to the Unclean Beasts boosts of per skill point (i.e., roughly 5 DPS per skill point per Shambler).

Summary

The Focus Mod changes to Entourage and Compost do boost her DPS by a decent amount. However, to fully specialize in minions requires foregoing most of the QoTs useful skills and almost all of her burst damage. V1.20 QoT Minion builds aren't very good. I don't actually think the current changes are sufficient either.

I'm starting a new post so I don't mess up the table formatting.

If every skill point is worth approximately the same value, consider the differences between Morale and the Queen Shambler Specific Buffs.

Each level of Morale offers the following

• +50 Health
• +0.5 Health per second
• +2% Attack Speed
• +50 Armor
• +4 Weapon Damage
• Applied to ALL of the minions a general has (QoT & Senda 10, Erebus 16).

In contrast v1.20 Demigods version of Entourage offers per level:

• +6 Weapon Damage
• +165 Health
• Only to Shamblers (max 4!)

So, +115 Minion Health and +2 Minion Weapon Damage for 4 Shamblers is the equivalent of the remaining buffs for the Shamblers:

• +0.5 Health per second
• +2% Attack Speed
• +50 Armor

PLUS all of the buffs for idol summons (up to 6!)

• +50 Health
• +0.5 Health per second
• +2% Attack Speed
• +50 Armor
• +4 Weapon Damage
• Applied to ALL of the minions a general has (QoT & Senda 10, Erebus 16).

I have to say I don't see that as being quite fair (rough comparison of an increase of 12 DPS for Entourage versus 20 DPS for Morale (plus all the other buffs)). Even my outrageous buff to Entourage isn't that great. Would you trade the above list for an extra +6 Weapon Damage (don't forget Shamblers attack once every 2 seconds, that's an extra +3 DPS per shambler or overall a boost of 20 DPS per skill point with 4 shamblers. That's the same damage boost that Morale provides). My version of compost does a little better with a 60 DPS boost with 4 shamblers after killing 2 creep waves. However, each successive level of compost after the first only adds 20 DPS (again the same as every level of Morale).

There may be some validity to arguments that suggest that buffs to a single skill line are more useful than buffs to a variety of skills. The single skill may be modified with a force multiplier and become much better than equivalent skills. However, to counter this argument, all damage increases seem to have been balanced assuming the QoT has 4 shamblers at all times. Additionally, her Shambler buffs require a huge skill point investment leaving her very unbalanced if she invests much into them.

In conclusion:

• The proposed +10 damage per skill point effect for Compost & Entourage is probably too weak
• The +60 DPS makes Compost 1 a really good buy, perhaps too good.
• Minion specific skillines for the QoT are really, really bad, worse than one would expect.
  

Morale also works better if you have idols, which at the very least you should have Monks.

That said, pretty sure the Armor debuff is pretty major when minions hit the table. Also have to remember how much of an affect creeps have. Oak, UB, Torch are the three people who can really compete for creep-wave control.

TB has Auras and Rain of Ice or Fire Circle

Oak has Surge + DJ

UB has Ooze