[2019] Activatable Abilities for Companions

In Patch 0.7 we will be continuing to implement the Companions system. In addition to various smaller improvements - such as slightly adjusting restrictions on how many you may have out at once - we will be adding the activatable abilities for your Companions.

One issue faced by minion-focused builds is that, once you’ve summoned your minions, your action bar can be devoid of useful skills. The Companions system will replace each of your Companion-summoning skills with an activatable ability. This will only be available while you have the maximum number of that minion summoned, to avoid making it impossible to resummon them if they die. Today we’d like to show your these abilities!
 
 

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A debuff which fears all enemies near your Bear causing them to run away.
 
 

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Causes your Sabertooth to make three melee attacks in short succession.
 
 

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Poisons enemies around your Scorpion with 100% increased duration.
 
 

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Heals all allies in a large area over time.
 
 

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A stacking buff that increases your damage and your minions’ damage by 10% for 4 seconds

Can I ask why? They’re not likely to be used more often than most other skills.

The durations and cooldowns are for sure still up for discussion.

Making one of the activatable skills a permanent buff sort of misses the point.

The Companions system is intended to help differentiate the pet classes.

While we’ll be continuing to improve the Acolyte’s minions over time, there are no current plans to either make her minions Companions or to implement an equivalent system.

Yea, we’re really trying hard to differentiate the acolyte from the primalist in playstyle as well as theme.

Very good points. We do plan on adding nodes to the primalist companion skill trees which will disable their ability to have active cast buttons but will give some other small passive bonus instead or for some of them, the companion will just automatically use the abilities but they will be slightly weaker. This way you can pick which ones will have passive and active abilities.

Also, that back story might need some changing, I’ll get loremaster @kqkyle in here to see what we can do.

I think that we could have the potential instant cast nodes too. They would probably need a slight downside like increased mana cost or cooldown because the cast time is part of the current cost.