Queen of Thorns Without Bramble Shield?

Could do a Groundspike build with minion and reinforcement support. Rank 4 groundspike reduces armor by 1500 for 5 seconds allowing allies to rip your opponents to shreds. That will make them think twice about running up to you especially if you have Haulbek of Life and Platemail of the Crusader.

I plan on testing this build after the current Pantheon is finished.

You *could* only get the Mulch Shambler ability.  The problem I have is with trying to cross her two forms together.  They honestly don't mix that much.  It seems to make more sense to be primarily in flower, and then pop out to do damage, then the other way around.

no.   IMO shamblers are horrible and scale horribly.

granted im not the best at controlling minions I just dont see her being very effective even if you are good at controlling minions.   Not to mention playing both forms "wastes" a whole lot of time switching back and forth.

  QoT is even more 1 dimensional than sedna.  Her shield spell is over the top but the rest of her is sub par.

I wouldn't even consider playing QoT without brambles.  It's without doubt her most powerful skill, and a prerequisite for her high level synergy with her ground spikes.  Her shamblers are pretty crappy, and her ground spikes are her only other great skills.  If you don't want to use brambles, you're playing the wrong character.

Will516,

I disagree, the shamblers scale extreeemely well.  Especially with Entourage AND Compost.  With both those skills maxed the shamblers are about twice as powerful as any other summonable in the game.  That's just raw numbers, it doesn't include the splash damage they do.  So in true DPS they are 250-300% stronger than any other minion.

The trick is to keep her alive.  I've looked at some different wasy to distribute her skills.  If you're going to max shamblers, entourage, and compost... you can either go for the Bramble shield/groundspike combo and use shield for survivability.  OR, you can go mulch and morale. 

If you're going mulch/morale, Spike Wave may also be useful.  You can take points away from morale and put it in spikewave if you choose.  I like spikewave, so i usually do this.

Shield is a better defensive spell of course, but if you're pushing mulch/morale you'll probably get priests as well, so it balances out.

If you're going to leave shamblers behind, you'll want to take Shield/Ground Spike and Spike Wave.  These are fine support spells.  And you have two options for your damage.

Either pump Morale and use Idol Minions.    OR, go Uproot and Compost.  Uproot will be your primary damage out put for the game, so it depends on the gametype.

Uproot is not super impressive on it's own... but if gets Quite nasty with maxed out Compost.  3000+ Damage to Buildlings (+splash damage later), for a ~900 mana instacast on a 15 second cool down.   Get some hats and cast as often as possible.  For reference:  Towers have 5600 HP, in Fortress mode, fortresses have 15000.  Basically, she can single-handedly drop a fortress if she gets two solid runs at it.

QoT is the master  (mistress?) of raw damage output.  But she's fragile, she'll need either bramble shield or mulch+priests to stay on the field.

Compost is NOT optional if you are using the abilities it supports.

Twice as powerful as any other summon = still weak.

I've actually played games where I just get the first level or two of shamblers (1 early on, second around level 11) just so I can use them as snacks and get more kill credit from their AoE.

   hey if they work for you.  I never really tried to max thier power with compost.   I agree with zechnophobe they are of more use early on to help you get xp and they are a little more effective against lvl 1 demigods.

  But having a build that scales up compost, uproot and the minion buffs just does not seem viable to me.  By the time you lvl all those enemy demigods will just ignore your minions.  Also granted QoTs minions are more powerful than other minions what about the fact that Erebus can have like 3times more minions?

   like I said I never really tried the compost buffs but when I maxxed all the other buffs enemy demigods literlly ignored my minions.  In fact I was almost positive my minions were doing 0 damage... :/.  maybe they were just out regening the minion damage but this happened quite a bit lol.  

      Maybe it just takes more skill for QoTs to be uber without being a shield spammer.  I havent seen a QoTs dominating without shield yet though.

            I brought this up in an ideas thread but I would like to see uproot have a health drain like Rooks spell.  And I would like the minion buffs to get +1gold income everytime you get one of them, instead of having to wait until the end to get the +4gold skill.    In exchange add 3 seconds or so to the recast of shield so QoTs have other options than just being shield spammers.