- The Ring of Mendeln will be broken… I’mma guess 3-5 glaring bugs.
- These bugs will be found day one of the PTR.
- By launch, 1 or 2 will be fixed, but come with 3-5 NEW bugs.
- Half the bugs will be patched throughout the season, the rest will remain indefinitely.
- The new unique gloves will be really good, despite - I dunno, 3? - 3 major bugs. May even qualify as OP.
- For launch, they will “balance” minions by buffing the new gloves slightly and nerfing all other minion systems into the ground.
- End result will be Mendeln + Naz is the only minion build.
NERF bat will batter seasonal powers as well - that new jewel that buff DOTs will be reduced to 0.01% increase or similar.
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zero chance minions will be nerfed, they may infact get buffed after the PTR.
As it stands minions need to play with the overpower rune to do competitive damage, and overpower is being nerfed.
Minions are playing with a boss power offering 150%x damage which is not replaced with the new season 9 powers outside of a “on kill” 30%x for 4 seconds damage bonus, so not much good on bosses.
The tragidgy is that having 14 mages instead of 8 zero dps warriors and 7 mages and a golem will be much much more damage and the only way to play minions.
playing without the new gloves as a minion necro will be absolutely crap and only just capable of T4 with good gear and masterworking.
I personally just want game stability fixes, im really hyped to play mage necro, so I will only be sad about the state of minion necro once the new gloves novelty has warn off 
Pessimism serves me well: expect the worst and you can only ever be right or pleasantly surprised.
Yep, my fear too. On the bright side, we’ll have TWO mandatory uniques for minions instead of just Mendeln. Hooray for … variety?
But, back to pessimism… I rewatched the gameplay clip, and I’m really starting to fear that the mechanic is that you get an extra mage per type of minion sacrificed, not per each individual minion you would have had. So only an extra TWO from sacrificing, and no double dipping on mages from Occult Dominion.
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well I traded the NPC in town on the PTR for a load of uniques, seems the new gloves are not currently available for testing on the PTR…
Hahaha! I noticed too. CLASSIC!
They do show up in the obol vender though, so… Good luck gambling.
On the bright side, I am happy to admit I was wrong:
The gloves DO work like we hoped, and you get 1 mage per warrior, and 4 extra mages via Occult Dominion.
So I was right the first time huh?
how else where they going to work 
Anyway, they are bugged on the PTR currently the mage mastery does not show up on the mage mastery node on the skill tree.
I must say im quite concerned about these gloves going live bugged like mendeln was and skill tree bugs continuing.
I mean they will have to bug check all interactions, and then do it all again for the arch mage varients.
I did a T4 infernal horde with only 9/3 mage mastery with my live char (not well optimized for maximum damage, but deletes T4 on live) and my god the damage was bad… due to the loss of the seasonal boss powers, but yeah those gloves did not make up for it at all 
Anyway im not worried T4 will be absolutely fine for any minion build with horadric powers in S9, especially the new gloves build.
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In the campfire chat, the video they showed of the gloves had only 4 mages out. I still don’t really know how they accomplished that (bare minimum should be 7). So, being a pessimist, I prepared myself for the worst.
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I was also pessimist about how the mechanic will turn out, but let the record show, blizz made this reputation for them selfs.