Did they nerf Necro Minion?

PC General Discussion
1

Or am I just not reading the Patch Notes correctly?

If so, then WTF why?

2

many things have been nerfed. including the boss hp by a massive amount.
Way too early to make educated assumptions on how things will turn out really.

if anything, s5 offers pretty much the biggest batch of balance changes accross the board. Characters, uniques, enemies.

personally i wonder how the new aspect works out

  • Your Minions deal 25% Shadow Damage per second to enemies around them. The damage over time lasts for 2.0-5.0 seconds after leaving the aura.

and

  • Each minion drains 1 Essence per second but deals [30-45]% bonus damage. With no minions, this bonus applies to you and drains 5 Essence per second.
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3

For one thing, they buffed their aggressiveness. Golem will now actually leap towards an enemy instead of standing there doing nothing while half a screen away from enemies.

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4

They might still work fine. Maybe not as good as this season 4 but at least not be a no go for end game as they used to be.

5

This is my biggest gripe with PoE minions.

I’ll have to try a minion build in S5

6

Pure minion builds got buffed. Hybrid shadow DoT builds got nerfed. However with all the changes and new items it’s hard to say exactly how this will affect each build. I’m still undecided which necro build to go but I’ll figure it out once I get into the game and can test things out.

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7

Well it might be a solution to put Blighted on amy, and Hardened on chest, Great Feast on weapon, and Shademist on offhand, it pumps the Blighted stacks to max in half second with shadow mages. So its mainly a shadow mage build, and the golem build aka the pure summoner is just allaround better. The scythes got summoning dmg implicits also, so they alsmost made up for the loss of Blighted aspect in minion builds.

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8

Minions can overpower now as well

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9

actually quite nice that you for once might not have to rely on BCE.

10

Well in S4 we were relying on Blight in shadow minion builds mostly, and now in S5 BCE will come back. If Blight could pierce by default and hit the middle of a monster pack8your target), instead of hitting the first thing in it’s way, it would be much more useful as it adds 20% damage to you and the minons against affected enemies.

11

Pure minion lacked multipliers hence needed shadow blight. When this is gutted, minions reverted back to pure and hence the “nerf”

In coming season, necro are expected to push on Bone Spirit with Blood surge helping somewhere along the path. Necro isnt weak, just not a lot of build diversity.

There maybe some cool interaction with shard of verathial on necro.

12

I played pure minion for S4, it was great. Pushed to Pit Tier 100 and stopped. I probably could’ve gone a little further, but the grind eventually starts to wear me down.

I’ve no doubt if I went the same build in S5, it would probably be even easier.

Oh crap you bring up another question though. We had the bundle of legendaries that gave us aspects toward a specific build, I wonder if that will still be a thing this season, and which builds were chosen? Maybe I can tweet Adam.

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13

I wouldn’t bury any minion builds yet.

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14

It’s going to be Bone Spirit build. Adam allready tweeted it.

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15

not trying hence the nerf is “”. Pure minion doesnt have enough multipliers though even with the new stuffs according to some calcs. Nerfed boss allows pure minion to push further but it doesnt draw comparison to SB prenerf power though.

for necro: bone spirit/prison / bone golem

Barb: weapon swap/knock back
Druid: catalysm/companion
Rogue: Flurry/Dark Shroud and mobility
Sorc: Chain lightning /mana

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16

Minions are massively nerfed - shadowblight, hell commander, paragon board caps but there are new uniques and the boss’ hp are nerfed as well. At least the ones in the pit, not sure if necro would be able to kill tormented bosses or Lilith now.

17

Should be able to. 5x nerf to boss HP. Minion nerf isnt 5x.

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18

What bugs me is S4 was season of the minions, why haven’t they added a unique item that buffs minion damage, like actually and not just a proc effect like Mendeln. Speaking of Mendeln, looking at the stats more and more, I think it’s not going to be a bad item to try and squeez into a pure (Golem) summoner build.

19

Not even close, the summoning % on scythes are low and additive (unless im wrong)…

20

really? i must have missed that. now thats interesting. in theory blood/minion builds could become a thing then?