I’m asking because I see a lot of people stack % Minion Life but they’re not actually building +Maximum Life on their own character. I presume that the bonus to Minion Life is based on your Maximum Life, so you want this stat as high as possible as Minions get 30% of that. % Minion Life applies and boosts that 30% number.
The other thing is that you need to be building 1) Intelligence and 2) All Resist. Intelligence increases your +All Resist and this plus bonuses from your armor and Paragon nodes should be shared by your minions as well.
You wind up losing too much of your own durability by boosting your minions via gear. Maybe one or two pieces you can afford some +minion health, but for the most part you’re better off getting their survivability from allocating your skill and paragon points appropriately. You’ll basically have to get the survivability nodes and glyph socket from Cult Leader, slotting Deadraiser.
Resistances don’t work at present. We’re getting all of our durability from raw health, armor, and % damage reductions. Minions are in the same boat in this regard.
You’re not supposed to be losing personal durability though. I’ve said before in other threads that I don’t like the gearing paradigm by current high lvl Necros who claim to be playing Minions. You’re supposed to build YOUR OWN durability thereby building your minions. They inherit 30% FROM YOU.
They work for me. Maybe because you presume it doesn’t work, you don’t build it, and so you’re not seeing what they’re supposed to be doing?
You can’t “build” resistance. First, it’s multicaptive not additive. Second, at WT4, it’s nerfed to like 50%. Third, resistance only count as half value to protect damage from that type. Another 50% is from armor, so why bother getting the resistance if you can just stack armor? We already get some from ammy and rings, and as int class, we have base 40% resistance (assume 800 int). Any rolls on resistance on gears is a waste to getting better affixes of some type.
As for the minions life. It’s actually very good to stack it up. It’s multicaptive. With % minions life on chest, pants, shield and RoM, my minions get like 350% bonus life.
Being said that, your other ring should not be rolling % minions life and stick to pure offensive.
Well gee, us old timers use the word ‘build’ to refer to putting together stats from gear that we choose.
Yeah see this is terrible thinking right here. Just because higher difficulty tier subtracts 50% from Resistances doesn’t mean you don’t build it. If anything, that should tell you to build it because TAKING IT AWAY HARMS YOUR SURVIVABILITY! You need EVEN MORE OF IT in higher difficulties!
The benefit to % Minion Life is very small if you do not build Maximum Life. My theory is that the game looks at your total HP, gets a number that is 30% from that number, and then adds a bonus based on that number. This could go in a variety of different directions.
Scenario 1:
Let’s say that your HP is 1000. You have 20% Minion Life. 30% of 1000 is 300. 20% of 300 is 60. Total Minion life is 360.
Scenario 2:
The 20% Minion Life stacks on top of the 30% making it 50%. That would mean 1000 HP = 500 HP for minions.
Scenario 2 is obviously much better however the one single thing that remains consistent is that the game looks at your total HP and calculates based on that. Therefore, if you do not build Maximum Life, what you get with % Minion Life is meager in comparison to building Maximum Life AND % Minion Life. I can guarantee that.
For rings, the % Minion Life affix is a “nice to have” and not necessarily something I MUST have. Reason being is that your rings need too many affixes to roll and because it’s all random, the likelihood of getting the exact set of affixes is very low.
Amplify (150%) glyph on the cult leader socket, hardened bones, disobedience, shield, +minion life gear, -damage from close/distant gear, +necro max life, +damage reduction gear
I get what you are saying about resists, but if you wanted to stack them to kind-of effective levels, you’d have to give up (a lot of) gear slots to do so… you only get so many defensive slots. It’s really only feasible to focus on DR and Armor, since those don’t get a 50% penalty in wt4
Just edited to add - it is worth over-capping armor as much as much as possible, because minions only get 30%, so even though the cap is 10k, taking that to 13-14k with disobedience on neck does make a huge difference in minion tankiness
The root issue is that minions require too many stats while receiving too little benefit from the player at 30%.
I don’t think you need to build your character any differently in terms of survivability stats for yourself vs minions- they get the same benefits you do, just at an unreasonably reduced 30% rate in most cases. Minions start dying endgame because of the level gap against the mobs they are fighting, not directly because of your survivability built. Damage scaling in this game is a mess, in both directions.
Kinda. How I do it is Amulet + Socket, Gem Ring 1, Gem Ring 2, and try to get the last one on Helm (usually Shadow). It’s very random but it’s ideal to get 4 different resists with the Ring 1 and 2 implicits. Then I go for Resist All via Paragon nodes.
You do not want all resist it is useless. These are the stats you want in kinda this order:
Armor (gear and in paragon)
Flat DR (gear and in paragon)
DR to close (gear and in paragon)
DR while injured
DR to enemies affected by shadow if you are using shadow skills (gear and in paragon)
DR to distant
DR while fortified (if you fortify)
Max life (gear and in paragon)
Damage reduction for minions (in paragon)
Minion life on gear (this is OK but cuts down on your offensive or defensive stats)
Resistances for minions (in paragon, somewhat useful for minions but not for you)
Minions can’t get near armor cap like you can so they will die in higher nightmare dungeons. There is nothing you can do to prevent this. They especially die to elemental damage like fire enchanted mobs or cold enchanted mobs. You can’t stop it.
There’s a lot that we want but we can’t have it all.
Right. That’s the way that I’m gearing. As I said in another thread, if I were to switch specs while wearing the same gear, I’d still decimate everything. It has to do with the fact that it’s all built around the stat inheritance.
All resist is useless. Armor is like 20x better because it also gives all resist (not exaggerating). Resist is just somewhat useful for minions but there is literally no way to prevent them from dying to elemental damage.
You can’t stack enough of anything to stop it. And since resistances are the worst stat possible for this they don’t help much.
They need to reduce damage minions take from spell effects or at least AOE spell effects, significantly- same for CC duration on them. Something that you cannot control should not be taking full damage or duration from area of effect spells.
The dungeon aspect where the shade chases you and if it hits a minion or a minion walks into it, the minion just stands there and can’t attack for the full duration of the puddle- it’s ridiculous.
The error in your logic is that Armor + All Resist + Max Life together comprise what is called Effective HP. You can’t endlessly stack Armor so you have to stack other things to go along with Armor to further reduce incoming damage. Endgame elite packs have multiple element affixes and without Resist all (and incl difficulty All Resist nerf), you have no defense against any of that. It’s insane that you even think AR is useless. In Diablo 3 original Inferno, AR was the one single stat you needed.
You didn’t read what I said. There is LITERALLY nothing you can do to prevent elemental damage even if you stack everything possible.
Minions are still going to die in high nightmare tiers.
You can not stop this from happening. There is no stat in the game currently to stop it.
How can I make this clear to you…you can’t do anything about it.
And since you can’t do anything about it, wasting paragon points for resistances is next to useless because of the TINY benefits they provide compared to armor nodes and all other forms of DR on gear and in the paragon. Life nodes are also more helpful or life stats on gear.
You are the one asking for help. I know more about this than you do.
Stack all the resistances you can and then try and fight a fire enchanted elite in T70+ and report back how many times your minions are still dying.
I watch a streamer try and solve this problem on a daily basis and he has given up. He has tried LITERALLY every possible combination of defensive stats and nothing works.
You are not going to figure it out when he spends all day working on the problem and has concluded YOU CAN’T STOP MINIONS FROM DYING.
Sadly he won’t listen when people who know more than him explain this same thing to him.
