I feel like we need to lower our expectations with minions. I wouldn’t expect minions to be these high damage, high survivability, meat shield powerhouses that I keep seeing complaints over. They need some work but most of the damage should come from you or your interaction with those minions. Do you honestly think that Blizzard is going to create a situation where a single class can sit there and let the game essentially play itself? You need to sacrifice either damage or survivability here.
In a full minion build, your 13 pets should do more then 10% of your total dmg.
8 Likes
Ok well a full minion necro here and I have neither damage nor survivability so…
8 Likes
No you don’t. Let us play how we want to.
3 Likes
A lot of people assume that minion builds mean you just sit there and let the minions do all the work. That couldn’t be farther from the truth. Most minion builds you are like a conducter moving your minions positions or the enemies positions, debuffing, enhancing your minions damage like through Blight, making sure they stay alive and doing pull ins combined with golem ability. You don’t have anywhere near as much downtime as people think minion necro’s have.
5 Likes
By using minions you’re sacrificing both
7 Likes
never played a macro focused build i see.
1 Like
Agreed, just as someone who sacrifices the ability to summon minions for considerably power gains, so too should someone who focuses entirely on minions be rewarded with at least a decent, viable fun to play build.
It can be slow and lack survivability, but make it viable and fun to play.
#playyourway, yeah right…
2 Likes
Slow but viable, that is what we expect from minions indeed.
1 Like
I expext minions to be equal to or greater than my level 70 witch doctor’s.
Thats fair. Not reinventing the wheel. Just equal to, as a minimum.
But they simply aren’t. Blizzard reinvented the wheel. Brilliant.
Guess it’s back to Diablo 2 Resurrected to play a proper summoner, for now at least.
Somehow it feels like this was just a minor patch, to retain players, nowhere near the 13 pages they kep bragging about.
It’s good to see that the necromancer community expects to be god tier with no input by the player, at least most of you do. I’d move on because that’s ridiculous.
Minions need work for sure but most of you expect far too much. Name one arpg where your minions do all of your damage, don’t die, and you can complete the game at the same pace as someone who’s doing it without minions.
At first I thought I wasn’t to sure that’s what you guys are expecting but now…lol.
“Name one arpg where your minions do all of your damage, don’t die, and you can complete the game at the same pace as someone who’s doing it without minions.”
Umm… How about a small , unknown game named Path of Exile… Diablo 4’s biggest competitor, and probably the second most well-known ARPG…
There’s tons of minion builds in path of exile with minions that basically never die and deal 100% of the damage, with the summoner being there solely to buff the DPS of his minions and apply curses / cast short duration minions / reposition them , etc.
Also, how about an even more obscure game called “Diablo 2”, where you can run pure summoner builds that can clear the hardest content super fast including uber tristram… With some help here and there from corpse explosions to help speed up clear speed.
Or the Last Epoch, which also have multiple minion builds that are endgame viable and rely exclusively on minion damage and tanking for viability…
Basically every other competitor.
Honestly, D4’s summon necro isn’t even in that bad of a spot, they just need to buff them to be more viable when using them a standalone because right now it kinda feels like your offensive skills are doing the heavy lifting and the minions are there mostly as diversion and to generate essence for you… Or at least give us the option to bind a second ability bar so we can offload the summon spells off our main skill bar and put the curse in there while we’re at it.
Necromancers have always been more complex classes to play, requiring multiple skills at once. Path of exile gives you 13 skills at a time (plus how many auras and active skils you want to run)… Diablo 2 Resurrected on controllers also gave us an alt skill bar so we could cast twice as many different spells (while keyboard players could have 16 different skills on their skill slots), but here we are in the sequel, which gimps us with a six skill limitation, and forces you to allocate two of those skills if you want your skeletons and golem… Leaving you with only four skill slots. Which is further gimple by the game’s kinda shoehorning you into having very specific ability archetypes (ex: one generator, one core ability, one survivability ability, one crowd control ability, one ultimate, etc)… Really hard to fit two summoning spells in that minuscule skill bar , basically. That way more builds get to keep their summons instead of sacrificing them because they frankly don’t have room in their skill bars for them (and the sac perks are a little too good anyway)…
Honestly, I just want a keybind to switch to a 2nd skill bar so I can slot in my summoning skills, ultimate and curses I rarely need in there , leaving me room on my main skill bar for DPS and survivability abilities.
And to be honest, this really dumbs down builds, making them one-trick ponies. I want to be able to use different skills in different situations. But D4 is all about runing the same rotation of skills over and over since you have no room for anything. What’e even the point of having +X to all skills items when you never actually have the room to equip any of these…
So yeah, I just miss being able to have multiple curses for different situations, multiple minions including stuff from other classes, offensive and defensive stuff PLUS a full army of every single minion from my class.
6 Likes
there you go. in diablo 2 and poe they are very good. and with very good, i mean NOT OP.
1 Like
Diablo 3. PoE. Wolcen. Maybe Diablo 2, not sure havent played in a decade. Last Epoch from what I’ve seen.
Pretty much every arpg with a minion class allows pure minion builds except, apparently, diablo 4 because it would mean “doing nothing” according to people like you. Its funny how all those arpgs manages to have pure minion builds/classes but for some reason it would be completely impossible in diablo 4.
No one wants “god tier” with no input or immortal minions. We want viable MINION builds on the MINION class with MINION skills like being able to tell them what to attack, where to go etc. Its not a complicated concept.
The whole class mechanic is about minions, the theme is about summoning minions, blizzard has advertised it as a minion class. So as a minion class it needs to have viable minions.
3 Likes
Lol, if thats the case then remove all minion boosting skills from the tree, remove the minion paragon boards and let me have 9 minions out without sacking 2 skill slots. Just make them passive and dont punish me for investing in them.
If you actually think it was designed like that then why is it possible to invest 110% into minions?
2 Likes
I feel like blizzard just spat in my face with these patch notes,.
3 Likes
Really wish they allowed you to remove summon skeleton and summon golem from your skill bar and keep the minions you summoned… At least as long as you have them unlocked in the book of the dead. Especially considering army of the dead already ressumons your skeleton army anyway on a somewhat reasonable cooldown for most situations… And it could be expanded to also summon your golem.
… Just make it so you can slot in Army of the Dead to replace both Summon Skeleton and Summon Golem… Freeing up basically two slots and making Army of the Dead the best-in slot for Summon Necromancers. Most people don’t really care that much about the skeleton priest and the golem attacks anyway… And once your skeletons are pretty tanky you don’t need to ressumon and heal them all that much anyway… Plus you could always briefly reequip the summon skills if your minions get wiped while your ult is on cooldown… That would make it way more viable to keep minions around , even for non-minion focused necromancer builds…
1 Like
Thats not how good minion classes work in arpgs.
It should be possible to make a build where your damage comes from your minions.
In this situation, your actions support your minions.
The tools exist in d4 for that playstyle to exist, but the math isnt there.
A minion necro would be cursing, buffing their minions with skele priests, using the golem active to order it around, and using army of the dead to buff them further.
Finally, even though generally no one is arguing for an AFK build, im going to.
AFK builds are a thing in every modern ARPG. Theres no reason they shouldnt exist in diablo 4.
They should be less effective than an active build, but thats a different thing.
This concept is covered by the design goal of “play how you want”
Meanwhile, at Last Epoch developer meetings they regularly say: “i speak for the lazies, who do not care to speak for themselves”
Tldr: naw homie
3 Likes
I think the biggest obstacle to minions being buffed is without nerfing non-minion builds, how do you do it without making those builds wildly OP? If bonespear only has to give up 1 skill to get a much beefier, super strong army, and they’re already considered OP, imagine the outrage.
Clearly minions are in a garbage place, I just don’t think it’s as easy as “give them 100% of summoner stats, ship it!”