Minion build feedback

Necromancer
1

From the poll taken from a blue post a while ago we can probably assume they are tweaking minion builds somehow for next season… I hope… so many have posted HUGE reworks… its really not needed… just make minions less STUPID… compensate for lack of doing game mechanics (anyone doing beast in ice knows what I mean), and honestly, hit the boss, not the wall that he spawned… 2 things in my opinion are needed

  1. Minions get a built in reduction to environmental damage
  2. Change hellbent commander to “you and your minions gain 1% damage AND damage reduction for every minion” or something to that effect…
    In my opinion you have to invest 99% of skill points and paragon points and if your minions run off or die… its over… period…
    Would like to see more survivability in the minions and minions used like a hydra basically supplemental damage, and the actual necromancer dish out damage where it’s supposed to go…
2 Likes
2

I would like to see better Minion AI. How is it that d4 minions have worse AI than d3? my god AI can make art and write articles. Why can’t minions actually attack enemies instead of picking their nose?

3

so many have posted HUGE reworks… its really not needed… just make minions less STUPID

oppinion read, and denied…
you don’t know what you’re tlaking about.

In my opinion you have to invest 99% of skill points and paragon points and if your minions run off or die… its over… period…

thats not an oppinion that’s a fact…

Would like to see more survivability in the minions and minions used like a hydra basically supplemental damage, and the actual necromancer dish out damage where it’s supposed to go…

im genuilly confused what topics you’ve read, cuz most of the as you said Rework topics talk about this…, you’re just making it extremely simplified…

“just let minions survive more” - more res, dmg red, armour, hp,
“let them do more damage” - buff whats needed

i genuilly… am lost what topics you’ve actually read cuz i know my topics and others that i’ve read talk about the exact thing but not as extreme simplified as you…

But outside of that…, Necromancer does need a rework… and quite something at that…, as multiple necromancer players have compared other classes (how much abilities/power) they get unlocked vs Necromancers, and we’re genuilly in the disadvantage by quite a margain…

There have even been post videos by multiple content creators stating/proving this with multiple builds/characters.

Seeing how blizzard handles “balancing” asking for a simple make minions less stupid and give more power they will mess this up so… badly, and why?

Look at Beta, minions were strong and AWESOME, (blizzard saw fun, some streamers couldn’t keep their mouths shut and basically killed the entire character)

4

no thank you, we have enough “hero damage classes” we need a summoner class where minions dish out the damage.

Yes minions are stupid, but them attacking the wrong target is fine, them leaving combat mid fight is not fine.

my hellbent commander gives 60%[x] damage (level 6 with amu) to my minions, if that was nerfed to 12%[x] and my (nercomancer) damage was boosted, this would be soo much worse for a summoner who actually wants minions to do damage.

also, investing 99% of your skill points and your minions run off, just imagine spending 100% of your skill points, aspects, glyphs, gear modifiers and paragon points all for the single purpose of minion damage and minion/necromancer survival, only to do absolutely abysmal damage and have awful survivability on all fronts.
This is a huge issue and needs a MASSIVE (apologies for the caps) overhaul. Will this happen? i really doubt it.

The issue I have on the minion front is the base design, all skills corpse explosion/bone spear etc can be leveled up, even companions can be. But summons cant. To me this says “these minions are support and should not be your main source of damage”, which would lead me to think the real summoner class is in fact the druid. But then necromancer has all the passive skills for minions and not for other skills (except generic buffs through the sacrifice options) while druid lacks the same level of passive options for companions.
So basically I don’t really know what they want with minions, are they pure support? or is the plethora of modifiers outside of leveling up minions suggesting they can be your main source of damage?
3 seasons in and i still don’t have a clear picture on what their design wishes are for minions, as there is evidence pointing in opposites directions, support or main source.
its all so baffling to me that minions roll in the game is so unclear this deep into the game.

anyway that’s my two pence on the matter.

1 Like
5

Agreed. In their sheer terror of making an ‘afk’ class they have completely missed what the summoner archetype playstyle and class fantasy entails.

I want my active skills to be debuffs and targeted manipulation of the battlefield while my army hacks the enemy apart.

If they still need to have the player being the one performing in order to avoid the ‘afk’ condundrum; rework the minion-adjacent or minion-complementary skills, rework the minion-focused legendary affixes and uniques so they actually function.

Things like say; if an enemy is afflicted by blight and decomposition at the same time they take a vastly increased amount of damage from minions.

That type of strategy requires now 3 or 4 skills (skeletons, maybe golem as well, decomp and blight) with the possible added focus of blight and decomp affixes, and requires the player to channel and be stationary, and thus vulnerable. Those stipulations would require an active playstyle and risk assesement, and would warrant the reward of huge damage.

Things like that. Something. Anything.

Right now the only end game uniques that connect with minions dont actually improve or boost them at all, and instead use them simply as vehicles for debuffs or dps bursts that in no way reflect the minion’s actual stats or how much focus youve put into them

6

They could add in effects from skills outside the established de facto ‘minion support’ abilities like
“Whenever your bone spirit damages an enemy they take an increased xxx from minions, stacking up to y times”

So now you have a targetable, situational resource you can spread out vs mobs or save up vs bosses, opening up new synergies and builds.

This isnt rocket science, Im spitballing ideas while working, not even a paid game developer. I cannot fathom why minion builds just continue to be so pigeonholed and nonfunctional

7

i don’t get how they seem to be unable to make a real pet/minion/summoner class. There are many great games with great ways to do it. F.E. take grim dawn. grim dawn has its own minion stats on gear so as a summoner you know “look mainly at these stats” and only when optimizing you begin to compare in detail the other stuff.
in grim dawn you also have perma buffs, temporary buffs, enemy perma debuffs, enemy temporary debuffs, temporary additional pets, short boosts for the pets. if you play summoner in grim dawn you are constantly buffing and debuffing as well as managing your pets (you have a “go to” and “attack this” button). Also you need to resummon some pets and some pets have active abilities you ned to trigger by resummoning them (demonhound explodes when resummoned and does AOE). Grim dawn also has something extra with their devotion system, it is comparable with paragon but it has special passives you need to attach to an ability. F.e. if you take a devotion that produces a fire ring around you you can bind that to your skeletons. the skeletons then each ahve a fire ring around them. or you bind an area heal on a aura buff, then your pets trigger the area heal when they are being hit.

8

The way I see it, that’s how it works right now.

The current Mendeln Summoner is not on AFK. This is how it works on me. I start
with Bloodmist that desecrates the ground and I desecrate a big area. The Bloodmist too throws corpses around 3 corpses per Bloodmist. Cast Tendril on a corpse, throw Decrepify and Blight instantaneously and then spam Corpse Explosions (Blighted). Shadowblights in there too. Every mob death leaves corpses so i just continue spamming Corpse Explosions. Many of them would die and then I do Metamorphosis dash to remaining mobs.

And in the end, all mobs die. But look at those damages I threw to the mobs: Desecrated ground DoT, Tendril to put them all together, Blighted Corpse Explosions, Shadowblight and Metamorphosis Dash damage. Each of those damage has Lucky Hit. Add those Lucky hits from my Lucky Hits stats I am wearing from my gear. I would always be almost 100% on Lucky Hits. But the Ring of Mendeln only proc’d 10% of my Lucky Hits. If there are 10 mobs in there, there would be 10x attempts from each damage i did to proc my Ring of Mendeln. With 10% proc rate on Lucky hit on Ring of Mendeln, 1 out of 10 of those attempts would proc the Ring of Mendeln and it would explode, doing very heavy damage to all the mobs. The more mobs, the more attempts it would try to proc from my Mendeln ring. Let’s say 50 mobs in there got tendril’d. There would 50x attempts for each damage I did to proc my ring. With 10% proc rate around 5 of those attempts would proc the Ring that would explode/melt everything in there depending on crit/vuln of my toon.

That’s the Ring of Mendeln. How about Xfal’s Corroded Signet? It has 50% chance proc rate from a DoT. The DoTs I used above are Desecrated ground, Blight, Blighted Corpse Explosion and Shadowblights. If there are 10 mobs tendril’d to Decerated ground, Blighted, Blighted Corpse Explosions with SHadowblights, there’s 10 attempts from each of those DoT to proc the Xfal. 50% proc rate means, 5 out of 10 of those attempts would proc the ring. There is Andariel’s Uber unique helm that has Poison DoT. And Bonestorm Ultimate Shadow Aspect converting Bonestorm into Shadow DoT. Those can be used to proc Xfal if you use them.

So the Mendeln-Xfal build, you never AFK. You spam those abilities/DoTs. With 50% Lucky Hits from gear, most of the time you would be on Lucky Hit. The proc rate on each rings are not that really bad.

I only used 2x glyphs for my Minions to keep them alive and 4x damage glyphs from 6 Paragon boards. But I also covered critical nodes for Minion survivability. Of course, there are moments, minions would be overwhelmed with damage but you have Army of the Dead to bring them back. It’s a matter of who kills first. Make sure it’s not you who dies first. To me, build works. I put down AoZ tier 1 and I could do better if I continued. It’s not a meta build but is enough. I find the build viable. Of course, it requires a lot of movement and lots of spamming. It’s a very high APM Actions per Minute build… far from AFK… which is GREAT.

9

this is basically d3 Zunimassa set, and in general I think this is bad. My reasoning is, the power is not with your minions, its with your spell that debuffs enemies or buffs your minions for a short period to do real damage. This feels so bad when you are fighting hard content and your minions do zero damage, not even moving enemies’ health bars, then you press 1 button and bang you one shot that enemy.

I would literally take a boring AFK summoner over this.
I think the answer is, player input should have no more then maybe a small increase on damage, but is mandatory for utility.
So if you make utility a requirement in a game then you have a very active playstyle while also having the real power with your minions.

For me the goal for a summoner should be “afk summoner” works on easy standard farm content. “active play summoner” is mandatory for efficiency and hard content.

How do you implement this?

  • Give a CC break to your minions from an active spell on a cooldown. Making a decision here is important.
  • Make Minions initiate combat and generate some threat. (not done)
  • Make cursing increase damage by a large amount (already done)
  • Make active play required for survival and make sure investing in survival is valuable and a required aspect of the game (done, self healing/barrier/disobedience)
  • Have a minion heal button (done but done badly, not strong enough. spamming this should stop minions dying)
  • Have a minion utility button (done well, golem abilities)
  • Have a mechanic that requires active play (done - lucky hit/self healing/cc)
  • Have some kind of cooldown to increase minion damage (done badly AotD. AotD should be a boost to minions rather then doing its own damage. It should not rely on an aspect to be a “summoner” skill.)

I am sure there are more, but we already have everything we need for active play as a summoner. What we need now is minions to do 10x more damage so they work, a good unique and tweaking the above list, like making minion healing better, more aspects to increase minion damage exclusively.

anyways that’s my 2 pence again.