Minion Necro feels bad

Minion damage felt bad on live without Mendeln in the end game, now on the PTR Mendeln feels bad compared to army of the dead.

in Pit 100 my fully decked out minion summoner does vertually no damage with minions and mendeln unless army of the dead is activated, but then army of the dead deletes monsters off screen without my minions assisting.
Summoner necro is now simply an ultimate class as most of the damage is from army of the dead and minions themselves do absolutely nothing, with mendeln contributing a tiny bit as long as its getting unyielding commander boosted.

If this is how it goes live, i am no longer interested in the D4 summoner concept.

Summoner players will only be happy when minions are the main sauce of our damage not some lack luster support.

9 Likes

It would be nice if death’s defense passive and all the glyphs that give more minion armour/resists were changed to do something beneficial.

And we desperately need a way to make our minions attack a certain target or at least move to and attack in a general area

1 Like

I could not agree more with everything you have stated here. Minions lack imagination including skill variance, minion type and interesting uniques/legendary affixes. I am almost completely disenchanted with summoner builds at this point as well. Until minions are the source of minion damage, necromancers should play a different build and consider themselves dark sorcs.

Learn from PoE and PoE 2 on how to do minions. At least you can macro them to attack what you want in that game and every other ARPG. Defensive Aura sucks so much when you can’t command them - forcing you into tendrils most of the time. AotD doing damage is great but if it goes live as is I think I’m out for now too.

They didn’t change the skill tree and paragon, including glyphs for minions, which still give garbage stats like total armor and elemental resistance for minions. They didn’t give damage to the aspect that gives +2 to skeleton warriors/magicians, they didn’t give the aspect blizzard to skeleton mages in the book of the dead and the aspect for shadow damage for dark mages. We need to wait for the next season, I think at this rate I will completely lose interest in this game, the only thing holding me back for now is the companion druid.

2 Likes

Totally agree.

TLDR: increase base minion damage (with paragons and glyphs to not unbalance low lvl), slight nerf AotD and mendeln procs, merge some aspects and update useless passive skills/nodes.

Minion damage is very weak outside mendeln, and even mendeln procs isnt good enough doing pit 95-100 (comparing non minion builds).

Its important to mention, to be able run pit 100, you need invest too much on damage, sacrificing alot survivibility.

If you compare with non minion build, like bloodsurge or blood lance, these can tank alot (pratically imortal), while doing way better consistent damage. You also can do defensive variants in your build, without lose alot of damage…

AotD is in the right direction, but its too disproportionate… They need to buff alot base minion damage in high end, while doing some ajust (tune down) in mendeln and AotD to prevent overpower too much the build.

I will point some suggestions i already did in necro forum, as a effort to Blizzard change their mind.

1 - Best way to improve base minion damage without buff too much low lvl experience, are paragons and glyphs:

A) Warrior glyph: its outdated… Need to put + 20(x)% summoning damage (all minions) and keep the armor buff as secondary effect (for those that have hope with thorns).

*Legendary effect (lvl 46), increase summoning damage by “x”% up to +20(x)% at lvl 100.

B) Mage glyph: keep resist plus increase skeleton mage damage by (x) 20% (only mages this one). Legendary glyph increase mage damage up to 20% on lvl 100.

C) Golem glyph: keep same damage % (golem only), but put a aditional extra thorn %. Legendary glyph +(x) 20% golem damage on lvl 100.

D) Paragons: since skeleton warrior take low % from weapon damage, they need to improve alot the additive damage to warrior which do almost no damage in any highlvl content.

The defensive nodes need to have some sinergy with the necro, giving a small portion of the stats to necro.

E) Passive Skill “Death defense”: This passive is totally outdated and useless. Since is a high lvl passive, it need to be good (some will say its good to thorns, i disagree…).

Suggestion “Assemble the army” (or whatever you want): increase the total skeleton warrior/mages by 1 (3 ranks).

F) Aspects: some aspect need to be merged, i cant find a build (no matters the class) which require so many aspects to work…

G) Shields: this could be our best defensive gear, but it decrease too much overall damage. It need to grant us at least 90-95% main hand damage to be competitive with focus. It already cant use offensive aspect, no reason gimp even more the damage.

Percentages can be changed to balance to a reasonable lvls.

3 Likes

I agree 100% with the OP. Clicking AoTD to do damage is not really what I was expecting as a summoner of an army.

1 Like

I 100% agree.

In my experience on this PTR, with AotD my minions are like spectators… And without AotD they cant do a consistent clear on high pits [90+]…

You absolutely right. And I’ll add to your argument: Even older games like Grimdawn already show how to make a minion necromancer.

1 Like

I also support this. If someone want’s to build around the ultimate skill make aspects for it. Army’s rank 5 bonus should boost the stats for the minions not it self. Or boost it more for them, than itself.