The Campfire chat today has made it abundantly clear that they don’t see Minions as an “End Game” or dedicated build path. Adam Jackson said that they will be receiving another small numbers buff but no rework as they are busy with other projects. As someone who has spent a majority of Season 2 play testing Minions I just want to share their viability, purpose, and direction, with the community. I feel like not only the devs but the player base needs to understand the issue it faces and why it needs to be revamped to become viable.
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Utility: Most of the supposed utility from minions simply does not work as intended. Things that should work seem to do well on the target dummy but have a very different outcome in the open world.
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Reapers do not spawn corpses as intended.
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Bone mages do not provide worthwhile fortify giving only base while necrotic carapace gives maximum.
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Shadow mages do not proc shadowblight in the open world or on dummy and they do not show terror and or gloom activation though it does seem to be activating.
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Skirmishers still do the same damage as reapers and defenders even though they lose 15% of their health for the 30% damage increase.
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Defenders and Bone golem are still bugged and sometimes do not get the benefit of minions inherit thorns.
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Abhorrent decrepify still triggers off thorns from minions but specifically only works with some choices and not others. This is a working as intended bug?
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Spiked armor still only gives 30% of its value to minions and scales with level not weapon damage as stated (2388 at level 100).
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Damage: They simply can not clear end game on their own. The most damage I have gotten out of my Golem as a pure summoner build is 150,000 in fully optimized 925+25 gear. Warriors are hitting for 25,000 and mages 40,000. Why does this matter? Because it goes to show it isn’t a direct trade off compared to simply sacrificing them.
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Minion attack speed caps at 100%, any additional amount does nothing for the minions and is wasted meaning even taking unyielding commander’s aspect is a waste.
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Minions get 30% from all multipliers that are not universal. Damage to close, distant, amplify damage, fueled by death, death’s embrace, blighted aspect, etc, all only give 30% of their listed amount to minions. When you couple this with 30% weapon damage, crit, etc, they just don’t scale at all.
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Iron maiden is flagged as thorns, can’t crit, and doesn’t get a majority of the players multipliers in the same way as other skills. This means a skill meant to assist thorns builds does less than a basic skill. Even a level 19 Iron maiden does less damage than decompose with the same multipliers.
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Minions do not have a keystone thanks to attack speed being capped at 100% and they do not count as blood, bone, or darkness, skills. You fundamentally do not have a way to synergize or scale them.
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Mastery does not benefit from +skills. With a 30% base weapon damage as a skill “less than basic skills” and mastery only increasing the value of that 30% instead of increasing the actual skills scaling means they will never be WT4 ready.
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Army of the Dead is worthless. Unyielding commnader’s aspect is completely wasted thanks to the attack speed cap, the damage is lack luster, the lucky hit chance is ok but hits on world destructibles and objects doesn’t trigger, the corpse gen is a few seconds of hewed flesh and isn’t good utility wise. Overall it is a bad decision to run this ability while using or not using minions.
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Survival: I put together a toughness calculator to see why minions were struggling so hard to survive. Here is what I found out.
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Armor: While it is possible to get golem to the ADR “Armor Damage Reduction” cap for AoZ at 14,200. it is nearly impossible to hit this value outside of running 5 sources of TA% “total armor percent affix”. What this means is that choosing to wear unique items which you would do to increase your main skills damage while using minions means they die to one shots regardless. This is also true for NMD 100 and explains why so many people say their army starts to die around level 80.
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Resistance: You get way more than you need. Minions get your total resistance not the cap of 70% meaning you may have 120-200% resistance to an element that gets -50% from the difficulty and capped at 70%. Minions take from that larger pool at 30%. Meaning most of the extra resistance paragon, mage glyph, etc, is usually wasted.
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Minion Maximum Life: This hurts the players itemization choices along with being a double edged sword. On one hand it increases skeletal priest healing and allows them to survive damage over time that hits for less than 30% MML. On the other hand it also means the damage reduction minions get from the old passive “death’s defense” which is now standard, gets worse the more you stack. They take more damage overall from single hits and damage over time that would be reduced by 70% because you now have more health which is effectively disabling that 70% DR threshold.
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Damage Reduction: Actually seems to be really good and they are able to hit high values. However “Aspect of Hardened Bone” takes another unique / legendary slot from the necromancer.
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A.I.: Anyone who has played minions understands the frustration here.
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Golem: Will straight up eat its cooldown if you use the active while it is spawning. Server lag, terrain, etc, all affect how long this window is and makes it hard to time it so that you don’t waste a skill on your bar.
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Mages: Struggle to attack monsters near the edge of your screen. This often leads to them simply not doing damage. So there are times where you effectively have a skill on your bar that is well only working half of the time. This is a huge issue that makes them worthless from a utility point of view and damage.
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Warriors: No focus fire and reapers being the only AoE “Area of Effect” option means some monsters will actively heal the damage that they deal because they are being dps checked. This is a general issue with minion A.I. in general. But it can mean between mage and warrior A.I. you can have a skill that gets stat checked by a group of elites or monsters making it a dead skill.
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Invulnerable: They still sometimes attack a shield, barrier, or do not attack a destructible obstacle. Using decompose or reap to destroy a wall with hundreds of thousands or millions of health is tedious at best. Having half or all of your army attack something that can not die makes them a dead skill on your bar.
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Pathing: They are the worst missile in the game. While you can direct bone spear, blight, bone spirit, etc, You are reliant on your damaging minion skill to find its way through crowd control, obstacles, A.I., etc, to even begin its dps “damage per second” on a target. Minions could deal the same damage as S2 Hota and still be worse than other skills. Why? because the macro involved with controlling them gates their clear speed potential massively.
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Other Options Choices: It is a choice to sacrifice your army. There is no benefit to running them as is.
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Sacrifice: You will always get more value from simply not running them. You save two skill slots, skills, etc.
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Utility: Minions do not provide nearly the functionality of the sacrifice bonuses. The things minions give is essence regen, corpse generation, damage reduction, and a worse version of fortify. Most of these are either bugged and not working or an overall worse option.
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Damage: Because of the problems listed above and other things, they will never be able to provide the same damage output as a single multiplier from book of the dead sacrifice bonuses. Plain and simple you are nerfing yourself by taking either raise skeleton or golem.
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Unique vs Unique: Mendeln is now outclassed by X’fal’s. There is no way to hit the same damage value from Mendeln as you have to give up sacrifice bonuses and 2 skill slots. X’fals will always deal more making Mendeln a choice to be worse. Deathspeaker’s Pendant is worse than regular blood surge for the same reasons listed. This is without talking about how banished lord’s talisman sharing the same slot means straight up giving up a 120%[x] damage bonus so you can try to make a worse build work… Neither of the minion uniques are worth running and it is a compounding issue.
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Blood mist vs blood golem: The 15% damage reduction could be worthwhile if we didn’t have to give up the damage and utility of simply running blood mist over it. There is no reason to choose golem and invest an additional 9 skill points along with taking the cult leader board to keep it alive in the end game. There is simply no logical trade off here.
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Raise skeleton vs everything: Pick your poison. Corpse tendrils, bone prison, blood mist, etc. They do not provide the same utility and definitely do not provide the same damage as any other skill point. They are objectively worse than literally any other option including essence regeneration from cold mages.
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Conclusion: There is just no reason to play a minion build if you want to complete the end game. Even if we get another “small number buff” tomorrow in the patch notes. You are willfully choosing to give up massive damage multipliers and survival along with skill points and paragon just to pretend you aren’t an emo version of the sorcerer. Not only are they not designed to kill things at the same level even with their unique choices but you are losing far far too much. Until the developers lose their bias against them and give us a proper rework, they will continue to be a noob trap.
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While I love them personally and have gone to great lengths to try and make them viable, there is simply no way to do it currently. The community deserves to know that raise skeleton and golem are noob traps and will do nothing but artificially increase the difficulty of the game for yourself. Please do not play minions unless you are willing to acknowledge this and are trying to under perform as a necromancer in the end game.