Minions are embarrasing! The execution, the design the AI is just terrible

PC General Discussion
1

I am sorry blizzard but this is just embarassing and horrendous.

The minions are a joke (The necromancer ones) but from what i am reading the druid minions are not great either.

  1. The AI the main reason why i moved away from Necro is because during a LARGE amount of the encounter some of my minions would just stand and watch… or the golem not attacking, not doing anything just standing in 1 place doing jack.

  2. Extremely squishy with low dmg and BAD targeting (WT 4 is just impossible with a minion build) notice the purple boys that grant dmg reduction to the mobs near him? Yeah good luck targeting him with the minions they will attack anything and everything except him meanwhile this is EASILY resolvable and it is RESOLVED by a MARGINALLY way less smaller company with way less resources in the face of Last epoch by SIMPLY adding the A button to move minions to X place or make them target X mob (takes like what 5 minutes to program? and you are developing this game for 7 years??? what a joke) its so fun having to spam the corpse priest to heal my minions every 1 second (that is if they dont insta die). You met the butcher? have fun he will rush past, ignore all your minions and go straigth for you, how do you deal with that? Kite him around a corner 10/10 game design blizz.

  3. Minion abilities (skills) and design

Once again lazy and bland, so you are telling me that between each skeletal warrior or mage i choose between 2 types REALLY wow… so much variety once again lets look at Last epoch for example a simple google search for “last epoch minion ability” will show you a WHOLE SKILL TREE for your minions, im not even going to mention how ridicilous it is that the only attribute that you can have on a piece of gear is minion health and attack speed (raw stats) um?? minion damage? no lets just have that for 20 paragon skills and we are done. (minion health regen, minion dmg reflect, minion dmg, minion crit and crit dmg there are SO MANY MORE stats you can add to make this more interesting and not bland)…

There are thousand more examples and words i can use and give as to how badly this is designed how bland it is and how uninspired for the 7 years of development this game had.

Multi-billion dollar company… embarassing

P.S before someone says to me just unlock more paragons etc have a better build my necro is level 81 and i quit him because of how boring bland and just ridicilous it was, i have a level 100 barb and its just NOT EVEN CLOSE in terms of ANYTHING

P.S 2 Even my hunter in WoW classic (Vanilla) which released 20 years ago has more in terms of minion (pet) skills , engagement , diversity and stats

5 Likes
2

You have a 100 barb and an 81 Necro? Sad I didn’t use those XP caves I guess, my takeaway from this is buff XP from other sources, thanks Blizzard!

On minions, they actually were working on a way to command them that was datamined, not sure what happened there.

Last Epoch definitely has much better minion variety than this game, though it’s a fairly low bar currently.

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Yes there are still more XP caves but I DO NOT RECOMMEND rushing to level 100 because there is absolutely no content to do when u reach it, no incentive to push high nightmare dungeons… nothing. You will get burned out and just quit.

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The minions are a massive part of the necro kit and they are complete garbage.

Every unique. Every legendary aspect. Every passive skill that mentions minions. Every active skill that mentions minions. Every active skill improvement that mentions minions. Every paragon board magic node. Every paragon board rare node. Every paragon board legendary node. Every glyph. Every book of the dead selection except sacrificing them.

Every single aspect of the necromancer class that in any way involves minions is utterly worthless because the core component is broken.

3 Likes
5

For druids, the creeper minion is really good. But that’s because it’s an Aoe, not really a minion.

The wolves are janky and low damage, but that make decent meat shields and aggro mobs pretty well to give you some breathing room.

The ravens are pretty bad. Static Aoe field that most enemies ignore or run through.

1 Like
6

Sounds like you’re making mistakes or haven’t prepared your build properly.

This literally doesn’t happen during actual fights as someone who mains a necromancer. I think the only time they’ve actually done that is when I’ve had to attack static objects like doors in a certain quest in Hawezar. But the moment enemies show up and I tag them with a basic attack? They jump right in every time.

Which is why the ‘purple minions’ are incredibly weak and can be killed with a few casts of bone spear, and since your minions are keeping the others busy, you can kill the purple one on your own.

Sounds like you need to give your minions some damage reduction via curses and paragon points (seriously Decrepify is your friend here, you’ll want to keep that active all the time). Also the passive that greatly increases your skeletal priests healing is mandatory.

You constantly put your minions between you and him. You’re correct that he will make a beeline for you, but pathing is still something he has to deal with, and while he’s trying to path through your minions, they’re whaling on him.

There are quite literally 3 different types of minions for each type, and each type has two specializations you can pick from (as well as the ability to sacrifice). For the easiest time I recommend using Skeletal Defenders with the talent that allows them to block damage every 6 seconds, Skeletal Mages with Cold for the CC (extremely useful, even against bosses because that stun bar will grow fairly quickly with the amount of CC they apply) and Bone Golem with the Corpse Shedding talent every time they take 25% of their health in damage.

Also, make sure you have the right Paragon Boards and Legendaries for a minion build. If you’re not using them, you will have a harder time. For Paragon Boards you want to use Cult Leader (Rotated for easy access to the legendary node), Hulking Monstrosity and Scent of Death. For your glyphs you’ll want Mage, Deadraiser and Warrior. For legendaries, those can take a while (since none of them are in the codex of power) but it is absolutely vital that you have the following aspects:

  • Aspect of Hardened Bones (extremely vital, gives flat damage reduction as long as you have 7 minions or more active)
  • Aspect of Frenzied Dead (extremely vital, massive attack speed bonuses as long as your minions are dealing damage)
  • Viscious/Blood Getter’s Aspect (each of these increase your maximum number of skeletal mages/warriors by 2)
  • Coldbringer’s Aspect (Your cold skeletal mages will cast Blizzard every 10 seconds, chilling/freezing enemies for more CC).
  • Aspect of Renimation (After 10 seconds of being alive your skeletons deal extra damage).

If you don’t have those, especially the first two, reduce the difficulty until you do, because even with paragon board enhancements you’re going to have a rough time on the hardest difficulty.

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7

Huh? I remember that even shortly after the D:I announcement debacle, they still said that they are not working on D4. Only half a year later did they start saying they would work on it.
That are barely 5 years working on D4. (which imo explains quite a bit about the actual state of the game)

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It might be 5, doesnt matter either way its obvious and clear that they did not playtest anything man just the fact that a simple feature as to move command your minions is not implemented just goes to show, not to mention the massive gap in balance.

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“Sounds like you’re making mistakes or haven’t prepared your build properly.”

I get what you are trying to say, however OP is correct. I have seen indy games with better minion gameplay. For a 95$ game (in my case) , this is unacceptable. I have every aspect you mention (with frenzy on 2hd weapon and all at max level), I have all the pet paragon points. I even sacrifice some gear slots for pet health, as well as use decrepify and bone prison for debuff/CC, all of this dosen’t matter at high level (even with max paragon pet DR).
Running around in circles 10 seconds into the fight trying to respawn you pets is not fun. This is what you experience at high level. Your solo (or golem only left standing) necro is usless at that point due to all the resources placed into a pet build. It is quite evident this dev team did not fully test this class. Evidence was the massive beta adjustment/readjustment prior to launch. There needs to be better AI, a pet/target command, another layer of minion defense as a start, or pet necros will drop like flies when they hit high level content.

1 Like