A bit about my experience:
So I have played exclusively Necromancer with summons as my main source of damage, as to me that’s what a necromancer is all about. Pre season 1 I leveled to 100 before the XP buffs in NM dungeons, exclusively in NM dungeons as I found them more enjoyable then repeating the same normal dungeon over and over again. I racked up a few hundred hours i’m sure!
Season 1, I have played significantly less, though have had a 100 char for quite some time, also playing exclusively minion damage.
My issues:
Minion survival:
Minion survivability and effectiveness while under the effects of AOE. They simply need flat damage reduction to all AOE effects built in, like in every other blizzard game with minions.
They should either break CC effects when I break it for myself, or have some kind of ICD to CC effects, after x seconds of being CC’ed they are immune for x seconds after, due to them standing and stacking in every fear/freeze whatever.
They take far to much damage from poison effects, this needs the same treatment as the fire nova nerf.
Frost empowered Goatmen champions still 3-4 shot my entire army with their cleave attack. Obviously my entire army is frozen and unable to do anything in this window. if you encounter 3-4 goatmen champs at once, my army is 1 shot. Experienced in a NM82, the rest of the champions, bosses, elites were a doddle.
Minion damage:
Minions in general have awful damage output. Its so evident that builds are not even using Cult leader or Hulking Monstrosity boards outside of glyph activation and damage reduction. this is clear by the fact that the Cult leader board in 99% of “minion builds” is utterly ignored and only used as a “minion damage reduction board” to keep them alive so as to ensure Ring of Mendeln has minions alive to facilitate its damage (I will get onto Ring of mendeln later)
To make matters worse one is forced into specific ultimate choices (bone storm over army of the dead) due to how utterly week one is over the other. I should not be choosing an ultimate (army of the dead) only for the effect of 1 aspect ( Unyielding Commander’s Aspect), it needs to bring more to the table then a single aspect. Bone storm empowers multiple aspects, and brings some amazing utility to boot (DR + Crit chance).
Minion Information and stats:
Summon necros are for some unknown reason the most cryptic of classes where it is close to impossible to know anything about anything without extensive testing. They simply need stats somewhere, I need to know how much life they have, their armour, barrier, damage per hit, attack speed etc. add this info ASAP!
Ring of Mendeln:
This ring is not a summoner/minion build ring!!! If I build a summoner, I take minion damage nodes and glyphs in my skill tree and paragon boards. This ring does not scale from ANY minion stats. Either change this ring to only scale from our skeletons/minions damage (huge nerf to the ring lol) or add an actual summoner unique.
Aspects:
Some aspects such as +2 skeleton mages/warriors need to be moved to paragon boards, as this is such a waste of aspects just to be able to play as a summoner. Its like a barbarian needing 2 aspects to hold his weapons.
Make a distinction between aspects that say “you deal” and “deal” X more damage (this would be simply resolved by giving us minion stats). I was playing with Conceited Aspect (deal 25% more damage while you have a barrier) until I found out Blighted Aspect (you deal 120% more damage after XYZ) worked on my minions too.
Please make pure minion builds better, I should not need to impose rules on myself like “no mendeln” and “no barber heart” to have fun and enjoy the classic summoner experience. What happened to play your way?
