My take on changes required for minion necro to use more of it's potential

  1. Skellies button should have command button like active ability for golem, priest could be invoked when we manually set target, not necessarily from bodies
  2. Skellies should just respawn like golem (or like on boss), dying in the pit or horde is way too punishing, minion necro is the only build that needs THAT MUCH time to keep rolling
  3. Mendeln should be counted for each minion separately
  4. Aspect of Occult Dominion should be removed and base number of skellies should just be raised. Let’s be honest - this aspect is mandatory for minion necro, it only takes precious slot without giving any meaningful choice (for example having curse aura is a choice, you can just micromanage curses on your own), minion necro is aspect starved even without that (we could put Fel Gluttony in that spare slot so our golem is eating bodies instead of mashing skele priest all the time)
  5. Minion balance should be addressed - currently the only actual choice we have is skirmishers/reapers - this choice is not obvious, but shadow mages and blood golem are kinda obvious - skele defenders are totally useless, this game is about doing a lot of damage, defensive minions are useless
  6. Why don’t we have Core skill related to minions?

Did I forget about something?

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I agree with the occult dom.
Skeleton commanding the golem would be great idk how difficult to code.
The main issues for over a year now are the glyph and boards. They keep giving minion defense, armor, damage reduction, health etc these stats should be changed to minions attack speed, cr, damage etc there’s a glyph that gives mages armor lol.

The developers have made it clear they want minion necro to be mid tier at best. They envision the necro more like a Gothic mage.

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Ahh yes, these ideas were raised many times now.

I think the corpse explosion on totems needs to be addressed. Anduriel is huge pain. The ramp time in certain situations feels really bad especially doing hordes. I hope they rebalance the class with the big nerf coming to soulrift. I doubt it but I hope.

I can add to the list:
Requiem aspect, istead of increased essence per minion, it should regenerate essence per minion per second. This could work with, compnesate for Great Feast’s essence drain per minion.

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I don’t understand why Great Feast has a drain when Reanimation provides the same bonus without a penalty.

Great Feast is the only Offensive Aspect that also has a penalty. There is absolutely no reason why it’s the exception amongst the 197 offensive aspects across 6 classes.

Drain is fine if we could combo it as “resource spender” for example for Ring of Starless Skies and other similar effects.

reanimation has a penalty, your minions don’t get its effect for 10s after they are summoned. This used to be a big deal when keeping your minions alive was hard, now its basically obsolete.

I play great feast with curse auras (u can also play with auto rune cursing) and corpse explosion as it has no essence cost. Yes I sacrifice 20%x from not using blight, but its also way less clunky to play as CE stacks flesh eater so it just feels way smoother to spam CE rather then 5x skeletal priest + blight.

In addition to this you can build some essence back on gear to facilitate a normal build while still using great feast.

That’s not a penalty, that’s a wind up effect. And, like you said, minion survival hasn’t been an issue since Season 2…

We are still talking about a minion build?

You can call it what you like, it was a downside to using the aspect (it still can be in some niche situations), and a downside is commonly understood as a penalty. If your minions die in combat each individual minion interacts with this aspect independently. This used to absolutely destroy your damage output risking further minion deaths, creating a vicious circle.

I have been playing pure minion since season 0, and minion deaths was a huge issue from 0-season 3, thats 4 seasons in total.
Season 4 and 5 it was never an issue outside of tormented andarial and Uber Lilith for me, others had much more problems, especially those not playing as tanky as I do.
Season 6 it was not an issue for me, but I heard many people having this problem while trying to make the switch to harder content, it was an issue early in T4 again on Andy + Lilith, however for me now… yeah minion death is a thing of the past.

But then on the flip side Great Feast’s penalty never bothered me. Because I detest stacking flesh eater and baby sitting skeletal priest i specifically made my build with this in mind, that being i just need to mindlessly mash corpse explosion and randomly add skeletal priest to that mash fest… Which just so happened to synergies really well with Great feast.
Its great because this effectively automates this process as its not requiring any level of concentration. This allows me to pay attention to other things, like my second monitor and x files reruns^^

I have been playing summons since launch as well. Hardcore specifically. I haven’t had any issues with summons dying. Great Feast is a recent addition, as such, the benefits are on par with Reanimation with an added penalty.

It wouldn’t be an issue if curses were free to cast… The summon build already has abysmal clear speeds, the last thing I need is to wait around for essence to curse to increase minion damage.

As far as curse aura aspect, it was useful as a gem. There are no free slots for such an aspect without sacrificing a damage multiplier aspect.

yeah i can imagine thats the case in hardcore as you are much more focused on your defensive stats and not pushing content that is likely to kill you. Sadly on softcore this is never the case. I personally really enjoy trying to take my char’s to hard content far before they are ready, this is why I leveled 1-60 in penetent.
Climbing high into the Pit to is fun, though towards the end its just a case of, like you say, stacking all the multipliers due to the bullet spunge nature of the monsters and end boss. Without the gear this is just not viable in hardcore,

have you tried the rune option? Lith + Wat or Yol + Wat are a really nice auto Decrepify curse option. In addition if you select Abhorrent decrepify on your skill tree the Wat Rune will apply a curse with both Horrid and Abhorrent decrepify which is quite powerful in later pit tiers as its effectively a 10% nerf to monster maximum HP. I personally don’t use this setup, but its extremely powerful and probably the meta way of applying decrepify now.

Yes the minion build is still aspect starved and and sometimes feels like a chore to decide what aspect you want to loose for a unique or mythic.

Remember when useing Blighet aspect and Blighted CE solved this issue? Now shadow minions is not even an option and basicly a lot of shadow builds are gutted, no builds use Shadowblight keypassive, it’s the weakest of all keypassives.

As did I this season. Last season I soloed Cathedral of Light at level 21 (started at 16) and got one shot in Fallen Temple without a golem. Really have to get up to level 30+ (for a better weapon) to clear Fallen Temple. I was 34 when at completion the 2nd go.

I use Bac + Mot and Neo + Ohm.

I am currently running 3 mythics: Grandfather, Tyrael’s, Heir.

Mendeln ring
Reanimation on gloves
Great Feast on neck (will be replaced with Grasping Veins if I can ever find 23%+)
Frenzied Dead on gloves
Occult Dominion on pants
Blood Getters on boots (24%+ Penitent with GA on crit vs chilled if I run cold mages)

Cult Leader, Frailty, Blood Begets Blood, Flesh Eater

Iron Golem sacrificed.

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