heya. had some thoughts on the necro minion balance and the talk of wanting a more active playstyle leading an army now that i have more information after listening to people and looking at builds and paragons and aspects and all that.
for starters i will get this off the board.
i feel that with a real investment into the talents / paragon / aspects that you will be able to command an army and probably be fully capable of clearing the game with all the tools that are available with all that. your playstyle will no doubt be active and the big heals that you will be able to do for minions with the added ability of minions not being able to take more than 45% (i think it is that) of their life in 1 hit will make them able to be actively managed.
that being said , i feel if a maxxed out minion necro can do it but still with some issue here and there, a not as invested necro will not be able to keep their minions up without a large issue. so much so that they will probably opt for going without minions or maybe even golem only.
the problem is two fold.
base minion survivability and active healing management of the summons.
if you make minions that can survive at a base level forever and also do damage you have a huge eazy playstyle that is by far the best in terms of survivability and getting out dmg without issue.
if you make them too squishy baseline that only with big investment they become solid enough to take on the higher difficulties , you lose the people in the middle who would otherwise have played with minions just not playing with them.
and then you have that for both bosses and elites where they spam abilities that do huge chunk dmg and make you vunerable on some and you would see there is a problem.
lastly , i get that the devs want a “active” playstyle. i dont know what they want with this.
is it they want you to manage your army by healing them and replenishing them? if so that is a noble goal and with investment it seems that people would be capable of doing that.
without a big investment the army will be not only squishier to a large degree but the ability to heal instantly for a large amount like the one talent near the bottom of the tree (i believe its 60%) would not be there. one sollution you could do is to make the base heal either stack as an over 5 seconds thing and be able to be spammed or preferrably make the skele heal instant 10% so they could be actively managed and wouldnt cause a large amount of downtime in between pulls.
anyways feel free to post your thoughts on this.
I am the oppinion minion mastery focus should not be viable for high end dungeons, mainly kept for overworld. Youd want to go caster if you want to succeed at endgame dungeons.
i disagree with that. basically cutting off one of the key features of a class for parts of the game would be bad design imo.
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Eh, Guild Wars 2 did the same thing to necromancers there. I see it as a perfectly acceptable solution after seeing how necromancers ran out of control in Guild Wars 1.
Minions should be for goofing around, not something serious, too many balance issues inherent in a horde of disposable minions.
if that were the case they shouldnt have made necromancers or designed them this way.
but we are where we are at this moment.
i dont think you understand fully what youre saying. without large investment in minion buffing skills /talents/ paragon/ gear/ect minions will likely become useless at higher levels and tiers of play.
necromancers dont have many movement skills if any at all.
they dont have most of the defenses that other classes do other than blood mist that i am aware of.
they arent beefy without a large investment in passives .
they arent totally built to be sans minions but there are loadouts that can make that a possibility.
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I wanted a FULL army of indesposable minions ala- D2 - necromancer. FOr some people its nice to be able to hide behind a wall of minions and not have to actively manage the dying minions like D3 necro did. For that reason alone I will not play the Necro, I did play during the open beta and I really thought they we ok at lvl 25 but Im guessing much like in D2 once you get to higher difficulties they will get weaker and weaker making them useless. The land of the dead skill in d3 was a horrible idea because all you did there was get cooldown so u can make them invincible but I hated that style too. I guess I dont know why the devs insist it has to be an active build - why cant we have the hoard of minions to do all the work ???
well some would say that would be kinda boring and without real challenge.
i think the active part on fully buffed minion builds through talents/gear/paragon boards ect will be just fine. ill post the minion build i was fiddling with (it doesnt have the paragon boards but youll see the jist of it).
(https://d4builds.gg/builds/7db0f8bd-8598-4bcb-9028-88552869e968/)
if you look at the passives you get:
a 60% heal every 5 seconds
minions cant lose more than 45% life in 1 hit
and lots of dmg buffs for being close or other such things + flat bonuses to life and damage on all your minions .
that will make the actively managing their health alooooot easier.
the rub would be if they go too far in forcing the active thing and then on top of the later world tiers doing tons more damage and probably having more elite/boss ability spam.
im sure the build will be functional and they will tune it to be such but the real worry is if they do that how will non buffed minion builds fare.
And some thought they said play your own way … 
I get your point though - I want one nice and easy player character for when I just wanted to play but not have to pay attention and be all button mashy all the time…
I think they fixed a lot of the issue with the hotfix, honestly. My summon Necro handled boss fights better than my main werewolf Druid. I would say the main challenge will simply be bosses that don’t have any minions (so no corpse creation). Bosses with minions are fine. You SHOULD have to be re-summoning minions during a boss fight. But not having any corpses is the problem.
I wouldn’t want them to make the summons overpowered just because of a few boss fights. I’d rather solve for the boss fights themselves, whether its adding a few corpses to the environment itself, a few minions to kill, etc.
Side note: Anyone else not really pleased with the 4 skeletons right off the bat design? Call me old hat but I really prefer starting with 1 and climbing to a much higher number with skill points and gear. Building a gradually larger army is most of the fun of the Necro imo.
I agree. But i think 4 is a good starting place. With 4 skeleton warriors you have a little squad. If you want more you can invest into the skirmisher node that gives you 1 more. And then i understand there is gear that increases your number.
Then you get skeleton mages. With three of them, and 4-5 skeletons its feeling a bit like an army. I understand there is also gear that increases your number of skeleton mages.
And finally you get a golem. Just one, but hes big. So thats cool.
So we start at 4 and climb to 8-9. Then with gear maybe as many as 12-13 with gear. Thats a decently sized army.
Then army of the dead every 90ish seconds gives you even more (temporary) undead.
I think the numbers are probably fine. As long as theyre viable in endgame
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i think them asking for a bit of maintaining the army isnt too much to ask really.
it does depend on how much they ask of it though.
I agree.
I dont think you should have to be resummoning fighting white trash mobs. If you lose a couple during a nasty elite fight, thats ok too.
Id be ok with having to resummon all of them a couple times during a hard boss fight.
And, if you spec the warriors to be tanky, instead of damage dealers, they should almost never die
true. it also is a gear thing too with people saying you should go shields or maybe have some thorns on the gear for it.
also i would invest in the passives that create more corpses and the reapers upgrade 2 i believe to create corpses.
even with that though not having enough corpses to maintain your army sucks and would def feel bad.