The Necromancer’s minions need to be buffed on WT3 and above, no question about it. I get that you don’t want them to be so strong that they tank everything and basically run you through the entire story, that’s fine. But, if I am playing a minion necro, shouldn’t I still be allowed to play the game on WT3? Because right now, you cannot. Just reached level 50, I have every buff associated with minions in the skill tree and 4 pieces of gear that give them extra health and damage reduction, and they are getting melted by normal enemies in under a second. My entire build is essentially worthless now in WT3.
And for those of you saying “NoT eVeRy BuIlD cAn Be vIabLe”, EAD. I’m not asking them to be as good as the first beta (though I’m sure they STILL wouldn’t stack up in end game) I just want to be able to play the game in any capacity on WT3 and above. I can’t even focus solely on keeping them alive because they just die too fast. I will run slower dungeons I don’t care, just buff my minions a little Jesus Christ.
2 Likes
Minion Necro, L77 doing NM dungeon 36 with some nasty modifiers (because I didn’t want to spend resources and though it would be easy). Bunch of mobs, Butcher among them in the blob, job done, moving on. Minions are okay.
Not sure about high tier NM dungeons. Some buffs may be needed there.
What’s your setup?
You running ‘minions’ but with a powerful damaging ability where most of everything comes from it?
Bone Spear?
1st fix the paragon board, it’s broken for minions. After that lets see how they perform.
The big issue is it takes so many Aspects and Nodes to make Minions viable and it’s a gigantic time sink to figure out what does and doesn’t work.
Going minionmancer is the most expensive class build in the game right now.
Skelies and Golem, maxed. Army of the Dead to bring them back. Max Decrepify for the slow and the CD reduction to my only CD skill, Army of the Dead. Against large blobs You can almost chain the ultimate.
I have Decompose as a generator and Bone spear for the Vulnerable. Believe me, later on the Spear does not do much but it is still helpful for tagging Vulnerable and finishing odd low-life mobs.
In NM dungeons you may want to avoid certain modifiers.
If overwhelmed, you can run a few screens away and approach the blob of enemies more strategically. Minions are good at following you. I prefer to reposition than to just eat damage.
Remember to have +3 skeletons on the amulet and +2 of the other skeletons somewhere else.
P.S. I also have 3 points for +30 healing passive when injured.
^Appreciate the feedback, will definitely look into Decrepify and see if that can make a difference! But one important thing that people are missing is that you shouldn’t NEED to ever get a certain aspect or unique to make the minions viable, they are the core mf mechanic of the Necromancer.
That would be like saying in order to use a 2 handed slashing weapon on a barbarian, you need to find these 2 specific aspects and put skill points into these 2 passives, even though there is literally a weapon slot that only takes two handed slashing weapons. Anything that is core to the character you are playing is where the viability of any build should be coming from, early mid or late game.
You have the book of the dead from like lvl 5 or something, yet that core part of your character is only viable throughout the entire game IF you put all your skill points into it and IF you find the right pieces of gear and IF you play in a very specific playstyle with no room for experimentation? Idk bout y’all, but that makes no mf sense to me whatsoever.
You really don’t need certain aspects or gear to make minions viable until WT3, where you’ve beaten the campaign and are now into end game content.
Just don’t AFK and expect the minions to carry for you, you need to use skills like Corpse Explosion to support them.
Where Minions start to feel weak is the WT4 capstone dungeon. Everything before that is solved by baseline aspects and not trying to AFK farm.
Paragon board nodes for minions are bugged currently and that hurts minion builds really bad late game.
Hahaha that’s where I am man 
and that’s the whole point of this post! I’ve got the full shadowblight settup going, corpse explosion all that. Sequence of the fight goes a lil something like:
See enemy
Shoot em with blight
Reap a corpse
Splosion
immediately use next corpse to spawn skeletal priest (fully maxed)
next three corpses to corpse explosion to stack shadow damage
Minions dead before priest healing gets off or by the time there is a 6th corpse to spawn priest again
use Army of the dead to respawn minions
repeat
Seems kinda dumb to me don’t ya think?
IDK man, in all of WT3 including vs all bosses with the only excepting being the lvl 70 capstone I can almost stand still, spamming shadow damage corpse explosion, blight, Decrepify and Army of the Dead.
The big aspects I needed was +2 to Skeletal Mages/Warriors and + attack speed per attack for minions and the Army of the Dead baseline one you can get from a dungeon. Those alone make the build fairly viable on WT3.
Except for the lvl 70 capstone…but once Blizzard fixes their Paragon board for minions that’ll probably be fine too.
I do fine as a summon necro at lvl 70 with bone storm and bone spear. It’s slower then any other build but i haven’t run into a nightmare dungeon or anything I can’t do.
Important thing that youre missing is that if you want to play any of the endgame activities, you, by default, have to optimize towards them.
So its not like youre forced to play certain thing per se, you need to use it down the line when the real difficulty comes