Necro minions will not be viable endgame

PC General Discussion
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I know there are already posts about this but I want to make one more focusing on later stages of the game. I have played a lot of minion builds in other ARPG’s, POE for example (a thousand hours of minions probably) so I understand about scaling difficulty and I can make some easy guesses about viability of minions.

First I’ll explain my build on the server slam:

  • Decompose (this feels bad btw, but it’s the best solution…)
  • Bone spear, actually really good and mandatory imo
  • Skeletal warrior mastery
  • Grim harvest x3, mandatory for essence uptime (spamming the minion key)
  • Iron maiden with enhanced, mandatory for essence uptime
  • Decrepify
  • Skeletal mage mastery

That gives you the basics anyway. You summon continuously which gives you essence, you double curse and bone spear while your minions fight. Of course on gear you stack minion life/damage/speed (maybe thorns as well I couldn’t test properly).

This works reasonably well, after getting some gear minions do good damage for the level on non-boss encounters. I will say that I have serious doubts this scales to end game, I sort of suspect that high tier elites will just delete your minions. The main reason it works at lower level is that bone spear can generate corpses by one tapping small mobs.

Even if all that does scale correctly (I really really doubt that), minions need a big change! The problem is that bosses just merc your minions and you don’t have a way to resurrect them at all. The corpse mechanic doesn’t work, you can’t generate them while fighting the boss, you simply can’t do it.

On the server slam it’s not an insurmountable problem, you can just Decompose and burst them down with bone spear but that is not going to work later on. If you focus your build on minions and the boss deletes your minions then your build won’t do anything. This is not hard to understand ok…

I am not sure what the fix is but this needs to be fixed on release. Necro without a viable minion build is just such a failure of imagination.

Here are some ideas, not perfect but something needs to happen:

  • Minions can be summoned without corpses
  • One corpse can revive all your minions
  • Minions have huge damage reduction buffs against all bosses and elites (This would be great, but can you tune this properly? I have my doubts about that.)
  • Minions are unkillable
  • Minions that die self-res after 5 seconds

Maybe the best solution is to allow you to res all your minions from a single corps. Also why doesn’t the heal do anything? My whole build was pressing the minion key to gain essence and you can’t tell their health is going up at all…

I don’t know if anyone from Blizzard will read this but it’s obvious that minions, in their current form won’t be viable in endgame. Also I have seen comments from people who played the endgame beta, even pre-nerf they were not viable…

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Don’t worry, dev’s don’t care and the class will remain unplayable aside from yard trash killing.

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I just don’t get it. I’m sure they already had this feedback from the end-game beta and yet we see them nerf minions. It doesn’t make any sense. Also if any of the devs every played minions they would know they die on bosses (like with the bubble or that goat in the lvl22 keep). It’s not like it’s an obscure issue, very in-your-face.

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I really wanted to be a necro it’s the reason I even was interested in d4 but the minions are still so worthless. No I’m not going to refund but now I’m going to main another class with a meh this is better then nothing experience :(. I played the necro skeleton n earlier betas when the minions just didn’t die… They should be able to die they did need a nerf but that doesn’t mean nerf them to the point people no longer enjoy it.

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Copy and paste from one of my posts in a different thread, lowkey feel like I’m missing something because I had a great time as Necromancer:

(The following is from a post-nerf T2 Necromancer run, lvl 1-20)
For being a player that is new to the Diablo series, playing as the Necromancer was an enjoyable experience.
Throughout the game I invested heavily into blood skills which seems necessary for minion survivability, at least for early game.
Having made a character based around corpses, I had no problem using hemorrhage and tapping 1 and 2 to summon minions and explode corpses respectively (can’t forget cursing and AOE attacks!) in the heat of combat.
I not once died throughout my playthrough of the Necromancer and I only really got frustrated at the cold effect (damn you cold elites!).

TL;DR
T2 Necromancer was an enjoyable experience for a new Diablo player post-nerf. :+1:

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We are not sure how end-game will be or what it is like past level 20/25. I think items will have a big impact on minion survivability. Really I think we can just wait at this point and see what it is like later in the game and go from there.

The dev team has been transparent and are listening, so if it is really a terrible thing I’m positive at this point they’d patch it or add in items to help with a minion focused build.

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I think this is just a beta-feeling that they needed a nerf. The problem is that once they all die you have no mechanic to resurrect them. In the beta part of the game that isn’t a huuuge problem but it will be at endgame. There is no way you can do like lvl 100+ dungeon bosses like this.

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There are skills in the game that have chances to spawn corpses per hit on an enemy, those are meant for respawning your minions and using the corpse explosion skill.

Not to mention the Paragon boards which will probably be able to boost minions further.

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I know you can generate corpses, this is not going to help you. Your minions die faster than you can res them (on bosses for now but will be elites at higher level I’m sure of it). This currently only works because we are at the start of the game. If an endgame mob deletes all your minions, they will then move to delete you. That’s the whole story. If you focus on minions and they all die then you have no build.

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May have felt this was in the server slam. There’s an ultimate called Supreme Army of the Dead which when used summons all your skeleton warriors and mages, no corpses needed

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I had little problem with this, even during bosses. Having played through level 1-20 on T2, I can say bosses do hit different but not in such an impactful way that they sweep all of my 5 reapers in one blow, plus the 3 cold mages.

We have no idea what an endgame minion (more like corpse) based build would be, and if it’ll be good or not. There’s no way you can definitely say it’s only because of early game.

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Guys, just think about this clearly. I am talking endgame. On the server slam my build was strong as well, I was even farming the lvl 30 keep at lvl 20. What I am saying is that this won’t scale as the difficulty scales. There have already been comments about this from people who were part of the endgame beta.

About the supreme army, that’s nice, that definitely helps, but only if the endgame mob can’t delete your minions in less time than the cooldown. That’s just not what I expect to happen for bosses and elite packs. There needs to be a big change in the res mechanic or it just won’t be viable.

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We have no idea what an endgame minion (more like corpse) based build would be, and if it’ll be good or not. There’s no way you can definitely say it’s only because of early game.

But we do , because there was already feedback saying they (minions) were weak prior to the nerf. That’s right, people played in the endgame closed beta and minions were bad. Heck, Rhykker even said outright on his limited late-game experience, that was specifically tailored for minions, changed him from thinking necro was the best class to the worst class.

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Exactly! And I know how to build strong minion builds, I wasted way too much of my time on that in my life haha. I can tell this will not scale even without trying it. But we do have endgame beta feedback about this already.

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This is good to know, I didn’t even know there was a previous endgame beta due to me

The server slam was my first experience with Diablo 4.

I feel like the Necromancer is meant to use minions as a skill, alongside blood and corpse skills as an overall playstyle.

If minions did prove useless during the endgame beta then I 100% think it should be changed.

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That’s exactly what I was doing, corpse and bone. Tell me though, in the campaign didn’t all your minions die on that bubble boss or on the keep lvl 22 Goat boss. I’m sure, like me, you finished them off with your generator + your damage skill not with your minions helping you. And that works for now but it won’t at lvl 70 → lvl 90 → nightmare dungeons lvl 120. The mobs will merc your minions and then they will merc you haha!

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