Minions are pretty OP for season 4.
Ill wait for the patch notes to determine that . I hope they do so i can really play a commander of death
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It looks AMAZING for hybrid builds but holy crap does it basically gutter the minion cult leader paragon board and makes a bunch of passive skills lackluster.
Unless they get rocked at super high levels ( only went to 87 on the pit before ptr closed and never saw them die unless standing in poison) all those dr, armor and resist paragon points are useless in the cult leader board for minions. Cult leader itself is a million times better, but unless the entire board is revamped (golem one too), gonna have a lot of worthless traits.
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That’s what I thought. With 100% stat inherit what’s the point in those paragon points for the board?
Imo that entire leader board needs to get buffs in terms of legendary nodes. Same with the golem one. The nodes themselves are OK inconcept but they just need enough to make them worthwhile. If someone wants to braindead the game, let them. Who cares? As long as it doesn’t invalidate PvP it’s all G.
The only ones on that board I care about is the mage dmg one and Cult Leader. that’s it. The Glyph node is miiighty convenient for Int based Glyphys though.
Minion survivability was not an issue against pit 100+ mobs (level 199).
I had Deadraiser in the Cult Leader board for the damage reduction, which should total something like 53% if my math is correct. There’s no better glyph for damage on that board, anyway. At least if your build cares about minion damage.
i don’t really use it anymore outside of bossing, i just use the run speed + 10%x minion damage on those nodes now. you lose about 10% additive damage and 10% DR in exchange for perma 10%x damage.
for uber bosses (level 150-200) I would swap in Deadraiser into my build in that slot and place the run speed one in the control glyph slot as control glyph gives nothing vs bosses outside of stagger, and deadraiser only will ever get 15 stacks on anything that survives for more then several seconds.
I don’t know what your opinion on this is, but i feel like its worth it given how unimportant minion survival is now.
On shadow minions, the only other options would be exploit or gravekeeper.
i would go corporeal in exchange for deadraiser, and if you were already running corporeal add exploit.
But it probably doesnt matter to much either way… i feel like damage is not a big deal, we should really focus on player survival and boss damage. I doubt going over 100 pit is worth anything anyways.
personally im going to stack as much DR as I can, add loads of dodge + heal when you dodge aspect, then stack damage on my bone mages. hit minion IAS cap so i can run shadowblight + blighted aspect at some point, then just have minions to generate corpses for fortify and golem for 30% DR. get +4 mage mastery on all slots 
however that is a very basic strat so far, and probably the end result will be completely different
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Corporeal doesn’t affect shadow damage and the 50% additive and 12% multiplicative on Deadraiser are pretty good, actually.
are u not stacking minion damage? sorry i thought u ment minion shadow aka mages.
corporeal for me is a no brainer due to move speed + 10%x and its 150% to blue nodes makes it a poor mans dead raiser. also deadraiser is 15%x now but will be 1%x for 99% of dungeon content.
Yeah, I didn’t stack minion damage but rather prioritised stats that affect the character, too. That being said, the first priority is stacking multipliers. My build uses seven boards with multiplicative glyphs and I’d swap control for exploit on bosses. I got the shadow mages up to 23 mil on the target dummy and didn’t even have blighted on the 2h or a lot of ranks in mage mastery. My core skill damage ended up being insignificant and pure minion stats are probably fine for the build.
I didn’t feel like I needed more movement speed. My gear alone put me at 175% or something.
yeah im going to go mages too, they are just so scalable. im kinda sad we have to chose a specific minion type due to the way mastery works… but meh they are still pretty cool.
With equal ranks in their masteries the mages deal 5-10 times more damage per hit than reapers. I might end up sacrificing them for 15%x shadow damage. That would free up an aspect slot, too. I’m not sure what to replace Aphotic with, though.
just don’t use it, i dont see the point in buffing their damage (turning it into shadow aka synergizing with your glyphs and gear) when you are not giving them mastery levels.
I see there are 3 options with melee minions, sacrifice, corpse bots, CDR bots, taunt bots. So far i didnt test taunting, but if its single target, thats pointless. I think fortify is going to be very important given the lack of DR, so corpse bots are probably the best bet. CDR bots seems kinda weak if im honest, so i don’t rate that option either.
for example there is a small chance I will run blood golem with 30% DR with no hulking board or glyph… literally ignoring its damage in favour of further stacking mage damage. I see melee skeles as clearly the worst dps minion, so I will fully ignore trying to make them do damage and just use them as “utility”.
They help with blighted uptime. I don’t think taunt is necessary. Corpse Tendrils clears the screen, anyway.
hmm i tested them only with shadowblight and they didn’t proc it at all… I was basing this simply from the shadowblight sound effect (it goes boom when it proc’s) so it could have been a bug. Did you test shadow melee minions independently to see if they stack blighted aspect? If so, then yeah it might be needed to insta stack it.
I believe that was among the things I tested. If they don’t proc shadowblight that must be a bug.
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Warriors absolutely 100% proc shadowblight w/aphotic. I confirmed it 100x over in my testing. Freaking insane with Aphotic aspect, shadowblight, and blighted. The easiest way to KNOW they were triggering shadowblight is to also have the Blighted aspect on, because not only does it do the sound effect, but it also shows the stacks as a buff on you. They did NOT trigger it unless you were using Aphotic aspect and trigger Skeletal Priest buff (they only do the shadow damage while they’re buffed, then it reverts back to physical).
Furthermore with reapers, both types were triggering the 3 sec CDR but the second type also generated corpses, and they also both work with abhorrent decrepify to trigger the stun & even more CDR (the lucky hits on those are really weird, minion attacks do somehow trigger them).
I even confirmed the CDR interactions using a stopwatch and timing dozens of tests to make sure that I was getting reliable, consistent proof of overall reductions and stuff. Turned Army of the Dead from 70 sec into 15 sec using reapers with aphotic and shadowblight and decrepify without attacking at all myself.
I isolated literally every skill/passive/aspect etc. one at a time and confirmed definitively every interaction. You can check out my full post on the PTR forum if you click my name, I put a stupid amount of time into reviewing every single thing from aspects, items, skills/passives, paragon boards & glyphs, and book of the dead choices, as well as combinations of all of them.
While mages, by far, are better damage dealers than any warrior type, I think that running with both seems far more beneficial than sacrificing the warriors for the +5% crit chance or +15%x shadow damage. They massively increase your damage, but they all have a ton of benefits. The defender taunts are technically a crowd control too, so you get bonus damage from that, too, while the reapers CDR is insane cause basically nothing will ever be off CDR. Constant corpse tendril buff uptime, constant blood mist availability, constant uptime on golem active, crazy short CD on ultimate.
They shouldn’t. Necro minion skills are not lucky hit coefficient. So it’s a bug.