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
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.
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.
You’re right, minion skills do not have any Lucky Hit coefficient. However, the curse lucky hits have worked in the game since release and they’re not a bug, because in this one specific case, the skill does not require the hits triggering it to have a lucky hit coefficient themselves. I’ll do my best to explain -
- Enhanced Decrepify: Lucky Hit: Enemies hit while afflicted with Decrepify have up to a 10% chance to Stun them for 2 seconds.
- Abhorrent Decrepify: Lucky Hit: Enemies hit while afflicted with Decrepify have up to a 15% chance to reduce your active Cooldowns by 1 second.
It doesn’t work exactly the same as other Lucky Hits. The effect can be triggered from any hit from any source (such as thorns, minions, or even other players), but it’s still technically counting as the player performing the Lucky Hit because the curse was their skill cast.
It’s maybe a little like the way that DoTs can continue to lucky hit from any damage tick over their duration, except with the curse, the curse doesn’t do any damage itself so the hits can only come from other sources - including non-player sources. Regardless of where the hit comes from, the curse can use the hit to potentially count as a lucky hit as if the player performed it.
Likewise, if the hits coincidentally have their own Lucky Hit chance (like another player casting their own skill) and it triggers as a Lucky Hit, that would be credited to them, not the player.
That was considered a bug and is fixed on live at the moment. PTR probably buged it out again.
I couldn’t test this right now, but I wasn’t aware of that and just watched a recent video by Macro talking about that – I think what they patched was thorns damage counting as a hit that could trigger abhorrent decrepify or hewed flesh. I was only testing in the PTR with minion hits for this purpose to confirm what they triggered. It sounds like that didn’t get patched out from anything I can see, just the thorns stuff because with minions being able to all stack it, then enemies casting AoEs would inadvertently trigger like 15 thorns hits back and that’s why it was causing significantly increased procs.
its ok, i was thinking it could be a bug and given i didnt have blighted i knew it needed further testing at the time, but battletag said earlier that he tested and confirmed they work 
All good, sorry, I wasn’t trying to like, dispute you. I was more excited to share the good news lol and just trying to say I’m sure of it working.
Something I wasn’t aware of until today though is that they apparently patched thorns to not count anymore for certain lucky hit effects, specifically hewed flesh and decrepify - which only required “damage” and “hits,” respectively. I
I didn’t get to test thorns builds in PTR, but given that they buffed various thorns sources and build options significantly in multiple ways, it felt like they were trying to really encourage thorns and make it viable. For one, there’s an entire tempering manual just for Necro + minions… so that really blows that it doesn’t count toward the other stuff.
To me, that seems like a design flaw, because now it’s just another source of bland uninspired damage. It already wasn’t capable of triggering lucky hits in any normal way because it’s not its own skill with a proc coefficient, but at least it used to have its own unique advantages to make up for that and balance itself out.
So I was all excited about trying that but now I’m pretty sure that entire build is likely pointless compared to how much stronger stacking all these damage multipliers, attack speeds, and bonus projectiles for minions would be.