The new bane of SoloQ, after number of warriors have been slightly reduced, are minionmaster.
The issue of this kind of build is pretty much regarding the low-to-mid level of competitive GW2 enviroments (i.e. SoloQ and lower rating/pugging TeamQ), where an overabundance of minionmasters are seen and stacking more than one of them is far from counterproductive.
- Minionmasters create huge clutter: this advantage becomes bigger if you stack more than one of them. Lately, I’ve met teams with more than one MM which are extremely hard to manage and quite effective.
They make targeting extremely hard (expecially when you are going to target mesmers and asuras) and reading animations a real pain. - Minionmasters are too effective for the amount of skills required: they are extremely tough to kill, while dealing massive amount of damage through both power and minions, while having the inner survivability advantage of the clutter that the builds create. They don’t require much efforts on the offensive side, since minions output an huge amount of damage by themselves, neither on the defensive side, since the natural high LF generation, the sustain provided by minions and the Soldier amulet usually ran by minionmasters.
- Minionmaster are extremely tough to kill in small scale fights: even the worse minionmaster is still an extremely dangerous enemy when fighting on a point. Minions are extremely survivable and, in most cases, you will not manage to kill them before they kill you.
- Minions are “meat shields” to projectiles: one of the crucial issues of minions is thay they are meat shields. They block projectiles and melee attacks with extreme easy. It happened so many times that I tried to throw a projectile to the minionmaster (Magnetic Graps to be specific) just to see it wasted on a random minion passing by. That happens also on non-cleaving melee attacks. The huge clutter provided to minions is nearly the equivalent of complete immunity to projectiles, which is extremely strong.
Proposed Solutions
- Reduce Flesh of the Master HP gain to 20%
This will make easier to kill minions with AoE, forcing the Necromancer to actually play to sustain his minions.
The amount of HP and Armor of current minions is, right now, just insane with this trait. For instance (according to wiki), Bone Fiend has 2600 armor and 12500HP, while Shadow Fiend has 16000 HP and 2125 armor when traited with Flesh of the Master.
Flesh Golem HP goes up to 19500 and 2600 armor, while Blood Fiend has the same 19500HP but with 2000 armor.
It is, in fact, easier to kill an elementalist or a thief with AoEs than a minion. - Reduce the base HP/Armor of Shadow Fiend, Bone Fiend, Bone Minon of about 10-20%
This changes helps to futher reduce the survivability of minions, leaving untouched Flash Golem and Blood Fiend because of the more relevant role they have in a minionmaster build. This will also push the need to bring sustain traits like Transfusion to heal up the minions. - Change Vampiric Master adding the effect of healing minions for ~400 HP each time they attack
This will help to not make Minions too much easy to kill even by clueless enemies. If left untouched and free to attack, minions can in fact heal themselves having quite a bit of sustain. - Minions don’t block projectiles or single-target melee attacks unless targeted
A needed change because of the too strong advantage they give to Necromancers against projectiles.
Numbers, of course, needs to be tweaked during testing.
(edited by sorrow.2364)