Guild Wars 2

This isn’t intended to adress the issues of minion’s being effective, boring, on-use abilities being delayed, etc. Those are all important things but not what this idea aims at.

One thing absolutely murders all other aspects of minion use before you even get to them: the minions are dead. They die fast, and then they go on cooldown. The result being that you are often left with (up to) 4 slotted skills on cooldown doing nothing for the majority of combat.

So, here’s the idea to address that in a balanced way. When a minion is killed by enemies (or two minions, in the case of the explodey rats), it’s subsequent cooldown is reduced by lets say 5 seconds for every other minion skill currently on cooldown.

Example: Flesh Golem has a 60 second cooldown. You have two other minions, the Shadow Fiend and the Bone Fiend, both already dead. Flesh golem goes down, and the cooldown is reduced by 5 seconds for each already ticking skill, resulting in a 50 second cooldown instead of 60.

The example obviously doesn’t include the 20% trait because I don’t want to do that much math in a brainstorming post. The timing involved can obviously be tweaked, changed to a %, etc, and the base cooldowns adjusted as well. I did think about the reverse (reducing the cooldown on other skills when an active pet dies), but that seems to result in burst of pets and no pets rather then a dynamic fight.

The benefits to this system is that it still punishes the Necro when his pets die- an important part of minion balance. The intention is that the harder your minions are hit, the less time you spend without them. So if you lose a pet, you’re basically in the same place the game puts you now. If you lose all your pets, you’re not completely borked for the next 60 seconds, but actually have a chance to recover before the fight ends. It also scales with how invested the build is into pets, and may create new strategies of when to summon what pets mid-battle for the best uptime. Because it requires enemy action, pets sacrificed by the player (blood fiend, flesh worm, etc) are unaffected and retain the balance of their natural cooldown.

Hopefully this hasn’t been brought up before and I’m not being a moron with bad search skills. Please discuss.

Coding that seems way beyond Anet’s abilities.

I don’t think dead minions are a problem. They’re not pets, they’re utilities. They are useless while on cooldown, like all utilities.

As for your suggestion itself, I’m not sure what can be said. You suggested a way to lower the CD of minion recharges. I guess my response is “that’s certainly a way to lower the CD of minion recharges.”