Guild Wars 2

With the CDI vote upon us, (and in hopes we’re in the top 3), I thought it would be a fun idea for the Necro forum to start some threads about dream changes. I think it’s important to stay positive in our communications with the Devs, so if we can stay upbeat, that’d be nice. (Remember, no matter how bad it is, at least we aren’t Rangers!)

I really like the look of our minions, but I believe their skills are lackluster – especially in PvE. The Necro is too selfish of a class for PvE, wouldn’t it be nice for our minions to bring some team presence? Here’s some ideas I’ve had for changes to the skills of our minions.

1. Blood Fiend
Isn’t this guy cool? A floating, bloated, blood-filled balloon is a great necro minion heal, but couldn’t he be better? I’d like to change his mechanics for his siphon. Instead of healing the necro a bit on auto-attack, I think the Blood Fiend should instead grow in size as he sucks blood from the enemy. Using the Active Skill should still sacrifice the Blood Fiend, but the heal should scale based on the amount of blood drawn by the Fiend. Imagine a full Blood Fiend, nearly bursting with blood like a greedy mosquito. It’s a cool visual and very necromantic. On using the Active Skill, the necro receives the direct heal, AND it bursts in an AOE team heal that scales on Necro Healing Power (giving the necro some small team bonus!).

2. Bone Minions
We need to summon two different minions on using this skill. One should do relative high direct damage and the other should transfer conditions on bite. Visually, the direct damage minion could have a cool bone helmet and a little charge attack (no knockback, but something to get them in the fight quick). The condi bone minion can stay the cute little undead squirrel we love, and on bite give the enemy weakness, bleed, torment, or poison. We also need the ability to target one of the two to blow up first, as I’m tired of hitting my nuke and the wrong one blows.

3. Flesh Wurm
Necromancers need team utility, and allowing the Flesh Wurm tunnel to act as a portal for team mates would go a long way for this. It would be a limited version of the mesmer portal with a shorter leash AND should allow enemies to use it, but they incur a condi (bleed, poison, torment, blind, or weakness) when they use it.

4. Shadow Fiend
I know some people like the blind on this guy for PvP, but Necros already have several sources of blind. Instead, I think we need a reflect and the fiend could do it. His active skill should be a ground targeted ability. On use the shadow moves to the designated spot, and the necro rips it apart, causing its shadow form to split into a wall – killing the Fiend, but reflecting projectiles and acting as a dark field. This gives the Necromancer a large reason to slot this guy in PvE and gives us a more util purpose in Fractals.

I really like the Bone Fiend and the Flesh Golem skills and think they are great!

How would you change the minion skills to increase necromancer team presence?

Honestly, Shadow Fiend is the only one that needs a change. The effects of Haunt are great, it’s the long delay after you activate it and when it goes off that drastically limit its usefulness. The Blind cannot be used tactically, so it’s pretty worthless in practice unless you get stupidly lucky.

An actual teleport by the Flesh wurm that works in the Z axis more reliably would be a great change and general pathing issues of course, but thats not a necro only problem.
Maybe a tooltip fix about projectile finishers on minions would be nice if they run out of actual balance stuff.

Besides QoL fixes like Flesh Wurm working better on the Z axis and Flesh Golem not getting stopped by by minor rocks, the only minion that needs change is Shadow Fiend, as Drarnor said.

A significant reduction of the activation time (still allowing dodges but not being the 25s long cast time it is now) would make him a much better choice.

Besides that, the best thing that could happen for minions is the introduction of new minions and traits that better fulfills other themes for MMs. As it is now, only expendable minion builds are good. I’d love to see strong minions/weak MMs, and MMs that are all about keeping the minions alive.