Guild Wars 2

…you guys at ANet are ever going to fix the disease that affects minions, making them clueless as to what their master is attacking much/most of the time?

Getting close to a year and a half after launch, bunches of major updates…and yet…nothing? My minions remain brain dead—even more than expected for things that are actually supposed to be dead.

I don’t recall reading anything from a dev that explains what’s so hard about:

I attack mob -> minions attack same mob.

Works for Ranger pets.

Works in reverse for mobs and whatever THEY summon (hello toxic hallucinations, for example).

To be blunt: What the hell’s the problem with minions which are essentially in the same boat?

Now, for those Necros that like minions and havent’ figured this out, I have a trick I employ to make mine move their kitten to attack an initial target:

Get near your target, but not near enough that your attack can hit it or within the mob’s aggro range. Then start attacking the target with your #1 skill (so you can repeat without any/significant cooldown). Your minions (usually after some brief durping; certain minions will durp more than others) will begin running off to attack the target, after which you can join in.

This works 100% of the time for me (with scepter and axe, and presumably would work with daggers; staff’s long range #1 skill grasping hand is generally not usable here), but obviously limits certain opening tactics you might want to use. Even so, better than them standing around gossiping while you do all the work without the help of those utility skills they’ve displaced.

Hope that trick serves to help out some of you annoyed MMs while we await the end of the univ…the patch that actually fixes this silly situation.

They’re actually not all that bad. Compared to several months ago they are worlds ahead of the trash they were. Are they perfect? Nah, but they’re useable as is. If you open with aoe’s, channel skills, and other such things, then yeah they will get confused. Just open with an auto attack. Half of our overall damage is autos anyway. You can also begin auto-ing the target well before it is in range and they will lock on to it and go after it. Personally I don’t mind them waiting for me to engage first because it allows me to position more efficiently, rather than trying to get good positioning after they engage and working around their odd preferences to all go full melee range even if they’re ranged minions.

Tbh minion always were meant to attack target at random (starting with the one you hit) The whole point of having a lot of minion is the confusion and havoc it causes by attacking everything at once forcing the mobs to attack minions and disregard players (so was the concept of the aura of the lich minion master doing the tanking for everyone in GW 1). The problem is in GW1 we had like 12 bone minion or more (with all 3 hero behing minion master and spamming aura of the lich death nova + yourself also behing a minion master or spirit spammer you can have like 20+ this made the game prety much of a huge petting zoo especialy with signet of spirit behing used both as a weapon and a meat shield) while here we can only have 7 at best wich is hardly as overwelming as what we had back then. Maybe if they revised reanimator so to make the minion spawned that way appear every 5 second or actualy have no cooldown it would actualy make the minion build into the epic stuff we had in GW 1 while keeping PVP relatively clean of Minion master armies (player dont die as often as pve mobs do so less stuff to use reanimation on)

That meat shield concept has ALWAYS been the trademark of minion master necro and as such it is somewhat normal for pets to die or for MM to do less dps then a real damage spec as their real purpose is to keep the bosses and mobs busy hiting the wrong target. In some way they do this job better then mesmers right now but since their long pet cooldown mesmer has the advantage of behing able to keep poping illusion while the necro is forced into handling his pets to keep them alive. This is totaly against the ‘’fodder builder’’ concept minion master always been the paragon of. If they actualy did MM right we would see a rise in the defensive support necro spec we havent seen since Guild Wars 1 and Necro would finaly be recognised as other stuff then the little guy spamming his condition and curse crap in the corner with his scepter because right now thats prety much what everyone vilify us as, heck the support role could even be cimented as an officialy important roll in dungeon party on the same lvl as glass dps.

The death trait line wasnt choosen as the toughtness line because its meant for the necromancer to tank it was because tanking and dying for the party is the jobs of the sacrificiable pets he can summon at will.

The true purpose of minion and youl call me crazy for saying this as a lot of people who play pets thinks the total reverse is actualy to die defending their masters the best they can and as such minion death is a part of the natural order of things in a MM build so expect your minion to die and quite often, of course you hope they last a while and pull their share.

Literally just open your fight with any single target attack that requires you to have a target selected. Boom, minions get aggro.

Are they perfect? No, but they are workable. You just need to learn how to use them.

Kruhljak.2705:

I attack mob -> minions attack same mob.

That is literally only one thing what is wrong with MM necro, but this “one” is big as thousands little bugs. Fix this, and i’ll play MM necro in pve at the same second. (I play it in pvp, it’s great, but sometimes i die just because minions do nothing even when i’m in close combat)