Guild Wars 2

One of the main complaints I see against minion builds in the sPvP forums is that victory comes from very simple play from the part of the Necro. One of the biggest complaints I see in the Necro forum about minion builds is that Necros have mediocre control over their minion’s actions.

How about we think up ways to change that?

In order to keep minion power levels unchanged and make their active skills more interesting, we’ll also have to tone down their passive stats, damage and hp. This doesn’t mean that it’d solve all my perceived problems with minions. We still need a trait compression or something to allow a Necro to supplement a minion build with more fine tuning instead of going all in like right now with the traits.

Bone Minion -
25% less explosion damage, 15% less HP

When activated a bone minion will emit a high pitched squeal and move at swiftness speed towards the target. Bone minion will attempt to melee attack the target and explode when it does. If nothing is targeted the minion will just explode.

Reasoning – Smart bombs, what’s not to love? Since the explosion will now be easier to hit it should deal less damage and the squeal combined with a slightly reduced HP allow enemies to attempt to kill the minion coming at them.

Bone Fiend -
25% less damage, 30% less HP, 20 second active cooldown.

When activated the Bone Fiend will slightly burrow becoming immobile but attack twice as fast. Every 4th attack pair inflicts 1 second of cripple.

Reasoning – Bone Fiends become glass cannons when immobile. With 2 projectiles per attack they have a very high chance to trigger projectile finisher from our fields and the cripple keep some control going on. The trade off is lower damage while mobile and less durability over all.

Blood Fiend -
15% less damage

When activated the Blood Fiend will inflict a massive attack dealing 3x the damage and healing the Necro as well as himself for 5x the normal amount siphoned.

Reasoning – Less healing than taste of death but actually keeps the bugger alive and is a small nuke. Less sustained damage to compensate.

Flesh Wurm -

Reduced casting time to 3/4 and if activated within 100 range the wurm is unsummoned going into a 10 second cooldown.

Reasoning – Wurm is pretty well made but requires slight tuning, this should be enough IMO.

Shadow Fiend -
20% less damage, 20% less HP, Haunt cooldown increased to 35 seconds.

When activated the Shadow Fiend latches onto the target for 5 seconds, attacking and blinding once per second. Each of these attacks recover 2% Life force.

Reasoning – Targeted well of darkness combined with actually haunting the target. The Fiend will deal and tank less damage to compensate. Works slight like entangle since it adds a melee enemy attached to the target which inflicts some debilitating effect.

Flesh Golem -

Charge becomes a 900 range AoE the size of a well and the golem leaps into it dealing damage, stunning 5 enemies within for 2 seconds and inflicting 4 seconds of cripple. The golem then proceeds to attack the target nearest to the center. Blast Finisher.

Reasoning – Similar to Earth Shaker but also leaves a lingering cripple effect. Charge is very good but so iffy with terrain that just making the skill more reliable increases usability by a lot. Adding a blast field also feels right if it works as proposed.

PS – I know it’s nothing but wishful thinking that a dev takes notice of anything we post in these forums but what the hell, I’m an optimist and like creating discussion.

Reducing their base stats, especially by so much, will kill minion builds 100% in every game mode. Even the very mediocre viability they have now will be completely gone. Control is not worth such a massive decrease in damage and survivability.

How to fix control?
AI:
Minions only attack when the Necromancer targets an enemy and casts a targeted ability on them (aggro begins at the start of the cast, like right now) or when the Necromancer deals damage to a target.
Minions no longer cause the Necromancer to go into combat mode when they take damage but the Necromancer does not.
General AI fix so minions no longer drop aggro and won’t attack.

Actives:
Putrid Explosion – causes minions to glow and leap a very short distance towards the target, if no target they just explode as they do now
Rigor Mortis – AA reset on cast
Haunt – 1/2-3/4s aftercast animation, instead of 2s
Charge – instant cast, 3/4s aftercast animation that has the Golem winding up before charging

If you want to decrease the passive damage of minions, or fix their utility, do it by changing Training of the Master and Necromantic Corruption to increase the strength of the actives but not be passive damage increases. Trait compression won’t solve anything either, minion builds work because you can go all in, and frankly the fact that you so often see players running with 2/5 of their utility/elite skills as minions shows that untraited minions are just fine too.

Edit: Forgot one of my pet peeves about Putrid Explosion, it applies the blast finisher a few seconds after exploding, which is stupid, fix that so it applies the blast finisher right after death.

IMHO there are two components of this problem.

1. ai sux
it sux
fix it plz anet

2. Haunt
haunt sux
remove the minion cast time plz anet

Really, though, Bhawb’s just about got the right of it. There are very few actual ability changes that need to happen to make MM more playable. Without the minions actually acting reliably, meaningful balance discussion is really difficult to have.

Sarrs.4831:

Really, though, Bhawb’s just about got the right of it. There are very few actual ability changes that need to happen to make MM more playable. Without the minions actually acting reliably, meaningful balance discussion is really difficult to have.

This is a big issue, and HOPEFULLY this rumor I heard about them hiring someone to recode AI is true, because you are right its hard to talk balance when you have to assume minions are acting “perfectly” when this is sometimes true, sometimes not, and most often a weird mix of both.

I’m assuming that AI is never getting fixed and proposed more meaningful active abilities for the ones with bigger issues, melee minions.

I also think that too much of the minion is skewed towards what they accomplish outside of their active abilities, leaving less room to distinguish between a beginner MM player and an experienced one.

Long casting times and unreliable pathing/AI are in my experience a big part of it, so by reducing passive strength and instead bring stronger actives into play would be an option outside of just making behavior more reliable. Better AI might also provoke nerfs, minion passive damage output is pretty large when it keeps connecting.

Its not that large, frankly.

DPS
Bone Fiend – 200
Blood Fiend – 15
Bone Minions – 100
Flesh Golem – 600
Flesh Wurm – 280
Total (untraited) – 1195 (note that all DPS values were rounded UP, this is higher than it is in reality)
Total (TotM) – 1494
Total (TotM + Pack Runes) – 1599
Final Total (TotM + Pack + VM) – 1840

Note that that is a set of Blood Fiend, Bone Minions, Bone Fiend, Flesh Wurm, and Flesh Golem, with rounded up numbers on all damage, and rounded down attack speeds. So even with an artificially high DPS calculation and assuming a situation that will never happen (perfect AI and an AFK opponent), they deal significantly less damage than other comparable builds (like hambow).

Nerfing numbers with no rebalance is a total wrong idea.
Nerfing HPS is wrong, their actual HP is ok.
Nerfing the whole damage without any balance on other sides is wrong.
What should be done is putting more emphasis on their active skills, lowering auto-attack damage, emproving it and emproving the utility on the Activated Skill.

Anyway this whole system sucks so bad, it would need a total rehault to make it work finely.

Anyway, any form of theorycrafting on this forum is a waste of time.
Anet won’t give a kitten about.

The problem with necromancers always seems to be “Hey, this sounds like a really cool build concept. OH but wait.. The necromancer can’t make it work because they are missing X or Y doesn’t work right.” And What I mean is the Minions have a 50-50 chance of being pacifists.