Life With Minions: A Discussion
I can’t say much about minions in general since I only use the golem.
Actually I just want to commend you real quick because It’s nice to see that there are a few people left who defend this class and don’t – as you say – “refuse to come to the forums simply because they don’t wish to waste anymore time trying to explain this and getting flamed”. I’ve seen you take a lot of heat in other threads of the forum xD
As to the experience I had with my only minion ever, the golem: Yeah, he is weird sometimes, but I don’t care… I play all content the game has to offer and in every mode I choose the golem over lich or plague. As I said, not using minions in general, but the golem still fits better into my pvp, wvw and pve build than any other elite. Once you know how he reacts to certain situations and what to expect from him, he’s fine.
And btw: I’m also one of the people who thinks that necro is borderline op with the right build.
Like all of our viable builds they come at a cost of other utility/damage. It is a matter of playstyle as to which build you prefer and what is important to you in selecting the “specialty”. I don’t think many would argue with Bas that there ARE work-arounds for the MM builds/AI and indeed for most of our “bugs/design foibles” but it is that the way the game should be implemented and left? I think that is the issue.
Saying that this is fine and that is fine is reinforcing poor implementation and neglect of valid gameplay issues….in considering issues to be addressed the devs will naturally gravitate to those views that offer the least requirements for them…. but this in itself is no excuse not to do something (like minion/pet AI) if we are to get a game that is working as it should be. I think some of the “incidental” and “accidental” changes that have occurred shows that this is not the case at the moment.
TLDR: No near enough is not good enough.
(edited by Oldbugga.7029)
In my experience with minions is that Golem is usually the most responsive minion, followed by wurm/fiend/shadow minion and lastly the bone minions are the least responsive.
In my experience they are most responsive with axe/dagger as main weapon, followed by scepter where bone minions will start failing and just stand around specially with multiple targets. Let’s not mention the staff, if you start the fight with staff auto attack it’s possible the minions won’t respond at all. The workaround for this is to start with axe/dagger auto attack.
Other than that minions are actually great when traited right, I actually made a solo video of the up path and on 3 bosses I use minions with good results, I think it would’ve been actually a much tougher without the minions. Here’s a link to the video, I killed vines, spider boss and nightmare boss with minions.
Also minions seem to react better when summoned into a fight rather than pre-summoned.
I’d like to add a note that yes minions are still buggy and they should be better for example react when using any skill. But when using workarounds they can work just as well.
Retired Until Expansion or Meaningful Content is Released.
Like all of our viable builds they come at a cost of other utility/damage. It is a matter of playstyle as to which build you prefer and what is important to you in selecting the “specialty”. I don’t think many would argue with Bas that there ARE work-arounds for the MM builds/AI and indeed for most of our “bugs/design foibles” but it is that the way the game should be implemented and left? I think that is the issue.
I don’t think pet AI is a bug. It’s a design issue. Their aggro triggering is tied into single target abilities, and the entire pet AI is buggy and a bit warped. However, my point was more that Minion AI is as good as the rest. That’s not saying much, but it’s saying that it’s not broken it’s more a universal issue. From what I have seen it’s an Arena-net design that was prevalent in GW1 as well, but just not as evident because of how the game was set up.
This leads us to the discussion at hand, any specialty utility builds we make force us to give up or take something to use it. Which is why in high end tournaments you won’t find Utility Specific Builds for any class. You take a little bit of each and spec around what your task is instead of utilities.
This is where Minions fall off, they generally do not perform well in that situation. Epidemic is too good, Signet of Undeath is pretty amazing, and that leaves one free utility. If this is your reason for not taking minions than fine, but the blanket statement of Minions suck is not valid (you didn’t say that, just making a point as to people think Minion AI is the reason why when it’s more they aren’t strong without fully speccing)
Saying that this is fine and that is fine is reinforcing poor implementation and neglect of valid gameplay issues….in considering issues to be addressed the devs will naturally gravitate to those views that offer the least requirements for them…. but this in itself is no excuse not to do something (like minion/pet AI) if we are to get a game that is working as it should be. I think some of the “incidental” and “accidental” changes that have occurred shows that this is not the case at the moment.
TLDR: No near enough is not good enough.
I agree poor implementation is the issue here, but I still think Minions are fine as they are built. We don’t need better control over them, they need better response triggers. However, looking over the history that GW1 and GW2 this isn’t going to change, therefore the perception of what minions are needs to change.
Minions are perfectly fine in 80 percent of the game. High end tournaments are about the only place they don’t really have a role because of the need for certain utilities. I haven’t tried Fractals with Agony yet to see if it affects minions that much.
I disagree about High end tournaments. This game doesn’t have a large enough pool of players playing at the highest levels to be able to definitively rule out things based on meta or perceived need, when the build itself works well. It is certainly possible that minion builds might not be good enough, but how many people have actually tried a team composition with a necromancer running minions, with the person playing MM having a sufficient amount of experience running minions that he could actually use them to their “full” potential? I highly doubt that it has happened, because minions are so rare in good tournament teams that I doubt many people even know the build well enough to try to make it work.
I also think that goes for a lot of builds, there just aren’t enough people trying it to really be able to say that something can’t work (assuming it is a decent build already, I’m not trying to argue that ranger spirit builds are going to be the next big thing).
While I haven’t done high level fracs yet with minions I have done 10+ levels where there is agony around, and honestly, in most of the fractals they work amazingly as agony sponges. Yeah for most of them it’s a 1 shot kill with the agony, but the enemy AI seems to really get a kick out of hitting them instead of you, so guess what, you got free agony shields, for 1 hit anyway. Run with a full minion team and it’s downright comical. I absolutely love running them in the asura fractal (gotta swap them out for Tom but they actually do ok on the rest of it). The grawl one is great for them too, but I would recommend against running them full for the imbued shaman, they usually just burn up but a few like the wurm and golem work well. I wish I could commenton the pvp aspect, but as we know, I suck at pvp and haven’t attempted a tournament.
~Surrender fiend and you will get an easy death
~I could promise you the same…but it would be a lie…
“Minion AI is exactly the same as every single pet AI in the game. "
If this is true, why can I find myself having changed elevation three times and broken LOS four times and find a mesmer and a ranger pet exploding on me for 3k or chewing on me for 1k bites on the back of a tower when the player has forgotten about me 60 seconds earlier? I never see a necro pet do this but just hover in a cloud around the necro.
Since our minions are slow, or unreliable targeting that makes their utilities unreliable which to me is just a death sentence in a timing based combat. In WoW the pet was were you sent it unless it was specifically countered by enemy cc, which is fair. You could reliably have the pet execute an attack and know it would land. GW2 they’re either too slow or too poor targeting. Reliability is why I don’t use minions even though the paper builds are decent and life siphon MM is an ok bunker..until you get turned into a moa and lose all the pets in one shot. Or one well placed AoE knocks them out since they just hover in a tight cloud all the time. If they would track better/faster it would solve a lot of that, so I think AI or speed is still the problem with them.
Minions aren’t pets.
I honestly think pointing out that you need to bring 2 specific utilities in tournament mode in itself shows how limited the class is and how much needs to be addressed. This is compounded by the fact that the necromancer is defined by the utilities he brings more-so than any class. Don’t even get me started on how the compounds the isue with minions as Anet said (some time in the beta weekends) that they had to design minions to suck without traits due to how powerful they were otherwise.
In GW1 tPvP I saw all sorts of different necromancer builds from blood necromancers, to melee support necromancers, to SS and beyond. To say that the class is “fine” when you need to bring this specific build is laughable at best to me.
S/I/F engineer Z/R/D guard
A minion is a minion. Therefore I should have the option of having commands so it follows my orders.
Pets following commands however don’t make sense to me, sometimes a pet won’t follow your orders, animals have their own personality, feelings, etc etc… Therefore I believe that we should get minion commands and Rangers can just have pet ai without commands.
Buff Rangers so they don’t have to rely on their pets as much, and just buff us… don’t nerf us.
:)
(edited by Rok.5260)
Your house dog might not listen to what you say because you haven’t trained it, but if you look at animals used in war, they are usually highly trained; you can listen to orders and still have a personality.
They refuse to come to the forums simply because they don’t wish to waste anymore time trying to explain this and getting flamed.
Heh, glad I’m not the only one who feels this way. I’d probably be a fair bit more active on these forums but the Profession subsection feels like nothing but people complaining about how terrible their profession is. It’s not just necromancers, almost every one I look at is filled with that sort of thing.
They refuse to come to the forums simply because they don’t wish to waste anymore time trying to explain this and getting flamed.
Heh, glad I’m not the only one who feels this way. I’d probably be a fair bit more active on these forums but the Profession subsection feels like nothing but people complaining about how terrible their profession is. It’s not just necromancers, almost every one I look at is filled with that sort of thing.
It’s one of the reasons I started the Podcast. I knew a lot of really good Necromancers that were avoiding the forums, and we just wanted to put a more positive and constructive outlook on the game.
I picked a necromancer because I like to play with pets/minions/whatever you like to call them. That is in games like these when I don’t have the option to play a fulltime healer.
I’m only around lvl 50 atm, so I don’t the full view of all the possible builds and such, but I doubt that I’ll play a necro without pets at any point. I’d rather play another profession then, as pets for me are the core of being a necromancer.
I do like them, but there are some flaws wich already are very annoying to me.
The fact that they don’t regen life between combat;
It’s annoying but not a feature I’d rage quit over. However that coupled with the fact they I can’t dismiss and resummon is just really kittenty design imo.
So they don’t regen, I have no means of healing them other than staff 2 (which has a short radius and thus only heals melee pets) and I can’t dismiss/resummon at any point even though I can see they have less than 10% health and will die in seconds next fight….. That is annoying like hell.
I’ve only tried 2 dungeons at this point so I can’t really say alot about that, but I trust people here who say that they are viable.
TL;DR – I like my minions, but I want them to regen between fight and/or be able to dismiss/resummon.
Reading some of the posts about pets (oh wait, sorry, let me use the word minions…as if it makes it any better) in the Necromancer forums always amuse me. I’m not going to argue and say that minion AI is the worst compared to other classes. It is not a point that we, or any people on the other forums should be arguing about (yes, this is an opinion).
The fact is, the AI for minions, pets, clones, etc. is broken, period (oh, I’m sorry, they’re not broken, and they’re not bugs; its a feature guys!).
If they could not get them to work before release, or even a few months after release, why make it part of Guild Wars 2 content? I’ve seen a lot of people excusing some of these bugs by saying that it requires a lot of coding. Here’s an idea: how about they go out and hire more people instead of releasing “patches” that are halfhearted attempts at fixing things. The “fix” for Spiteful Talisman was a real zinger guys, nice job! We should not be finding workarounds for bugs when it’s something that should be working in the first place.
Yes, this is a free to play game, but this cannot be used as an excuse for the amount of bugs that the game still has. I won’t even get into the class balancing issues, as I’ve already gotten off-topic.
I’ve been playing my necromancer for quite a while and I’m having fun playing this class.
Minions are fine in my opinion, however, what throws me off in using a full MM spec in either pve or pvp is their unresponsiveness. I was thinking, why not just make minions attack on the mob/player using the autoattack (skill 1) as the trigger for it. This way, if we change targets and autoattack a different target, the minions will go and attack that specific target immediately instead of lounging around doing nothing.
Another thing I would like to add is to put a sort of UI tracker on the bone minions wherein we get to choose which bone minion to blow up. Like put an icon we could press or make it as a sort of optional profession skill we could use and put them in either F2, F3 or whatever.
(edited by Drensky.9567)
Right now I am running a minion master power build in sPVP, and I like it more than any other build I’ve tried. I think this is because the lack of a gaming mouse and the fact that I"m not very good at sPVP. Things like spirit weapons and turrets and minions appeal to me because they take the managing out of my hands. But alas, the necromancer’s minions do several things for me that I couldn’t find elsewhere:
#1: Control. The bone fiend has an immobilize, and the flesh golem has a knockdown charge. These I find to be incredibly useful, since it stuns and lets me pounce on enemies that would’ve otherwise gotten away. This also lets the minions build up damage with their attacks, and the flesh golem hits like a truck. I currently use dagger/warhorn to come in close and control my opponent, letting me build up lifeforce and letting my minions wail on the opponent. I use this to maximize LF gain (and the power build lets DS hit for a lot) and use it defensively, letting the minions attack for even longer.
#2: Burst damage + damage overall. Bone minions make for great burst damage and an AoE blast finisher, and burst damage is something a necromancer lacks. Normally.
#3: Body blocking. I can’t count how many times someone has ended up targeting one of my minions with single target attacks instead of me, or has had their projectiles hit the minion instead of me. Any attack that hits the minion is O.K. in my book.
#4: Minions have what is arguably the best stun breaker in Flesh Worm. Even though it is immobile, it hits like a truck and has far range. With the recharge trait it is up every 32 seconds, and the whole time you are not stunned and in a dire situation the flesh worm is adding to your DPS. The worm also acts as a teleport, getting you out of a bad situation in every sense of the phrase. It does have a problem in that it needs to be summoned first before it can be activated, and that a smart opponent would realize it is best to kill the worm first before doing anything, but nothing is perfect.
#5: High sustained damage regardless of build. The minions do a lot of damage when traited up, and the best part about this damage is that it works no matter what I try to run. I can make a condition build, a glass cannon build, or a bulky build and they’ll still be there racking up the DPS. Currently I run all soldier’s gear with a superior runes of the Earth set, so suffice to say I am incredibly durable, and the minions let me have a high offensive alongside of this statistical fortitude.
My current build is the following:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fQAQNBIhZakRrUvVzWjeTBIz4ZqhUsr0RFOm+w6A;TsAA1Cto2xsjYH7Oudk7sEZUwUEA
I forewent wurm for the spectral armor at half health bonus. The cool thing with this build is that, as the fight goes on, it becomes harder and harder to fight. At the beginning the earth runes will give me protection most of the time, meaning that the initial burst damage will fail. Then, at half health all stuns are broken, protection is applied again and then there is a burst of LF gain from there. Should health get low enough, at 20% health I get a magnetic aura which reflects all projectiles, and this will often clench the fight in my favor had I not already won. Usually at that point the other player has switched to fighting at range, since running up to melee only leaves them susceptible to all my control and minions. The whole time, every time I switch I get 3 stacks of might for 25 seconds, so eventually I’ll have anywhere from 6 to 9 stacks sustained in the battle.
Disclaimer: [i]The reason a majority don’t play minions has nothing to do with whether they are strong or not. It’s simply they feel there are better or more useful utility choices. A majority rarely run a single (focused build). It’s not that they don’t think that you can’t outside of Agony (hopefully the patch changes that), simply that the abilities given up to run one will limit your ability to play different roles.
It is pretty remarkable how it is possible to switch from a condition build to a power build to a MM build and that they are roughly pretty balanced with respect to each other – they just have different strengths/weaknesses. After playing around with the minion build, I’m kinda torn about going back to my condition build. If I could just have a minion that cast epidemic, I’d be all set!
It’s not that Minion AI is broken. The entire pet system is really poorly done. I just find a way to work around it. Using Single Target attacks to create threat on a target is fine. Should it be tied into our own personal target, and attack that one? Absolutely!
I think it has to stay tied to single-target attacks. I don’t want my minions to attack arbitrarily as a I tab between targets until I am on the one I want them to attack. Since we don’t have pet controls, the single-target attack is our only “pet button”.
So if you can’t change the inherent nature of something, how do you fix it? You make it slightly better than it was before. I think the major issue is the lack of any sort of semi decent tutorial as to how to make certain things work that aren’t user created.
It also seems that the full combination of traits to make minions really shine aren’t available until late in leveling, especially since they are spread across three lines: Spite, Blood, Death. By the time one acquires these traits they’ve probably long given up on minions as being: low-health, low-damage, and poor healers.
TL;DR – I like my minions, but I want them to regen between fight and/or be able to dismiss/resummon.
Oddly enough from beta to live they nerfed the health of minions by a significant portion because they were incredibly powerful in pvp.
There are multiple ways to regen your minions health, but I really don’t see a need to as I prefer them to die for Death Nova of it just doesn’t matter all that much since 24-32 seconds later I get them back. 30 seconds in a dungeon is nothing.
The ways you can heal your minions are as follows. Staff 2, Focus 4 (unreliable), Transfusion (life transfer healing), and Well of Blood. If you are running with a guardian who has symbolic heals (they all should :P), shout heals (that’s annoying to your teammates), and elementalist regen.
I ran with Del Onasi and Nay who were running full Necro support builds, and they were able to keep a constant state of protection as well as heals going and I did not lose a single minion during the run until the final boss.
As for the dismissal, I wholeheartedly agree I would love to just get rid of them and resummon them.
My worst issues with minions were fixed in the patches this year. I seriously wanted to kill the golem for not letting either of us heal before aggroing another mob while farming on Orr. Minions are stronger and more durable than the were. I run them most of the time, now, to supplement direct damage. Tequatl, for example, gets bone fiend, fflesh worm, well of blood, well of power, and lich.
I also do not put 30 points in a trait line except when I have a specific purpose for it. Toughness usually gets 20 points because that line versatile. However, I typically spread the points into 4 lines at least for the utilities.
I’ve spent some time recently doing a bit of WvW with a minion build. I haven’t run into any problems with their AI outside of Flesh Golem and Bone Minions. Though it’s quite frustrating when it does happen.
They perform exceptionally well in 1v1s and small group (4~7ish) fights, which is usually what I run into going about my tasks in wuvwuv.
The issue is that the second the scale tips even slightly past that… your utilities are near worthless. Flesh Wurm may be relatively safe, Flesh Golem may get one suicidal charge through the ranks, Bone Minions will die before they get in range, and Bone Fiend will get run over.
As fun as it is to play with them (and minions are the reason I’d play a Necro class) I can’t justify bringing them outside of silly messing around occasionally.
Necromancer
Anvil’s Last Stand [ALS]
You don’t have to spec full minion. Just dropping 1 minion for a slot opens up all kinds of possibilities as per my chill blind build no comments lol.
The ways you can heal your minions are as follows. Staff 2, Focus 4 (unreliable), Transfusion (life transfer healing), and Well of Blood.
Focus #4 will never bounce to minions or clones [even if there are no players (or other enemies) within the bounce range of your target.]
My major worry with minions is how naturally they dominate a build. It’s probably more psychological than anything, but once I’ve spent 40 trait points on minions I feel like every skill should be a minion. I don’t mind the thought of all minion builds or anything, but as it is I feel like I’m wasting my points if I only take a couple minion utilities, rather than filling my bar with them.
Maybe I should do some more experimenting in the vein of Zainey’s post.
You don’t have to spec full minion. Just dropping 1 minion for a slot opens up all kinds of possibilities as per my chill blind build no comments lol.
It’s pretty obvious, and nobody’s impressed.
(edited by Softspoken.2410)
The ways you can heal your minions are as follows. Staff 2, Focus 4 (unreliable), Transfusion (life transfer healing), and Well of Blood.
There is also the Deathly Invigoration trait that heals after you leave Death Shroud (though I imagine most other MMs would run Vampiric Master). I have also never noticed Focus 4 to ever bounce to my minions whether I was near or not, though it is very hard to tell with so many minions around the target.
Heya Bas,
I’ve been tryin to catch you online. Been wanting to run an all necro fractal run. I’m on level 6 currently because fractals aren’t really my thing until recently where I decided to give it a try. I also want to give minions a try and want to see them in-game.
Heya Bas,
I’ve been tryin to catch you online. Been wanting to run an all necro fractal run. I’m on level 6 currently because fractals aren’t really my thing until recently where I decided to give it a try. I also want to give minions a try and want to see them in-game.
They work fine in fractals. Full mm works fine on lvl10… past that… Meh I don’t know but I also have no desire to deal with calculator difficulties to even see it. Even running in full berserker you still remain more durable then most classes… up until aoe pokes its ugly head in.
Heya Bas,
I’ve been tryin to catch you online. Been wanting to run an all necro fractal run. I’m on level 6 currently because fractals aren’t really my thing until recently where I decided to give it a try. I also want to give minions a try and want to see them in-game.
I apologize, I was on vacation last week, and this week has been catching up on everything I left alone until I got back from vacation. I will be on tonight, because I will need about 4 and a half hours of recording to finish up. Tak and I are going to do about an hours worth of dungeons with andele tonight to get some recording for his version of the podcast.
I haven’t done a fractal past lvl 6 I believe either. The guild I was in was a hardcore fractal farming guild, and I just couldn’t keep up. I will try to catch you tonight. I want to record an all minion run.
Currently I am recording with xfire if anyone knows how to get it to record my voice as well as everyone else’s that would be great. I can only seem to get it to record Gameplay and other players with me or just my voice.
What about recording everyone’s voices through mumble like usual, while recording the video only (or even video+game sound) via xfire, then you can overlay the sound recording later.
What about recording everyone’s voices through mumble like usual, while recording the video only (or even video+game sound) via xfire, then you can overlay the sound recording later.
I most likely will go that route, but was hoping there was an easier alternative since it means I have to do twice the work :P.
TL;DR – I like my minions, but I want them to regen between fight and/or be able to dismiss/resummon.
Oddly enough from beta to live they nerfed the health of minions by a significant portion because they were incredibly powerful in pvp.
There are multiple ways to regen your minions health, but I really don’t see a need to as I prefer them to die for Death Nova of it just doesn’t matter all that much since 24-32 seconds later I get them back. 30 seconds in a dungeon is nothing.
The ways you can heal your minions are as follows. Staff 2, Focus 4 (unreliable), Transfusion (life transfer healing), and Well of Blood. If you are running with a guardian who has symbolic heals (they all should :P), shout heals (that’s annoying to your teammates), and elementalist regen.
I ran with Del Onasi and Nay who were running full Necro support builds, and they were able to keep a constant state of protection as well as heals going and I did not lose a single minion during the run until the final boss.
As for the dismissal, I wholeheartedly agree I would love to just get rid of them and resummon them.
I don’t have Death Nova yet, but plan to try it out and that might change my mind about them not regen their health.
Also, I’m abit at a loss as to what stats to go for. I’ve searched the forum and came up with power/toughness/vita. Is that prefered for a MM?
PVT is what I use in PvP, but I don’t think you need it in PvE.
Berzerker and Power/Tough/Prec or Power Vit/Crit damage are all better choices unless you plan on tanking.
I’ve always felt that MM has a lot going for it. Most of the traits are in Death Magic and Blood Magic so durability comes as standard, and there are a couple of different choices you can make in your traits to fit your play style or to suit the content you’re doing. And unlike condition based builds you’re not tied to one set of weapons which again opens up options to customise the play style to your liking.
Bas.7406The reason a majority don’t play minions has nothing to do with whether they are strong or not. It’s simply they feel there are better or more useful utility choices
I know many Necro’s haven’t, yet, tried an MM build or have tried minions while leveling and written them off as being useless, untraited, they can be quite poor. There are also plenty who aren’t using them in favour of other builds which supposedly give you more flexibility in utility skills. Its often remarked on these forums that Necro builds are defined by their utility skill choices. With that said the MM build does have to make the choice of which minions are better for which situations, or even to drop one entirely for another skill. Choosing to drop a minion should be, and is, a valid decision in the right circumstances.
The build itself is very strong for solo and small group play, solo play especially,
and the fact that Minions don’t scale with player stats make it fantastic for fresh 80’s. Furthermore the lack of scaling allows you to use almost any combination of stats you choose and still be successful. (Great for Magic Find gear!)
Since allowing minions to benefit from Agony, their survival in Fractals has been acceptable so far. Old Tom in the Unorganised Fractal and the is the only really minion unfriendly boss, with good positioning they tend to manage everything else fairly well. I don’t find myself having to resummon a ranged minion any more often I have to revive another player, melee minions need resummoning more often but its very rare that I find myself in a situation where all my minions are dead at once.
Sadly however its held back by a couple of AI issues, and while these are not exclusive to the Necromancer, I do feel we get hit the hardest by them. Unlike the Ranger we have no way of ordering our minions to attack, and unlike the Mesmer we’re not able to produce lots of them to make up for the ones that break. Some minions are more reliable than others, I notice the Blood Fiend and Flesh Wurm seem to reliably assist me while my Flesh Golem spends most of its time standing around. There are some workarounds for these but they’re still not guaranteed to work. Its been suggested plenty of times that we should have some degree of control over them, and I agree on that point. Nothing too extreme but being able to order them to “Kill” or “Stop killing” or even “Put both halves of that Dredge down right now!” would go a long way.
It has also been in my experience quite a weak spec when it comes to WvW, and AoE heavy events, where the minions are likely to be dead before they even manage to reach a target. However I don’t see this as being a “problem” as such, I see it as being the trade off for being such a fantastic solo spec. I’m sure others would disagree here, but I think having one build which is universally good in all aspects of play would be detrimental to the Necro. We have such a wide and varied amount of viable builds that we should be encouraged to try them out.
I mostly WvWvW on my Necromancer these days so I never really had much use for minions, however, I have found myself using the Flesh Wurm an awful lot recently. If our zerg runs into an enemy zerg I normally place it at the back of our zerg and use it to escape if things go badly for us. Another use I found for it that I dont see anyone else doing is casting it on top of walls. While it might not last long it does attack people caught by your staff marks and can continue to damage them when they run out of view. From this position you can also use Necrotic Traversal to poison anyone around it on top of the wall.
I like you Bas, I’ll have to check out your podcast sometime.
Your right about the AI issues, thou Arenanet has always sucked badly at AI, not just pets AI, but monster and esp boss AI. (monster AI is so-so now)
Their great at so many things, but AI is not one of them.
At least in GW1, due to the mechanics of the game, pet/minion AI more or less worked for the job it was meant to do, but here they have a much higher bar to reach, and they just can’t measure up. That, and the old GW1 mechanics for minion creation and management was outright superior in every conceivable way to the ‘new’ minion system.
Which is more to my problem with the Necromancer, both in regards to minions and as a whole, that it is a vastly inferior, watered down imitation of the original.
This is why I hate the GW2 version of the Necromancer, thou I love every other profession. It’s just plain boring.
But I’ll save that for my own thread on the matter, which I’ll probably write up later today. Which is a long time coming, but I’ve been avoiding it hoping the Necro might grow on me or get fixed over time….. it hasn’t, I hate it as much now as I did back in beta.
Well so I was strolling in Frostgore today… saw an ice drake… went at him with 1 blood fiend, 2 bone minions, 1 bone fiend, 1 shadow fiend, 1 golem, 1 jagged gorror, 1 griffon and 1 ember and a skele mini… I could have probably dropped a seed mortar too but forgot. Then ice drage did his breath… and my entire entourage died… in 1 breath attack. What suprised me the most wasn’t the fact that as full mm they all just borked over from 1 attack it was the fact how unsuprised I was. As if I already gave up on the whole idea somewhere deep inside.
The end.
Going to play some new bioshock now lol.