Guild Wars 2

Was thinking of running some fractals with my New MM necro and wanted to know if Agony just kills the minions outright? Don’t want to take a MM into fractals just for the minions to die in one hit.

not sure if agony will kill them but I think your making everything scale higher and doing less damage than a normal necro also minion ai is kittened right now

Minion AI is incredibly easy right now, its fine.

I’d suggest not using MM builds in fractals unless you are built non-traditionally, aka a zerker MM build. No need for the standard 20/0/30/20/0 soldier build.

Due to the single target nature of minions they arent great for fractals. But the ai isnt as bad as it was. And to answer your question, they inherit your AR. So aslong as you have enough AR they should live.

Be careful dudes, declaring actually the minions’ AI is fine is wrong: recently it become pretty bugged, minions started again standing without doing anything.

I use “fine” to say that it is serviceable. Not necessarily that it is as good as it could be, but it shouldn’t really prevent you from anything. PvE minions dropping aggro doesn’t really matter, it is at worst a drop of 2k DPS total, if you are running TotM, plus VM, and 6 minions. They’re really just there to eat damage, and they tend to do that anyway.

Yes Anet should fix their aggro (how they hell they manage to break it all the time is beyond me), but it shouldn’t bar you from using them in PvE. sPvP is a very separate issue, but I’ve always found them to have pretty limited issues there (except FG’s perpetual issues where Charge messes up his aggro).

Bhawb.7408:

I use “fine” to say that it is serviceable.

MM necro since launch here. soloed mai and inquest lab boss with MM build on fractal 24, fractal level 31.

MM has really good single target damage, almost always last man standing, a pain when stacking, will always be picked on by that one thief in the party (not sure why still) and become unusable since minion AI was bugged in a recent patch.

before the AI improvement patch, minions were not very responsive, flesh golem will randomly go aggro, but all minions will almost always attack targets that attacks the necro. all minion can be commanded to attack by using shadow fiends haunt skill.

after the patch that improved AI, all minions will attack necro’s target after the first auto attack.

after the recent patch that nerfed necro, minions will stop attacking upon entering deathshroud. only flesh golem responds to mob that attacks necro. bone minions almost never attack, and minion will not attack target when haunt is used.

edit: I never paid attention but I didnt notice my minions dying all that much at all in fractals, so i assume they scale with your agony resistance?

They are supposed to scale, yes.

minion master necros are just afwul for pve group content.

Well ran some tests with some friends and will have to say MMs are very nice in Fractals. Had no AR on her at all but her Minions didn’t even take any damage from Agony it seems. If it did it wasn’t noticeable. Tested some PvE champ slaying as well and found MMs to be extremely nice as i was able to take most of them down solo. Damage was on average 3-6k per hit so not as powerful as a zerker but 5 times more survivable. So MMs are very powerful if done right.

Luke.4562:

Be careful dudes, declaring actually the minions’ AI is fine is wrong: recently it become pretty bugged, minions started again standing without doing anything.

70% of the time, minions do nothing.. >: Also I wish I seen this thread earlier, I coulda told you that MM for anything is good. :P

Starwind.1069:

Well ran some tests with some friends and will have to say MMs are very nice in Fractals. Had no AR on her at all but her Minions didn’t even take any damage from Agony it seems. If it did it wasn’t noticeable.

Ah yes I forgot. Minions use to scale AR with the player. But when they did the fractured patch they made all non player npc’s immune to agony (to fix mimic abuse). This i believe effects minions and pets. So agony is no longer an issue for minions no matter how much AR you have.

Minions appear to be unable to handle elevation changes, at least that’s when they drop aggro for me. If it’s a flat surface they aggro just fine.

On an aside, it’s always nice to plunk Flesh Wurm down between you and Old Tom in the harpy fractal. He makes a great shield against the spin attack.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

On an aside, it’s always nice to plunk Flesh Wurm down between you and Old Tom in the harpy fractal. He makes a great shield against the spin attack.

forgot to mention, people seem to forget that we got 2 teleports, spectral walk and wurm. so we can solo the harpy electrical escalator switch and the inquest lab heat room, which can come in quite handy at times.

I find that playing MM in dungeons/fractals is nice simply to reduce the general difficulty of everything for your team. You’ll be a bit slower than if you ran with an optimized group, but the tendency of bosses to focus minions, especially with single-target things (like CoE alpha golem), makes content a lot easier for a group that might have difficulty otherwise. It won’t be faster than running another DPS, but it’ll be simpler when you have a pug group that can’t manage as well.

Just curious, what exactly would the MM build in question look like? Thanks

Minions (as well as pets, clones and all other summons) are completely immune to Agony now. So no, don’t think they’ll be completely useless in Fractals.

There are some Fractals and situations where a MM is not ideal, such as the Dredge Fractal boss (since the boss can aggro onto the minions and thus not follow you under the lava pots), but on the whole MM is perfectly viable in Fractals as long as you play smart.

In some cases, they can make bosses such as the Thaumanova boss laughably easy because the boss spends all his time glaring angrily at your minions (which can’t fall through the floor anyway), leaving the rest of your party free to beat him up without any trouble whatsoever. Another example is the Aetherblade fractal, where your minions are completely immune to the laser walls. (Seriously, it passes straight through them as if they weren’t even there!)

And what is now an actual MM build for PVE ?

thx

Deiniol.2159:

And what is now an actual MM build for PVE ?

thx

Standard dps build but slot minions instead of wells i guess?

ok. 20/0/20/30/0 Build ?
MFG

Deiniol.2159:

ok. 20/0/20/30/0 Build ?
MFG

Thats not a dps build.

I would say 30/25/0/0/15, 30/10/0/0/30 or 20/25/0/0/25 with minions would all be fairly decent.

ok. and kplt. Zerker Gear ?

Wtf does kplt mean? Yes zerker gear.

So is it better if we refrain from using minion traits (apart from Training of the Master) to be an acceptable Minionmancer?

Yes because you lose so much damage by going into those traitlines. And dps is important in pve. Even in a minion build minions are only a small percentage of your overall damage.

20/0/25/25/0, ofc. Anyhow I quit gw2 until they make necro skills scale better with power, and fotm is magically doing 2x more damage to me than in the last few runs I did. Like srsly mossman does 100k aoe and you have literally 1 second to register that he has teleported to you………

I use 20/0/30/20/0

Traits i use are;
Spite:
V for Retaliation in DS
IX for Training of the master for harder hitting minions.
Death:
III for faster minion recasts
X for Increased minion health
XI for Death Nova
Blood:
II for better Siphoning Health damage and return(works well with 15 point trait)
VII For minion siphoning health(also increased by II trait)

Armor is Sentinels with Dolyak runes can also use Lich runes for more minions.
Weapons are Sentinels as well Staff and D/D with bloodlust and battle sigils on them.
Jewelry is Soldiers with crest of solders if not using Ascended.

Starwind.1069:

Armor is Sentinels with Dolyak runes can also use Lich runes for more minions.
Weapons are Sentinels as well Staff and D/D with bloodlust and battle sigils on them.
Jewelry is Soldiers with crest of solders if not using Ascended.

Troll?
I hope so…

Norjena.5172:

Starwind.1069:

Armor is Sentinels with Dolyak runes can also use Lich runes for more minions.
Weapons are Sentinels as well Staff and D/D with bloodlust and battle sigils on them.
Jewelry is Soldiers with crest of solders if not using Ascended.

Troll?
I hope so…

Why a troll? Not everyone enjoys playing brainless berzerker dpsdpsdpsdps specs. I have a full set of ascended apothecary gear/weapons I use often and it works great (others for certain situations but I enjoy that one the most). You don’t do any dps when you’re dead. I think its fun to have so much healing your jagged horrors actually regen from mark of blood and never die. Not everything has to be about min/maxing, maybe he just enjoys a tanky spec.

Zerker is brainless but sentinels not?

Even a bearbow is more useful then a sentinels MM.

You dont even need a screen to play sentinels. Thats the very definition of brainless.

Either like spoj said, a full DPS build, or at most 20/0/20/0/30 (gives you the most minion tanking possible, but with the least impact on DPS). Full damage. You should never be running more than 20 trait points in your minions in PvE, or you’re simply handicapping yourself for no reason.

Full berzerker is obviously the choice. Especially with minions, you should almost never get aggro yourself, so you have almost no need for defenses anyway (assuming you can manage to dodge roll the few AoEs that will come at you).

I have been using the zerker MM build back in the days, worked really good, you just have to know when to spawn em/ when to aggro the mobs
But, nowadays the AI is not good again.. A normal autattack does’t activate em anymore, the best way to activate em is either use their Minion skill or use a channel attack (Dagger 2 / DS 4, Axe 2 also doesn’t work 4/5 of the times)

Why does any1 say that a build is working good, if u have no numbers to compare it?

If u are unable to die, u re not “doing well”. U´re just to tanky to make any comments about “good/well balanced” or helpful (which is not including max dps only) builds…

Just for example. A Full Clerics x/x/x/20/30 post patch “Healingmancer” will be more usefull then any! other pvt/sentinels/dire/whatever build. That doesn´t mean that the build itself is good, but it´s more usefull then an “tankyMMancer”…..

I always use Bone Fiend and Bone Minions in the underwater fractal along with SotL. Sometimes I will add Blood Fiend, too.

In the fight as a Charr against Ascelonians, I will pull out Flesh Golem for door ramming and knockdowns. There are other situations where FG has benefit but I use it less consistantly.

i use tanky build for wvw and have no problems with any other professions. Even those annoying thief’s they tend to run away now.

What does this have to do with your own topic?