Guild Wars 2

After trolling the forums alot,trying to contradict various statements from other fellow necromancers (my posts have been mostly in defense of the Necromancer as a whole), I will admit that the necro profession isn’t that great after all,as I thought it was. However,it’s not as bad as people think it is either (talking about the general stigma associated with the class mumbles-friggin’ non necros…) xD I believe we’re in this kind of middle ground.

There’s like these few nitpicks about the class that is so spot on which should be fixed but I’m not going to mention any of these now,again,for the thousandth time like everyone else did. The devs (mainly Robert) is aware of it now.

There is one thing though,which I’d love to see with the release on HOT,not JUST on the Necromancer but on the Reaper as well…yes,if the main title didn’t give it away,here ->Minion Bomber.

I never played the Minion Bomber in GW1 but I did play the Minion Master with his freakin’ huge army. Now that we will get the shout “Rise!” with the Reaper this has an even more potential to be a thing. From a PvP perspective this would be a very welcomed,possibly even “META”, build. It’s main focus would be too heavily (and when I mean heavily I do mean REALLY heavy) instant damage output on a point,or coming in during a team fight,dealing out this huge damage spike.

During the beta weekend I was testing out the Reaper MM. I was also simultaneously browsing through the forums,looking at others people feedback while I came over a thread post in the,I think it was the “General Reaper Feedback Thread”,where one Necromancer had tested out (and had been earlier) a Minion Bomber thing. He said it was very niche at the moment because we have to go into some sort of transform to cancel out all of the minions at once,which will make them all explode due to the “Death Nova” trait being active. I thought to myself that this couldn’t be as good as he said (or at least as I got the impression it was) so I figured I’d give it a try,mainly because it would be refreshing too just dabble with some new weird “tactic”.

I tested this on the group of Heavy golems in the Mists and HOLY KITTEN. The damage. I couldn’t believe it,I wish I’d taken a screen of it because you probably won’t believe it. I kid you not,12 Golems inside that cluster went from 4/4 HP to 1/4. In an instant. I had my Blood Fiend out,the two Bone Minions,Shadow Fiend and the 5 Jagged Horrors from “Rise!”. The damage alone came from just the 9 minions, a hydromancy sigil and with the Berserker Amulet equipped and the Runes of Ice,which I believe might have contributed to the damage via the “7% more damage to chilled foes” 6th bonus. Maybe they got chilled by the Hydromancy sigil when I entered Lich form BEFORE the minions exploded and hit with the “Death Nova” trait because that was some serious damage.

“When I entered Lich Form”….How would you feel about adding a F2 (as another person on this forum mentioned in another thread) so we would be able too actually sacrifice all of our minions instantly for a huge damage spike? This would be a kind of “risk-reward” play where you’d have to think weigh the option of losing all of your added toughness (Flesh of the Master) plus the condi clears they give you (Necromantic Corruption) versus the damage spike from “Death Nova”. Shouldn’t this have been a feature since launch? Because as it stands now,we’d have to take an Elite Skill to be able too do this. Shouldn’t we be able to do this more often than every 180 seconds +?

An F2 mechanic. That would be a great start. A couple of more problems would certainly have to be fixed for this to be even more viable,namely the AI of minions (why are they acting so weird all the time though) and possibly even do some rework with the Jagged Horrors….removing the degenerating life maybe? All they really serve as now is bombs. Tiny itty bitty bombs. And I don’t mind that to be honest but I’d stil love to see the HP loss go away and instead replace it with a detonating F2 class mechanic so that we’d have more reliable bombs. Make the F2 execute all minions at once. Not like what we currently have on our Bone Minions.

Also,something should be done with the Lich Runes,again, I read that when the whole rune and sigil rework happend the Lich Runes never got touched. Could they maybe summon more Jagged Horrors at once instead of just 1 every 60 second? That’s like an extra 1k damage every 60 second plus some seconds of poison from “Death Nova” trait. Noone is nor has anyone even thought of using that rune because to be quite frank,that rune is just terrible. Let it maybe summon 5 Jagged Horrors every 60 second like “Rise!”,or maybe even just 3.
EDIT: Fixed grammar
2nd EDIT: Now that the Jagged Horrors have been replaced with Shambling Horrors (new type) we’ll just have to wait and see if blowing them up is worthwhile after all,as Nightwulf pointed out. But it would still be cool anyways if that “Destroy minions” F2 mechanic was implemented.

What do you,the rest of the necromancers ,the forum specialist and the devs think about this? Any dev or Robert probably won’t respond to this post but I know you’ll be reading it. What do you think about it? Too overpowered? Too stupid? Too unfair that we’ll get another core/spec Fx mechanic while noone else does?

Excuse my use of to and too (to be honest I have almost no idea how to differ from the two). And my grammar,as it’s not my first/mother language/tongue.

Honestly, I throughly enjoyed the minion bomber. I equipped the rise shout to just have some fun, then started running around cursed shore spamming it at every 5 plus encounter. However, as you said this is very very niche, and requires a good bit of set up.

I think Rise! Needs to be lowered down to a 30 second cool down, along with a universal cast time reduction on the shouts. In addition, jagged horrors I think should get death nova by default as it would make them much much much more useful in non-death Magic builds. As for minions in general, well…their AI is all I can say. If they don’t attack then they won’t be in a position to take advantage of your bomb.

TheLastNobody.8319:

Honestly, I throughly enjoyed the minion bomber. I equipped the rise shout to just have some fun, then started running around cursed shore spamming it at every 5 plus encounter. However, as you said this is very very niche, and requires a good bit of set up.

I think Rise! Needs to be lowered down to a 30 second cool down, along with a universal cast time reduction on the shouts. In addition, jagged horrors I think should get death nova by default as it would make them much much much more useful in non-death Magic builds. As for minions in general, well…their AI is all I can say. If they don’t attack then they won’t be in a position to take advantage of your bomb.

This is true. And your point is very valid. I didn’t mention any of it though since at the moment I think pushing through the F2 mechanic alone would be what we best would hope for. I have alot of different opinions about minions and shouts (something I missed in my Reaper feedback) but I won’t mention them in this post. It’ll have to do in another one. F2 on topic discussion or else it will be lost in every other complaint about something else,ultimately the thread will become like several others. Completely in another direction with just a vague hint of what topic was actually intended to be brought up. The forums,at times,feels like politics

Hehe, I do believe that may have been my post in the general reaper feedback thread you saw. Reaper Minion Bomber was one of the builds I was most excited to try out this weekend, glad I was able to inspire someone else to try it out. The damage can be very impressive but it does take a lot of setup and relying on a 180s cooldown skill to trigger it makes it sort of impractical a lot of the time.

I love the suggestion as well, a button/command to dismiss/kill all summons would be great for minion bombing but could also be useful for standard Minion Masters who want to reset their minions or for any class that uses summons if they want to dismiss them early.

Riot Inducer.8964:

Hehe, I do believe that may have been my post in the general reaper feedback thread you saw. Reaper Minion Bomber was one of the builds I was most excited to try out this weekend, glad I was able to inspire someone else to try it out. The damage can be very impressive but it does take a lot of setup and relying on a 180s cooldown skill to trigger it makes it sort of impractical a lot of the time.

I love the suggestion as well, a button/command to dismiss/kill all summons would be great for minion bombing but could also be useful for standard Minion Masters who want to reset their minions or for any class that uses summons if they want to dismiss them early.

Your post is like that little unpolished gem that NEEDS to get polished. Thank you for bringing it up,rather subtely though, but still :P

Just a friendly bump. Do people ever even go to the second page? I know I don’t lol.

A bumpity kitten bump

I read about minion bombing being a possibility when the beta weekend was going. I tested out how much damage I could do in the pvp area and got decent damage on the golems, but yeah, it’s a bit unreliable as there is no way to kill them all outside of using a transformation elite on a high cool down. What I did later was try to see how many jagged horrors I could keep up at once in the open world. I think I counted 11 jagged horrors during an event where there was enough aoe healing to keep my first wave of horrors alive long enough for a second wave of them. I did not test this build with a transformation elite, but I might next time. This would have been decent bleed damage but only under very specific conditions that allow the first wave of horrors to live long enough. And probably more than decent spike damage if you could corral them on top of your enemy to blow them up. Now that they are shambling horrors, the value in blowing them up might not be the same.

Edit: Where’s Blood of the Master when you need it?

nightwulf.1986:

I read about minion bombing being a possibility when the beta weekend was going. I tested out how much damage I could do in the pvp area and got decent damage on the golems, but yeah, it’s a bit unreliable as there is no way to kill them all outside of using a transformation elite on a high cool down. What I did later was try to see how many jagged horrors I could keep up at once in the open world. I think I counted 11 jagged horrors during an event where there was enough aoe healing to keep my first wave of horrors alive long enough for a second wave of them. I did not test this build with a transformation elite, but I might next time. This would have been decent bleed damage but only under very specific conditions that allow the first wave of horrors to live long enough. And probably more than decent spike damage if you could corral them on top of your enemy to blow them up. Now that they are shambling horrors, the value in blowing them up might not be the same.

Edit: Where’s Blood of the Master when you need it?

That’s true,we don’t know yet how the new type will work but if it’s something along the lines of the 250 years old one then I’d be thrilled, http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Shambling_Horror .

Like if they’d spawn Jagged Horrors upon death hehe :P

I’d definitely also like too see “Blood of the Master” as a utility skill,totally forgot about that one. Thoughts on that? Or maybe it’s not needed when the minions siphon health anyway?

I’ll wait to see what the new minion does. The short work-in-progress description didn’t mention leaving a jagged horror behind but that would be a must have for minion builds if it turns out that way. As for longevity, the minions don’t attack often enough for the siphons to offset the damage they take if the enemy you fight has any sort of aoe. Right now, minions can be healed by outside sources but not reliably. Blood of the master was designed for a very different sort of minion combat than what we have in GW2. However, if it were to come back, I would tack it on to the Blood Fiend sacrifice skill. That would make sacrificing Blood Fiend feel less like just losing your passive heal for a meager self heal.

Let me first state that I’m a big fan of minion builds. I have played similar style builds in a lot of RPGs (Diablo series, Elder scroll series to some extend, GW1 of couse, and many other RPGs).

Back in GW1 I loved the minion builds. There were a lot of different builds that all had something unique. The minion bomber was really fun in its own little way.

Thing is, it won’t really work in GW2.
There is a lack of undead army (sure if you go through some hoops you can keep a lot of jagged horrors up, but that’s not how it was in GW1). And minions almost feel more like pets in GW2 where you really want to keep them around as much as possible, for their buffs and damage; instead of them being disposable tools / meatshields.
There are mechanical issues too, like the pathing, lack of aggro, stuck with using certain kinds of minions, etc.

The F2 skill is something we simply won’t see. Nor do I think it would be a very elegant implementation.
If there would be some kind of tricky minion bombing trick like the one you mentioned; it would be cool to see it used in some weird builds, but I really think they’re more eager to nerf it down than to make it a viable playstyle.