Guild Wars 2

I was a MM in gw1, and was hoping to be one in guild wars 2. I know the game is totally different and would change how it works, but I’m always a pet class in mmo’s so I didn’t mind.

I don’t find the necromancer’s pet spec in gw2 fun. It’s clunky and even more tedious than in gw1.

The pet’s die very fast. In dungeons AoE will destroy them. Most other mmo’s have a 90% reduction to AoE because pets wont move out of it like players. It would make sense in this game too.

Not all pets regen HP out of combat. This is annoying because our CD will reset once they die, not from the last cast.

It’s hard to control them. You can’t really focus your pets on a target, esp in longer fights with target changes. The pet dmg isn’t very high but when they work together it would make sense, but you can’t really get them to do that unless you’re solo pve.

Those are the general ideas of why it’s not fun, but you can go into even smaller detail and I’m sure people have already on the forum.

I know you’ll say omg go play another class. I do. I have 2. But MM necromancer was what I was looking forward to months before release. I’m just disappointed.

I am with you, and so are a lot of other players. The necro forum, as it is right now, will not tell you to play a different class. We will simply tell you that we agree, hopefully they will be improved/fixed soon, and try a different build when doing non-PvE. That is all we can really say as of this moment.

Ditto – in the BWs they were better because you could at least get a small horde. Jagged Horrors didn’t degen so you could keep a few out at once. You got 3 Bone Minions and 2 Fiends. I hope they fix them as I’m with you in that I loved my GW1 minion master (and I played it from day one of GW1 launch).

What I can say is stay positive. MM was a joke in early GW1 history as well and then later became the godly, and finally settled on very good (for PvE). Hopefully we’ll go through a similar transformation in GW2.

I agree with all points. We’d probably need more pets to make up for kitten AI. And ya the AOE reduction is really needed. Especially in sPvP. Hell they take condition damage while a turret engineer’s turrets take none.

And regen is so badly needed on them. Either they need to give regen or allow us to easily unsummon that one without swapping utilities.

I’d really like it if the jagged horror could have multiple of them. Don’t degen but instead whenever they attack they leech from their own health to deal damage.

Pathing and targeting issues are the only real problem with pets for necros. They have fairly short cooldowns, that you can make shorter via a toughness talent and theres another toughness talent that allows you to benefit from their deaths with a fairly long lasting poison dot.

I just wish they gave us points for death shroud, unless I’m mistaken only Flesh golem seems to do that.

Well I’m glad to see I’m not the only person who thinks this. Their AI is crap, which means you lose a lot of DPS because minions are standing around picking their nose.

I love detonating a bone minion to find out he’s standing right next to me having never gone in to fight the enemies. I think he’s on to my strategy for him…

I wanted to play necro for the minions. When I found out that minions don’t regenerate health out of combat, I quit shortly after. It’s so stupid how I’m at more of an advantage for the next fight if my pet dies than I am if my pet gets left at 20% health.

It’s silly when people claim that’s because Guild Wars 1 necro minions degenerated. In GW1, it was like that because you could equip one summon skill and conjure multiple minions with it. It was to put some resistance against necros who try to maintain armies. In GW2 it’s totally different. One pet = one utility skill. It’s capped, and most pets are easily killed as it is. Let them regenerate out of combat.

AOE mitigation is something that’s absolutely needed for a minion master build. I don’t even care of its not innate, but some sort of minor/major trait.

Lack of AOE mitigation is the major problem for a minion build right now.

All the other issues could be classed as irritations (although pretty majorly irritating some of them I grant you) since atleast there are work arounds.

Losing all your minions within the first few seconds of an encounter because they get caught in an easily avoidable aoe with nothing you can do to get them to move out of it/dodge it is just a killer for a minion spec. They die easily enough as it is without that, and once your minions are down as a minion spec necromancer that’s you lost most of your effectiveness.

The fact that they’re just permanent pets summoned whenever kind of cheapens the experience as well.

There’s no feeling of actually managing them, outside of just popping their activated skills on cooldown.

And really there’s just nothing interesting and fun about it, you just spawn as many pets as you can, then run around and auto attack stuff. No interesting combo’s of abilities/traits or anything.

If you’re just running around auto-attacking as a minion master then you’re not reaching your full potential.

Apart from how quickly they die to aoe I was really enjoying my MM spec (despite the other irritations) as it felt like I was playing a support role in a group (my favoured role in other games). It does help to think of it as a pug though, due to how chaotically the pets AI behaves at times…they often randomly go AFK without telling you, or pull when not everyone is ready. :P

Um, AI aside, we couldn’t control our minions in GW either could we? I mean, it’s been a few yrs since I played it but they were just degenerating meat shields.

Not played with minions for a while…
Does anyone know if they can crit? are they effected by character precision, will the boons like fury/might effect them

Right now, MM build is akin to a signet warrior; lazy and not fun IMO. You pretty much limit yourself to your 5 weapon skills and rarely touch the rest.

@elmentcius uhm i don’t know what mm does that maybe only you. but i def swap my weaps as an mm. you would be stupid if you didn’t.

@merch: boons that effect allies in an area effect minions as well. However it prioritizes allied players first, then minions.

@Derek: Minions were more tedious in guild wars 1. They degen health, required constant maintenance, Required bodies, and for them to do decent damage required you to dedicate your entire bar to buffing/summoning them. It’s definitely a step up in effectiveness/engagement levels, but it is a step down in wow factor. They are smaller, less impressive looking, and in smaller numbers.

Top wish lists for minions (and I don’t think this is asking too much)

1. AI fix, I hate having them stand around doing nothing
2. Either increase survivability or let me kill them (like blowing up the bone minions)
3. Let Death Nova trigger when blowing up my bone minions (I hate that I have to choose which should take effect)

@ invictus ya i hate how when u blow up the minions u cant get death nova to activate. they are technically dieing

@striker: What I meant by it was in gw1 it was like it’s own style of gameplay of running through as fast as you can and keeping your army alive and clearing a map. It was tedious, but it was also fluid. Now in gw2 they’re clunky/tedious as in no fluidity. You can’t resummon until they die, some have degen even though the cd doesn’t reset and is lacking general playstyle. It’s just a badly designed spec atm.

@Seras: Yes in gw1 you used them as meat shields and didn’t control them much. You could actually make a focus target though, if you looked in the control options for pets, which is more than you can in gw2. Besides that point though, gw2 is an entirely different game and the fact you are very limited in the number of minions to have out compared to gw1 makes them ineffective meat shields. Also they aren’t effective damage dealer’s now either because you can’t have them focus anything along with limited amount/unable to re-summon immediately after they die.

@derek I do agree minion master is far from perfect. I certainly like it more than GW1 though. I just hope that in the big halloween content patch we see a lot of bug fixes and something done to jagged horrors.

The issue in dungeons is aoe, the issue in pvp is the ai being broken. I don’t mind them being stupid and giving people the opportunity to play around them, but flatly refusing to attack is a problem.

@Mammoth I think it’s a bit more than that obviously. I think it needs a play-style change, like a revamp of the entire spec and pet functionality. But I have been playing an elementalist, and I use the elemental elite, and the only one that seems worth it is the earth elemental because it can actually survive some aoe. Stupid being so limited like that.

I enjoy Elementalist, but I feel like I’m putting Minion Master on hold until they fix it up :[

Are you using a staff? I found I had a lot of issues when I was using a staff, and even ended up deleting my necro. After restarting, I chose daggers with staff as secondary and it’s way better.

People have told me that the reason our minions dont regen is because its not our class mechanic. I’m told the ranger’s pet regains health because it is there class mechanic.
If thats true(and I dont think it is), then I say dump this worthless death shroud and make minion management out class mechanic.

People might say it would be unfair to necros that use it, but as it stands there are several necro builds that dont use Death shroud for any thing but its number 4 skill for a quick aoe hit then there out of it again.
And having a class mechanic that is basically just a second health bar means they have to balance the rest of the class to need to USE the second health bar.
In other words, make us weak so we need it.

People start necros because they want to be minion masters, if they want a class with lots of HP to take hits they have the warrior and guardian for that.

MM feels a bit bland (imo). Mostly you use your weapon skills and that’s it. The golem’s charge is nice…but the rest. Blind has a cast time, and the bone fiends immobilization seems bugged because I have never seen it work (correct me if I am wrong there).

Too bad that you cannot do some good area denial stuff. The exploding minions are hardly worth it (are they ever near the intended target?) and the death nova does hardly any damage.

The spec lacks a jaw-dropper and something special. something unique. Simple as that.

And don’t get me started about the AI…especially the flesh golem’s AI. It is a big pile of dung and they clearly need capable AI programmers.

Other very ‘Mad Bro, oww that’s unfun’ bug(s).

Siphon life with pets, not effected by +heal stat, or the 50% more siphon trait. (Also might not be working with heal other players)

The CD when they de-spawn. sPvP can’t go in water, and also CD after you die. Other MMO’s are nice enough to even re-summon them on res in pvp.

There are a lot of bugs with abilities and traits for pets and necromancer in general.

The one that’s been bothering me lately is the siphon heals allies doesn’t effect pets. Also the focus weapon skill Reaper’s Touch never goes to minions. I actually wouldn’t like it to if minion’s were designed better and didn’t die so fast, but right now when regen on them is very important, it’s a big disadvantage not hitting them.