Guild Wars 2

This is a quick suggestion to Flesh of the Master and Necromantic Corruption. After the recent changes MM is getting a little bit of love, but minions overall still have some issues. Without addressing all of them at once I wanted to bring up just two small changes.

As it stands right now, Flesh of the Master is one of those traits that is mandatory to run a skill type. Without it, minions are just too squishy to reliably use in any build, and non-minion builds can’t justify taking it as it is essentially a wasted slot for yourself. Making the +50% HP baseline, or un-splitting PvE and PvP/WvW by increasing the HP of minions in PvP/WvW to their PvE values (71% HP boost from base), would allow minions to stay alive much better and be more useful for non-MMs to take.

Then the trait could be deleted, with the loss in toughness being offset by more active traits like Putrid defense, and a new trait could be put in its place. This reduces some of the trait clutter as well, since minions are the only skill in the game that has 3 specific traits.

The other suggestion is about Necromantic Corruption. As the trait is right now there are two problems:

1. The massive increase in condition damage in the game can’t be offset by MMs right now. Necromantic Corruption also makes minions take even more damage since conditions won’t be transferred right away, and since they only transfer once every 10s their transfer on hit really only exists to offset the transfer from MM to minion.
2. The trait takes too long to take effect. Much like DS traits that were changed to work on-entry and then every X seconds, Necromantic Corruption currently has no effect until either a condition has been on you for 10 seconds, or a minion has been alive for 10 seconds, whichever is longer. This means if you summon a minion in combat it won’t remove any conditions until 10 seconds later, or at the beginning of a fight your minions (even if they are summoned minutes before the fight starts) won’t draw a condition until 10 seconds after it was applied. This makes it useless against short conditions that aren’t being applied with longer ones, as this timer resets any time you fully cleanse yourself of conditions, and also means there is a long period at the start of the fight that your trait is useless.

The proposed changes would be to make Necromantic Corruption work immediately once a minion is summoned or a condition is applied, and have minions remove conditions on every hit, and once every 10 seconds they will transfer on hit instead. This allows the enemy to have some counterplay, you are still able to kite minions as they won’t be able to remove CC conditions unless they hit you, and they can “waste” the beginning removal with weak conditions. On the other hand, it rewards the MM more for CCing the enemy by allowing minions to survive a bit better when the build is being played well.

Basically, the two ideas are to react to the damage creep slightly without actually making the MM itself stronger.

Thoughts?

I’m not sure if Minions removing conditions with every attack is a good idea. They’re one of few perfect targets (with Ranger’s Pets) for Epidemic and don’t die before you finish the cast ;3.

No, but seriously, I think it could be too much.

I’m not sure what Arena Net thinks of Minions – should they be kind of like stupid AI with little control, being recycled fairly quickly, but coming en masse (design of “Rise!”) or be more of permanent pets assisting the fight.

If it’s the second option, what if MM got some baseline trait that removes conditions on some Life Force/Shroud actions or possibly make Minions remove conditions quicker/get more healing bonus the longer they exist, i.e. if you just re-summoned Flesh Golem, it will lose condition every 15s, but after living for 30s, the ICD gets down to 10 or 7s etc to promote “taking care” of minions.

Necromantic Corruption could also grant some short Resistance after using Minion’s active or transferring condition.

Idk, I’m all for Minions losing conditions, but I don’t think it should be just passive ICD of Minions themselves.

One addition I would suggest that should be fairly minor: Fractals. While I don’t have any personal experience, from what I’ve gathered minions are awful in higher level fractals because of agony. Should minions not be affected by agony? Or have innate agony resistance? (Similar to how minions/pets can charge up to the Mega Destroyer heedless of lava)

They are supposed to have the same AR as the Necromancer, is this not the case?

Ohhhh. I wasn’t aware that was a thing. As I said, I’ve only heard that they’re not good in fractals. My mistake if they’re technically possible to use there

I think minions are fine the way it is now. The only problem is the AI, so changing anything else will break the balance completely. Your proposed idea is clearly way too OP for sure. It is already a very powerful and extremely bulky build. The only issue is the minions’ AI.