Guild Wars 2

So playing through other games for a while I’ve been looking at the necro minions (I tend to play necro in other games a lot, or necro-like classes).

Mainly though I’ve decided to revisit Diablo 2, Diablo 3, and Guild Wars ( 1 ).

Classes which are minion based/focused etc. are supposed to have minions which either deal high damage but have a hard time surviving, or deal miserable damage yet act as meat shields.

In Guild Wars the necro minions would degenerate health and would require a lot of attention to keep alive, if you lost attention for a moment they’d be gone – however you had a high number of them out and to top it off they dealt really nice damage. They acted as separators from you and the enemies but mostly they were there to deal damage for you.

In Diablo 3, they were having the same issues Guild Wars 2 is having with the minions (Witch Doctor minions in this case). The Witch Doctor minions were supposed to act as meat shields, they did miserable damage, however the minions were simply dying way too fast. They dealt no damage and they provided nearly no protection at all – they were useless in other words (much like the necro minions in GW2, at least the Witch Doctor minion AI works decently enough).
So naturally with time players quickly stopped using Witch Doctor minions all together, they were put away to never be taken out again, much like necro minions in GW2. However luckily the cries of the players was listened to and they gave thought to the minions, they were supposed to act as meat shields but died in a second or two, that simply would not do.

Quite quickly (two maybe three months from the game’s release, somewhere along those lines I forgot exactly) Blizzard fixed the Witch Doctor minion problem, they made them scale with vitality, added more defence, and gave a damage cap to minions – the minions could not take more than a set percentage of their max HP in one single blow, preventing insta kills and preventing them taking too much damage too quickly. Today I’m able to happily strut around with my horde of undead as they serve their meat shield purpose.

So in a general sense, minions are meant to be either short lived damage dealers, or powerless meat shields – one or the other, not neither. Currently GW2 necro minions do not serve to deal damage, nor are they useful in taking damage.

Quite naturally most players ended up not using them, simply storing them away, after all why would you give up other skills for broken minions? I do admit from time to time I respec my necro and use minions for a while (because deep deep down… I really want to), however usually it doesn’t last more than 20 minutes for me to remember how horrible the minions actually are, and I put them away once more.

So this has been puzzling me, I understand that changing the minion mechanics and how they work in general is complicated and time consuming. However there are some obvious fixes and solutions which for whatever reason have been ignored. I mean players have cried about the jagged horrors, they by far are the most 100% useless creatures in the game, not only are they useless in combat, but tend to do more harm then good to you in certain situations.
Anet did something about it, by reducing the health degen rate, but that just made something 100% useless into something 99% useless. Why not remove or reduce the cooldown at which jagged horrors get summoned? It’s not as if a necro could overwhelm anyone even if he had 5 jagged horrors out at once, those things can’t take a hit and deal miserable damage.

I mean really, why did they make such a huge cooldown on jagged horrors? It’s not as if having multiple jagged horrors will make you over powered in PvE, and especially not in PvP where killing even one player is already a feat, so it’s not like being rewarded with a jagged horror for each kill will unbalance PvP either. And WvW least of all, even if you had 10 jagged horrors out at once, in the chaos that is WvW they would die the moment they show up anyway.

So why I ask you, why do what you did with the minions? I don’t doubt that Anet realizes the issues with the minion, including damage, usefulness, survivability AI, etc. But there are some simple and obvious solutions that to me are a mystery as to why they’ve not yet been taken.

I understand that to redo a feature you’d have to test it out well enough to see if it works properly or not with itself and the rest of the game. But the minions are already in the game, changing or fixing a couple things here and there really shouldn’t take so long.
I mean really, if Blizzard managed to fix their Witch Doctor minion issues, it’s puzzling to me as to why Anet has yet to really even touch the Necro minions.

Not trying to discredit or invalidate your concerns, but this has been argued over and pounded into the ground until it’s in so deep it will take them months to wade through all the posts. Yeah minions suck, but they’re not 100% useless. I actually have a fairly easy time with them if I run a version of a well bomber/support and I become the tank and work on keeping them alive lol. But as backwards as it may be, it actually works pretty well but I don’t generally like minions so I rarely use them for that fact alone. I prefer using my own skills and power so minions aren’t really an option for me. Just know that Anet has been aware of the issues and they are working on them, but we can’t expect them to update us on every single tweak they’re testing out. The jagged horror “fix” was an emergency one I think, and even some of the situations where they negatively affect bosses have been fixed and will be included in an update coming soon. The fixes are there, we’re just waiting for the release of them. Trust me we’re all as frustrated as you about them, but just hang in there. I would prefer fixed the first time rather than 50 little changes every other day until they get it right. Once minions are fixed and viable you can bet other classes will QQ their tiny little heads off because “zomg necros have viable builds now and I can’t figure out how to counter it” and thats why they wanna do it right the first time instead of having to go back again and nerf what they just fixed.

Well Anet themselves already said that they don’t plan on getting a bunch of changes, updates, and fixes and sending them all out at once. Doing that would have a high chance to cause an unbalance so they said they prefer to send out little by little and see how that affects the game.

To that effect, it’s depressing so far since the game’s release (and necro minion’s have had their problems since before the game’s release) that of all the necro minion fixes, all they did was reduce health degen by a bit on the jagged horrors.

So don’t expect there to be a miracle patch that has dozens of minion fixes, only little by little as time goes by. That being said I honestly imagined there would be more so far, or at least… some. At the very least I honestly imagined that with the Halloween update they would at LEAST fix the AI, they didn’t, with the Wintersday update I thought; “well this is it!” – but nothing.

It’s just frustrating seeing that patch after patch there’s just nothing.

Delryn.7235:

It’s just frustrating seeing that patch after patch there’s just nothing.

Honestly, MMO’s shouldn’t be released late in the year. There are too many holidays; too many players finding problems, too few coders fixing problems. That is – I think – the major reason that there have been no significant class balance changes yet. There’s been nobody at ArenaNet to fix them. And there’s a long list of priority changes that needed to be made before fixing the AI bug. That said, this has been an issues since day one of necro alpha.