Right now Minion Masters are just low risk, low rewards. New necros love them because it’s possibly the easiest spec to play, but you never see them in high end contents like high level fractals or raids.
Personally I love being a minion master back in GW1, and the idea of being a one man army sound awesome, but it failed on execution for me in GW2, you just summon all your minions and let them do their thing.
Let’s go over all the minion skills.
Starting with Blood Fiend, this minion is sort of unique, being that its one of the few healing skill that add to your dps, but the minion itself is boring, it’s essentially a minion having blood magic traited without needing blood magic.
I have a crazy idea in my head to make this skill more fun, and that is to have the skill summon a blood leech/worm that melee your target, the leech itself doesn’t heal you but it gets larger and larger the more it damages a target, then the active skill after summoning the leech would be to burst the leech, healing you and all it’s nearby allies (Including other minions) based on how large the leech is up to a maximum number (presumably high but would take a long time to get there). The active skill can be used immediately after summoning the leech but it would heal very little, making it a high risk, high reward skill.
Now let’s look at Bone Minions, lets face it, this skill is boring as hell and Rise is what this skill should’ve been. Back in GW1, Bone Minions fills a niche in being able to summon 2 minions from one corpse so it’s useful in areas with very little exploitable corpse, and synergizes well with the Jagged Horrors elite/Death Nova, in GW2, all it does is summon 2 minions that can explodes on demand with little to no micromanagement.
My idea for this skill is as follow:
Summon one bone minion. When this minion dies, all nearby foes take X damage and are poisoned for 5 seconds. You can have more than one of this minion at a time.
Duration: 25 seconds
Cooldown: 5 seconds
Cast time: standard minion casts
Basically a spammable short lasting minion skill that bombard foes, due to their short lasting nature, you can at most have 4 or less minions up at the same time and their role is to fill the AoE niche that minion masters lack, and in PvP, they could serve as a deterrent for enemies that just likes to AoE down your minions, because having them explode at the same time is deadly
. Synergizes with Death Nova trait.
Now let’s look at Shadow Fiend, another horribly boring skill for something that could be super cool. The only thing unique about this minion was it’s ability to teleport.
Let’s make this minion a true nightmare (to fit the theme), before going into this, lets talk about Fear, Fear is great but it makes the enemies spread out and run away from your AoEs, kind of counter intuitive when you want them to stay in (Reaper 5). So have this skill be a unique fearing tool that pulls enemies toward you (not to mention pulling is one of the thing necro lacks). My idea is as follow:
Summon a Shadow Fiend at target area and fear all nearby foes around it. The Shadow Fiend cannot move and attack using Necrotic Grasp (Staff auto).
Fear(1s)
Number of targets: 5
Range: 1200
Radius: 300
Cast time: Standard minion cast
Cooldown: 80s
Second active skill—Haunt:
Teleport to target area and fear all foes around it.
Fear (1s)
Number of targets: 5
Range: 900
Cooldown: 18s
Cast time: 1/2s
A high risk, high reward minion skills that shine in PvP where it has a spammable fear, the risk comes from the minion being a priority target to kill in PvP, and once its dead you’re stuck with an 80s cooldown. The unique thing about this fear is the fear originate from the minion itself, so if you send the minion behind the enemy target, it will fear them towards you, which synergizes well with your plethora of AoEs skills (Marks, Wells, Reaper 5/4)
The two non-elite minions—the bone fiend and flesh wurm, are actually already quite interesting, both being able to shoot at range, the bone fiend can hit twice (thus can trigger blood magic twice), and flesh wurm is a clutch teleport tool that can actually does decent damage.
And the last three non-minion skills that spawn minions—Death Nova, Rise and Mark of Horrors are actually awesome, and meta, so keep that up Anet.
Lastly we have the ultimate minion, the Flesh Golem, in GW1 they were unique in the way that they leave an exploitable corpse on death. In GW2, they’re just a beefier minion. Often times it is ignored by enemy players in PvP and does not do anything significantly game changing like Chilled to the Bones (or Lich Form for PvE) to be taken over except maybe to help break bars.
Summoning the Golem should be a massive dps increase if all it does is attack, but the only way to balance that is to make it a temporary minion, same way Jagged Minions is handled (High dps, temporary duration).
My first suggestion is to change the Golem attack chain to the following:
First hit: High raw damage
Second hit: Low raw damage + Mediocre bleed
Third hit: High raw damage + Mediocre bleed
Number of targets: 3
This way, when the minion is first summoned, all attentions should be focused on it.
Then the second suggestion is to replace the Active skill that appears only when the Golem is up.
Enrage Mode
The next few attacks from your Flesh Golem knocks down their targets, and can hit for a higher number of targets. The Golem also gains stability and ignore all movements impairing effects.
Knockdown(2s)
Effects ignored: Cripple, Chills, Immobilized
Number of attacks: 3
Number of targets: 5
Duration: 10s (In case 3 attacks isn’t used)
Cooldown: 40s
Cast time: 3/4s
This skill would work as a Necro equivalent of Gravity Wells where it shuts down a group of targets for a short periods of time, in PvP the Flesh Golem should grows larger and red to signal its currently Enraging and players should take proper counter like Blinds, Blocks, Stability, and Dodging.
Finally, this massive buff shouldn’t come without a string attached, the last suggestion would be to make this minion scarce. Increase its cooldown to 180s and its health degenerate over time, same treatments as jagged horror, with the exception that you can only have one Flesh Golem up at a time if you managed to keep it alive for 180 seconds by healing.