Guild Wars 2

Lets keep this on topic for a change please.

Anyway discussion subject 1.
Minions and water. We have 3 elites. Out of those 3, 2 are purely situational. Lich form is only useful in very specific situations and in most cases even power speced necromancer don’t take it because it robs us of our heal, utilities and turns us into a giant target. Yes there are spots where you can use it. But the skills set is almost never worth it, just the auto-attack. Plague even more situational it completely lacks damage while offering 3 aoe abilities added ontop of poison, thats either bleed or blind or cripple+weakness. And lastly a much more generally useful elite flesh golem. It doesn’t remove our skills, it doesn’t take away our weapons it doesn’t change anything we do except give us a knockdown and damage+cripple. Unfortunately when it comes to water all we have is plague. Both lich form and plague destroy one of our class defining aspects minions. While it makes no sense why our own skills hurt us instead of helping its not even the point. Why do we not have a damaging elite in water? Plenty of classes have 2 elites in water. Not only do minion master have no elite that they can use in water, there is nothing worse you can do as minion user then use plague and destroy your main source of damage AND healing(which also counters any defensive use of plague). But we also lack any elite that works for everyone. Why? We already can’t use minions in most content that keeps people playing. Wvw, dungeons, large meta events etc. But we aren’t even able to have an elite that works for every necromancer. Also… flesh wurm. There are plenty of wurms that live under water. We still need a surface to place wurm and his main purpose is still usually stun break+teleport and rarely damage. So why can’t we use that minion in water again? He doesn’t require swimming animation its stationary. It requires surface… And we still need stun breaks even if its under water.

Moving on to topic 2 of our discussion.
We recently finally got ooc regeneration on some minions. Lets think what it really does for us. If your minions are pretty much dead we can spend a few seconds to let them regen, instead of swapping skills to destroy them then waiting for the ENTIRE cooldown to resummon and only then going for the next target. Wow… it only took 10 months to give us that. While I’m grateful and all that but why did blood fiend, flesh wurm and bone fiends didn’t get it? Yeah sure… Blood fiend only and I can’t stress it enough ONLY useful if and only if he is THERE. If he isn’t there for the fight then he may as well be replaced by any other heal. Healing he provides with active is pitiful at best and not useful at all. He doesn’t cure conditions he heals for very little etc. So why can’t the one thing that needs the most durability, heal outside of combat? It changes nothing combat wise which is what mmorpgs are all about. Combat and loot. Yet we are stuck killing him then waiting or going in all the while main source of healing for minion user drops down to pretty much nothing that will let your survive if you take any real damage. Next is flesh wurm. Again why… why does this guy not get ooc regen? Arguably its best use is stun break since it instantly takes us out harms way. If he survived a fight GREAT. But why if he survived with 1% health do we need to sit and wait for entire cooldown to resummon him? If you use it for damage then… well you are stuck waiting for entire cooldown anyway so yeah sure maybe he doesn’t need it for that. But that is why not a lot of times is it used for his damage. Most dungeons aren’t friendly towards minions in the first place. If he lives with sliver of health and dies in one attack we face not having anything to use for the next fight? Even bone minions… Why can’t they regen? Why am I once again forced destroy and then resummon them if I happened to finish a fight and have 2 bone minions both with barely any hp left. So next combat situation I’m running the risk of them getting destroyed in first attack and me not getting anything out of it.

There are plenty of things wrong with necro and how anet does things. Starting with core mechanics and ending with attitude. But for now how about just those 2 things. One that concerns class across the board and another which was half addressed. If it was addressed why not address it fully? Why leave if half finished?

I thought it was pretty obvious why blood fiend / bone minions / flesh wurm didn’t get out-of-combat regeneration. The active skills of those minions sacrifice them. If you want to ‘clean up’ after a fight and start fresh, you can just kill them off the normal way, rather than having to fiddle with the UI via switching utilities in and out.

Edit: Regarding underwater – I’ll admit, I think they should have made Flesh Golem useable underwater. Maybe someday, but every time ANet updates underwater combat the forums kitten and moan about how nobody likes underwater combat. So it’s kind of a “kitten ed if you do, kitten ed if you don’t” there, since the work doesn’t seem to be appreciated.
Flesh wurm isn’t useable underwater because it’s a ground-targeted skill. There are incredibly few ground-targeted skills available underwater, I think Signet of Undeath got an exception because it’s still useable for the passive buff.

1. Using active still effectively puts it on full cooldown. kitten ed if you do and kitten ed if don’t.

2. Flesh wurm uses ground targeting for placement. I’d so abuse it in capricorn if I could use it. But I can’t… Hell even in fractals for a bit that there is I’d have used it over bone minions or shadow fiend. Plenty of places to put it. What I want from it 90% of the time is gtfo button… the other 10% is boss fights where I can stick it away from aoe and let it sit and dps but that isn’t always possible.

I was thinking of making a post about these exact topics as well.

ALL minions need out of combat regen, their AI is still crap (2 auto attack hits before they attack is not an improvement) and send the Flesh Golem to therapy so he can FINALLY get rid of his water phobia.

Softspoken.2410:

I thought it was pretty obvious why blood fiend / bone minions / flesh wurm didn’t get out-of-combat regeneration. The active skills of those minions sacrifice them. If you want to ‘clean up’ after a fight and start fresh, you can just kill them off the normal way, rather than having to fiddle with the UI via switching utilities in and out.

Try playing Minion necro then. If you leave one fight and go in another last thing you need is a Blood Fiend about to die leaving you with no heal. Saying “kill them and wait” is pretty redundant. In pve, specially dungeons, you don’t have time to just stand still and wait 20 secs till it comes back up. In pvp or wvw even less. Keep in mind that it has a 1 1/2 sec cast time and it’s ment as a sustained heal. The activated heal is just way too low. It should have the out of combat regen, there’s no way you can heal them yourself viably (unlike in gw1 where Minion Master did some actual mastering).

HiSaZuL.2843:

1. Using active still effectively puts it on full cooldown. kitten ed if you do and kitten ed if don’t.

2. Flesh wurm uses ground targeting for placement. I’d so abuse it in capricorn if I could use it. But I can’t… Hell even in fractals for a bit that there is I’d have used it over bone minions or shadow fiend. Plenty of places to put it. What I want from it 90% of the time is gtfo button… the other 10% is boss fights where I can stick it away from aoe and let it sit and dps but that isn’t always possible.

The change wasn’t about saving someone a cooldown, it was about letting people get minions back to full without slotting the skill in & out again. That a necro doesn’t have to wait for a cooldown for those two minions is just a nice buff.

Yes, that would be the clever usage of it in an underwater environment. You asked why it couldn’t be used underwater though, and I’m sure that ANet’s paradigm of “Ground targeted -> not usable underwater” (based on the availability of utilities for multiple professions) is the reason why.

Glenn.3417:

I was thinking of making a post about these exact topics as well.

ALL minions need out of combat regen, their AI is still crap (2 auto attack hits before they attack is not an improvement) and send the Flesh Golem to therapy so he can FINALLY get rid of his water phobia.

Softspoken.2410:

I thought it was pretty obvious why blood fiend / bone minions / flesh wurm didn’t get out-of-combat regeneration. The active skills of those minions sacrifice them. If you want to ‘clean up’ after a fight and start fresh, you can just kill them off the normal way, rather than having to fiddle with the UI via switching utilities in and out.

Try playing Minion necro then. If you leave one fight and go in another last thing you need is a Blood Fiend about to die leaving you with no heal. Saying “kill them and wait” is pretty redundant. In pve, specially dungeons, you don’t have time to just stand still and wait 20 secs till it comes back up. In pvp or wvw even less. Keep in mind that it has a 1 1/2 sec cast time and it’s ment as a sustained heal. The activated heal is just way too low. It should have the out of combat regen, there’s no way you can heal them yourself viably (unlike in gw1 where Minion Master did some actual mastering).

I want Flesh Golem to get over it’s hydrophobia too. :c But I’m pretty sure minions react to the first attack now. (It changed again recently, and given that nobody’s really complained, it’ll likely stay that way.)

If we’re talking PvE dungeons, I have enough time to sacrifice the blood fiend between major fights. If we’re concerned about speed, then I go without for any trash clearing / skipping that we do, and if we’re concerned about speed we’d better be able to do that without my blood fiend out. So generally, I can bring it back up in time for any midbosses we have to clear.

PvP or WvW though, you have a point, since fights are a lot less predictable in those formats. Honestly I think of it as a counterplay to minion masters: even if you don’t kill their minions completely, at least you can leave some lasting damage. Still, I suppose there’s enough disparity there between necromancers and other professions to be a potential issue.

on the other hand minions are not dependant on your stats so you can max tank and minions still do max dmg. or have whatever build you want and minions don’t care. how about that.

i do agree that minions should have order to attack and deaggro though since AI doesn’t do it even half decently.

AI has been vastly tightened up, it is rarely an issue now that I have noticed.

You can acutually have a Flesh Wurm underwater by targetting the seafloor. However, if you go underwater, the wurm does instantly die.

Can still be handy, though, as the Flesh Wurm does have a strong attack (albeit slow-firing one) and nobody ever looks underwater. It also makes for an unexpected escape in that situation.

However, I would argue that Flesh Wurm doesn’t need ooc regen. Why? Because you have to sacrifice it anyway to move it. Only times when I feel it might be helpful are during WvW when you’re trying to hold a tower/keep through multiple waves, but even then, it almost never actually survives a fight.

Softspoken.2410:

I want Flesh Golem to get over it’s hydrophobia too. :c But I’m pretty sure minions react to the first attack now. (It changed again recently, and given that nobody’s really complained, it’ll likely stay that way.)

If we’re talking PvE dungeons, I have enough time to sacrifice the blood fiend between major fights. If we’re concerned about speed, then I go without for any trash clearing / skipping that we do, and if we’re concerned about speed we’d better be able to do that without my blood fiend out. So generally, I can bring it back up in time for any midbosses we have to clear.

PvP or WvW though, you have a point, since fights are a lot less predictable in those formats. Honestly I think of it as a counterplay to minion masters: even if you don’t kill their minions completely, at least you can leave some lasting damage. Still, I suppose there’s enough disparity there between necromancers and other professions to be a potential issue.

I main necro in tpvp and wvw so that’s where my point comes from. Specially so when you roam and some wussy hides in his tower and shoots of an AC when you run past. My Blood Fiend is half hp by that then lol.
You’re maybe right in dungeons, though they are so squishy minions hardly are effective there since they get insta killed by a lot of mobs.

Bhawb.7408:

AI has been vastly tightened up, it is rarely an issue now that I have noticed.

I notice more often than I want to that my minions don’t attack the target and just stand there being a waste of space, mostly the Flesh Golem. The other are quite ok regarding attacking.

Nobody ever expects you to teleport into water. So when you fight near it and have flesh wurm sitting somewhere in water using his teleport does marvels to confuse the hell out of people. Sadly because as soon as I do get into water I can’t use him it’s a wobbly subject.
And like I said… ooc regen changes nothing as far as actual combat is concerned. It simply doesn’t force us to sit and wait and wait until something is ready. People need to get that fire and forget mentality out of their system before they can talk minions. Minion on cd isn’t worth anything. Minion skills are only useful as long as they are there. Unlike a skill that you use once and then wait for it to recharge. You can’t treat skill that relies on being active same and a skill that grants you effect when used the same way. Minions downside is that they can easily be destroyed then you wait for cd.

@Glenn you can still do fractals more or less with minions. Tho its still masochism. At least as far as 29 and below goes. Never did anything higher. Just being a necro at this point is masochism enough.