Guild Wars 2

I find shaming tends to be the best way to get change done.

well since skill lag and dc’s in wvw have brought me to the forums i’d like to say thanks for trying to bring attention to this trash

They make DAoC Necromancer Pathing look good, and i know it was my main for many years in RvR.

Also Dolyak AI > Minion AI in the video.

Well that´s what i call useful pet´s ^^ at least they are good observers. Maybe Arenanet will increase there value and give them an /applause and /buh emote

Ok while I agree some minions in wvw really freaking suck, a few things:
Your bone fiend was attacking the whole time, I watched your video at least a dozen times to see which ones were attacking and which weren’t. All of your minions did execute their minion skills on command, the only time your flesh golem didn’t was when you got interrupted, which put it on the 5 second CD, had it failed to respond entirely the CD would have been a normal one, but it wasn’t/ The shadow fiend….well yeah, while one of the coolest looking and (in theory) a useful minion, he’s worthless in all aspects of the game most of the time. His minion skill is slow, his damage abysmal and his hp/defense horrible. Don’t ever bring him, you should have used flesh wurm. Your bone minons, yeah I saw a few commenting on the local flora in the background. They do that, but you can always kite your opponent to where they are currently going afk for the entire fight and explode them there (they WILL explode, never once has their minion skills been questioned for response- now their activating of combo fields….that’s another story). So I’d say 50% of your complaint was user error, we all know the minion pathing is bugged, but it’s not a gamebreaker like you displayed. There are workarounds that honestly do not require much extra effort. I’m sorry if this comes off condescending, it’s not meant to be at all. it’s just the cold hard facts I have learned the hard way and other more hard core minion masters before me have shared as well. Before you set me to the torches, try the things i have suggested, yes not every fight will it work perfectly but it largely depends on the classes you’re against. We all know some of them are just too OP right now but I sincerely hope the meta will shift to more balance with the future updates. And no, I don’t want a report on whether or not what I suggested worked. I just want to impart what I have learned from playing necro.

I’ve found that right now there is a bug with the melee minions in the game.

They sometimes just do not auto-attack at all. Flesh Golem gets bugged the most.

While a little condescending, this is a video displays the bug perfectly.

Source – 2100 sPvP games as Necro.

Tenderly.7019:

I’ve found that right now there is a bug with the melee minions in the game.

They sometimes just do not auto-attack at all. Flesh Golem gets bugged the most.

While a little condescending, this is a video displays the bug perfectly.

Source – 2100 sPvP games as Necro.

Yeah I agree it displays the bug perfectly (obviously lol…it’s in front of our faces) but like you said, he was pretty condescending in the video and missed a lot of key points, if you want to showcase minion shortcomings, you need to do it in a professional and methodical way. We all get mad at them, calling Anet out in some wild attempt to shme them or w/e isn’t gonna fix the problem. Point out the things like I did. The minion skills worked perfectly, the ranged minion worked fine, the melee ones did not. This tells us, it’s a pathing issue (i.e- the minion making it’s way to the target) because if it was AI, none of the minion skills would have worked, or they would have some kind of delay. The skills are obviously tied to the minions themselves otherwise our damage would scale the minion damage. If you have played minions enough you would see what I mean, they do try to get to the target, but pathing blocks them (they will twitch and lurch forward for a second as they try to engage the target then they get reset, this indicates pathing, not AI, their AI is working fine because they are cycling to try to acquire the target successfully) so you simply work around the pathing issue, you use the stupidity of the human brain to tunnel vision and drag your target to your minions or set yourself up to avoid their spikes until the pathing glitch resolves and minions engage (prime example, dragging them towards your bone minions to explode them, people only see you the necro as the puppetmaster, most don’t know how your skills work they jsut know you’re not a mesmer so they don’t fear your minion skills, use it to your advantage…oh and don’t EVER take shadow fiend in pvp lolz).

Nay your all over the place first you agree minions suck in wvw then critique him saying he didn’t drag his opponents back to his frozen minions and last you warn him to never take shadow fiend insinuating it sucks. We have all seen the minions not respond its a problem that’s been around since launch. If it was super adventure box skills not working this would have been fixed. We should all be a little condescending at this point

citizankane.5723:

Nay your all over the place first you agree minions suck in wvw then critique him saying he didn’t drag his opponents back to his frozen minions and last you warn him to never take shadow fiend insinuating it sucks. We have all seen the minions not respond its a problem that’s been around since launch. If it was super adventure box skills not working this would have been fixed. We should all be a little condescending at this point

What you just said reiterates what I just said lol, you need to read my posts carefully. My first post, first line I said: I agree some minions suck in wvw minons in general suck in wvw for 2 main reasons: pathing and overly-excessive AoE’s. Hence me saying minions suck in WvW. And never once in my original post did I once mention shadow fiend as a viable minion, if you would like me to edit it to reflect that I will gladly do so. I didn’t talk about the dragging minions part in detail so much in my original post because, at this point, after all the massive amounts of information on the necro forums, I would hope people would read about that before commenting on stuck minions. Most of the ones reading this are necro players, we are all frustrated by this, I never once denied I wasn’t. But to tout it as gamebreaking and then accuse the devs of being inefficient at thier jobs most definitely will not get results. We need cold hard facts, and his video provided the visual cues, as well as many others before him. But his tone, text,s, and overall presentation was wrong. It was not at all an accurate test. Read closer, he plays ranger mostly. Hardly the one I want flagshipping my necro problems tyvm. And his quote: “I find shaming the best way to get change done” ….since when?!?> are you kidding me!?!

Clearly saying nothing has worked quite well for Necromancers.

This game was released over 6 month’s ago, and you want to handle this with kids gloves?

I click on the movie thinking “omg minions would be such a cool build, I wonder how he does it. Does he use the healy pet? does he use conditions? does he use the skill that makes ’em blow up? can a minion build really work?”

…and now all my questions about minion-mancer builds have been answered.

It’s sad the devs will never ever show their face in this forum, and for good reason, i would be deeply ashamed if i had to release a product that is in the state the Necromancer is in.

Whilst I cringe at the ‘mancer’ word in your title (I don’t understand where this word has come from but I’ve only ever seen it here on the GW2 boards)

The video itself is a perfect example of the poor state of the minion AI in WvW. I play most necro specs including minion master so I understand this frustration and the reactions a lot of people on this board has regarding it. If I remember correctly they mention AI improvements in the latest SOTG episode though, so hopefully it’ll get better.

From a technical perspective this video is really poor. A non-Necromancer is going to have no idea what’s going on, or what point you’re trying to make.

Some constructive tips:

Film during the day cycle, use fewer words to say more, try pausing the video as specific times and pointing things out. There was this great Ranger video (can’t find it now) where two guys in SPvP showed how their pets could be kited without even trying, and how a Ranger’s arrows could be made to Miss while an Ele fired back at the same range and hit.
It got a lot of play and contributed to the arrow speed change for Rangers.

Anyway video aside, MM necros are a joke, I kill their pets without even meaning to. There isn’t even a meaningful punishment for killing their pets (unlike Mesmer clones), and losing them is very painful for the MM (unlike a clone mesmer). You’d think they would be reversed.

Nay of the Ether.8913:

Ok while I agree some minions in wvw really freaking suck, a few things:
Your bone fiend was attacking the whole time, I watched your video at least a dozen times to see which ones were attacking and which weren’t. All of your minions did execute their minion skills on command, the only time your flesh golem didn’t was when you got interrupted, which put it on the 5 second CD, had it failed to respond entirely the CD would have been a normal one, but it wasn’t/ The shadow fiend….well yeah, while one of the coolest looking and (in theory) a useful minion, he’s worthless in all aspects of the game most of the time. His minion skill is slow, his damage abysmal and his hp/defense horrible. Don’t ever bring him, you should have used flesh wurm. Your bone minons, yeah I saw a few commenting on the local flora in the background. They do that, but you can always kite your opponent to where they are currently going afk for the entire fight and explode them there (they WILL explode, never once has their minion skills been questioned for response- now their activating of combo fields….that’s another story). So I’d say 50% of your complaint was user error, we all know the minion pathing is bugged, but it’s not a gamebreaker like you displayed. There are workarounds that honestly do not require much extra effort. I’m sorry if this comes off condescending, it’s not meant to be at all. it’s just the cold hard facts I have learned the hard way and other more hard core minion masters before me have shared as well. Before you set me to the torches, try the things i have suggested, yes not every fight will it work perfectly but it largely depends on the classes you’re against. We all know some of them are just too OP right now but I sincerely hope the meta will shift to more balance with the future updates. And no, I don’t want a report on whether or not what I suggested worked. I just want to impart what I have learned from playing necro.

People write whole paragraphs like this to justify crappy minions but then you compare them to the heat seeking ICBMs called mesmer clones and ranger pets and you wonder why Necros want to stay like this.