Necro Minion Idea Please Read!
I agree with this.
In GW1 MMs were almost mandatory for a lot of content because minions made great meatshields and were readily available.
I also believe a way to sacrifice your health to heal minions should be re-introduced, along with some ways to give minions Aegis/Protection.
This would completely destroy minions in sPvP and tPvP, I would need to kill 1 person for every minion I summon? Impossible. Even if they did it like sigils where it stacks multiple, any extended fight I would automatically lose because they can just try to stall me out.
I appreciate the thought put in, but minions, despite AI bugs, are one of our strongest builds right now. The way they are using minions right now is awesome, and has finally balanced minions out so that they can be used in most situations (except huge WvW and high level fractals, where no matter what they would be pretty useless except as bombers).
They got rid of the corpse requirement for a reason; it forced MMs to be only useful in big areas. It completely voided us from being useful in anything below the size of alliance battles, or PvE missions with trash mobs.
As a regular tPvP and dungeon MM it saddens me that so many people have no clue how effective minions are, and that they are extremely powerful. Complaining about something that is effective is ridiculous.
If you want tips on how to use them effectively contact me in game. Your idea is awful, and would make minions useless in everything except wvwvw. Thanks, but as a avid minion fan your ideas are bad. It’s much better if we just had some aoe avoidance for them.
Bhawb can vouch for me. I am no slouch, and the minions don’t die nearly as much as people say.
Good insight into the flaws of my post. I honestly did not want to overcompensate ideas into the post because, if I did it could probably turn out to be overpowered.
As for this part. (This would completely destroy minions in sPvP and tPvP, I would need to kill 1 person for every minion I summon? Impossible.) I don’t want to override my post by adding other ideas, but I am pretty sure there would be ways to make it work.
I think any significant changes to minions (such as instant re-summoning) would unbalance minions. For example, think of just using bone minions with this idea; you could instantly respawn them over and over again, and the second they reach the target you have them explode. In this way, I can have 1 skill, along with 1 trait (the grandmaster death magic), and have 2k damage per explosion, with poison fields everywhere. Now, we could even do something like only getting X charges per minion skill, but still, in WvW I would just be too strong, I could sit in the back of a zerg spamming out marks (to get as many charges as possible), and just send bone minion after bone minion to its death, making the entire fight a giant field of poison.
I think the current minion system works pretty well. We all know their AI needs to improve, but after that they are a great build, and one of our most balanced ones. It doesn’t have the same feel of GW1, and that throws some people off, but this new direction is a good one.
I have no clue =D!
I fixed it for you. You went through an entire post and then forgot to add that. You stated above you have no clue if they are good in dungeons or tPvP. So why are you even commenting. Bhawb and I have outlined in previous threads how erroneous this thought is. Go look up another of he 50 ill informed minions are bad threads before yours to see the reasons why my fixed quote of yours is correct.
Good insight into the flaws of my post. I honestly did not want to overcompensate ideas into the post because, if I did it could probably turn out to be overpowered.
As for this part. (This would completely destroy minions in sPvP and tPvP, I would need to kill 1 person for every minion I summon? Impossible.) I don’t want to override my post by adding other ideas, but I am pretty sure there would be ways to make it work.
I think any significant changes to minions (such as instant re-summoning) would unbalance minions. For example, think of just using bone minions with this idea; you could instantly respawn them over and over again, and the second they reach the target you have them explode. In this way, I can have 1 skill, along with 1 trait (the grandmaster death magic), and have 2k damage per explosion, with poison fields everywhere. Now, we could even do something like only getting X charges per minion skill, but still, in WvW I would just be too strong, I could sit in the back of a zerg spamming out marks (to get as many charges as possible), and just send bone minion after bone minion to its death, making the entire fight a giant field of poison.
I think the current minion system works pretty well. We all know their AI needs to improve, but after that they are a great build, and one of our most balanced ones. It doesn’t have the same feel of GW1, and that throws some people off, but this new direction is a good one.
Haha I love the thought of sending a 1000 bone minions out into a Zerg. One necro could hold a single point indefinitely. Haha, okay I now like air wicks idea. We wouldn’t even need a group for dungeons. It would be better to just solo content haha
He speaks of how good they already are in tpvp and dungeons. I have no clue if this is true. In my experience even traited for MM build the minions hp and resistance is so poor. That a player alone can take down the entire mob the Necromancer can summon with ease. How else does a player fight a mob in GW2 that has more hp, resistance, and damage then Necromancer minions.
It sounds like he does easy dungeons? It sounds like the people he vsed in tpvp were easy?
What to do…I know wait for his reply =D!
Actually, minions do very well in dungeons (there will be a few situational spots where they will have issues in specific dungeons with too heavy of AoE, and also higher fractals). They have pretty decent HP pools, although nothing spectacular, but that hardly matters when the least durable of them are also the most expendable for damage, with the lowest CDs.
Personally, I have used them in PvP a lot. The only builds I cannot handle are a specific engi build (that drop mines and run in circles), and trap rangers. Everything else I can 1v1 for the entire match. In fact, I did some tPvP today, I could completely destroy their bunkers in 1v1, and even in 2v1 against two hammer guardian bunkers, I could hold middle point fine until my team came to help. The only weakness we have is on Battle of Khylo when we get treb focus. Minions just get wiped by it, and that reduces my damage significantly.
Personally, I have used them in PvP a lot. The only builds I cannot handle are a specific engi build (that drop mines and run in circles), and trap rangers. Everything else I can 1v1 for the entire match. In fact, I did some tPvP today, I could completely destroy their bunkers in 1v1, and even in 2v1 against two hammer guardian bunkers, I could hold middle point fine until my team came to help. The only weakness we have is on Battle of Khylo when we get treb focus. Minions just get wiped by it, and that reduces my damage significantly.
Did you run with zerk or tank gear? I love facing guardians with minions. They stand there so kitteny then they get wrecked, and they have no idea what to do. So many times no one can really hurt them that it wigs them out.
I will say two hammer guardians is impressive though. The sheer amount of knock backs are brutal. Did you run boon stripping?
I am pretty sure I was running full tank gear (dolyak runes with soldier’s amulet), and boon stripping instead of poison. It wasn’t easy dealing with knockback, mostly just because I was trying to keep the point neutral, but it isn’t too bad if you don’t get caught. What I did was use a lot to hit one guardian hard (cripple, flesh active, focus 4, axe 2, etc), which brought him low and running off point to heal up, and that made it a 1v1 for a while, which let me hit that one pretty hard. They also tended to be really obvious with trying to use the leap to close the gap, so I would actually walk into it, making it miss completely. I also had enough cripple uptime (I run 10% longer cripples, with flesh golem’s on hit cripple, bone fiend’s occasional one, and the axe 3 it makes it very hard to close in) to keep them off me most of the time, so they could only really occasionally use knockback to hit me off point for a second, and then I’d run back in.
I didn’t have to hold it for forever, my ranger (I think) came in after a bit to help me finish them off, by then they were both low, and I probably would have won, but its hard to finish people in a 2v1, especially double guardians.
Posted by me in a different version multiple times before already, being able to summon additional minions at the cost of cutting of parts of your life force untill all minions of the type are destroyed, thus giving the minion masters true armies for management while not making a necro unkillable because of both flesh walls and DS.
When life gives you lemon, ask if its from a anime or manga.
I think your over exaggerating it with the bone minions. Their hp pool is low and your assuming that every explosion actually hits. You can sit behind a zerg but theres no guarantee your bone minions can actually live to explode against the other zerg spamming all kinds of things. I also did mention they are charges and sure you can spam the bone minions. They are still nonetheless the squishiest minions Necromancers have. You can’t assume the enemy is going to just let you use them. You also have to take into fact if there destroyed then their damage output would just be 0?
Obviously it wouldn’t be like some epic movie where I can spawn tons of CG minions to run to their death.
Actually, they don’t (although if they do its more damage, each explosion would be 2k damage), if they all die, it still leaves poison fields all over the battlefield; everywhere they die is a few second long poison field. Add that in with the generally high amount of finishers going around in zergs, and we get ridiculously easy poison spreading, plus it does mean a little damage. The main problem that I’m trying to show by being over the top (and obviously I can’t just spam minions quite like that), is that with almost no investment, no downside, I can spam tons and tons of minions, leaving tons of poison fields all over the place. It would literally only require going into death magic (which is fine, use the rest of that tree for awesome staff traits), and one utility skill. It is too much benefit (the chance for 4k damage every few seconds, and essentially covering a full battlefield in poison), with almost no drawbacks (one utility slot, 10 trait points).
You are still over exaggerating. First of all you have to trait into it. When the minions die they leave a poison cloud for only 3 seconds. You can resummon all you want from the charges and let them die leaving a poison field. If there is actually anyone even standing in it. Think it through if you think its that merry against a zerg how many charges can you keep up and replace till there all gone? This is also applies if your the losing zerg as well. You also can only replace them after they died so there still a cap of how many you have out at once. With the mechanism I explained you will just be able to replace the ones that have fallen.
The problem with what you are suggesting is that it completely removes the counterplay that MMs have right now, and adds in a mechanic that is nearly impossible to counterplay against in huge fights, and far too easy to deal with in small ones. Our biggest counterplay, atm, is when our opponent aims their AoE damage to hit minions, as well as us. If they can kill off minions fast enough, our damage is halved, at least. The new counterplay is just to kill our minions a few times, and bam, useless necro until we can get some charges; and that is what they were trying to fix in the first place.
In tPvP, this would make is far too weak. Imagine Battle of Khylo, if they hit us with a treb a few times, all of our minions are gone, and we have no way of getting them back without being a huge tax on our team. sPvP would be similar, its just far too easy to burn through our charges, with no way to actually get them back.
In PvE/WvW, this makes them far too strong. It would be incredibly easy to get tons of charges, and essentially have infinitely spawning waves of minions. In PvE this would completely break it, we could go entire dungeons without being attacked because I could just keep spawning minions to hold aggro. In WvW this would just be annoying because every single necro could just go 30 into death magic (which gives staff abilities, which are amazing already in WvW), and sacrifice one skill to be able to lay down tons of fields, and potentially doing easy, easy damage. Its not like zergs are these fields of constant AoE, I guarantee you would manage to get minions through.
The problem with what you are suggesting is that it is a step backwards. This is almost exactly like what we had in GW1, except now you’ve even removed the biggest weakness we had; its now even stronger than it was. Now we have stronger minions, that we can instantly resummon on death (assuming we have charges), and don’t even need to go through the weak stage in the beginning where our opponents at least have a chance of shutting us down. And yet despite this definitely OP setup, we will still be incredibly weak in all small-team settings (outside of PvE), which was the entire reason the change from GW1 to GW2 was made.