Guild Wars 2

I am a glutton for punishment I guess. I play Necro in this game and have just got to lvl 46.5. I use minions most of the time and my biggest gripe about them is they don’t regen health out of combat. You did a fix for Ranger pets to heal out of combat and I would like like to see the same kind of attention given to Necro Minions please.

Minions are a utility skill they are not pets. They didn’t regen health in gw1 and they won’t here.

If they are intended to be utility skills, and not specifically pets, it would be nice if you could force them to die, or they behaved in a manner like Mesmer illusions, where the cooldown on a resummon begins as soon as they are cast (but die at the end of combat).

As it is, they behave like pets, not like any other utility skill. I shouldn’t have to have a pet on the verge of death, with no out of combat way to heal it, at the start of a combat. I enter combat, my pet immediately dies, and only then does the cooldown start to summon another. Very frustrating.

• puts on cranky old man voice * Back in my day minions didn’t regenerate health, they degenerated! Even in combat! And we couldn’t even raise the darn things until we killed something! We didn’t even have fancy smancy active abilities for them either! If we wanted them to explode when they died we had to manually click on em and then use death nova! You kids these days don’t know how nice you’ve got it!

yes i would like them being able to either to regen their hp outside combat or then there being option to easily replace them with fresh summons without waiting minute for cooldowns after their death.

I for one agree that minions should have an out of combat regeneration or as TeasingPink suggested, a cooldown that starts after the minion had been summoned and not when it dies. The necro was my main in guild wars 1 as well. You cant really compare the minion master in GW1 to the one in GW2 since the mechanics are so different, but in guild wars 1 you had an ability that focused only on minion healing whereas in guild wars 2 there is no such ability. Of course, people often use abilities like Mark of Blood to heal some of the minions for a bit during combat as well as spending a few traits in the blood tree to heal the minions through death shroud. The problem with these abilities however are that they limit how you can build your character, for example:

Mark of Blood – since its a staff skill, traits that improve on its effects (radius, damage, cooldown, etc.) is also located in the Death Magic tree along with the minion traits, meaning that there will be a trade-off, making your main weapon weaker without you even wanting it to be so.

Death Shroud healing – its traits are located in the Blood Magic trait line, which is very annoying because there are minion traits located in the Spite tree line as well (30% increased minion damage starting at 20 points), this forces you to spread your traits out over several trees, meaning that your character cannot focus on certain stats (i.e. increased condition duration for every point spent in Spite), meaning your character’s offensive capabilities will reduce, and with Marks that can hardly be improved, this is a real problem.

So in short, the current methods used to heal minions, even when out of combat aren’t really worth it since you sacrifice too much.

OP confirmed for never playing the first guild wars

Stop comparing this to GW1 the game is NOTHING like it, except for the lore and background setting. Comparing this Necro to the one in GW1 is a joke. If we had the skills and abilities to be MM like back in GW1 then youd see alot of people with pets. Atm you do not because evry freaking Necromancer in GW2 has come to the conclusion that so eluded the designers that our Minions in this game are utter crap with the mind the size of a walnut that just lays there 50% of the time. They are badly designed and whoever though the design was a good idea should feel bad about it. They are just awfull in their current form, The traits for pets are spread evrywhere in our traits meaning we have to shoot ourselves in the foot to get the traits, and they do pitiful dmg and have no survivability with 1 minute CD on the skills. And thats just IF they acctualy decide to do something other then stand there with drool hanging from their lips while you get Mowed down by mobs.

PLEASE! dont dumb down the game any more than you did in beta 3 Anet. it takes less than 2 seconds to recall your pets as a necro they dont need healing skills at all.

Necro is the single toughest class in the game, able to tank/PBAOE grind 10 mobs of even con at once an chain said mobs. With no downtime. Specking for aoe (wells)(marks) an pet survivbility makes the Necro the single toughest class in the game.

There is nothing wrong with pets at all.

(Bubbles Magee Sorrows server)

PS as for pet damage LOL, they are not meant to do ALL YOUR DAMAGE, my flesh golem hits for 700 on crit. I am specked proply to take advantage of my pets toughness an lay down nearly 30k aoe dps every time.

If you are finding your pets are useless, then spec correctly to use them.I just remembered too, there is an in combat heal that can keep your pets alive for a very long time, if you know what your doing. mine ticks for 309 per tic.

Tassy.5891:

There is nothing wrong with pets at all.

This crosses the line of exaggeration and is simply a lie. At the very least, we can all agree that the minion A.I. is entirely and profoundly broken. Whether you’re a crusader for Anet or deeply miserable concerning the state of necromancers, hyperbolic talk does no one any good.

I’m a little old to be exaggerating mate, an Ikittensure dont lie. I state simple facts or els I don’t talk. Now I am sure you will come out with some passive aggressive insult for this, but it wont change facts.
I hate to use the old chesnuts, but “learn to play your class, an learn how the skills work”. You then will have no problems. I have not once died because my pets were doing bad dps. SUre once in a blue moon they get hung up, but pfft, bad pathing is nothing to cry about.

Tassy.5891:

SUre once in a blue moon they get hung up, but pfft, bad pathing is nothing to cry about.

Uh huh.

Careful, if you dig that hole to deep you may not be able to get out.

I stand by every single word I say, an always do. dont much care if its disliked. This conversation has obviously gone as far as is going to.

The Life Transfer heal of Death Shroud works nicely out of combat, try something like this:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/en/?fQEQNBmQDbkQrWvVzUjePBIpIaqne0N4hDp4WpB;T0Ag1CqoGzMmYM7Yuxkjt+YUxJgXAzFA

Remember that you can kill your minions to manually triger their summoning CD by simply swapping the skill on the toolbar out for another before switching back to a minion.

Hope this helps.

EDIT: These forums keep telling me it’s a bad link, but you can copy and paste it and it works fine.

At low levels I would’ve agreed that they need regen, but at lvl 80 (as of today) I don’t really notice it much of a problem… and I’m not 100% as to why. I think the flesh golem does regen out of combat and he seems to take most of the damage.
I’m a diehard MM necro and honestly, the only issue I find is the AI (aggroing randomly or carefully pondering the meaning of undeath while I am being murdered). If that was fixed, I would hardly ever switch out of my MM utility skills (as opposed to using wells for dungeons).

As a side note, my minions sure seem to do a lot of damage for me. I spec death/spite (getting the extra damage trait) and then use an axe to vulerablize an enemy watch their health plummet, all while taking no casualties and little damage.

I dislike using minions for two reasons, both kind of go hand in hand…
I agree with the OP that it is frustrating that sometimes you leave a fight with your minions HP depleted…when they go down, oops have to wait 30 seconds to recast.

Now, a bigger gripe that I have is that they have minds of their own and begin to attack anything when you are out of combat. Too many times yesterday I was done clearing an area of bandits and I wanted to move on… My minions, on the other hand, had other plans. They decided to stick around the bandit camp beating on turrets. Really? There were some respawns, and by the time I could save my minions from certain death, they had about 3% hp left. Rediculous.

I could be wrong but I think the Flesh Golem have the same regen as players. Though the other minions don’t have it for sure.

I’ll admit that I just started playing, but the fact that the recast timer resets when they die, and that they don’t regen health outside of combat are definately issues.
I have no problem that they’re supposed to be somewhat expendable, but both of those things are a hinderance to play.

That and the fact that they don’t scale with gear. It’s been proven across several games that pet classes where pets don’t scale with gear become rapidly useless as players gear up at level cap.

Having to switch out for some random skill and back to effectively de-summon your pet is a brilliant UI choice. So effortlessly natural. I love it.

I think originally the non-elite necro pets were not meant to be ‘forever’ pets. this was probably a design decision to go along with how life-force is accumulated. But currently I do not think that life force is being generated when necro pets die ( possible bug ).

people still use minions in gw1?i thought everyone went discord

urtv.8791:

people still use minions in gw1?i thought everyone went discord

Discord teams still use minions bombs last time I checked, though admittedly that was a while ago.

At any rate, there are a plethora of ways to heal your minions in and out of combat. Keeping them alive is a non issue once you figure out the right balance of traits/skills for it. I admit it’s tough keeping them topped off at low levels but as soon as you get the Transfusion trait minion healing in and out of combat isn’t a problem. As someone else pointed out, you don’t have to be in combat or even hit anything with life transfer in order to heal with it.

If that’s still not enough for you you can switch out blood fiend for well of blood as the fiend is the lowest damage ranged minion and isn’t exactly a great self heal on its own.

Tassy.5891:

I’m a little old to be exaggerating mate, an Ikittensure dont lie. I state simple facts or els I don’t talk. Now I am sure you will come out with some passive aggressive insult for this, but it wont change facts.
I hate to use the old chesnuts, but “learn to play your class, an learn how the skills work”. You then will have no problems. I have not once died because my pets were doing bad dps. SUre once in a blue moon they get hung up, but pfft, bad pathing is nothing to cry about.

“once in a blue moon”? Surely you can’t be serious.. It happens constantly. You need to stop trying to defend your blatantly false statements out of pride and just admit you’re talking out of your rear. The minion AI is horrendous. There’s no way I could count how many times my minions just stand there like wet sponges while I fight multiple mobs. And then on the flipside to that, once those are dead, the Flesh Golem will then want to run after a mob 30 feet away that hasn’t even aggroed yet.

Minion AI is terrible the Minions are slow to react and often simply stand there especially if the ground has any kind of elevation.

Elite Minion takes a while after combat ends to regenerate health and it has a ridiculous obsession with weapon racks, it will attack one and just ignore anything I do!

Playing as a Minion focused Necromancer yields worse results than playing other builds such as Condition focused Necromancer.

Minions needs to share stats with Master and have avoidance to AE damage.

necromancer minions are strongest pets. i never seen a pet that is stronger than my minions in spvp. especially bone minions explosion. he blows up all the illusions and pets. flesh wurm and flesh golem are strongest pets.

First of all gw1 and gw2 is nothing alike.. in gw1 pets degen Hp even in combat but you could actually heal them alot with many ways and still pets were viable and more clever as it is now… plus back in the day you could have countless minions if you had lots of corpses in the field…
things are a bit different now… minions are permanent pets so yes necromancers are PET class thats why pets should be regain after combat.. flesh golem already does that.
To add on that Minions need some more ways to be able to heal them… like it is now some skills that are meant to heal allies ignore pets… (focus off hand skill anyone? )…
And finally Pets need a PET UI so u can control them!! i dont mind the jagged horror to be like headless chickens but my perma pets should have a pet ui so i can order them to attack a mob or to NOT attack anything if i like so…. if a necromancer summon a undead minion will have complete control over it… in the other hand a ranger could tame completely a savage beast..? i dont think so.. the way to goes is to give necros complete control over their minions so they can have more ways and strategies on their arsenal as they are the “slow dmg” class…

hey. i really don’t like heal and life steal. delete all of them. and add zombies and skeleton and bone dragon or Devil for elite skill.

Forice we said it before… we cannot have Zombies and skeletons cause every undead are in control of Zhaitan……. thats why we necros have made minions of dead parts that never being alive so not actually dead either! :p oh and life steal is the best…we actually could use some more skills with life steal tbh

First of all this is not Guild wars 1, hence the title change and new game….

I agree with a few views on this subject but the main is that minions need some sort of OOC regen.

Come on OP, it didn’t happen in the first GW, so it isnt gonna happen here.

On another note, the class is broken as you should be able to raise an infinite amount of pets that totally demolish everything in sight… this needs to be fixed asap

I like how logic can work both ways

They should all heal like the Flesh Golem. Why does it heal “properly” while the others don’t? Not the I use minions all that much, BECAUSE of this exact reason and the crappy AI.

To those saying they did it in GW1 so it works the way it works…GW1 was essentially a lobby PvP game with a linear on-rails, mostly boring PvE world tacked on. GW2 is a real MMO. Comparing them is sort of stupid at this point.

Having to re-summon some of the minions because they’re at 2% hps at the end of a fight, then wait 30+ secs to resummon them, is just a mindless annoying bump in the road that gets worse the longer you play. The more time that goes on, you can’t comprehend why exactly Anet would do it. Just tokitten us off? How are Mesmer Illusions so much smarter and more usable than our minions? Its much like how the AI for Ranger pets works the way its supposed to and ours is screwed up. Shouldn’t it be the same code? Hello!!! How hard is that? Just let us set them all on aggressive or defensive stance so they attack anything within range or only what we’re targeting. Stick it on the control/right click like autoattack and let us cycle between the 2 modes? SIMPLE!!! My ranger pet does it, why shouldn’t a minion? Hello??

i dont agree with self heal out of combat. Them minions are supposed to be expendable and to that they serve their purpose…mostly. Give the non-elite minions reduced cd, cept them nuke rates (loves em <3), and problem solved. oh, ye we need a attack/deffend ui, its just plain stupid that they hump on every single mob i run across -_-

Tassy.5891:

PLEASE! dont dumb down the game any more than you did in beta 3 Anet. it takes less than 2 seconds to recall your pets as a necro they dont need healing skills at all.

Necro is the single toughest class in the game, able to tank/PBAOE grind 10 mobs of even con at once an chain said mobs. With no downtime. Specking for aoe (wells)(marks) an pet survivbility makes the Necro the single toughest class in the game.

There is nothing wrong with pets at all.

(Bubbles Magee Sorrows server)

PS as for pet damage LOL, they are not meant to do ALL YOUR DAMAGE, my flesh golem hits for 700 on crit. I am specked proply to take advantage of my pets toughness an lay down nearly 30k aoe dps every time.

If you are finding your pets are useless, then spec correctly to use them.I just remembered too, there is an in combat heal that can keep your pets alive for a very long time, if you know what your doing. mine ticks for 309 per tic.

You know this thread is about minions not healing outside of combat? Why are you going on a tangent about damage. How does giving minions out of combat regen make Necros any easier? It’s a quality of life issue. When I first started Necro I was very surprised to learn my Blood Fiend did not regenerate health. I don’t see the logic in it. Making this change wouldn’t “dumb down” the game. We regain health out of combat, so why don’t our minions?

Prowl.5097:

Come on OP, it didn’t happen in the first GW, so it isnt gonna happen here.

On another note, the class is broken as you should be able to raise an infinite amount of pets that totally demolish everything in sight… this needs to be fixed asap

I like how logic can work both ways

You also couldn’t jump in Guild Wars 1. What is this logic you speak of?

Terok.7315:

Tassy.5891:

SUre once in a blue moon they get hung up, but pfft, bad pathing is nothing to cry about.

Uh huh.

Careful, if you dig that hole to deep you may not be able to get out.

Actually, I’m with Tassy on this one. Heck, I just changed my build to using only Flesh Golem as I found my minion build made things a little too easy for me. Heck, even not using minions I still find things a little too easy for me. Sometimes I purposely jump off cliffs just to taste death. That’s how much I miss dying, or feeling of defeat.

Perhaps I’m alone in this, but I come to this forum and scratch my head when people say Necro is broken. People comparing Necro’s pets to Mesmer’s clones, or burst damage to Warrior’s. It’s like saying, “Hey, I bought this pizza, butkittenit tastes like pizza. I want it to taste like chocolate sundae instead!” scratches head

And no, don’t ask for videos or builds or whatever. Believe me if you will, or don’t if you won’t.

Everyone in this thread agrees that it’s not hard to get a full health minion after every fight. This is simply a QOL issue. So yes, minions should heal OOC. It will not effect balance in any way, it will simply improve QOL.

Anyone using “It wasn’t in GW1” as a reference is mind boggling. Guess what, the stuff in the last patch wasn’t in the game until last patch either……..

Skaigash.4715:

Terok.7315:

Tassy.5891:

SUre once in a blue moon they get hung up, but pfft, bad pathing is nothing to cry about.

Uh huh.

Careful, if you dig that hole to deep you may not be able to get out.

Actually, I’m with Tassy on this one. Heck, I just changed my build to using only Flesh Golem as I found my minion build made things a little too easy for me. Heck, even not using minions I still find things a little too easy for me. Sometimes I purposely jump off cliffs just to taste death. That’s how much I miss dying, or feeling of defeat.

Perhaps I’m alone in this, but I come to this forum and scratch my head when people say Necro is broken. People comparing Necro’s pets to Mesmer’s clones, or burst damage to Warrior’s. It’s like saying, “Hey, I bought this pizza, butkittenit tastes like pizza. I want it to taste like chocolate sundae instead!” scratches head

And no, don’t ask for videos or builds or whatever. Believe me if you will, or don’t if you won’t.

The way many people see it is as if they ordered a chocolate sundae from a diner and received a pre-packaged frozen chocolate sundae. Yes, it’s a sundae. No, it’s not near what they expected.

Well of Blood will heal your minions too

Yes, the well heals, but its also on a long cooldown. So we have to sit around in one spot and wait for our minions to heal up after every fight? Might as well dismiss and re summon. Takes the same amount of time=)

All I can imagine is whoever the lead is didn’t actually play a Necro for any length of time to easily spot all the obvious annoyances or their testers were horrible or they simply don’t care enough about the class to fix the obvious flaws. I’m betting #3.

It just makes no sense that the Flesh Golem heals itself while the other don’t. Its so simple and no one will complain because in PvP it really means didly squat. They’re still going down fast, but at least give them a fighting chance=)

This game isn’t GW1 so it’s bizarre that people would use an excuse like “well minions didn’t regenerate in GW1!” The degeneration existed in GW1 because Necromancers in that game could potentially run around with droves of minions. You can’t do that here.

As for the utility argument: If necromancer minions don’t regenerate out of combat simply because they’re utility skills, then why do racial utility summons regenerate out of combat? For example, the Norn wurm summon is capped at 45 seconds yet still regenerates out of combat, but the more permanent Necromancer wurm will not regenerate. It makes little sense, and it’s a hassle when you end combat with a minion that has 10% health left, especially because you would have been better off had the minion died instead.

I actually wish minions were just like Phantasms tbh. =/