Guild Wars 2

I started rolling a necromancer about a week ago, and decided to go with a pet survival build. It was going great, until I started actually using pets. Now up front, I love the initial gameplay with pets. It legitimately feels like I am using my death magic to destroy my enemies with an army of undead minions. However, I soon realized that in a scenario with fights that aren’t immediately linked to each other, minions are next to useless. Sure, in the first and perhaps second fight, the minions do enough damage to be fully actualized. It’s by the second or third fight, when the minions have died due to damage, that this build feels drastically underpowered. Because the minions do not regenerate health in between fights, you are left after each battle with a minion that is that much closer to death. And here lies the problem. In a build that relies so heavily on the damage and healing of minions, to be left without minions is an almost guaranteed death. If minions were capable f regenerating health out of combat, then these deaths would be more based on the skill of the player than the death of his or her minions.

I agree. However I’m worried Anet won’t give the out of combat regen due to how kitten easy it would make world exploring. You would basically be invincible outside of dungeons and WvWvW/s-tPvP. . .

I posted about this in another thread, but I think minions should be closer to a mesmer illusion, in that they’re summoned and used during a fight, not carried around with us everywhere. I see rangers as being the “pet” class, whereas ours are meant to be temporary minions.

So, if I had my way I’d suggest minions have a short summon time with an immediate cooldown of about 5-10s. The minion’s health would slowly degenerate, but can be healed through a number of lifesteal options and buffed with boons, etc. After the cooldown, you can spawn another one, so the longer a fight carries on, you could continue growing your army. Seems to fit more of a necromancer in my mind.

I think this would give an interesting hybrid between the ranger pets and mesmer illusions. Plus different minions would still have different uses, maybe aoe, stuns/slows, direct damage, conditions, etc.

We should still have the option of a permanent pet with the flesh golem, though…

Edit: In pvp, to counter the mass aoe to down all your minions, maybe have an ability to summon all minions back to you, so you can pull them out of something before they all die.

At least make the blood fiend heal out of combat. Or make his drain which heals us, also heal himself.

Yeah, the blood fiend would be a special case too, since he’s our heal buddy. He needs some way of regenerating health. It would seem too punishing to force us to spawn and support our healing minion.

It would be an idea to let us use lifeforce to heal our minions. Maybe with an F2 added ability. Would that be a fair tradeoff?

jwburks.9735:

It would be an idea to let us use lifeforce to heal our minions. Maybe with an F2 added ability. Would that be a fair tradeoff?

Yeah I think that works too. My main point is that I think it would be interesting if necromancers could summon a small army if left alone long enough (capped at, say, 6-8 minions) . You could do that now, but you’d have to devote all your utility skills to it and it’s not really designed to work that way. I’d rather see shorter summon times with a short cooldown. To compensate, they’d degenerate health, thus being limited to during fights, but would be something to contend with if you get them all up.

no they dont, they are perfect the way they are . if you were to give out of combat healing to all the pets , then whats to stop some mm by parking their toon some place and going afk for hours , while its pets attack anything that attacks them or the necromancer and being able to kill it and the necro not having to do a thing like resummon the pets . how ever the idea of a f2 button that allows you to transfer life force into healing to all your pets is not a bad idea . i kinda like the idea . i would also like the idea of a f3 option of being able to launch a single massive attack based around the amount of life force a necro has as a dot

They don’t really regen out of combat, except for blood fiend. Any serious MM build uses well of blood or staff for regen.

I do think Bone Minion should have more armor/HP. He is a serious dps, but can be easily killed by almost every enemy.

I guess it makes sense not to give health regen to pets because of botting. Since people could be iddle and let pets kill whatever was nearby and thus doing chain events without any effort.

Also as far as the Blood Fiend goes, I used to believe his attacks healed himself as well, I find it completely ridiculous how it doesn’t. Why would anyone in their right mind (especially in PvP) use the blood fiend as a healing mechanism when it’s so extremely unreliable and fragile.

All the other minions I think are fine, the Bone Minions I also believe to be fine, after all their ability is to kill themselves, they’re meant to be disposable creatures used to AoE damage, that’s why their cooldown is so insanely short.

(PS: I hate the Shadow Fiend and the Jagged Horror)