Guild Wars 2

Necromancers need more minions!

I’d really like the old GW1 raise minions from dead enemies mechanic should make a comeback. Have a skill that summons jagged horrors from enemy corpses.

Then add an elite minion skill that summons a Death Knight, Death Mage, Death Cleric or Death Rogue upon killing an enemy. By activating the elite skill, it tags an enemy. If the enemy dies within an allotted time period after it is tagged, it resurrects as one of those types of elite minions. (Depending on the type of enemy that is killed. I.e if a an ascalonian Mage is tagged and then killed a Death Mage is summoned. Death Mages are ranged minions that have an activatable skill like firestorm. Death Knights could have a leap attack than stuns, Death Rogues could fire crippling arrows, Death Clerics could heal party members… )

Add in necro traits that allow the necromancer to summon more minions. A master trait that says if bone minions are summoned three pop out, bone fiends pop out two instead of one, phantasmal horrors get two instead of one. Then a grandmaster trait that let’s you summon two elite minions.

*Want not need.

Sagat.3285:

*Want not need.

lol, looking at it that way, everything is want not need. Right now minions kinda suck. Necromancers are supposed to be masters of raising the dead and compared to the GW1 Necromancers, GW2 Necromancers are a massive step backwards in minion mastery

We aren’t masters of raising the dead, we don’t raise the dead at all. We can, but we don’t, for a variety of lore and gameplay reasons, and we never have raised the dead in either GW1 or GW2. We create golems using dead organic material, its basically the same as what the Asura do, only instead of using metal we use organic material.

That said, we really don’t need new minions. We need the current minions to be fixed before anything extra is added. After that, the only particularly interesting things to add would be a truly defensive minion, and then potentially minions on weapon sets (OHs mainly, they’d have to be balanced around being useful for everyone) with things like AoE control. Minion traits are much more capable of expanding the minion playstyle than new minions are.

I’m pretty sure in GW1 Necromancers raised minions from corpses. Seeing as I’ve played GW1 since its Beta, I can be fairly certain of that. You would have to kill some monsters first without minions to get some corpses then you could begin steamrolling through with your minion army. It was one of the best and most fun parts of the missions to start with zero minions and then end with like thirty. (It takes quite a bit of skill to be able to maintain such a large force of constantly degenerating minions, but dang it was pretty awesome!)

GW1 had many more minion types that could fit into your skill bar, and being able to pick and choose which ones you wanted for any given scenario was half the fun of being a necromancer.

Derenek.8931:

GW1 had many more minion types that could fit into your skill bar, and being able to pick and choose which ones you wanted for any given scenario was half the fun of being a necromancer.

Not exactly. GW1 had Bone Minions, Bone Horrors, Vampiric Horrors, Shambling Horrors, Bone Fiends, and Flesh Golems (Jagged Horrors spawned from one of the above only)

However, Bone Minions and Bone Horrors were really the same thing. Minions were just lower level and came in pairs.

So, we have 6 minion types (counting Bone Horrors and Bone Minions as separate), 7 including Jagged, in GW1. In GW2, we have 6 minion types, 7 including Jagged.

Well, you had fewer skill slots as well, and only carrying minion skills would be suicide, so you’d always have to choose only half the available types. In GW2, you have more skill slots, and fewer total minions. When you look at the comparative gameplay… I’d roll around GW1 with 5-10 bone minions, 5 bone fiends, a bunch of jagged horrors, and a flesh golem… Then compare it to GW2, the necromancer’s minion mastery is just simply not even close to the same level. Which I find to be kind of sad. It’s like Necromancers became much weaker in the years between fighting the mursaat and the arrival of Zhaitan.

Yes, the corpses were used as raw material. If you killed a cow, you didn’t bring the cow back to life and create an undead cow, you just used its bones, flesh, and other parts to make whatever minion you wanted. That is why the corpse itself didn’t matter, you could kill anything and then use that corpse as the main source of materials for your golems of dead material, aka minions.

I do think a few more minions would be fine after they fixed the current issues. But we actually have a larger variety of minions now than we used to, since so many of the original minions were just copies of each other. Vampiric Horrors are now a trait, as are Jagged Horrors, Bone Horrors are unnecessary since they existed as “base” ones, instead they added Blood Fiend, Flesh Wurm, and Shadow Fiend, while only really taking out Shambling Horror and Bone Horror.

Edit: Also no you wouldn’t roll around in GW1 with 20 minions, that was patched very early on to allow 12 minions max, 10 in most situations, and 8 without special rune investment.

I’m not sure how early on you’re talking about. I played all the way through EotN and always had dozens of minions

April 26, 2006 they changed minions to have a cap according to Death Magic, this was 2 days before Factions. So unlimited minions only existed in the game for just short of 1 year.

Bhawb.7408:

April 26, 2006 they changed minions to have a cap according to Death Magic, this was 2 days before Factions. So unlimited minions only existed in the game for just short of 1 year.

That said, my friend had a personal record of 36 minions. The nerf was absolutely necessary.

36 is pretty wild. I normally capped around 20

Lol oh man the good ol days guys plz stop your going to make me cry! lol!

What the necromancer really needs is the return of the enemy aggro circles in the minimap, so we can stand outside of it and command our minions to attack before the enemy monster detects us. That way we could use our tactical insight to compensate for minion stupidity.

I’d be interested in some type of vampric&utility minion, like fearing one.

Rym.1469:

I’d be interested in some type of vampric&utility minion, like fearing one.

A fear minion would be pretty awesome. Fear is pretty powerful, so that would probly be an elite minion.

What I would give if they removed the cooldown on jagged horrors through death nova. I believe they’ve stated that you can only have 8 of them up at a time anyway so the the cooldown seems redundant. Just thinking about the potential synergy gives me a sugar rush, even with no other minions equipped.

Having 8 jagged horrors constantly would be pretty ridiculous with the new poison changes. I would like to see Death Nova spawn Jagged Horrors (with no ICD) on minion death though.

In the end, just having more minions is just cooler. Unless Anet decides to spend time tweaking their AI, the only way to make minions useful is just to have more of them. One monkey typing a million years might write a book, but a million monkeys typing over one year might get Shakespeare… Or something like that…

Please no more minion. (Maybe an underwater golem)

I would appreciate less minions however. If I could take duplicate utility skills so I could take a whole team of similar ranged minions, that would be pretty cool.

The only minion skill I can really think of that we’re lacking is a way to spawn jagged horrors on demand. Especially with the new traits we are seeing, there is a clear division between “strong hitting minions” and “death nova fodder” minion builds.

As of right now, the “strong hitting minions” build is solid and complete (if the skill changes stay the same). It’s a simple power/toughness/vitality build that holds the enemy down as your minions tear them apart, simple enough. There is a lot of obvious synergy for the build between blood magic, death magic, and spite (asuming you use axe+focus with this setup) making it easy to fill all it’s “slots”.

The “death nova fodder” build isn’t. It’s a condition damage build, but lacks a way to get jagged horrors out on demand. The jagged horrors give a great way to apply bleeding (through their attacks) and utilize death nova, and would be core to the build. Some givens for the build would be:
weapons: scepter+dagger / staff
trait lines: curses/death/?
heal:?
utilities: corrosive poison cloud (?), bone minions, ???
elite: lich form (summoning 5 jagged horrors)

Yet, there are some pretty clear weaknesses here. There isn’t really a third trait line that seems to synergize with it. The blood magic trait line doesn’t have a grandmaster trait that really benefits the build, and soul reaping has no synergy with it. Spite is heavily geared for axe/foxus and power builds, yet building for power seems to stretch the build thin since you need survivability, condition damage, and crits. This huts Lich form, as Lich form deals more direct damage than condition, and spawning 5 jagged horrors on a 180 second cooldown is wasteful at best. If you take plague form it kills all of the horrors and bone minions you might have out, and if you have another corruption in your third utility slot, you might as well run a corruption focused build instead.

There simply isn’t enough to give the build an identity as anything other than a lesser corruption build.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Bhawb.7408:

April 26, 2006 they changed minions to have a cap according to Death Magic, this was 2 days before Factions. So unlimited minions only existed in the game for just short of 1 year.

That said, my friend had a personal record of 36 minions. The nerf was absolutely necessary.

I am of the paranoid belief that I caused the change in functionality to Aura of the Lich some time after EoTN was released. I created a Necro hero team that was able to maintain 30+ minions with ease. When vanquishing with it I was able to keep minions alive so efficiently that they would level up.

The crux of the whole build was of course Aura of the Lich that allowed mitigating the sacrifice costs of spamming blood of the master to 30+ minions. Within a month of me posting my build online Aura of the Lich was changed and thus the whole thing was effectively broken. Ah, I did love making and breaking builds in GW1, good times.

On topic, while I would love to come up with new minions all day long, I’m not so sure it’s what minion masters need at this exact moment. As someone else mentioned the biggest addition I’d like to see for minion mastery atm (apart from the obvious AI fixes) would be a GW2 equivalent of Jagged Bones, spawning jagged horrors on minion death.

striker.3704:

The only minion skill I can really think of that we’re lacking is a way to spawn jagged horrors on demand. Especially with the new traits we are seeing, there is a clear division between “strong hitting minions” and “death nova fodder” minion builds.

As of right now, the “strong hitting minions” build is solid and complete (if the skill changes stay the same). It’s a simple power/toughness/vitality build that holds the enemy down as your minions tear them apart, simple enough. There is a lot of obvious synergy for the build between blood magic, death magic, and spite (asuming you use axe+focus with this setup) making it easy to fill all it’s “slots”.

The “death nova fodder” build isn’t. It’s a condition damage build, but lacks a way to get jagged horrors out on demand. The jagged horrors give a great way to apply bleeding (through their attacks) and utilize death nova, and would be core to the build. Some givens for the build would be:
weapons: scepter+dagger / staff
trait lines: curses/death/?
heal:?
utilities: corrosive poison cloud (?), bone minions, ???
elite: lich form (summoning 5 jagged horrors)

Yet, there are some pretty clear weaknesses here. There isn’t really a third trait line that seems to synergize with it. The blood magic trait line doesn’t have a grandmaster trait that really benefits the build, and soul reaping has no synergy with it. Spite is heavily geared for axe/foxus and power builds, yet building for power seems to stretch the build thin since you need survivability, condition damage, and crits. This huts Lich form, as Lich form deals more direct damage than condition, and spawning 5 jagged horrors on a 180 second cooldown is wasteful at best. If you take plague form it kills all of the horrors and bone minions you might have out, and if you have another corruption in your third utility slot, you might as well run a corruption focused build instead.

There simply isn’t enough to give the build an identity as anything other than a lesser corruption build.

Inb4 a shout that spawns 5 jagged horrors

I’d be nice if they just remade the FG to look like the more spiky looking GW1 one.

The problem is: we already have minions and if you have utilities that can be activated after you have killed a enemy… you need to kill the enemy first to active it and if you see our actual status that can be a problem, expacially in some situations.
In pve it can be good, killing an enemy is easy, but obtain that enemy can be harder to fix. In spvp it can be a problem because you have to kill e anemy becore you can use it, and we already have some bad minions and the actual AI is very bad, we don’t need more bad minions in that game. Another place where you can find a lot of dead people can be www but in www a minion die so quickly that you haven’t time to say “ehi, come here, little dead asura warrior” and it is already dead.

If I had a choice of more minions, I would want an Undead Scritt to run around swiping turrets, banners, and capturing spirits, elementals, enemy minions, etc.

Our minions should be disabling everyone else’s minions.