Guild Wars 2

So my main in GW1 was a necro who ran MM, I Started a necro with high hopes of owning an awesome looking, ideal army of undead who can hold their own.

First the minons. These things look like little rats, hit the same amount of damage as a bleed tick, and die within a hit. It seems to me like they weren’t meant as minons, but merly blast finisher. I would have rather had a skill such as throw corpse that simply exploded on impact rather having useless minons.

The Shades seem fine. They can hold their own, they can inflict a good condition, I like them.

The ranged ones (forgot their exact name) seem fine too.

I have yet to try another other than those 3. I’m interested on the flesh worm, but they seem to be mostly just for locking down points/locations.

My biggest problem is that I dont feel as epic/rewarding with minions as I did in gw1. I can understand reducing the amount of undead minions we have, but the present amount is so little I just dont feel epic. The little undead minion blast finishers are the size of rats and are generally useless. The jagged horrors are basically smaller undead rats. With the rats, i think we should get tripple of what we do now. There are no main foot soliders of our army. The thing with GW1 is our main minions were the bone horrors. They held their own really well, not too op, and if one died there was usually a body in earshot that we could eventually replace them. Plus they looked hella cool with their bone swords and what not.

The healing skill for summoning a minion seems useless too. IF a mob gets close to him, he just stands by it and dies or I am forced to sacrifice him.

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/List_of_minion_skills

Animate Bone horror http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSwxx6WjBPo
Animate Flesh Golem http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CP8Swb_42AI
Animate bonefiend http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rh3YZd-f5mo
I couldn’t find a video of someone using Jagged/Shambling horror, but they looked amazing too.
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Shambling_Horror
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Jagged_Horror

The spells felt creative, they felt like they put a lot of time into making them and developing their looks. I just dont feel the same with the minions in GW1. Not saying their good, but i felt they could have been a lot better. I wont even mention the AI.

Guild wars 2 Comparsion for looks: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hXIISKRksM

Not only were they effective, but you could get a good amount of them, they look awesome (not just “undead” versions of pre existing monsters) and it was all around satisfying.

Do you guys feel the same? Any Guild wars 1 MM who have a GW2 MM that is high level want to give me their opinion on it?

Just to catch you up and save you hours of frustration… minions are the worst in gw2. Leveling with em, fine. Regen and play whack a mole.

Almost all the necros know that minions are garbage for competitive play here, but there are other strengths. Sorry to disappoint you as an early player, but its true. Once you get past level 20, they are more likely to get you killed than to kill something.

Sheobix.8796:

Just to catch you up and save you hours of frustration… minions are the worst in gw2. Leveling with em, fine. Regen and play whack a mole.

Almost all the necros know that minions are garbage for competitive play here, but there are other strengths. Sorry to disappoint you as an early player, but its true. Once you get past level 20, they are more likely to get you killed than to kill something.

Sigh…first I mained and level an engineer to 80 because I thought turrets were going to be good to use, then I decided to look into necros because I thought the minons were going to be good/ bring back some old memories.

It seems to me like Necros and Engineers are the worst done classes.

Right now they are. Unfor you picked the current two most underdog classes and the two most underpowered strategies. Really sorry for you, but there are many aspects of the necro that are fantastic.

The recent nerf to engis really took a toll.

I had exactly the same thoughts about MM necromancers. GW1 minions were fun, slowly dying but packing quite a punch in decent numbers. GW2 on the other hand offer only limited number of minions of which none survives most combat situations (with Flesh golem being the only one capable of health regeneration but still weak). And there’s the trait summon of jagged horror, another rat that self-bleeds before reaching and bleeding single enemy (which already has about 10 stacks of bleeding from marks).

So I’ll have to pray to Grenth for more MM love and tweaks (until that it’s staff and well necro for me).

Agree, Flesh Golem looked much better in GW1. The Golem in GW2 reminds me of an absurd unicorn thing.

Bone Minions look horrible and are horrible damage wise, unless you blow them up.

I would like a ranged kind of Bone Minions – lets say u summon 3 of those with ranged attacks and you can use the ability again and one of them launchs themself at the location dealing damage – like the normal bone minion. This would help with the minion AI and the minions deal their damage reliable – bone minions die halfway unless you summon it right next to your target.

Necros aren’t bad in GW2, they’re just bugged. Well, MM is bad but you can go condition build, power/well build or a hybrid and still do well in all forms of play. Engineers are in a bad state right now since Anet implemented that they get the sigil from their weapon when using a kit (and thus nerfed the damage) but haven’t yet applied the stats from the weapon to the kits (something that shouldn’t lead to a further nerf since it has been that way in spvp since launch)

To me the Neco pets seem as stupied as the ones in GW1. But unlike in GW1 you have to give up a skill slot for every minion you mack. In GW1 you could pack in 1 maybe 2 summon spells and still get a decent amount of Minions out depending on your death magic. It had that nice personal army feel with it becaus of the pure amount you could bring. One or two of them spasing out or doing stupied kitten did not really effect something as you had more then enough ( even more when the hero limited was raised to 8 and ppl multiple necros in there party for PvE). Now in Gw2 the best you can get is haveing 7 minions out at the time. With the incredbly bad Jagged Horror and Bone Minion. If you count usfull minions the max you can get is 5.

Another factor that and problem besides the AI is that the minions scale with nothing. Meaning if youskill fully into them that you still have to to eiter condition dmg or raw dmg to do something. Nerfing your overall DPS compared to pure and hybrid builds.

LaronX.8079:

To me the Neco pets seem as stupied as the ones in GW1. But unlike in GW1 you have to give up a skill slot for every minion you mack. In GW1 you could pack in 1 maybe 2 summon spells and still get a decent amount of Minions out depending on your death magic. It had that nice personal army feel with it becaus of the pure amount you could bring. One or two of them spasing out or doing stupied kitten did not really effect something as you had more then enough ( even more when the hero limited was raised to 8 and ppl multiple necros in there party for PvE). Now in Gw2 the best you can get is haveing 7 minions out at the time. With the incredbly bad Jagged Horror and Bone Minion. If you count usfull minions the max you can get is 5.

Another factor that and problem besides the AI is that the minions scale with nothing. Meaning if youskill fully into them that you still have to to eiter condition dmg or raw dmg to do something. Nerfing your overall DPS compared to pure and hybrid builds.

Don’t underestimate Bone Minions, at least you can blow them up for some effect (just make sure they are BOTH in range >.<). On the other hand, have you ever seen Bone Fiend’s ability ever root anything? Someone tell me how it works

The guild wars 2 necromancer is a LOT more fun than guild wars 1 necro. I simply cannot go back to guild wars 1 minion master.

guild wars 1 minion master was:
1. summon minions
2.heal minions
3.maintain buffs
4. go back to step one

while in guild wars 2 we can blow up minions, teleport to them, use 14 different spells while still having our minions, make the shadow fiend teleport to the enemy, ect. There simply is more to do as a minion master, even if the AI is less responsive in PvE. (minions in PvP in guild wars 1 always had a responsiveness issue).

striker.3704:

The guild wars 2 necromancer is a LOT more fun than guild wars 1 necro. I simply cannot go back to guild wars 1 minion master.

guild wars 1 minion master was:
1. summon minions
2.heal minions
3.maintain buffs
4. go back to step one

while in guild wars 2 we can blow up minions, teleport to them, use 14 different spells while still having our minions, make the shadow fiend teleport to the enemy, ect. There simply is more to do as a minion master, even if the AI is less responsive in PvE. (minions in PvP in guild wars 1 always had a responsiveness issue).

From what I read and used in sPvP, many of them can’t survive combat situations. I’d would gladly take less to do if they could survive their own. For me, personally, MM was always about the minions and maintaining a small army, not sacrificing everyone for a spell.

Thank you for the post.

I did not played GW1, looking at the art side GW1 minions looks better than GW2 and fit more necromancer, jagged horrors especially.