Guild Wars 2

Obligatory fifteen character plus post stating that indeed, I agree with the OP’s well-stated post.

+1 to this (random stuff to hit char limit here)

I’m MM and I don’t even want them… But at the same time, I wish they’d make greater marks baseline

PotH is ridiculous. Merge it with Reanimator at the least. Reanimator isn’t that good either but at least not totally worthless if you do MM. I’d like to see them merged, moved to 15 pointer, and remove or reduce internal CD. The game maxes 5 of the same minion anyway so it isn’t like we’d get a huge army considering that along with their very short life span.

Actually, the limit on Jagged Horrors is 8.

Even so, Reanimator is not a trait that forces you into a minion build. It may not be the best minor trait, but it isn’t useless if you don’t build a specific way. Protection of the Horde, however, is (and arguably, even if you do build that certain way)

Personally I vote they both go (I agree with them getting merged and put into an adept, no CD and no natural degen but make them have 20% less base hp) I’d be cool with that.

I agree that merging the 2 Traits would be a nice way to go, but it need some more emprovement, it should have some kind of value, a worth and defined utilization.

Protection of the Horde would be a nice trait, it comes from GW1 and gives a nice feel to the concept, but it should fit better with an average minion build, maybe if Reanimator would give you the chance of having easily more Jagged Horrors out, and if Jagged horrors themselves would be more useful than just applying a weak bleeding…

Consider that as the GW1 minions, it needs someone to die to work, so it would be a trait working mainly in environments with a lot of enemies dying (even with that, it brings some limitations, if you can’t get an enemy dying near you, it’s totally useless)… WvW, maybe Spvp, general Pve… So to make it useful in Pvp, the prize of getting a minion should be worth the focus for killing opponents or resisting them.

They can work nicely with Death Nova, but their number and the control over this mechanic is just too much random.

I’d suggest a total rework of the Minion System.
It would be better if it would interact with conditions and Life Force or Death Shroud.
I’d like to see again the swarming hordes from Guild Wars 1, with some limitation to balance them.
Maybe give more life force from Necromancer’s own pets.. I dont’ know, there are a lot of nice ideas.
It would be nice if Jagged Horrors would work like Karka Hatchlings, forcing opponents to dodgeroll to remove a debuff..

There’s a good chance protection of the horde is doing absolutely nothing for many Necros. And others bringing maybe just a flesh golem, or occasionally having a horror pop up for 10 seconds, that is 20 toughness, utterly garbage. Good traits are usually worth around 100 stats.

So if you have 5 minions out 20×5 = 100, then it gets there, but way too situational and build specific for a passive.

This is the best I can offer:
5 point changed to “Spreading Corruption: Increases the area effect of weapon abilities.” (So greater marks goes away, unblockable goes to 20% staff cd reduction. Dagger 5 and Scepter ground target aoes get a little bonus to radius, but not as much as staff marks).

15 pt. “Deadly Strength” keep it the same, but lower it since it’d be more useful to most builds.

25 pt. “Reanimator: Increases Toughness by 25 per active minion. When a minion dies, summon a Jagged Horror in its place.” Doesn’t summon Jagged Horrors for dead Jagged Horrors (This works here since both Grand Masters are minion based, it at least makes a little more sense).

BAM that tree looks a lot kitten cooler.

I agree completely, take em out as minor traits and make em majors. Put in more useful stuff.

ronpierce.2760:

This is the best I can offer:
5 point changed to “Spreading Corruption: Increases the area effect of weapon abilities.” (So greater marks goes away, unblockable goes to 20% staff cd reduction. Dagger 5 and Scepter ground target aoes get a little bonus to radius, but not as much as staff marks).

15 pt. “Deadly Strength” keep it the same, but lower it since it’d be more useful to most builds.

25 pt. “Reanimator: Increases Toughness by 25 per active minion. When a minion dies, summon a Jagged Horror in its place.” Doesn’t summon Jagged Horrors for dead Jagged Horrors (This works here since both Grand Masters are minion based, it at least makes a little more sense).

BAM that tree looks a lot kitten cooler.

This guy knows what’s up. However if the staff cooldown reduction also gets the unblockable effect I think it might be best if moved up to being a master trait, as that would be WAY too good of an adept trait.

ronpierce.2760:

This is the best I can offer:
5 point changed to “Spreading Corruption: Increases the area effect of weapon abilities.” (So greater marks goes away, unblockable goes to 20% staff cd reduction. Dagger 5 and Scepter ground target aoes get a little bonus to radius, but not as much as staff marks).

15 pt. “Deadly Strength” keep it the same, but lower it since it’d be more useful to most builds.

25 pt. “Reanimator: Increases Toughness by 25 per active minion. When a minion dies, summon a Jagged Horror in its place.” Doesn’t summon Jagged Horrors for dead Jagged Horrors (This works here since both Grand Masters are minion based, it at least makes a little more sense).

BAM that tree looks a lot kitten cooler.

I like this idea. If anything else, Reanimator and Prot. of the Horde should definitely be combined in some way, made stronger, and moved to Grandmaster. I hope Anet take note of this post.

I’m still shocked nobody complain before about those traits not being removed in the last patch.
But think about it. Anything a little more useful will bring even more complains about the necro being OP.

daimasei.4091:

I’m still shocked nobody complain before about those traits not being removed in the last patch.

Of course people did.
And complaints about Reanimator/Horde are as old as the game itself. They are the worst! Absolutely abysmal. Useless even for minion-mancers.

@ronpierce: nice idea.

Regardless of the minor traits. If unblockable marks is merged with lower cooldowns, then Staff Mastery has to be moved to master tier.
Just 10 points into DM for what would need an investment of 20 points now basically means the same as if current staff-builds had 80 points at their disposal.

I would be definitely be on board with a merged Staff Mastery and Greater marks trait being Master tier; as it stands it sucks to have to take two traits to bring staff up to par as a main weapon choice so freeing up an Adept trait choice for something else would be nice.

Honestly there would be far fewer if any complaints about minion master and protection of the horde if they were optional and not foisted on us if we want a staff or defense centric build; they would just be skipped in favor of things that actually help.

Invictus.1503:

PotH is ridiculous. Merge it with Reanimator at the least. Reanimator isn’t that good either but at least not totally worthless if you do MM. I’d like to see them merged, moved to 15 pointer, and remove or reduce internal CD. The game maxes 5 of the same minion anyway so it isn’t like we’d get a huge army considering that along with their very short life span.

Completely untrue, my buddies and I were messing around in wvw. Both of them running full healing builds, we thought it would be funny to see how many we could get up to while constantly healing them. We got up to 17 before it became just too much to keep all of them alive. Then we tried again, and came across some poor CD kid roaming alone.. at the time we had 11 up and omg the bleeds they stacked on the kid we were laughing so hard. You could tell the kid was freaking out. 25 stacks in like 3 seconds… poor kid.

Pendragon.8735:

Please fix these traits, remove them or place them in the active chosen list.

Plenty of Necro’s go down Death Magic who are not minion-masters and don’t want minion master related auto traits.

I think the bigger issue is that Greater Marks, the one almost everyone goes into that tree for, is not baseline.

That said, I agree, too many builds benefit from that tree and the minor traits are horrid for non-MM.

I’m bumping this thread because I think this is a very specific discussion about a problem that has been plaguing the necro since beta, and something Anet still needs to consider. There’s no need for minor traits that are only useful for MM builds and nothing else.

Here’s my idea of what I think they should do:

Take Reanimator and merge it with Minion Mastery, only the effect this time will be “Reduces recharge on minion skills. Summon a jagged horror whenever a minion dies.” No more cooldown on jagged horrors and they don’t summon new horrors on their death. Minion Mastery is bumped up to Master tier.

Next, Protection of the Horde is merged with Flesh of the Master. New effect would be, “Minions have increased health. Gain toughness for each minion you control.”

The idea behind this is to allow for MM to decide between either selecting traits to keep their minions alive or to use them as bombers against their foes. Someone who is going pure MM would probably take Minion Mastery and Flesh of the Master, and have no interest in taking Death Nova. A Minion Bomber would take Minion Mastery and Death Nova, and get shorter cooldowns on their minions, plus a poison field and a new minion every time one dies (which also leaves a poison field when it dies too). We’re trying to kill our pets, so something like Flesh of the Master wouldn’t be optimal in this sort of build.

Obviously they’re going to need to restructure a lot of the major traits to do this, and add two new minors, but it’ll be for the better in the long run.

The real problem is that the Necromancer class is not a minion class.

Minions have no synergy to do with death shroud at all. If anything, the well designed minion class is the Mesmer.

Anything that has to do with minions is terrible as a result. The minion skills may be individually good, or least bad in the case of Golem, but mesh badly with what the rest of the class is doing.

Necromancer might as well have only 3 trait lines.

Guard’s “Strength in Numbers” is 150 per person. So +750 in a group. We need to have all buttons minions and have killed to get Rat minion, to get to the 150.

I know the different class’s an’t suppose to do the same. But as a point of reference, It’s at best 1/5th the power, hugely more costly, is selfish and doesn’t help others.

IF, they changed the Reanimator to 5sec CD, we would have a ‘swarm’. (Where it feels this trait line was designed from GW1 necro swarm)

(I’d actually prefer endurance regen, so were not only class that doesn’t have the attrition to handle a 30sec+ avoid 1shot’s fight)

don’t forget to remove Siphoned Power as well!

We got Shrouded Removal and other traits that would perfectly fit there in the minor slots already~

Merge them, remove ICD on Reanimator make it a 20 pt master.

Insert 2 minors that are remotely useful. Maybe just make Shrouded Removal the 5 pt. minor and Reaper’s Protection the 15 pt. minor, then come up with a new major for 10.

I’d like to see a minion trait that allows Necros to bypass summon cooldowns by spending lifeforce. Would make MM a lot more viable.