Guild Wars 2

With HoT coming out, I’m going Reaper, ofc.

My build is Spite/Soul Reaping/Reaper for PvE with Berserker stats.

Considering the survivability boost for minions coming out with HoT, I was wondering whether it would be worth it to run with minions in some of my skill slots but here’s my issue.

Their damage does not scale off player stats.
Most of them don’t have decent utility on bosses, with the exception of the Flesh Wurm teleport and Bone Minions for blast finishers.
I don’t want to go into Death Magic.

So are they worth using without Necromantic Corruption? I know the 25% damage increase is big, but I feel like I lose too much replacing Spite or Soul Reaping with Death Magic in this build.

Not worth to go full MM if you want to min max, it should be more like Reaper with some minions. You are probably going to take 2 wells and flesh golem as elite with the usual S/SR/Reaper. I can however see Rise! take the third utility slot if nothing betters comes up.

I don’t think any minion except Flesh Golem is likely to show up. Rise! might happen if ANet ever delivers on forcing players to go truly heavily defensive builds, but it is unlikely.

Reknarok.7582:

With HoT coming out, I’m going Reaper, ofc.

My build is Spite/Soul Reaping/Reaper for PvE with Berserker stats.

Considering the survivability boost for minions coming out with HoT, I was wondering whether it would be worth it to run with minions in some of my skill slots but here’s my issue.

Their damage does not scale off player stats.
Most of them don’t have decent utility on bosses, with the exception of the Flesh Wurm teleport and Bone Minions for blast finishers.
I don’t want to go into Death Magic.

So are they worth using without Necromantic Corruption? I know the 25% damage increase is big, but I feel like I lose too much replacing Spite or Soul Reaping with Death Magic in this build.

I see little reason to pick up minions without going into Death Magic, if it’s purely for the sake of having a minion. Minions in my eyes are generally kind of “all in” builds, where you either take a lot of minions or take none.
The few exceptions I can see are:

1) Bone minions blast finisher – Mostly for group PvE. But the cooldown is short so you can just:
a) Blast your bone minions and swap out the skill when the cooldown is gone
b) Blast a single bone minion and swap the skill right away
There is little reason to keep bone minions in fights, other skills have a bigger impact. They’re purely for certain pre-fight blasts or blasting stealth or whatever.

2) Flesh wurm teleport – For PvE these uses are limited and you can just swap it in if the situation screams for it (e.g. in the swamp fractal you can just swap in your flesh wurm quickly if you want to run a wisp fast)

3) Rise! for defense – Which shouldn’t be needed much for PvE in your current build, Necro has enough innate defense for the basic stuff and IMO there are better defensive skills than Rise! with your build (e.g. Spectral Armor).

4) Flesh Golem for high uptime elite with a knockdown – This is really the only minion you want to have hanging around. Elite golem is actually pretty good for casual PvE as it’s a constant damage source and a nice medium cooldown on demand knockdown.

You honestly shouldn’t run minions without going all in unless you’re running a niche build (chilling darkness blind necromancer would use shadow fiend for it’s blind, for example). If you’reduce min maxing reaper, then there are other, better utilities for your build.

Alright, thanks for the information.