Guild Wars 2

Ok so the necro has always had the option to go the minion heavy route but most of the community settled for s/d condimancer as the epitome of GW2 necromancy. And while minions were ignored for a long time due to a misunderstanding in their utility skill nature and some serious flaws in their AI, i think they deserve a 2nd chance from the community.

I always wanted to do some fun pvp stuff with my power necro, but all of the builds which people came up with or i tried to make work did lack on the “tough-and kitten kicking bruiser” departement. Well bomber was way too glassy for my liking and too much of an all in type with one removed immob pretty much denying all of your burst and wasting your utilites. DS centric builds (with or without spectral skills) just lacked the pressure appliance to scare anyone and i always felt like i had to go on the defense first and let my enemy try to apply their burst until i could start to fight them back. And my biggest let down was with every attempt to make a lifesteal build work. A death magic cleric type was just not viable and while we do have some nice supporting/healing traits, one of the strongest (transfusion) doesn’t easily apply its healing to ourselves and vampiric rituals has the same downsides as well bombing.

So after finally giving minions a try i feel like playing a completely different class.
1v1s that put me in the dust before feel like a fair fight. Condition management became a breeze, health management became a non issue. Utility skills with horrendous cooldowns and extremely pigeonholed uses are gone and instead i got some all around useful abilities. The whole minion master design seems to be build around letting the necro do his thing while supporting him in fights.
I can use a zerker amulett and still feel like the hulk instead of beeing a thief without burst and disengage (hulk lacks disengage too!).

I know that some people on this board preached the juicyness of minion builds for quite some time but i never gave them a fair shot. I was also turned off by the appearance of minion masters, which for me still look like a greenpeace activist trying to free a bunch of zoo animals. So what are your opinions on the matter? Did you gave minion builds a fair shot? Why did it fail for you (my problems with their AI are close to nonexistant)? After experiencing the carnage that is a minion build i have to say we probably need a change of mind.

Minion builds became fairly popular in spvp for a short time a few weeks after release. They need to add bone fiend shadow fiend and Bone minions to F2 F3 F4 leave wurm as a utility and give us better utilities. Minions taking up utility slot is horrible design. Jagged horrors are terrible and only have 2 uses both of which require 30 points in either BM or DM. (Fetid Consumption and death nova). Overall the entire design is uninspiring and its a shame that 90% of NECROMANCERS dont even summon minions or the dead. They look terrible and most of the community agrees with this.

I agree with 2 things: They look moronic and they require heavy traiting.
But required traiting is true for every single build in this game. If you would give some arguments i could probably try to understand why giving up utility slots for them is horrible design.

I still don’t think minion build are viable right now.

They just aren’t viable. You can do some good damage, but once they stop attacking because of the AI, you are done.

Mindx.9610:

Minion builds became fairly popular in spvp for a short time a few weeks after release. They need to add bone fiend shadow fiend and Bone minions to F2 F3 F4 leave wurm as a utility and give us better utilities. Minions taking up utility slot is horrible design. Jagged horrors are terrible and only have 2 uses both of which require 30 points in either BM or DM. (Fetid Consumption and death nova). Overall the entire design is uninspiring and its a shame that 90% of NECROMANCERS dont even summon minions or the dead. They look terrible and most of the community agrees with this.

Absolutely not, adding the F buttons is ridiculous, and we have countered that point numerous times in the past giving examples as to how it can be abused and how bad that idea would be to be implemented. Please stop trying to encourage a badly thought out idea.

@Bellamy, the main issue a majority of the community has with minions is the misperception that they are pets. They are utilities designed to do damage and die. Once you change your outlook you realize how strong they can be. In fact, there are more and more players moving to minion builds as a better perception of them is learned.

Next week, bhawb is going to come out with an instructional video on minion ai. In our recent podcast with Talentless, he actually gave one of the best reasons as to why he doesn’t take minions. However most of the community is slowly coming around to the build as they put more time into trying it out.

I’ve had success in sPvP last two weeks, I heavily specced into DM and BM on making them viable.

Any 1 v 1 situation ends me winning, regardless of what class I encounter I win and that’s final. I feel like a powerhouse, I can 2v1 in certain situations but it takes a lot of time and a lot of button mashing.

However, I feel like weak Minions should be raisable by using weapon skills not utility. Therefor I would move Bone Minions to weapon skills, and introduce stronger and better looking ‘’Bone Horrors’’ a la GW1 style to utility slot. They should hit harder, but slower and be able to hit 3 targets at a time.

Regarding the overall appearance of Minions, I completely agree with every single Necromancer out that that they plain suck. The only exception to that is the Flesh Wurm and the Devourer.

Minions currently look so stupid that I do not feel like one that raises the dead to fight for me, the Shade looks kittened because the black stuff around him is static, if it instead drips down like Death Shroud does you’d have an entirely different Minion.

Minions well… enough said… Flesh Golem needs to be bigger and more bad kitten

Kardiamond.6952:

I still don’t think minion build are viable right now.

They just aren’t viable. You can do some good damage, but once they stop attacking because of the AI, you are done.

I can tell you that i don’t even care if one or two of them don’t attack. From a dps increase standpoint only flesh golem is a good addition (and to a lesser extent shadow fiend). I take minions because of the utility like passive lifereg, condition removal, as well as projectile block and a blast finisher. Every one of them, except bone minions, has an active ability that uses your current target. So even if they don’t attack (which they do after 2 autohits or using other single target abilites) i can use their corresponding skills.

Apart from that they are our lowest cd utility skills, so you can probably use them once or twice a fight.

And like Bas said, they aren’t pets. You don’t deal 40% less damage like a ranger if your pet dies. You deal exactly as much damage as you did previously with your dagger slashing, but loose condi removal and lifereg.

@Bas: Yes, i didn’t try them for a lon time because i dislike their appearance and the minion hate was strong in the community. But now that i have tried them, they are pretty awesome.
Also i didn’t listen to your 3rd podcast because it’s about wvw and i don’t do that much wvw. But if i had to guess i would say they suck because of way too much AoE?

@Bettadenu: I had pretty much the same experience as you in pvp. As far as your idea goes: Bone minions, as they are now, are one of my favourites. Traited on 16sec cd. Dealing 3k+ damage on active, which is easier to apply then a well and giving you stuff like condi removal and lifereg. So don’t know about your change.

Bas.7406:

Mindx.9610:

Minion builds became fairly popular in spvp for a short time a few weeks after release. They need to add bone fiend shadow fiend and Bone minions to F2 F3 F4 leave wurm as a utility and give us better utilities. Minions taking up utility slot is horrible design. Jagged horrors are terrible and only have 2 uses both of which require 30 points in either BM or DM. (Fetid Consumption and death nova). Overall the entire design is uninspiring and its a shame that 90% of NECROMANCERS dont even summon minions or the dead. They look terrible and most of the community agrees with this.

Absolutely not, adding the F buttons is ridiculous, and we have countered that point numerous times in the past giving examples as to how it can be abused and how bad that idea would be to be implemented. Please stop trying to encourage a badly thought out idea.

@Bellamy, the main issue a majority of the community has with minions is the misperception that they are pets. They are utilities designed to do damage and die. Once you change your outlook you realize how strong they can be. In fact, there are more and more players moving to minion builds as a better perception of them is learned.

Next week, bhawb is going to come out with an instructional video on minion ai. In our recent podcast with Talentless, he actually gave one of the best reasons as to why he doesn’t take minions. However most of the community is slowly coming around to the build as they put more time into trying it out.

How exactly can you abuse minions on f buttons? Is it because you gain more options? Most people agree that necros need better utilitys, so freeing some slots up how is that a bad thing? Minions are strong in spvp and possibly tpvp (which is why the build got popular early on..idk if you guys recall when they were actually popular, I’ve done 4 second blow up specs with wos, BM , golem + daggers made a video of it and got flamed for it) havent done both in a while but imo everywhere else they are garbage. There is always a better utility to use. Why cant I a necromancer not use my minions unless im built for it? Lame design .I agree that there are good builds out there with minions i just dont want to be pigeonholed into one just to use my minions on a kitten necromancer…..again lame design.

@mindx – the probelm is your perception of minions. You feel there are better alternatives. However, many of us disagree we feel it’s a great alternative that gives us more freedom to play the way we want too. I personally think Corruption skills outside of Epidemic are horribly, signets are just bad all the way around except Undeath, Spectral skills are gimmicky and situational, and wells are easily countered in anything except pve.

But again that’s perception, I have good in game friends who can use all those skills much better than I can, and have very logical reasons for not wanting to use minions. I have made a video (poorly done) of how effective minions are in dungeons, and their strengths in pvp. In wvwvw there is a small contigent of MM who spend their days farming supply camps because no one can do it better than a necro. As an MM I can solo it with ease.

Your point about not speccing for it is really weak. If you don’t build around any specific utility they lose their value. Except signets which are always bad. Minions just have a preset build if you want to use them effectively. However the same thing is true for DS builds, Condition builds, Well builds, and Staff builds. Every single style requires you to take a few key talents and then build around it. I am not sure how you can only see minions that way.

MMs in PvP are fine. I used to use a bunker MM build to bunker near point. 95% of games I never died, and that point was never flipped; the other 5% were because I got stacked by 2+ players and either I played badly and died too quickly, or my team didn’t come to help.

Minions on F2-F4 is terrible. Minion builds are already strong in PvP, putting our core abilities into F2-F4 means I now have 3 more utility slots open, meaning not only can I bring shadow fiend, but I can bring corrupt boon and another utility (off the top of my head probably Spectral Grasp or Wall) to be incredibly powerful.

Bas.7406:

Your point about not speccing for it is really weak. If you don’t build around any specific utility they lose their value. Except signets which are always bad. Minions just have a preset build if you want to use them effectively. However the same thing is true for DS builds, Condition builds, Well builds, and Staff builds. Every single style requires you to take a few key talents and then build around it. I am not sure how you can only see minions that way.

This isnt true, If you put all minions on your utilitys you must spec so you get the proper condition removal / heals and dmg that you lose if you were to choose other utilitys, you dont NEED to spec for wells to get those heals condi removal and dmg, you dont need to spec for bip to get 10 might stacks and in general this is the case for most of our utilitys except minions which require you to spec into them so they can give back what your losing from not chosing other utilitys…..idk thats just my opinion i guess

When I first started to play necro I tried every build, except minions because people said how bad they are. Then one day I gave it a shot, and I haven’t looked back since. So much fun and it’s good too. Yeah sometimes the dumb AI not attacking and terrible pathfinding will get me killed. But overall I love this build. <3

Minions are awesome and underrated.

Make them scale with stats, improve the AI and put Training of the Master in Death Magic instead of Spite and I’d call it a good day.

Making them scale with stats wouldn’t be good. Right now, they allow you to have 27k HP, 3.2k power, 3k armor, and still do the exact same damage as they would if you went full glass cannon. If they scaled, then they would have to nerf base stats and add in scaling, which would destroy the use of a PVT bunker MM.

Training of the Master in Death Magic would break a lot too, it would put 5 very strong minion traits into the same tree, and make it so you could never have damage and +HP on minions at the same time, without forgoing very strong Grandmaster traits.

I’m more concerned about toughness scaling than damage scaling. After all, a dead pet isn’t going to be pulling in any numbers.

And Poison Nova is a garbage trait unless you go for condition damage which right now is actively discouraged as a minion master due to the placement of Training of the Master. Also, I think you highly overestimate the effectiveness of 10% boon removal chance on hit. Especially in PvE.

In PvE sure, because there aren’t enough boons. However in PvP you are usually running with 4 minions + flesh golem (I separate him because of attack speed). Flesh Golem himself removes 1 condition every 10 seconds, on average. The other 4 should remove 1 condition every 2.5 attacks (of all 4 of them), and with 3-4 seconds between attacks, that is another 1 boon per 10 seconds. That is a very significant thing, considering how much certain classes like elementalists and guardians rely on boons.

Poison cloud in PvE is all about the field. That field lets you spread weakness, which is essentially a 25% reduction in damage to all PvE mobs. In PvP its all about the constant poison. Poison wrecks healing builds in PvP, if someone heals themselves while poisoned for a heal that would normally do 10k, but now is only 6.7k, you have effectively caused 3.3k damage just by having a minion die. That racks up over time very quickly.

Condition damage is bad for MMs. It is just the fact that any build that wants to run mostly minions wants to bring an axe; scepter does nothing for minions, and taking condition damage just for some poison field damage isn’t good.

Chance doesn’t work like that, Bhawb. It’s 10% chance to hit on every hit, not a consistent 1/10 hit. This means that if you’re exceptionally lucky you can get ten boons removed in a row. That said, the more likely option is that your minions will perform those ten hits without removing a single boon. You’re gambling with some seriously bad odds here. As I mentioned in the other thread this is just not an option in a competitive environment. It’s pipe dreaming.

And there are better sources of poison than Poison Nova which relies on wonky minion pathing and your minion actually dying ( something you really don’t want outside of jagged horrors and bone minions ) to work in the first place. Corrosive Poison Cloud comes to mind and it fits in a condition build which also buff up the damage considerably.

For grandmaster traits they are some of the weakest in the game and I’d happily replace either on an minion master build with Training of the Master which offers a tremendous damage boost. 30% is absolutely huge and crucial for any minion master build. Why it isn’t a Death Magic grandmaster trait is honestly beyond me.

It can be assumed that if you have a 10% chance to remove a boon on hit, you will remove 1 boon every 10 hits, on average. Obviously random chance doesn’t work exactly like that, but over a sustained period of time you will remove, on average, 1 boon per 10 hits. It is no different than someone who uses on-crit effects.

Yes, taking CPC in a minion build is a great idea… except it is a terrible idea because you should never be using condition damage with minions, and should be using only minions as an MM (heal excluded).

And every minion build will go 20 into Spite to get it, because it gives a bonus to power (more retaliation damage, more personal damage), more condition duration, and spite has decent 10 point traits.

CPC is not condition damage. Poison scales so poor, that it should only be viewed as a source of healing reduction.

As for necrotic corruption: found it way too random. For it to have a serious contribution to a fight you have to have a standoff with a boon bunker for 30+ seconds. That is just not good enough for a grand master trait.
As for Death Nova: Poison is nice but instead of death nova i can just take Greater Marks and incorporate staff into my build. In my opinion the synergies between an axe and a dagger set are very small and dagger is still the superior weapon, due to healing, hard cc and higher damage.

I would actually say that probably every necro has tried MM. Why wouldn’t you?

I leveled as one and played one in spvp a lot early on when they were a lot worse. I’ve never really liked the design after playing necros in other games. You do need to wrap your head around the idea of dumb, bad ai minions that don’t work at range, sometimes don’t work at all and take up utility slots but as a whole MM can be effective. They are good pve and good in certain situations for pvp. You are extremely tanky and can do decent damage in static situations while the minions are up and you can see what’s coming.

Never changed from MM since early game access…
And I would actually agree that 10% chance is garbage. In pve there aren’t enough boons to remove… if you do find oddballs with boons use focus, which you should be using as proper MM and remove them with that if they bother you.
Death nova is the best grandmaster trait there is for MM. Transferring conditions to minions is worthless in pve and its far too slow for pvp. On the other hand poison no matter how little damage you think it does still provides constant damage and in pvp poison, like example that was give if u heal under poison for 10k… that chunk poison ate is pretty kitten significant. Poison does wonders for harassing tankish builds. And back to pve poison nova isn’t just about poison… fact most people seem to just walk right over. Poison field = weakness…. a CONSTANT stackable source of weakness. It may not be as amazing as it sounds on paper but it does mitigate damage fairly well considering how easy it is to stack for MM. Constantly dying jagged followed by bone minions dying and triggering it followed by staff…
Also I do agree that having points in spite does wonders… 20% condition duration isn’t 30% but heck for MM that stacks vulnerability that duration isn’t meaningless. I can always put from 5 to15 vulnerability stacks on 1 target with focus alone(the kittening kitten jew kitten censor can go eat a kitten… I had to edit that line 5 kittening times)… then followed by a channel.
I honestly can’t see myself loosing any traits in blood… 20 is bare minimum for vampiric stuff… combined with hp and cd from death and death nova…. that’s another 30 that I can’t see myself moving under any circumstances. And damage from spite plus duration for my vulnerability+weakness+poison again does wonders. Id love to have 30% but well… wearing full berserker set and being able to face tank champs in pve that aren’t in the “abusive 1 shot abilities” category is pretty kitten impressive. Putting things together would require full revamp to our traits… which is needed… but will NEVER happen. Just give up on idea of getting any kind of revamps done. Anet doesn’t care enough to fix pressing issues for half a year and you think they would bother with that? Wake up children…

Granted I do still by this day think that MM is wonky and clunky. But its not as all over the pace as DS for instance. DS traits are so spread out its impossible to get them all… not even close. Forget combining spectral + DS…And its not THAT bad… I wouldn’t bother pvp with it… and wvw with MM is… well… but as far as pve goes its okay not great but its not bad either.
And I refuse to play a melee “spellcaster” that is ridiculous and I didn’t take a spellcaster to sit there with a butterknife poking things. “Me BIG strong me SMASH puny with BIG stick” classes are lost on me. Over decades of gaming every time I tried I would get bored in less then 5 hours(in the best cases where it is actually well made melee).

Minions do better in PvP than PvE. The damage rates in PvP are overall lower, so I have a lot of success in sPvP. In PvE minions suffer greatly due to the over saturation of AOEs in high level dungeons.

For minions to be good utility slots they need to bring more to the table than the occasional 2 second cripple or the meager 5 second 240 AOE blind on a 16 second cooldown.

To add to this, traiting for minions sacrifices a lot of your own personal strength. It would be nice if the minion master traits also beefed up the minion master himself.

bettadenu.5483:

However, I feel like weak Minions should be raisable by using weapon skills not utility. Therefor I would move Bone Minions to weapon skills, and introduce stronger and better looking ‘’Bone Horrors’’ a la GW1 style to utility slot. They should hit harder, but slower and be able to hit 3 targets at a time.

This is a very insightful point. MM builds have limited access to AoE damage and are punished heavily by opponent/mob AoE. I would like to see an AoE-oriented minion (e.g., mini plague) or at least one specializing in cleave damage. I would also like to see a trait that would help minions withstand AoE attacks better.

Moonrabbit.1543:

This is a very insightful point. MM builds have limited access to AoE damage and are punished heavily by opponent/mob AoE. I would like to see an AoE-oriented minion (e.g., mini plague) or at least one specializing in cleave damage. I would also like to see a trait that would help minions withstand AoE attacks better.

Do they? I figure you can just throw on a staff, maybe grab the trait that makes your marks bigger, and blammo. You’ve got some nice AOE. Don’t really need a pet for that. I can’t really find a purpose behind the Shadow Fiend, so if it’s really necessary, have Haunt do an AOE blind + damage instead?

I don’t really see any big problem with MM; the only ones I can really see are the unresponsiveness of Rigor Mortis, being unable to target Bone Minion explosions very well, and maybe Haunt being a bit weak. Maybe have Rigor Mortis extend the Bone Fiend’s range to 1200 or 1500, and make Bone Minions’ explosions a targetable leapy sorta thing?

Sarrs.4831:

Moonrabbit.1543:

This is a very insightful point. MM builds have limited access to AoE damage and are punished heavily by opponent/mob AoE. I would like to see an AoE-oriented minion (e.g., mini plague) or at least one specializing in cleave damage. I would also like to see a trait that would help minions withstand AoE attacks better.

Do they? I figure you can just throw on a staff, maybe grab the trait that makes your marks bigger, and blammo. You’ve got some nice AOE.

You would be sacrificing either 20% minion cooldown or +50% health for those bigger marks, which is a real dampener when it comes to minion mastering.

Tried MM in WvW, I had a lot of problem with how long it took for my minions to react. For example, my minions took at least 5 seconds to react when a Guardian started pounding on me, and from time to time my Flesh Golem would freeze and do nothing for at least other 5 seconds while fighting the guardian.

I also have a lot of problems with Glass Cannon Thieves and Warriors that just eat away my health, no amount of siphoning is enough against a Glass Cannon Thief or Warrior

If you are running dagger/warhorn and axe/focus, you will have 2 immobilizes, 1 knockdown, 3 cripples, 1 chill, and 1 fear to keep people away. How are you letting them sit in range long enough for it to matter how much damage they do?

I tend to not kite and exchange blows with them with my dagger, so maybe I’m doing it wrong haha.

Edit: I’m trying Staff and Dagger/Wh atm

Don’t be in that range with a glass warrior unless you have a full daze/fear/knockdown chain going and know you can kill them before they kill you.

Bhawb.7408:

Don’t be in that range with a glass warrior unless you have a full daze/fear/knockdown chain going and know you can kill them before they kill you.

Okay thanks for the help. Can you offer more advice against thieves? There was a few cases against thieves was hitting on me for like a good 2-3 seconds before I could see him.

Save everything that isn’t AoE for when he comes out of stealth, then spam as much CC as you can (daze, knockdown, etc). and murder him. They drop really quickly if you can chain a bit of CC.

Uh…..minion build are awful for pvp and spvp.

Why? the Ai is bad and they require so much traiting that you pretty much have to go FULL minion to do anything.

Its a good idea, but implemented poorly.

Bhawb.7408:

It can be assumed that if you have a 10% chance to remove a boon on hit, you will remove 1 boon every 10 hits, on average. Obviously random chance doesn’t work exactly like that, but over a sustained period of time you will remove, on average, 1 boon per 10 hits. It is no different than someone who uses on-crit effects.

Yes, taking CPC in a minion build is a great idea… except it is a terrible idea because you should never be using condition damage with minions, and should be using only minions as an MM (heal excluded).

And every minion build will go 20 into Spite to get it, because it gives a bonus to power (more retaliation damage, more personal damage), more condition duration, and spite has decent 10 point traits.

Over 10 hits you have a 65% chance of clearing atleast 1 boon.

Empiren.6401:

Uh…..minion build are awful for pvp and spvp.

Why? the Ai is bad and they require so much traiting that you pretty much have to go FULL minion to do anything.

Its a good idea, but implemented poorly.

It sounds like you’re just repeating what you’ve heard and have never really tried it. More testing less talk.

I’ve tested this, the number of times they DON’T attack is barely noticeable. In my experience Flesh Golem wouldn’t attack in 1 out of 15 times average. The same with other minions. So even if you have ONE minion that stops attacking you still have 4 who are doing their jobs.

Are we sure they’re still good? I’m downloading the game right now and always wanted to go a Minion Mancer build for TPVP and WvW (and PVE too but that goes without saying)

WvW I would highly suggest not using MM builds unless you are planning to solo supply camps, their AI bugs out hardcore in WvW and they get cleaved down by ever present AoE.

tPvP MM builds are fine up to a point, they work nicely on side bunker, but generally speaking you are going to want to run hybrid minions at most (either condi or power with some minions). Again AoE is going to hurt you, and the pressure you can put out with a bit of hybridization is much better than what you’ll get by running all minions.

Bhawb.7408:

WvW I would highly suggest not using MM builds unless you are planning to solo supply camps, their AI bugs out hardcore in WvW and they get cleaved down by ever present AoE.

tPvP MM builds are fine up to a point, they work nicely on side bunker, but generally speaking you are going to want to run hybrid minions at most (either condi or power with some minions). Again AoE is going to hurt you, and the pressure you can put out with a bit of hybridization is much better than what you’ll get by running all minions.

What minions are good for a hybrid build for Tpvp?

Minion HYBRID is currently the most powerful build for PvP. Only outshined by a 100% pure support made to cater a specific team. Yes, a change of mind is required.

The misconception that minions are bad comes from a lot of places:

- “Pure” minion masters are worthless.
- There is no decent MM/Hybrid build to be found anywhere. (If it is, I’d like to see it, so feel free to correct me…) and people mostly play with premade builds.
- Minions are pretty kittenty on PvE due to AI issues that for some mysterious reason are not present on pvp.
- Minions used to be a lot worse than they are now after several balancing patches. How many people know the health guy drains 1k hp and has 20k when traited?

Etc.

Anything not named Blood Fiend or Shadow Fiend has a place in hybrid builds. Bone Minions can be used as decent burst in power builds, a source of poison fields for condi builds, and also is nice to use just as blast finishers in general (if you have team coordination this can be nice). Bone Fiend also has decent finishers with its 2x projectile finishers and control, Flesh Wurm also has a projectile finisher, stun break, and life force, and then Flesh Golem brings a good amount of control and damage.

The main ways I see them used are as control, damage, finishers, and a bit of survivability.

And yes, the patches since launch have greatly improved them.

There’s nothing better than chain-CCing a particularly elusive target to death with a full MM build and dagger/warhorn.

Unless there is something better. I don’t know. I have fun with the build in hotjoin.

But why not use them as a pure minion mancer build? You get them ALL as a minion mancer, do you not?

Coolcat.1398:

But why not use them as a pure minion mancer build? You get them ALL as a minion mancer, do you not?

Because between your player charater and your minions your player character is still by far the most powerful of the bunch, and going “full” MM is like ignoring your own character.

A full MM is too easily countered, and requires too much team support. Blood Fiend is bad for obvious reasons, you are basically asking the enemy to shut down your entire healing, and that is too much power to put in their hands. They have awesome passive healing, they have great control, and they have awesome sustained damage; assuming your minions all stay alive. But they are too weak to cleave, too weak to burst, with very little AoE pressure, and frankly without team support can never really finish a fight.

So how do you deal with that? You give yourself more burst healing/LF generation, you pick up CB or WoS (or roll with a team, which requires you to not rely on living minions too much). Basically, you hybridize out, to cover the huge weaknesses of minion builds, which leaves you with a build that is not 100% minions.

Bhawb.7408:

So how do you deal with that? You give yourself more burst healing/LF generation, you pick up CB or WoS (or roll with a team, which requires you to not rely on living minions too much). Basically, you hybridize out, to cover the huge weaknesses of minion builds, which leaves you with a build that is not 100% minions.

Which is sad, because I like to run a full MM build despite its inherent weaknesses. I currently use Blood Fiend, though I still consider the well over it so that I can heal them a small amount.

Consume Conditions is the best option by far until you start getting into a decent amount of condition removal on your own, and higher healing power. WoB is only worth it if you can deal with condi pressure and have the healing power to heal a solid amount per tick.

Blood Fiend is great, until he dies and you are left with no heal.

Bhawb.7408:

Blood Fiend is great, until he dies and you are left with no heal.

Then I run half the length of the Forest of Niflhel trying to get away from a GS mesmer and his clones, so I can heal up from the 10% health I have left. Ahhh, good times.

That is actually part of the reason I think they should add Minion HP bars somewhere on your screen (or the option). It would make minions much more viable in PvP as focusing minions would only cause you to force a good MM to use the active; it wouldn’t actually cancel it out.

Actually, most of my minions were on cooldown while I was running away. If I had around 50% of my health instead of 10%, I might have tried to stay and fight with what I had. That’s not including Death Shroud, but if I remember right I didn’t have any of that either! ^^;

I love the look of them, except shadow fiend. I did prefer the gw1 versions of bone minions and jagged horrors, although in the jagged horrors case it’s only because the new one is so tiny. I’d love to see a return of the shambling horror, but the last thing I want is some generic zombie crap.

Maybe if an expansion ever DOES happen (unlikely) we’ll get better minion mancers for pvp