Guild Wars 2

First of all I rolled a necromancer to have some minions and found a spec which works OKish. However, there are some things which just make playing a MM sometimes a sado-maso experience. Nevertheless maybe someone of you has some advice (apart from rerolling or speccing to conditional builds hehe).

My problems are unfortunately mostly minion related:

1. Attack Something else or doing nothing
Sometimes minions just watch how I get beat up doing nothing or start to react when the fight is nearly just over. A similar case is that they just attack something, just anything but not what they should. This is especially true when clones, pets or a vanish of a thief is involved.

And even if they react…they react so terribly sluggish.

Is there a kind of keyboard command which allows me to give the little critters again the command “stop doing what you do andkittenattack THIS target”? I mean, even WoW had such a command when it was released…and that was 2006

2. Squishyness
Melee players with brains (and if the terrain allows it) do either…
a. Pull the minions around a corner and just aoe them down what seems in 2 sec. If I try to help them…I get in melee range which leads to a very dead necro usually. Also there is not command which allows me to countermand their attack or set them to passive.
b. Jump over/down obstacles which causes the horrible pathing of the minion to go bogus.

So if anyone of you has an advice (or a key command) to control minions better or another approach to the problem I am all yours .)

3. Stats
Do any stats influence minions’ performance? It seems only traits like flesh/training of the master do something. Again…a minion master which has pets which get that easily AoEd down is a huge problem. I also tried “Death Nova” to punish the melee for doing it…but the damage seems to be a minor annoyance.

Oh, and dear Jon: I also use DS as a minion mancer .)

As far as I can tell the answer to all of your three questions is no.

I figured out that the only thing das remotely helps getting your minions to autoattack a target is spamming their on-use skills. That´s about it.

1. Minion unresponsiveness will hopefully be fixed before too long. In the meantime there are ways to reliably “activate” your minions for combat. One method that has worked reliably for me is to simply run within aggro range and allow either the enemy or your minions to make the first stike, attacking after this will reliably send all your minions after the target. This is probably not very useful for PvP situations however, and to that end if you initiate combat with a minion active skill you can subsequently attack and your minions will reliably follow your lead, I find the Shadow Fiend’s Haunt is the best for this as it is ranged and inflicts blind which will let it ignore the initial retaliatory strike.

As for dealing with mesmers or stealthing enemies the minions are simple AI so they are always going to be fooled by such things. In both situations it’s best to switch to a staff and just lay down marks as the AoE will thin out illusions and alert and protect you from stealthed enemies.

Thanks for your answers. Too bad, I had a tiny sliver of hope that there is a hidden key combination with which to assign targets for the pets.

Its Minion master or if you go for nova, spam bone minions and such stuff and go for lich, Minion Bomber, please stick to the original build names.

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Minion_master

Andele.1306:

Its Minion master or if you go for nova, spam bone minions and such stuff and go for lich, Minion Bomber, please stick to the original build names.

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Minion_master

That’s the first Guild Wars, I’m not seeing a lot of commonality with the original Necromancer and the one in Guild Wars 2. So, community derived build names will be different because they are different.

Minionmancer sounds cooler IMO, so screw sticking to crappy names. We are Minionmancer, conditionmacer, buggedmancer, somethingmancer.

I love when you are downed and your pets are doing nothing but watching you die. “D.e.r.p.”

As someone originally said. All three question get a no. And so far patches have completely ignored only necromancers so don’t get your hopes up.
The only semi-reliable way to get minions to attack if they enter their afk mode is to use their abilities. Which for some minions means they get blown up… used for heal you dont need.
Pathfinding is horrendous same as ai. Only way to circumvent it is, if you know there is something you are going to jump over and it will take minions a while to walk around do yourself a favor and jump on anything a bit before that hop over obstacle. Due to inane teleport mechanic used to get minions to eventually teleport back to you if they are too far sometimes can trigger if there is multiple path issues. You can mostly notice this while doing jumping puzzles at times even tho distance is trivial they will teleport to you even tho you are still on flat ground but hopping on stones and such.
Stats do not affect anything in any way, shape or form. Even healing doesn’t effect vampirism traits. Which are miserable to begin with. 1 train to let minions siphon health… a whooping 25 hp at level 80 and another to increase that gain by 50% which by anets math means +4 hp and that brings you to a staggering 29 hp. And as was stated healing doesn’t effect life siphoning traits.
All in all minions benefit mostly for dumping as much as you can into vitality and toughness to survive long enough to summon next wet noodle appendage that gets 1 shoted.
All in all… unless you are dead set on being necro… do yourself a favor and try to enjoy another class until this mess is either resolved or confirmed to be a dead beat pony.

I think it’d be nice to have some buttons to command them with. We only need one profession button for DS, maybe they could use F2, 3 and 4?