Guild Wars 2

Okay, so as we know we have no minion cap and that ‘could’ be abused. That being said, we will help form the future of minion masters and the ability “rise”. The problem with it being abused is what most people are making fun of, yes you can have an intense undead army that will rule wvw. To be honest I don’t want that to happen, and then the whole MM gets butchered because of it. So below please list your constructive ideas.
My idea- Well the problem is this. It is not the fact that we have no minion cap, because before this was not a problem. The problem is this move can be spammed without limits.

Rise-minion cap should be either —-summon up to 6, after you summon 6 it will replace the closest dead minion with new one. So minion recycle. Much like gw1 mechanic.
Or we keep this move powerful and limit its ability to summon up to 10. Leaving room for this to be a good choice for MM or for non MM. Meaning if you use it 2x on 5 people you will receive 10 (instead of 12). 10 being cap, or 6 being cap. I would like some play room for this ability to truly see play. So I prefer 10.

Now, the reason I am not mentioning we get minion cap to 30 or so is simple. Because yet again, we could do ridiculous things, and the reason we could do those things is strictly because of ONE move. Clearly it is the move that needs the limit, not the minion cap itself. But again, I prefer play room, instead of the alternative of only being able to get 6 at any time out of that move.

Leave your comments below for constructive ideas.

I can’t say I disliked the cap of 10 minions in GW1, though it definitely wasn’t as fun as watching necros run around with herds of minions if they could manage it. I understand that it trivialized some of the content. As such, I don’t want to see that happen here.

At the same time, minions don’t work the same way either. We don’t require corpses to exploit in order to get the army rolling, for example. The don’t constantly degen health that we, as the Master, need to manage. People can’t steal them from us as a mean of negating them. They don’t persist after we die (which, I kind of miss). Etc, etc.

Right now neither “Rise” nor Death Nova have a count cap, and some people take issue with that because when healers are thrown into the mix, the minions can be maintained much more easily (too easily perhaps). Without healing, minions are usually cleaved down pretty quickly, even the shambling (which die in roughly forty-five seconds anyway due to degen).

I think, instead of just hard capping these as the first line defense, simply make minions immune to outside healing (druid, guard, ele water, etc) and see if that helps. Necro life steal or healing should still affect them (well of blood, mark of blood, etc), but that alone shouldn’t make them over powered. Merely prolong their existence a bit in a fight.

Edit: Lol my numeric was filter trolled

It doenst really matter in terms of balance. The minions deal very very low damage, at a very low attack rate.

In WvW they get cleaved down in zerg fights easily. While roaming they can be kited. Also, you need a considerable time to build them up, you could of course do this on mobs, but hey, you need to invest heavily in healing power and some certain traits to do so. In small roaming builds this could potentially be somewhat viable, but then again mobility, stealth, aoe damage and quick movements, all counter minions.

In PvE it doenst really matter damage wise. bosses still deal potent AOE damage, they soak up buffs and heals for teammates not in a party.

in PvP you simply wont bring that much up. You need enemys to get a high amount of them. Nobody in PvP will stand there, letting you build up an army. Also you cant sustain them alone in PvP if you wanna play a true MM due to the target cap. You would need very good sustain from a druid, or revenant with ventari, this also means he is wasting resources onto your minions which could be more usefull in other places at that time. You get outrotated. The power your team is offering to make this a problem for your enemy is a bigger problem for your team.

If it somehow is damaging for the game in terms of ressources, LAGs or something like that they should limit it. If it doenst have any impact on that just keep it as it is right now, as a easteregg for the former Minionmasters of GW1

That isn’t too bad of an idea. Then again that would only put the benefit to “Rise” and wouldn’t put benefit to the other minion abilities. But of course I like the ability, just like everyone else who has used it. But then again, turrets weren’t able to be healed by outside sources either right? And neither do spirit weapons? But yet again, that would be a nerf to all minion skills outside of Reaper traitline, which is a huge problem. All for one skill which we like.

There is no need for a cap, because an MM with large number of minions isn’t a balance issue in any mode where it needs to be heavily considered.

In anything short of Dungeons/Fractals/Raids in PvE balance is irrelevant (nor would this overpower us), and in those three things Rise! would never be capable of maintaining minions for any period of time, if it could even generate them in the first place against trash mobs. Even if larger numbers of minions were sustainable, it wouldn’t exactly propel us into god-mode.

WvW isn’t balanced at all, and these won’t create such an issue that they’d need a cap in order to cut back an overbearing build. In small groups the minions couldn’t do anything special, and in large groups it would be very difficult to sustain any large number.

And PvP, where balance is arguably the most required to be fine tuned, Rise! really has no opportunity to be abused. The minions will die, you won’t be able to prevent it, and due to the way generation works any situation where you’d be able to spawn many (teamfights) they’d also die the fastest, whereas any situation where it would be overbearing (1v1/2v2) they won’t generate enough numbers.

Now sure, if this ends up becoming an issue we can discuss a cap, but there is nothing to promote that idea right now except Wooden Potatoes getting over excited like he does every time anything happens and making an entertaining video about a mechanic that is irrelevant. If anything, you should be rewarded for devoting your entire build towards maintaining a bunch of minions, because that’s all that build will do.

On a side note, some type of counter to let me know how many minions I have trooping along behind me would be nice.

I second that lan :P

I’m not sure we need a cap, at least not any cap anyone would be likely to run into. It’s not like the minions actually do all that much, nor are they very hard to kill.

That said, I would support a cap of, say, 15 or 20 just to make sure we don’t start causing server lag issues.

As a lot of people have stated, shambling horrors even in huge numbers aren’t powerful at all and wouldn’t make necromancer overpowered even if you had like 10 up in WvW or PvE. Yes, to hypothetically constantly have 10 up in PvP would be pretty strong, but that is an unrealistic possibility.

The simple reality is Rise isn’t that strong, and even when you have 6 constantly rolling isn’t that strong. Why are we suggesting nerfs on a profession that is already at the bottom and is still struggling to maintain relevancy? Honestly, this is all just an overreaction to Wooden Potato’s video and the situation that allowed him to get such a large number of minions literally cannot happen anywhere else in the game but in the PvP lobby. Minion masters have also been able to maintain 6+ jagged horrors for a while now in full clerics, and only now is there this hype over having more than 5 minions.

there’s already a hard cap on AOE heals (only 5 allies at max) which limits the number of minions you can maintain by default. You also can’t ever generate the minions in a reliable scenario where they can get completely out of hand.

In PvP they drop incredibly quickly to burning AOE rings, or any AOEs.
In PvE they drop to AOEs 5 times as quickly.
in WvWvW. . .don’t even ask.

Why are you suggesting nerfs to an ability as soon as people say it’s usable? How about suggesting nerfs to something that’s been over powered for literally YEARS HUH?

We don’t need a cap.

These minions are weak anyway, and we can’t realistically expect to be keeping up a huge amount of them. In any big fight they will be cleaved down fast (WvW zerg), and in any small fight (PvP, WvW roaming) we won’t be able to generate enough for it to become a problem.

OlliX.1705:

We don’t need a cap.

These minions are weak anyway, and we can’t realistically expect to be keeping up a huge amount of them. In any big fight they will be cleaved down fast (WvW zerg), and in any small fight (PvP, WvW roaming) we won’t be able to generate enough for it to become a problem.

In terms of power I agree.

In terms of visual clutter and performance issues… I don’t know. We’ll have to see.

Another problem with copious amounts of them are the poison fields that go off. Its hilarious, but what ends up happening is: you go down, they try to cleave you down, minions absorb cleaves instead, minions die, minions explode into poison fields, you rally because they have 60 stacks of poison on them and died

I can say I agree with you guys. If the shambling horrors actually did something themselves rather than absorb.. Then they would be an issue. It is only through the right opportunity are they truly powerful.. But that was the idea of the shouts anyways. Get stronger from fighting more people. I agree. No nerf. No cap

Koolaid.9152:

If the shambling horrors actually did something themselves rather than absorb..

I’m not sure because I didn’t test it in BWE (tried reaper but not this specific point), but shambling horrors count as minions for traits, don’t they? So “actually did something themselves rather than absorb”…. let’s see…

- +20 toughness for each minion means 120 toughness for a Rise with 5 targets. They
get 50% extra health to absorb more damage for their master
- their damage can be increased by 25% and there are many of them
- 1 condition taken away from reaper per minion (10s CD per minion) and the
condition will be sent to the enemy with next attack → with that many minions you
gain perma condition transfer
- each of them will explode in a poison nova if they die
- each of them will siphon health for you.

If you have 20 shambling horrors that means: close to perma 50% damage reduction, perma condition transfer, 400 extra toughness. I don’t know their attack speed, let’s say they attack once each 3 seconds that means 200 hps for life siphon. Can’t say something about their damage so we can ignore that fact. But this whole thing seems to be unkillable in PvE.

Well in PvE you’ll have to look at the new raid content. It seems to promote minion playstyle, but they literally get melted. Also in WvW as we know in zergs they melt because they run in regardless of “pushing in”. And in pvp you probably get encountered most times vs 2 ppl. Meaning you get 3 shambling who take half your damage. So it is iffy. In those playstyles it isn’t op by any means. But it becomes op when people abuse the mechanic. And say have 20 reapers together with healers. But of course that can be countered too. And in order to get a ridiculous amount of minions, you will need a stationary reoccuring target. Like golems in heart of the mist. Otherwise you usually hit around 15 minions at a time in good circumstances

We don’t know if they will get melted in raids, we just had the chance to test 1 encounter and it doesn’t look like minions get affected by the damage in there. I was in a raid with 2 friends of mine, they played druid and reaper and told me it seems like minions and pets get no damage at all. We entered the instance with just the 3 of us (didn’t think we were able to kill the vale guard, just were interested in the mechanic).
Me and the druid died really fast. But the vale guard wasn’t even able to kill the reaper, even as he was alone on the field. Guess what was a big part of this heavy defense the reaper had? Rise!

And why shouldn’t there be a minion cap? All other professions (with exception of warrior and revenant) have minion like skills too. They all are capped.

I understand that it is a fun thing to someone but I think there should be a cap because necromancer is a profession which can improve their minions very far and it is kind of ridiculous to have so many minions at the same time. Even in the old days of gw1 there wasn’t something like this able to do. And these minions had a larger requirement to get them.

Kodama.6453:

And why shouldn’t there be a minion cap? All other professions (with exception of warrior and revenant) have minion like skills too. They all are capped.

They are not capped in the same way though. All other minions are capped due to the number of minion skills you can slot, the duration of those minions and the cooldown time of the skills/traits. These caps already exist for minion masters. The cap that is discussed here, is creating a cap on top of the cap imposed by those other things.

I understand that it is a fun thing to someone but I think there should be a cap because necromancer is a profession which can improve their minions very far and it is kind of ridiculous to have so many minions at the same time. Even in the old days of gw1 there wasn’t something like this able to do. And these minions had a larger requirement to get them.

That’s only true if it turns out to be unbalanced. So far, most people do not seem to expect it to be unbalanced. Putting a cap on it ‘just in case’ is weird.

Why are necros so self-hating? No other forum asks for nerfs to themselves before their skills are even live. Go look at the Mesmers pretending Chronomancer is balanced.

Diovid.9506:

They are not capped in the same way though. All other minions are capped due to the number of minion skills you can slot, the duration of those minions and the cooldown time of the skills/traits. These caps already exist for minion masters. The cap that is discussed here, is creating a cap on top of the cap imposed by those other things.

Sry but that is wrong.
Phantasmals and illusions. Mesmers aren’t able to have more than 3 of them at the same time. That’s an example for an already existing hard cap for minions which is discussed in this thread. And I think the same should be for Rise!
Make it that way you are able to just have 6 of them at the same time.

If they did implement something like this I can’t help thinking it’d be just a knee-jerk overreaction on their part.

Like, if it causes problems, fix it, but so far it hasn’t and I doubt that it will in any achievable scenario outside the pvp lobby.

I’m not saying nerf necro clearly as I posted on top. But again, because this was pointed out already several times, not just by me but by other people, i choose to make a post for constructive ideas to prevent a butcher to necros “Rise” before it gets abused. That’s why I figured it was not an op move by any means, instead it had room to be abused. That is why there should not be a cap to minions in general due to one move. Instead, Rise should have a cap to a reasonable level. Perhaps “Rise” has limit of 10 minions it can have out total at a time. This would prevent Anet from future giving a limit to ALL minions at a time, meaning all minions would get nerfed due to one skill. Do you see where I am coming from? BTW I never thought necro was op. I believe necro along with ranger, are indeed the worst classes in the game. And many people already discussed on other forums that they both still need worked on more. Reaper is close to being complete, but the base necro is still at problem, leaving Reaper to still be limited to what it is capable of doing as well. I am a necro supporter, not a nerfer of the class. It is one of my favorite ones and needs to be perfect.

I agree Rash, Right now Perhaps even though there is room to break the skill, it still wont see it in pvp, or even wvw. Instead it will be seen to MAYBE be misused in pve. But the thing is, i doubt running enough reapers to break the skill would ever be a good choice. Otherwise during the raid beta EVERYONE would have used Reaper, which was not the case. The skill might actually be perfect where it is. If it is not, then simple, limit just the skills cap. But still above 6 total minions from it at a time. To make it useable still.

Another way of looking at it is, this has the potential to be a play style that actually rewards healing power investment, which is something that they’re meant to be trying to promote right now.

Kodama.6453:

Diovid.9506:

They are not capped in the same way though. All other minions are capped due to the number of minion skills you can slot, the duration of those minions and the cooldown time of the skills/traits. These caps already exist for minion masters. The cap that is discussed here, is creating a cap on top of the cap imposed by those other things.

Sry but that is wrong.
Phantasmals and illusions. Mesmers aren’t able to have more than 3 of them at the same time. That’s an example for an already existing hard cap for minions which is discussed in this thread. And I think the same should be for Rise!
Make it that way you are able to just have 6 of them at the same time.

I know. That is the only case though.