Intro (Expect a long read. I love this set up, but it needs love and attention. There’s no TL;DR, this is for the people who care about the future of MM, and for the Devs. Thanks for your time, feel free to be a part of it!)
Hello everyone, it’s High Warlord Sikari, many PvPers have come to know me as a stand-out Minion Master Necromancer. I’m trying my hardest to increase viability to this wonderful potential build, but we need the eyes and ears of ANet. For too long the build has been over shadowed by Power Wells and Conditions as for viability, mostly due to intent of minions not matching viability options. Since June 25th that has been increased in the gap. I’ll lay out the thicket of the minion master, here, and let’s try to get it the attention it deserves! The following will have everything I can detail for the Minion master, including recent changes, effective builds, suggestions/concerns, and anything you personally feel is important.
(About me: Most of my credibility comes from 1v1/SoloQue as well as Live Casted 1v1 Tournament Events. Currently 605 on Leaderboard.)
-Additional note, I keep in contact with JonathanSharp providing him with community feedback as well as other information in regards to the Minion Master as a whole.
Overall Design
The intent of the Guild Wars 2 Necromancer is to use summoned minions to deal harm to enemies, provide additional utilities, but overall be disposable. This means the developers consciously decided that pets should not have 100% up time, and that the class was built around them being a utility, not a major source of their raw DPS in a sustained fight, and that them going under is all part of the plan. Now, that’s all well and good, but there’s a core problem with that logic. The traits don’t support that.
The fact is, a real “Minion Master” build, which is something that by design of the game should be very viable, doesn’t work, and only Hybrids that use things like Flesh Golem as an elite, or Bone minions just for the explosion, which is a pitiful excuse for minions. Needless to say this design is flawed. Our minion traits are so bloated, if we want to run with minions, at the least, about 4-5 major traits need to be sunk into them. Again, this would be fine except when they are down (3 of which are sacrificed when used) we are running around almost traitless.
Further more, our traits weren’t really designed for them to be killed (minus one). With needing to invest so many traits to make them viable, we find that with them dead or if we try to hybrid and use fewer pets, those traits begin to dwindle, especially seen in the blood region. HP siphon from pets, pets taking conditions, Pets ripping boons (death) etc are all useless with few pets or when they’re dead. And if you plan on running Blood the slightest amount of AOE kills our sources of healing, which is what we use to offset the lack of stun breaks, vigor, protection, you name it. So, they want them to be disposable, but that really puts us in a rough spot when asking “why”? Unlike and other build’s pets, they don’t have a duration, and a mass majority of their use requires almost full up time. As for damage, we lose a lot of damage speccing into them as the Necromancer. The damage from minions is less reliable, and lower than Phantasms, and our damage is lowered to off set the traits we had to spend to make them even close to useful.
All that needs to be done is change the mind set a little bit. 3 of our minions are disposable by nature. Why not get into the mind set that some of the Minion Master’s minions are meant to be sacrificed, while others are not, then we’re not so forced into a hole where many of our pets are being blown to bits as soon as they look at an enemy or zerg. I’ll explain what steps need to be taken below, and hopefully my vision of a better tomorrow for Minion masters will start to make sense, and we can bring the one man army build to some sort of viability.
Warlord Sikari (80 Scrapper)
(edited by ronpierce.2760)