Guild Wars 2

As suggestions are now encouraged to be made in their respective areas instead of the suggestions archive, I am making this suggestion again here in the hopes of garnering more opinions on this concept from those who play necromancer. I’d love to hear what you think!

I may be in the minority, but I really do not enjoy the way minions are handled in GW2, especially since it was so incredible in GW1.

I understand that there are reasons for why resurrecting minions from corpses was not implemented in GW2, but I feel that the way minions are currently handled is not ideal and is also lacking in depth. There is a lot of potential still to be had with the GW2 necromancer regarding minion acquisition and management over simply ‘buying’ a summon skill with skill points to summon one of the few predefined kinds.

Imagine if, just as the ranger has to ‘charm’ a juvenile pet for it to be selectable in the pet management, that a necromancer would need to kill an enemy/adult animal and perform a 10 second ritual or something which summons a dead/death-touched version of it, thus binding the soul/its essence to you and it then being able to be summoned in this proposed necromancer minion management. Necromancers could then be able to share some of the same pet control mechanics as the ranger in regards to controlling minions.

It wouldn’t have to be all types of animals that can be resurrected as the ranger has many of the same types of animals it can ‘charm’. Death form of animals could be one of each species; e.g. a feline, a drake, a spider, etc, but would look like dark, twisted versions of them…instead of just a re-skinning, though I’d not complain about that if that were the case. Or it could have nothing to do with animals and be entirely focused on species like Centaurs, or Humans, or even turn a Risen to do your bidding (maybe not Risen, lore likely prevents that).

Due to the increased control over minions (such as a ranger with directing their pet), being able to summon two or three minions at once would then be possible only to those necromancers who trait into minion controlling. To counter the OP nature of having three controllable pets, I would then like to see the return of the mechanic of minions constantly losing health and the need for sustaining your summons through sacrificing your own health, or better yet, your life force bar for death shroud. It would be interesting to have to choose between assuming death shroud or using the life force stored there through killing enemies to heal your minions.

And if you have two (or the max of 3) summoned minions, keeping the additional ones alive would be very taxing on your life force bar, so keeping and maintaining one or two would be ideal, but a third wouldn’t be impossible if there are plenty of enemies to fuel your life force bar. Even then, converting the life force into health for sustaining the minions could be attached to minion F-key skills with a cool down so you could only heal each of them so often.

[Continued…]

[…Continued]
But, with more minions summoned, the less control the necro has over them.
1 Summon:
F1 – Heals Summon #1
F2 – Special ability for Summon #1 much like the F2 ability on ranger pets.
F3 – Sacrifice the minion and cause a poisonous explosion at their location.
F4 – Sacrifice the minion for its life force (remaining health) to fuel death shroud ability instead.

2 Summons: By having 2 minions, the necro forgoes the special ability for Minion #1.
F1 – Heals Summon #1
F2 – Heals Summon #2
F3 – Sacrifice a random minion and cause a poisonous explosion at their location.
F4 – Sacrifice a random minion for its life force (remaining health) to then use for healing the remaining minion or to use as fuel for death shroud ability instead.

3 Summons: By having 3 minions, the necro forgoes the poisonous explosion ability.
F1 – Heals Summon #1
F2 – Heals Summon #2
F3 – Heals Summon #3
F4 – Sacrifice a random minion for its life force (remaining health) to then use for healing remaining summons or to use as fuel for death shroud ability instead.

Or simply limit it to 2 max summons and maintain the F3 and F4 functionality defined above in the 2 Summons area. Can also have it to where the initial summoning of a minion uses half of the life force bar, as needing life force to summon a minion makes sense. So the necro can choose to use the life force to create a new minion, to use it to heal an existing one, or sacrifice an existing one and then summon a new one if there is enough life force in reserve.

I make this suggestion primarily as a plea for the dark, necrotic side of the Necromancer to make its return. It deserves it. For the existing players that like how summons work currently, during character creation of a new necro, what way they want minions to be (current vs proposed) could be tied to a selection:

Current: “I wield the souls of creatures granted to me by X god.”
Proposed: “I dominate and control the souls of creatures of my own choosing.”

However, under the new minion acquisition and management, several skill unlocks would no longer exist that relate to the existing minions; e.g. minion summoning skills. So it might not be possible to allow existing necromancers to switch to the proposed form of minion acquisition and management, though I believe that it can be worked out to allow switching via a trait to where those summon skills are replaced with other minion related skills.

I know there is still a lot to work out on details and balancing, but it should only be implemented into PvE for starters and not in PvP modes as it could introduce a lot of issues with the existing balance for those modes of play.

However, I still believe that the changes that have been made in the name of balance in PvP and WvW should not have also been forced onto PvE players. These modes of play should remain completely separate from eachother; different skills and different traits ideally, but balance changes to PvP/WvW should not have any effect on PvE, just as the opposite should be true.

Anyone have additional thoughts or comments on this idea?

Previous response in old suggestion:

RoseGirl.1467
I agree that we really need more control over the necromancer minions. Quite often i’m running around and they decide to go fight a random boar or something, or if i’m running from a fight in WvW or something, my minions stay behind and slow me down. I do like the idea of the F1 F2 idea, like a cross between ranger and Engineer, which would give more control over minions, not sure about the healing idea though as most Minion Masters use staff, which can heal minions through the number 1 skill. However I especially want a button like the ranger pets ‘Return to me’.

I’ll go through this in detail, but I have to debate something you said:

I may be in the minority, but I really do not enjoy the way minions are handled in GW2, especially since it was so incredible in GW1.

Handling Minions in GW1 was kittening horrible. You had exactly 0 control over what they did, summoning/maintaining them required both corpses (so they were entirely barred from a lot of play), and generally a massive HP drain on your party (MMs often required near-dedicated healers, although this was fine). It was fun because you could have 10 of them out (12 with boosted Death Magic, infinite pre a patch) and because of the pretty intense microing and feeling like a god when you were snowballing. But it really had little to do with the minion-mechanics themselves, and more the mechanics that were used after minions were summoned.

Also, it sounds like you are misunderstanding a few core things about Necromancer minions in GW2. We are not Rangers, they aren’t pets. In fact they are basically worthless to us: expendable servants that we can and will readily replace when they expire. Hell we even blow them up because we need a little HP. Also, we do not raise zombies. Yes they look like mobs, but that is very likely because they are re-textured mobs: lore-wise though they are just golems of dead flesh.

Honestly, you are asking for them to completely not just change, but essentially do a 180 on everything that minions are right now. This would arguably be okay, because there are plenty of ways to do the “summoner” approach. But at this point in the game’s development, it is far too late to fundamentally change how an entire set of skills function.

At their core, minions are fine as they are right now. They could use some tuning, and as Sikari has proposed in the past they could probably due to have slight reductions in their (fairly high) single target DPS and be given cleave. But any changes that they do need (and they do need a few) and any additions that are made (like new minion types/expanded playstyles) are just expanding on/perfecting the current system. No need for an entirely new system when ours is just fine.

I stopped reading once you got to this part:
“I would then like to see the return of the mechanic of minions constantly losing health.”

Adding to that, I would say a big no thanks to you. As Bhawb explained, it was a pain to get going in GW1 and am glad that that mechanic did not return in GW2.

Without dedicated healers in the game, keeping up all your minions would be nearly impossible in GW2. We can give some regeneration to them, true, but the cap is 5, includes you and priritizes anything else than minions themselves.

Also, we’re not a type of summoner. It wouldn’t really work in competitive MMO to just sit back and spawn more and more minions when not engaging in fight actively.
As Bhawb said, minions in GW2 do not have any will or mind (even if it would be some nice stuff for some dungeon… Crazy summoner who tried to give his minions mind and they rebel :p ), spawns are just the way of executions master’s will. Also, they’re optional.
And we already have class mechanic.

I believe that further expansion of Death Shroud might bring some new things to the table. We still have 6 places empty and now they’re “utilities”