Guild Wars 2

Hello everyone, huge fan of Minion masters here, especially since its the only Necromancer that makes me feel necromancer-like. While I don’t want them to be over powered I do think some things could use looking at to make them slightly more viable, and hopefully in group PvP too.

1. Have a hidden “shadow leash” type effect. This is to say, all minions are bound to their master by a shadow leash, and if they leave the leash range of 1550-2000, they would be shadow-stepped back to the master. This helps with control when traveling the map, and allow them to quickly catch up if you end up too far ahead of them ready for a new fight, rather than waiting on them to take their time getting to you. Perhaps have the leash effect shortened when not having dealt damage in the past 10 seconds so even if it takes a while for combat to officially “drop” your minions can catch up to you quicker.

2. (Removed, merged with 1.)

3. Change Shadow fiend to be a ranged minion that shoots a shadow orb that “explodes” on impact dealing AoE. This gives Minion masters (a very little) bonus to their aoe which they could use in pvp, and the shadow fiend won’t spend most of its time trying to catch up to the enemy and hopefully with stand further out of aoe, leading to at least 1 more efficient pet who doesn’t die by aoe in 4 seconds.

4. Change Shadow Fiend’s “on use” ability to swap places with the shadow fiend acting as a stun breaker, while still blinding the target after the swap finishes. It is different than the wurm as it still deals less damage directly, and doesn’t trigger an aoe poison.

5. Make Syphon health effects also heal all of your minions. This is a smaller buff to survivability than boons would be, and not very over powered, considering the heals aren’t very heavy.

6. Give minions an out of combat regen. The flesh golem can, its just kind of annoying, with them not being a duration pet, but actual pets until killed, I just think it’s the right way to go about it. If not this, allow is to unsummon them on demand so we can heal them ourselves even if we wait out the CD. Being forced to enter a fight with a 5% hp minion even if out of combat for 2 minutes is just frustrating.

7. Allow Syphon Health effects to scale with Healing Power. Simply enough I don’t like stuff that doesn’t scale at all.

That’s all, I don’t think its over the top, mostly quality of life things. What do you think?

Edit Cleared up some points that Bhawb pointed out to me, left my opinions on some things unchanged, just made my points a bit clearer.

1) They do this in PvE, I think it would be a welcome change
2) Redundant point, if they leave leash range they come back anyway, and they already attack your target so long as you are changing their aggro (need to iron out the bugs here though, aggro should always work).
3) I think they should keep Shadow Fiend melee, but instead give him the proper changes/buffs to survive longer, and maybe a bit better active. Otherwise he is great because of his high attack rate (mo attack mo siphons).
4) No thanks, this is effectively what Flesh Wurm does. Like I said above I’d prefer they just slightly buff his active.
5) Minions are affected by boons. This is why MM + AoE allied buffing is very strong (spirits, guardians, eles). But I do agree they need some better healing
6) Agreed, all minions should have out of combat regen like Fleshy

I apologize about the boon thing, I read somewhere that they were not affected by boons, my current build doesn’t really use boons so its hard to test that myself. However, to add, I also think they should have an increased speed, and reaction time. They tend to have a HORRIBLE time keeping up on the most basic pvp enemies, let alone a thief… they basically stand around…

No problem. Its actually something I’m surprised people don’t take advantage of. Minion builds do crazy damage, and with Guardians being able to buff them + eles being able to indirectly buff the crap out of them with fields, they don’t suffer in team fights (assuming your team is coordinated). I need to find a ranger who’d be willing to run spirits now that they got that buff, now that I think about it.

I definitely agree they need to make it so AI works 100% of the time. I don’t think they should have increased speed though, I think that should be the MM’s job to control the enemy, while the enemy tries to run away.

Yeah, good point, my MM build has a decent amount of CC. And to be perfectly honest, I probably wouldn’t have the issues I have with them catching the target with a shadow-leash effect and their AI/reaction time being enhanced. Most of my issues is trying to get them to join the fight when coming from a really far distance away.

Updated initial post to be a little clearer.