Have you ever watched one of those old Zombie movies and notice they always start the same? Slow build up and confusion into full blown chaos?
I’m going to be suggesting some serious changes to the Minions that I feel will be a happy middle ground to people who want to be able to have their minions at the start of the fight and those who want them to be spammable. Although nothing I say will even matter if the AI doesn’t get fixed first. The reason for this suggestion isn’t to make them viable in one game type but to insure that they have a place in all game types, not just PvP. Because as we all know, if minion AI was fixed tomorrow and functioned perfectly it would still see no real play in PvE and probably not WvW except maybe as a Joke.
To start us off, minions are currently extremely fragile and its vital that all of them survive for a Minion build to work. As much as I love the Sarcastic way my human necromancer saying “It’s my own fault for making them so disposable.” minions are anything but disposable. If your minions die, that’s your utility gone, your heal gone, your elite gone. Depending how much you want to dedicate to your minions. Now since people seem to get confused when I say “Disposable” I don’t mean “fragile”. Fine china is fragile, but anything but disposable. Paper plates, however are extremely disposable. Minions should be the latter. A single minion should be far less impactful to a fight then, say, a engineer’s turret or a guardian’s spirit weapon. But the advantage of the minions should be their strength in numbers. Your goal as a Minion master should be to overwhelm your foe with low quality, high quantity, dumb and aggressive minions.
“Quantity, not Quality. Quality takes too much time.” __Necromancer Wisdom
So without any more delay lets get started on the actual suggestion.
Reduce Minion cool Downs: Minions at the moment, if they get destroyed you’ll often have to wait quite a while before they can be summoned again. This isn’t good for their spammability. Now only reduce the cool down of the summoning of minions and not their activated abilities. This is an important distinction. A minion’s cool down shouldn’t be higher then 20 seconds and the only minion with such a high cool down should be the flesh golem. Blood fiend should come in at the second longest cool down at 10 seconds and all other minions should sit at a low 5 second cool down. I know this sounds pretty insane, but don’t worry I have a way to balance this out.
Make minions cost Life force, or if you don’t have enough life force, Your actual health.: At the beginning of a fight you could safely spawn all your minions without worrying about other players or the cost of life force. But since these are going to be your primary source of both defense and offense you should be willing to give something up for your fleshy buddies. With such a low cool down there needs to be a trade off to get them back. The necromancer isn’t unfamiliar with sacrificing health. Your health pool should be treated like a resource. We are the dark masters, the black mage. We study forbidden magic. This is just par to the course. How much they should cost? I’m thinking a percent of your life/LF and not a set number. So Bone minions might be 10% while bone fiend might be 5% but these numbers can be adjusted as needed.
Increase the number of minions we can spawn in a fight: Like I said, quantity, not quality. We should have a snowball effect with our minions where it starts out simple enough and as we continue can begin to get out of hand. Bone minions should spawn 3 minions rather then 2. Like it was supposed to at the start of the game. Jagged horrors shouldn’t have health decay. I think with this we could see the numbers increase. This would mean if your foe doesn’t take care of you, you can cause more problems down the road. But its not like you’d be unbeatable. The minions would still have the fragility they always had before along with their kitten y way of walking through aoe fields but thats okay. AoE should counter large minion spawning but not hard counter it like it so easily does now.
These are just my thoughts on the direction anet should go with the minions. Before you leave a comment, remember how arena net thinks. They start things off completely powerful in testing and slowly roll it back. We, as a community tend to self nerf before any chance and what we get is a faint shadow of of what we are fighting for and doesn’t change anything for us. So I’ll ask you to think on it first, then leave a comment.
(edited by Lily.1935)