Guild Wars 2

As we know that minions have many bad issues such as AL , low hp and vulnerable to AOE.
I suggest a change that will make them much better.
( Talking about MM necro ) >> Specially in dungeons and crowded PvE , when they die , you will become too weak as they present 50% of your damage , healing and toughness.
The fix would be letting their summoning cd to start when they being called not when they die so we can resummon them immediately.
One more thing , life siphon skills and traits should be affected by healing power.

while this would be great for pve, for pvp you’d essentially have a constant swarm of goons to zerg a player, it’d be a bit OP 1v1.

it would be great though.

Too strong. In PvP you’d easily come into every fight with basically instant minion replacements. I don’t know how big of an issue it would be for minions like bone fiend, but it means you get two stun breaks via Flesh Wurm and 4x bone minion explosions (which is 10-12k damage), along with removing our biggest counterplay.

The Demonic Spirit.3157:

As we know that minions have many bad issues such as AL , low hp and vulnerable to AOE.
I suggest a change that will make them much better.
( Talking about MM necro ) >> Specially in dungeons and crowded PvE , when they die , you will become too weak as they present 50% of your damage , healing and toughness.
The fix would be letting their summoning cd to start when they being called not when they die so we can resummon them immediately.
One more thing , life siphon skills and traits should be affected by healing power.

They are not 50 percent of your damage unless you are running a bunker build. if you are rolling dagger or axe with zerker gear, they are maybe 25 to 30 percent of your damage, but they are a huge part of your survival.

Minions should be addressed, but this is not the way.

Unfortunately fixing the AI is a big programming problem compared to this kind of a bandage fix for the gunshot wound.

I suggest improving survivability (HP pool, toughness, regen out of combat) would be the best immediate fix if the resources aren’t available for fixing the AI properly.

Maybe a slight reduction in their base stats, and then have their damage, HP, and armor all scale with the Necromancer’s. I’d also say Blood Fiend’s siphon should heal itself/other minions (even at a % reduction) in some way, and I think there is room for discussion about them not being able to take more than X% of their max HP in one hit, or having AoE damage reduction, or something (can be split in PvE/PvP).

AI is always going to be an issue, and as long as they slightly improve the reliability of the non-ranged minions, then that is good enough.

I’d just like an “attack” icon so they’d at least do that once in awhile….

Bhawb.7408:

Too strong. In PvP you’d easily come into every fight with basically instant minion replacements. I don’t know how big of an issue it would be for minions like bone fiend, but it means you get two stun breaks via Flesh Wurm and 4x bone minion explosions (which is 10-12k damage), along with removing our biggest counterplay.

another knee jerk reaction from you thinking any change will make us OP.

we already have 2 stun breaks possible in very short succession from spectral walk and they are even insta cast

we can already put out 10-12 k damage more reliably in the 4 seconds it would take to blow up the minions cast 2 more and blow em both up again

Go ahead and think that, MMs are already one of the strongest 1v1 builds in the game and you want to remove one of two counterplay options we have.

Bhawb.7408:

Go ahead and think that, MMs are already one of the strongest 1v1 builds in the game and you want to remove one of two counterplay options we have.

perhaps you could come up with an argument that isn’t full of holes to convince me?

You can’t convince someone of something they don’t want to know. There are a lot of people that are dead-set on the idea that minions are terrible, and even if I posted hundreds of hours of me doing great with them they’d still say they are terrible.

If you are asking for changes, the burden of proof is on you to prove that minions are in need of the fixes you are asking for. I agree they could use some AI help, that their actives need work (fine in concept, just not execution), and that possibly reducing base stats in favor of scaling could work. I agree that they could use a reduction on AoE damage taken or possibly some reduction of damage they can take per hit max to make them more viable in PvE. But if you ask for bad changes that are going to throw us out of balance, I’m going to call you out on it.

Bhawb.7408:

I agree they could use some AI help

then why do you attack everyone who brings up bad ai in the necro forums

you need to make up your mind, a little consistency in your arguments would go a long way in building credibility and mobilizing the necro community with the cause of getting the fixes we deserve.

the devs do read these boards you know…

I don’t attack them, I’ve consistently tried to help them out. Its people who refuse to try anything that I lose patience with; it annoys me that people obviously don’t give a crap about trying to understand their build in the slightest and instead feel that it obviously must be the game’s fault, instead of spending even a little bit of time actually learning something.

Bhawb.7408:

I don’t attack them, I’ve consistently tried to help them out. Its people who refuse to try anything that I lose patience with; it annoys me that people obviously don’t give a crap about trying to understand their build in the slightest and instead feel that it obviously must be the game’s fault, instead of spending even a little bit of time actually learning something.

is this what you mean by “helping” people?

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Will-my-minions-start-attacking-on-the-30th/first#post1829458

you talk down to the guy and tell him it’s his fault?

then in this thread you admit there is problems?

how bout that consistency I was talking about?

Bhawb.7408:

You can’t convince someone of something they don’t want to know. There are a lot of people that are dead-set on the idea that minions are terrible, and even if I posted hundreds of hours of me doing great with them they’d still say they are terrible.

They’re terrible in the sense that they’re unreliable. Yeah, they work most of the time, but that one time you NEED them to work, but don’t, they just bring the whole idea of minions crashing down into a big pile of fail. Especially in tPvP. I’ve tried your minion bunker build. As long as I have minions, its pretty good, until an engineer or elementalist shows up, but thats not what this discussion is about.

However, on more than one occasion they’ve bugged out and failed to work correctly, especially Bone Minions. Losing a fight because you’ve invested all your traits and strategy into minions that sometimes have the chance to fail is why people still call them terrible. If you can’t rely on something to work 100% of the time, what good is it? Its crap, thats what it is.

An example that happened to me a few weeks ago. I get downed by a thief, but its a close fight, and I also manage to down the thief with my minions. As soon as I downed him, all of my minions just stop. Every single one. Then walk back over to me and just stand there. None of my downed abilities are causing my minions to respond and attack the thief again. Meanwhile, I’m getting destroyed by the thief because his throwing daggers are bouncing back and forth between me and my minions, granting him extra damage against me. Had my minions not failed and continued to attack the downed thief, I would have easily out damaged him and rallied. Never seen this problem happen with ranger pets or the mesmers clones/phantasms.

Fair point. I don’t personally feel like I am perfect enough at my gameplay yet to blame it on my minions (when I think over the few fair fights I do lose, I can usually point to myself every time), but I do understand that they are unreliable. I guess in my mind I don’t see them being any less reliable than say a well, that someone can walk out of, or any other build, which has similar weaknesses; a weakness of minions is that they go full kitten sometimes.

I tend to just work around their issues, instead of worry overly about them. I would love it if they would make AI more solid, especially before they go changing things (that aren’t revolving around making existing things more usable, like changing Charge), but again I just don’t really treat it any different than a lot of other utilities we have.

I hope that ANet tells us their thoughts about it