I am sad to see this thread not stickied, as necros account for 1/8 of played professions and most play with minions, not without them, as well as the other classes which use summons.
Necro minions and summons in general (as I suspect their AI is shared) need to be refined considerably.
Common minion issues:
- minion movement is far too uncontrolled. Minions should take up a designated place around the summoner, depending on how many of them need to be accomodated in the space around him, then need to stick to that position as close as possible, not wander around the necro, sometimes leashing out in this or that direction, increasing and decreasing the necro’s effective agro radius. Like in GW1, minions should take up their post around the necro and not move AN INCH RELATIVE TO THE NECRO, unless the necro swings into combat. Just like in GW1, I want to see a tight circle of summons around me, not a loose bunch of minions, some of them here some of them there.
-minion agro control is VERY lenient and uncontrollable by the necro. Minions (especially the flesh golem, but to a lesser extent all minions, including jagged horrors from kills) sometimes take up targets after the current target is dead, even if the player hasn’t even targeted or looked at the mob which the minions rush after immediately after ending current combat. It may have to do with mobs in proximity, or mobs within the “agro” range of minions? In any case, a minion pulling unintentional monsters is unacceptable behaviour.
-minion targeting is almost satisfactory, but still missing functionality, as in a target rich environment sometimes minions will fail to switch over to your current target. This makes it hard for the necro to focus their minion damage on a desired target. If this is supposed to work as in GW1 (minions cannot be controlled), then why do some minions sometimes switch to your current target and sometimes do not? Unpredictability is worse than knowing if minion targeting is working as intended or is not. The lack of targeting is another issue, where minions will simply fail to aquire a target within an acceptable time or at all, and just sit idle in the midst of a fight, not attacking anything. This is just as unacceptable (3 months into the game no less) as if there was a spell for some other class that you could cast but simply wouldn’t do any damage. Summoned minions are expected 100% of the time to take active part in combat (preferrably on your current target).
In short, please work on fixing the AI, or at least give us some news that it is undergoing fixing at least. Thank you.
( very sad