Guild Wars 2

The necromancer is suffering from many things, but most of all it’s weapon diversity. As of right now there isn’t a ranged weapon alternative for power focused builds, and besides mark of blood on the staff, there isn’t a lot that has synergy with minion masters. So I tried to come up with a weapon that works for both.
weapon: great sword or sword/sword

skill 1: shadow strike: swing your sword, Firing a shadow in front of you that travels along the ground, the shadow homes in on the target. This shadow will hit all enemies in it’s path to the enemy dealing X damage, and applies vulnerability to all that are hit. (projectile finisher 20%)

skill 2: shallow grave: the necromancer stabs into the ground with his shadowy blade, the ground of targeted area is ripped open, applying cripple and summoning X jagged horrors. These are exactly the same as jagged horrors summoned from lich form or the re-animator trait. has a X second cooldown. (blast finisher)

skill 3: spirit of anguish: summon a wraith who generates 3% life force on hit, deals X damage on hit, and has a 15 second life span. (cooldown is 30 seconds)

skill 4: taste of death: the necromancer swings his sword, sending out a green vertical blade/shockwave, applies weakness to enemies hit while dealing X damage, and swiftness to Allies it hits. (20 second cooldown)

skill 5: blood of the master: apply X stacks of bleeding to yourself, you heal x allies around you for X amount and damage enemies around you for x amount. (50 second cooldown)

*I purposefully left some of the statistics ambiguous as I don’t know what the fine balance needed to be met is.

*minion traits DO affect the minions summoned by this weapon (as far as health, damage, and health siphoning goes, not the cooldown).

As you can see, this weapon only deals direct damage, summons minions, and applies conditions that are beneficial to the power builds, and is not reliant on condition damage. There are already 2 condition ranged weapons, so I feel like this would create a good alternative. Not to mention, minions deal direct damage as well, so they too benefit greatly from vulnerability and such.

Yes, I’d much prefer they fix the AI than give us direct control.

And no “just ignore the tool you’re given” isn’t an option as that is purposefully playing badly.

I agree. However I’m worried Anet won’t give the out of combat regen due to how kitten easy it would make world exploring. You would basically be invincible outside of dungeons and WvWvW/s-tPvP. . .

Vangy.7403:

add to all the above a nice PET UI so you can actually control your pets.. and ofc The AI so they can do that rather than just stay and watch the fight… ;-)

I’d honestly rather not get minion control UI. It takes away from the whole “mindless undead” thing.

they have different teams for different jobs. I get the feeling they are trying to fix all classes equally before focusing on one single one.

however, considering there were 3 patches of most of the other classes getting bug fixes before us, idk anymore. I’m just happy a chunk of them were fixed, and hope the rest are eventually.

wells are very solid for PvE. They give a lot of survivability, utility, and damage. The fact they work in PvP astounds me. In PvE they should kitten on mobs since they aren’t smart enough to avoid them (mostly).

I definitely love minions. I’m perfectly fine with us not having complete control on them as they are after all, mindless undead. however their mindlessness is a little much. Once they fix minion AI and a bunch of the trait bugs, I feel like minion master will be a very solid spec.

Also, necros aren’t a “minion master only class”, far from it. However the minion master spec is extremely iconic for necro.

don’t think of it as “power, crit, condition spec” think of it as a combination of utilities. So look at it like “wells, blood magic, condition, minion master, death shroud”. Then pick up the stats best for your playstyle within that category.

so for example, if you’re doing a death shroud build you might want to bring spectral utilities as they generate a lot of life force. Since death shroud, it’s utilities and the axe/warhorn combo (the best weapon set for death shroud IMO) all rely on physical damage, you might want to get a high power/toughness/vitality.

forice.3165:

i will delete this thread very soon if someone insults my build again.

Dude grow up. If you don’t want criticism then don’t post your build for the public to see.

I like the idea of a minion master focused weapon. I don’t think it will happen, and is probably my own personal bias, but i would love it.

I use a staff and then something+off hand dagger. It gives you a lot of weakness to spread around doing aggressive protection of your minions.

Tutch.2496:

Regarding Minion Abilities

- They shouldn’t interrupt your actions (e.g reviving someone)

Flesh Golem “Rush” bug
- When out of a target, the rush is supposed to be faced to the Golem’s facing direction. Tested it at WvW today and the Golem (which was autochasing an enemy in a battle) turned around to used it.

all of the minion abilities (outside of putrid explosion and flesh wurm teleport) have cast times, so I believe that’s why they interrupt.

I don’t agree with putting training of the master in death magic. That only nerfs minion masters.

If you activate the “summon blood fiend” skill while in the middle of summoning another minion, it will cancel the first minion skill and summon the blood fiend instead. It treats the cancel as an interrupt and puts the first skill on cooldown.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/en/?fQEQNAW7YjEal6ta2a07JCpHRjaTbSR3AHki3LNA;TABgyyuEcJ5S1liLKiMEJIySkjIJRrAGKsVYiB
(if the link doesn’t work you can copy it and paste the url directly)
this is the purest form of minion master I could find. It focuses heavily on utilizing the minions and supporting your allies. This is mostly a PvE build.

More or less you want to maintain weakness on your enemies at all times. Healing power is really wasted on you despite having a 6 second cooldown AOE regen that heals for a third of your self heal, so you want to focus on maintaining weakness as a form of aggressive protection. Thanks to your staff’s blast finisher, all the poison combo fields you create, and the dagger enfeebling blood, you will be hard pressed not to have it up constantly. Your allies will love you for the 25% reduced enemy DPS.

Use mark of blood to heal your minions or allies, don’t run up to enemies to heal yourself with it. Outside of dungeons you should never ever get downed due to your immense toughness and all the passive healing you receive from minions. In a dungeon the last thing you want to do is run up to the enemy on low health.

Save your reaper’s mark (the fear) for when enemies are all over your bone fiend or you. It’s counter productive to use it otherwise as it spreads enemies out, reducing your AOE spells’ effectiveness.

Conditions on you are nothing to fret about. putrid mark automatically transfers all of your conditions onto the enemy even if you aren’t in the blast radius (this is probably a bug, but idk). The dagger’s deathly swarm gives you another way to remove conditions, so between them you should be fine.

Death shroud should be used every time life transfer is off cooldown. No matter how much you stack condition damage the damage from life blast over all is more than any auto attack you can dish out thanks to the might. At the moment my necro doesn’t have full exotic, but despite stacking condition damage my scepter hits for a grand total of 450 damage (including the bleed damage) while life blast hits for a consistent 1k. You basically use life transfer when you can for the AOE damage and heal, then use life blast until you get to half life force. Remember, death shroud needs to be used proactively in this build. Since you aren’t a death shroud necro it will NOT work as an OH kitten button at all.

Use minion actives whenever possible in mob fights, but with a bit of finese. I’ll try to explain how to utilize them well.

shadow fiend; use the blind on enemies who are about to/using a big windup heavy blow. blind still makes AOEs miss entirely. It’s also good when 2-3 enemies are tightly packed together. The cooldown is short, so feel free to use it to begin a fight with enemies as well. (this also happens to be a good way to avoid the “afk minions” ai bug.)

bone minions: use their putrid explosion whenever possible. Their auto attack damage over the course of 10 seconds is less than 1/3rd the damage putrid explosion does to a single target. Use it whenever there is a combo field around, or if the bone minions are in a big mob. just keep an eye on which one is closer. One of them tends to stand next to you for most of the battle, and you don’t want to waste them.

flesh golem: his AOE knock down is probably your best CC available. watch where he is on the battle field and target the enemy directly opposite of where he is. If you do it correctly he will charge straight through the center of the fight doing the most damage possible.

bone fiend; this one is pretty hard to use. atm he really just tends to root enemies right next to him causing his own death, just use it right at the beginning of a fight and whenever it’s off cooldown and hope he doesn’t die for it.

blood fiend: consume it ONLY if you’re at 25% HP or know the boss can one shot you from your current health pool. It’s passive heal and the health it also gives you from vampiric minions tends to be quite nifty, and you’d be surprised what you can live through. The consumption should only be a panic button.

In boss fights try to use them as clutch spells only. The blind still works but is much harder to time, the flesh golem charge will only interrupt if the planets/defiant charges are in line so use it to interrupt and hope it works. The bone fiends root removes a defiant charge I believe, so use it when possible.

I’ve had many instances where enemies continue to attack me long after I’ve stealth. This happens most often with ranged enemies. AOEs that were locked onto you before you stealth seem to hit you after you stealth regardless of if you moved out of the way or not (as far as AI goes).

feast of corruption is more of a life force generator spell really. (like staff auto attack, or scepter necrotic bite).

GW1 minion master wasn’t complicated, it was tedious. I mained a necro in GW and loved minion mastering, but now I simply cannot play him anymore.
-minions degenerating and in large numbers meant you needed to bring blood of the master in order to heal them, which was a huge toll on the healer of your group.
-minions constantly degenerating and dieing mean’t you needed to stop after a fight and create a bunch of minions, typically leading to your party leaving you behind. You would end up spending more time lagging behind than helping.
-If you were a minion master you damage relied solely on your party successfully setting you up with many bodies, putting them at a man down at the beginning.
-If a zone didn’t have a large amount of bodies, you were forced to swap to another spec to be useful.
-You could not MM in any high end dungeon due to the massive amount of AOEs flying around and enemy damage. Not only that, but they pulled aggro when it would cause your party to wipe.

In GW2 I’ve found minion mastering to be so much more enjoyable. There isn’t any “skill” involved with minion mastering in GW1 outside of death nova. While here in GW2 there are:
-minion actives to utilize
-minion positioning to take into account for the actives
-choosing the proper targets for your minions
-proper use of death shroud (transfusion is wonderful for minions)
-your own positioning
-your own spells
-swapping between weapon sets
-ect

minion mastering in GW1 was as follows:
-stand next to dead body and push [minion summon skill]
-activate minion healing skill when they’re all low on health
-maintain they’re buffs
-don’t stand in stupid spots

Minion master is overall MUCH more engaging and challenging than it ever was in GW1. Maintaining the minion army does not count as skillful in GW1 as none of it required timing except for MAYBE the minion heal. Even then you ended up needing to spam the heal keeping them alive.

negatives:
-They said necros needed the most love a while ago, but yet have given only nerfs
-A large amount of bugs carried from BWEs to the release for some reason

positives:
+said in a week or more we should see bug fixes

positives in the right light:
~A large number of the bugs are borderline game breaking, which means a bug fix could be the equivalent of a massive buff.
~We could still end up seeing that necro love

Before coming to any conclusion I’d give Anet the week or two more and see if they follow up.

for me personally, I use Death shroud whenever life transfer is off cooldown for the transfusion AOE heal. It’s nice that it seems to heal an indefinite amount of targets (great for my minions). Once that’s all cast and done I get maybe 1-2 auto attacks out of it and then wait for the life transfer cooldown.
Outside of the life transfer heal, there isn’t any reason for me to use it as a minion master. My staff auto attacks hit for the same damage and can fly through multiple targets, while my scepter also applies bleeding with it’s auto attack making life blast pointless. Doom is really pathetic (only a one second fear without anything else done what-so-ever) so it isn’t even really a factor as to why I enter death shroud. Dark path is barely on board, if only because the chill+bleed+port make setting up life transfer easier. (btw, the teleport from dark path doesn’t interrupt your spell casting.)

death shroud doesn’t yield much survivability unless you’re specc’d into it.

generally speaking you will be kiting no matter what class you play. Like AuraofMana said, you will need to be light on your feet no matter the situation as the enemy will kitten down your throat if given the chance. The necromancer also happens to have the fewest ways of out right avoiding damage, so you have to be even more careful with your positioning and dodge’s vs other classes.

striker.3704:

Training of the master doesn’t adjust the damage on the minion tooltips. In fact it doesn’t seem to increase the damage at all.

I looked into training of the master, and apparently it DOES increase the damage, but it doesn’t change the tooltip in PvE or in town. (I’m not sure about PvP)

I tried to take a screenshot but apparently it doesn’t capture tooltips. just stand in lion’s arch with training of the master active. at level 80 it still says the flesh golem hits for 770, when it should say it hits for 1001.

the necromancer is pretty hard countered by guardians (condition removal) and mesmers (can cancel out every single necromancer elite with moa morph). Until bugs are fixed and the meta shifts, don’t PvP with them. Otherwise they’re OK in PvE.

Training of the master doesn’t adjust the damage on the minion tooltips. In fact it doesn’t seem to increase the damage at all.

I keep playing mine because it’s fun. I haven’t run into an instance yet where I can’t accomplish the goal I set out for. Due to the nature of this game being (outside of PvP) friendly instead of competitive I don’t feel pressure to play another character as my “main”. However, it would be nice if the bugs were fixed.

the only things the strengthen minions are training of the master and flesh of the master.

I don’t see how you can call this a minion master build without the minion master trait.
imo true MM goes something like:
20 spite, 30 death magic, 20 blood
get retaliation and training of the master from spite
get minion master, flesh of the master, and death nova from death magic
get transfusion and vampiric minions from blood magic
scepter/dagger and staff give you a lot of supportive AOE spells (especially the weakness from the dagger offhand and regeneration from staff)

you don’t need to resort to “crying” slander to try and sway your argument. I understand your logic however it still doesn’t change my opinion.
-as it is channeling is an extremely situational instance, and the toughness added during it doesn’t support many builds (maybe blood magic dagger builds, and life transfer during Death shroud but that’s about it. both of which are more susceptible to CC.) So I don’t particularly see the benefit of toughness during channeling, especially as a minor trait.
-as a major trait even if the jagged horrors were buffed as you said they would be lack luster. as-is they don’t pass for a minor.
-retaliation when healing seems unusual. It would make more sense for retaliation during a health threshold.
however,

+your math is sound on protection of the horde, and it is a pretty situational major.

-condition necromancer is the only viable build atm (it’s pulled of pretty well)
-health stealing necro is sub par at best due to how flat siphoning is
-minion master necro suffers greatly from minion AI

for a power build you really want an axe. dagger is more of a “health siphon” build weapon, but even then it’s sorta lack luster.

the axe has great synergy with death shroud builds, which focus on raw power. In all honesty it doesn’t need a bleed. As it is the necromancer relies way too heavily on conditions.

when putrid explosion is used to activate the feedback combo field, there is a consistent 2-3 second delay before you get the combo effect.

yeah I really enjoy that too, but a minor trait should never rely on a grand master trait to be useful.Not only because it forces you to take a grand master trait to enjoy it, but also that it’s far more likely for people to get a minor trait from an off tree than a grand master. In fact I think overall it would make more sense to:
-remove the degen from jagged horrors
-allow bone minions to activate death nova when killed by putrid explosion
*this is to circumvent the lack of guarenteed poison AOEs when MMing
-increase the cooldown
-allow the minion master trait to reduce the jagged horror trait cooldown
This way people who spec into death magic but aren’t minion masters get something out of it. The jagged horrors won’t do much on their own without the minion traits so I don’t think they would be OP as a minor trait, but still provide something useful. The trade off is that you won’t have an easy AOE poison right off the bat.

as of right now the jagged horror trait does literally nothing in sPvP as there isn’t that much dieing around you. In PvE it’s [marginally] useful for an easy poison combo field, but overlaps with your other minions who die anyway. In WvW it’s awesome for easy poison to spread (poison is glorious in WvW). I’d honestly trade off the easy poison field for a more reliable low damage “don’t kill me or I poison you” meat bag.

hell, I remember in another thread someone recommended making it an “on hit” trait which would be pretty cool too.

Dorpen.4653:

I don’t play my necromancer very much but I was thinking the minions feel extremely weak compared to GW1.

I would have agreed with you during BWE 1-2-3, but I’ve actually gone back and played GW1 to help my brother get his HoM stuff right before launch, and I gotta say I disagree.

In GW1 your minions were incredibly squishy. their strength was in sheer numbers and massive auto attack overload. However comparatively they were even worse.
-minions were not viable period in any structured PvP
-minions were not viable in any high end dungeon (took aggro off of the tank)
-half the areas in the game didn’t have enemies who left bodies, meaning you couldn’t use minions either
-you needed to stop after every battle, create minions, only to have 2-3 of your old ones die from degen
-most of the time, once you finished creating your minions the next mob was already almost dead
-you needed to constantly heal your minions
After all of this maintenance, you still could lose everything to a single big AOE

To be honest minions in this game are FAR better than they ever were in guild wars 1. The only time minions felt good to me were in jade quary and fort aspenwood. This is coming from a guy who dumped over 900 hours into minion mastering in guild wars 1. In that game they were only viable if your party built around you, and even then it only worked in regular story PvE. For any real PvE I had to bring a curse build/SS to kill bosses and that’s about the extent of my usefulness.

In this game my guildies LOVE me as a minion master as they bring CC (probably more than any other necromancer build) and are temporary aggro holders. Once the minion AI is fixed then I’ll say my piece if they need buffs or not. (though the jagged horror trait SUCKS).

He’s not saying he won’t buff necro, he’s saying that death shroud is INCREDIBLY strong in the sense of [theoretical] potential.

in [thoery] he’s right in his points that:
-Death shroud gives access to a second health bar that can be recovered by normal combat along your already recoverable health bar
-Death shroud gives access to an essentially third weapon set (giving more diversity than warriors in many ways)
*this point bothers me though when elementalists have access to summon weapons and engineers have kits.
-He wants to see how the meta shifts
*this point is extremely valid. In Dota/LoL/any moba, the meta has a massive effect on a character’s strength. He did however say that he wanted to make necromancers less reliant on condition damage.

All and all the necromancer suffers from a lot of bugs and meta, He’s being smart and waiting to see if changes are needed once bugs are fixed.

displacedTitan.6897:

Bottom line is the Necro suffers from both underpowered skills, broken traits, terrible synergy within trait lines (Why is minion damage in Spite?), wonky minion AI.

the reason minion damage is in spite, is the same reason vampiric minions and fetid consumption are in blood. If all of the minion/well/whatever traits were in one tree, half your traits would be completely pointless depending on your build. They have to spread them out to give the other trees meaningful rewards.

Unless they take the minor and major passive trait from death magic and add them to existing minion master traits (like for example, the minion master trait not only gives 20% cooldown reduction but it also gives the jagged horror passive), then changing anything would be a severe nerf to minion masters on a whole, which already is probably the absolute worst path to take on a necromancer.

I personally like being a minion master, so I’m biased to say that they should keep those passive traits. However, outside of the staff and well traits within it, I don’t see why anyone would take this tree if they aren’t a minion master. If you take the death magic trait line for toughness alone, you’re making a massive mistake.

mangocheesecake.1487:

But with the 200 toughness… you wont need protection of the horde (give you lower toughness…….)

200 toughness is 200 kitten toughness. you can’t downplay that just because the tree gives 200 toughness passively. it isn’t until you get into the 1200+ range of toughness that it starts to become more worthwhile to pick something up.

Not only that, but most of the minion master’s damage comes from minions. The minion master needs all of the survivability he can get to guarentee he is around to keep those minions up. Minions don’t scale off of your personal stats, so power is only half as beneficial as lets say compared to an elemetalist who’s utilities scale off of her power stat.

Mirar.1087:

I agree this is somewhat a poor skill, but for 5 points in a skill tree, it’s not useless.

It does have synergy within the wonky tree, such as each minion providing more toughness and death nova reliably activating every 30sec.

Problems are they often die without even contributing because of poor pet AI system. Or they degenerate too fast in between battles. [They] prove useless in 1v1 situations.

I think there are a couple of good ideas in this thread so far. Such as those reducing the self-destruction time, or it only degenerates when hit or allowing more Jagged horrors to rise.

My ideas:
- They can spawn from the death of your pets/ally as well
. . .

I really like this suggestion. It’s very reminiscent of the old GW1 jagged horror elite skill, and would have a lot of synergy with MMs.

Koen.8703:

I really really dont get why all of you guy’s say the class is broken.
It needs some tweaks sure, but its certainly not broken.

Incase you wonder, only played necro from BWE1.

For the record, how can you even say that the paradigm guy know what he’s talking about. (not to flame but I saw some streams of them and saw some awful clicking on utility tree spells) Game is only out for a few weeks, and like he said I played every class so not one class fulltime.
At this point there are only opinions, but there are certainly no pro’s yet, so don’t all claim that he is right.

it’s broken in that the vast majority of traits don’t benefit the builds they’re designed for in a positive way or just don’t work at all. You don’t need to be a pro to know that if a skill doesn’t work, it’s broken.

in all honesty I feel like too much is taken from the necro minion master underwater.
-wells should work but instead create a corrupt bubble
-the flesh golem should be able to swim, just give it a swimming animation

until the auto attack is fixed, couldn’t you simply control+click the skill to make it into an auto attack?

I don’t really know why there needs to be a 4 second cast time on a 2 second blind. (2 seconds for you, 2 seconds for your minion) it kinda defeats the purpose of the blind outside of massive-really-long-animation-single-blows.

just a quick note for everyone, the DS auto attack gives the enemy one of your conditions each time you attack. so you’re supposed to:
1. go into DS
2. pull all conditions from allies
3.give it to the enemies

the only problem with this is that DS underwater has a ludicrous delay between skill activations.

1. remove the degen from jagged horrors. There’s no reason for it when they only attack once every 3.5 seconds for 1/10th of the putrid explosion damage.
2. Make Putrid explosion, the blood fiend consumption, and the flesh wurm teleport count as minion deaths aka trigger death nova.
3. Improve Minion AI and response times.
4. Don’t make minions die on transformation due to moa morph, I mean really. It’s almost as bad as GW1 Eclipse.
5. give minions out of combat regen. (this is the only suggestion I’m iffy on)

Underwater mechanics:
1. allow the flesh golem to swim. Plague form is absolute garbage to anyone who isn’t a condition necromancer.
2.Reduce the cast time between skills for death shroud.

Dead matrix.2670:

@skliros. If that was true when i make 2 bone minions with 0% life force, and blow them up, you would get some % of life force !!! you dont . Try it for your self .

that’s probably because the putrid explosion doesn’t count as a death. It doesn’t trigger death nova either.

Skliros.1058:

darkoracle.6483:

Now make toughness make my minions tougher and I’ll be on board.

Actually, I’m pretty sure it does affect your minions.

minions only scale with level and traits that directly influence them. I tested this with power. equipping a weapon that increases my power by like 10% doesn’t affect my minion damage by one point, so I assume the same goes for toughness/vitality.

the only stat that “affects” your minions is the healing power stat. that makes your mark of blood heal your minions more.

toughness is a flat benefit(I don’t have anything to back this up, it’s just my assumption). It really depends on how you’re traited.

for example, as a minion master necro toughness is really beneficial for me as I have the trait that converts 5% of my toughness to power. Unless you’re going for a death shroud build or a straight up damage build I think getting as much of both as you can is a good idea.

as far as they’re AI is concerned it half works and half doesn’t,
yes, they actually do partially target your target. I’ve accidently attempted to attack one enemy causing my minions to charge after them, and then swapped targets to another, causing my mininos to swap as well.

however, once combat starts it all goes completely out the window:
-bone minions are unresponsive 80% of the time
-flesh golem charge gets stuck on geometry a LOT
-bone minion doesn’t seem to properly use it’s range

and then there seem to be trait issues as well:
-death nova doesn’t work with minion sacrifices for bone minions explosion or blood fiend sacrifice(it should count as a death regardless)
*this conflicts with 3 of the minion actives (flesh wurm, bone minion, and blood fiend) as you now need to chose between using them up or getting the poison field.
-jagged horrors are completely useless outside of a free 3 second poison AOE (only paired with death nova)

I mean, I can’t even see why jagged horrors need the degen and cooldown at the same time. they attack once every 4 seconds and hit for pitiful damage like the bone minions. At the very least bone minions are worth having around for their explosive damage.

He doesn’t bother me quite as much. He mostly took up the “political” position of leadership while you get to do everything that’s actually fun. At the very least there was a logical reason he got the leadership position instead of you and he also makes sure you contribute to the decisions.The only things that really bothered me were his magical god sword that is the mcguffin device and everyone surrounding him. Most people talk of how amazing he was, but even he himself admits that he mostly just sat around watching stuff.

If you don’t like the staff you could build for a more damage focused minion build. Just make them throw away nukes. If you’re doing PvP especially, I’d take flesh wurm/bone minions/shadow fiend/lich form. (the heal could be a blood fiend but I’m not well versed in PvP, just theory crafting.) the flesh wurm gives you a cc break and a retreating teleport, bone minions explode for hefty damage with a low cooldown, and the shadow fiend gives you an on demand blind (which has a lower cooldown than the bone fiend root).

for traits you could get 30 in the death magic tree for minion master, flesh of the master, and death nova (the aoe poison is amazing for PvP). Then at least 20 into spite for training of the master (+30% minion damage), possibly even 30 for more condition duration.