Speculating Minions Per Class

In the Ghazzy/DarthMicrotransaction Tavern Talk podcast with Jonathan, the idea that "every class will have at least one minion" was brought up by Jonathan. Some content creators such as Talkative Tri have done some speculations in their own podcasts musing things like an expansion on mirages. GGG is taking a big, objective look at minion's role per class.

The main reason we have two classes per starting area is to help manage the thematic of skills within those attributes. They are effectively separating the elementalist off of the witch, and making it its own sovereign class in sorceress. They are inventing druid as a home for summon wolf (something technically already in the game since talisman league via spectral wolf) among other natural themes. It is fairly strange how this made the leap from ranger to the opposite end of the tree. We can assume summon wolf will have str/int requirements, but with the advent of being able to choose your attributes, it might be viable to pull off if it weren't for minion notables likely being very far away.

Ghazzy laments how every minion tree winds up looking dreadfully similar, so I am curious what their approach to this will be. Will minion nodes be shifted into the responsibility of gear? Will they delocalize minion nodes via something similar to cluster jewels? Will we have many more minion related nodes everywhere around the tree? Will it fall upon ascendancy classes to shoulder the burden? Only time and feedback through the beta will tell.
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This is a long list, and I will TLDR at the bottom so others can give their speculation:

- Witch. The army of undead, where each addition to your army has a role, and corpses are a premium resource limited to boss add waves and clearing, so you better not shatter anything exile. My first guess is they might make corpses stick around upon shattering, but potentially non explodeable for the sake of the increased importance. But carrion golem was out to lunch.

- Sorceress. We haven't seen any golems, but I believe they will be seen in some form or another. Golemancer is a popular scaling method, but mostly through the buffs and typically every accompanying golem type. This will be harder to pull off without potentially a meta gem to house every type of golem, so we might see some functionality changes around this. Carrion golem has excellent aggressive AI, but typically was used by necromancer in zoomancer setups.

- Druid. Wolves are a permanent minion not so dissimilar to how spectral wolf functions now, the goal is to constantly reup them to gain maximum benefit, and now from their on-summon crit debuff. But since the druid showcase is older than the witch showcase, we are left to wonder if wolves will resummon after all of them die, or if we will have to devise automated setups to gain full benefit. There will also likely be many other animals that provide different debuffs or buffs to aid you in what you are doing since the druid seems to focus on duration-based setup.

- Templar. Druid definitely has a lot of minion benefits on the way, but what about the shiny golden gang, conversion, and animation thematics? Likely we will see an improvement to these minions and maintain a strong incentive to play a guardian style character who themselves is the buff/debuffer trying to accelerate their army. Animate guardian seems like it is being taken largely into consideration, and post-heist, ZiggyD has nudged both Chris and Jonathan on the concept of hirelings that could fill this role.

- Mercenary. Talkative Tri among others have vague theories that Mercenary could be the originator of hirelings. A dude, a lad, the fall guy to go open doors for you while you unleash hellfire from your crossbow. It could potentially be an equipable cohort/squire/thrall to carry your burdens, or at least a partial unique inventory similar to heist. It could very well require the same resuscitation mechanic we saw in the couch coop gameplay if it gets downed.

- Duelist. Without knowing anything they want to do for this class yet, its hard to speculate what sort of minion would belong here. One could argue its the origin for animated weapons or the dancing dervish playstyle, but that is currently housed closer to shadow than duelist with the knife spells. The other potentials for duelist could be summoning apparitions centered on the character to attack things, similar to mirage archer.

- Marauder. In all technicality, totems are minions. Closer to a proxy since they derive your stats, but an entity that can be summoned and killed. Until we see what changes are coming to totems, its hard to speculate. We have the marauder ascendancy splash teaser for the ancestors, and during TotA we had loyalty tattoos that were conditional immortal minions with large active buffs, which conceptually were a lot more fun than being stuck in spectre jail. The only other concept minion-wise rests in the "mirage" playstyle. General's Cry, Tawhoa Forest's Strength, earthbreaker totems all exist to duplicate your slams, but we shall see what their plan is, since the showcases with warrior have been focused around the 2h hammer and slams.

- Warrior. An even bigger mystery since we don't know the true difference between marauder and warrior. They created warrior to be thematically distinct focusing on the stun slam playstyle found near the marauder area.

- Ranger. We saw a brief buggy WIP showcase of mount minions coming to the game. Jonathan described them as "probably overpowered" since they alleviated most of the movement speed balancing they were working on. They will likely be very different when next we see them, potentially with command button attacks involving motion, and will likely need to implement completely different melee skill animations or even distinct skills while riding them. So far until we know more about ascendancies, ranger is the condensed version of the deadeye for its original skills. We don't know anything about the "flare" tag for skills from their most recent gameplay footage, just more focus on rain skills being duration based instead. But they also have ballistas still I would imagine, as well as potentially more mechanically interesting mirage archers. And lets not forget mirror arrow or the ice mirages.

- Huntress. Neither ranger nor huntress are known to interact with flasks in any specific way yet. With Druid housing most of the animal and wild themes, its hard to tell what we could expect. Unfortunately falconry is prime territory here, and we shall see what GGG's spin on this could be to be distinct from Last Epoch's Falconer class, though that class heavily focuses on throwing traps, explosives, and acid as well. There is plenty of other thematics available to Azmeri/Ezomytes however, we could have Bestiary aspects see interesting applications, and minion gameplay might be very different for this class. We could see this class focus on plant-based minions, similar to those dreaded treants in act 2. This also unfortunately bumps into the Primalist in LE, but there is plenty that even that has unexplored. The minions may focus on mobility/standing your ground akin to how the spear gameplay does.

- Monk. The most we have seen from the monk is the new bell totem/orb that is functionally similar to skills like shockwave totem, but closer to the interactions with Tornado, or Hydrosphere. Monk appears to focus around emergent, reactionary, proc/charge-based or threshold/combo based gameplay. We could see many interesting new minion concepts in this class potentially some from charges like the zombie the witch has.

- Shadow. The extent of shadow minions currently lies in machinery. Many thematic ties to Riker Maloney, Heist robot rooms, and the existing nonkillable skitterbots for triggering traps, or saboteur's unique triggerbots that altered how we think about spell trigger builds. I am excited to see the evolution and adaptation of traps for this class once we see the showcase, and see the potential for many different minion archetypes to help you lay down death fields and bring more players into the trapper playstyle. This also could see the evolution of the animate weapon playstyle if the duelist is not considered to be the origin.
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TLDR;
Witch: Undead armies w/ corpse manipulation. Sorceress: Golems. Druid: Frequent animal summoning w/ automation. Templar: Player themselves supporting golden armies. Mercenary: Potential for hirelings similar to heist. Duelist: Maybe dancing dervish or apparitions that strike. Marauder: Totems or ancestral mirages. Warrior: How much different than Marauder? Ranger: Mounts, ballista and mirage archers. Huntress: Falcons or plants. Monk: Totems, orbs, charges, oh my. Shadow: Bots, maybe animate weapons, and generally a lot of spinning blades.

Let me know what you might think the classes could have when it comes to minions. We have a lot coming and the division of all these classes are really going to help GGG with theming many new skills for the future.

To don my tin foil hat once more, what if for Huntress as a distinction from ranger's mounts, we could summon minions that ride US? Imagine a Huntress running around, absolutely covered in snakes wrapped around her body, lashing out at all that get too close. They could summon a variety of ways, and you could activate the summon button to call them to ride on your shoulders. They could take damage as you do, and eventually die if you put them in danger.

The inspiration for this derives from my joys of playing Ark Survival Evolved, making my character as squat as possible, and having the light pets on my shoulder be extremely wide and flat due to body proportions. Maybe there could be a minion that provides light radius and accuracy when on your shoulder, but its really squishy and you have to invest in minion health or summon uptime.

Maybe crab armor could be quite literal. You have crabs on your body taking a portion of damage similar to guard skills and they scale with minion health.

These minions could also feed into any stance swapping that might exist, like if you are in the "snake stance" or "cat stance" then said minions gain benefits alongside you.