Minions need a massive change

So I don't play minions anymore. They are clunky at best, sometimes standing nearby doing nothing, sometimes running away from enemies, sometimes running into them to fire off their ranged attacks.

I am not an expert and defer to others. But in order to make me run minions I want more control of how they act. And some notable gear and passive tree adjustments.

The main issues I have:

The tree


Gear stress



Minions themselves
Temporary better minions in every way

Permanent booid


My solution would be to make a minion interface as part of the character screen. This would let you check defensive/aggressive, what skills they would use etc. It would also clearly state their life and accuracy etc. Also you could turn off offerings from affecting them fir some build interactions.

Additionally ggg could make attack and defense versions of convocation. The attack one would boost damage and teleport them too an area, the defense one does what it does now.

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roundishcap wrote:

AG needs to be deleted at this point if it is holding back a floodgates of adjustments that wild just be better

Honestly, I wouldn't be opposed to this getting deleted if GGG gives summons the same treatment they did for melee. As it stands, they're practically essential to any non-Reaper build to optimize DPS, much the same way as those annoying melee totems were. Sure I'll miss out on the defensive utility it offered such as fortification and crit immunity, but I'd rather have minions become strong again.

1) Personally, I dont think minion players should even be getting fortification in the first place. You are playing an archetype that is relatively safe at all times due to most of your tree being full of defense nodes and you play with all the defensive's, max resists, armor/eva base type, spell suppress, endurance charges + block/spell block cap relatively easy.

2) AG i think is fine, you put on gear for it that can make your build shotgun into S tier at a considerable risk. Without it though, eh.... you are putting it as defensive anyways with meat shield, unless you really wanna start risking your AG for some reason lol. And its not like your minions are ALWAYS standing within range for its buffs. Could lose it or use it, its conditional based on where its standing anyways. Stuff that isnt even a 4th of a screen away isnt getting any of its buffs or special properties.

3)The rework to Necromancer, making it less summoner was probably the stupidest thing I have seen GGG do and their reasoning for it was ..... well see below:

"We dont like necromancer being the strongest choice for minion builds"

What the hell kind of bullshit reasoning is that? This would be like saying "Yea man Berserker is just the most powerful melee choice for slams, we need to remove war bringer node because noone wants to run a slam build on trickster or deadeye"

Its called specialization you dumbos, you didnt HAVE to run necro for all minion builds back then. You still had people running occultists, guardian and ascendant.

If they could transfer AG's power to something else it'd be such a gift to the summoner archetype.

And I agree that there should be less specializations as it limits creativity.
More ascendacies could use more generic nodes instead of "you duelist you attack build now". And to that end passive skill tree could use some mixing of things too. Like why is all spell block on one side of tree and all marks on another? Many such cases.

"

Bosscannon wrote:

And I agree that there should be less specializations as it limits creativity.
More ascendacies could use more generic nodes instead of "you duelist you attack build now". And to that end passive skill tree could use some mixing of things too. Like why is all spell block on one side of tree and all marks on another? Many such cases.

Well as to why its where its at is due to the stat wheel which i think is super cool but it does have its downsides too right?

A solution to this problem can be implementing side-grade type defenses that do the same thing or in a slightly different way but fit thematically in with STR or INT and DEX even hybrid combinations.

Would dislike to see the balance of the wheel be disturbed but definitely wouldn't mind seeing it grow.

When it comes to minions however we don't have full access to everything we need defenses wise, it's not far from having everything but minion armour and spell supression are hard to come by.

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Mashgesture wrote:

1) Personally, I dont think minion players should even be getting fortification in the first place. You are playing an archetype that is relatively safe at all times due to most of your tree being full of defense nodes and you play with all the defensive's, max resists, armor/eva base type, spell suppress, endurance charges + block/spell block cap relatively easy.

Where did this come from?
Summoners have the exact same level of defensive investment as other builds do.
Max resists , block/ spell block endurance charges and armor are ALL centered around the marauder while branching into the templar and duelist. none of those three classes are particularly known for being good summoners apart from maybe the guardian subclass for templar.

And I am not sure why you think summoners somehow have more to invest in defenses than others considering... most minion uniques have terrible defenses and most other classes do not need to dedicated anything into keeping their damage skills alive.

Most summoners are basically forced to into cluster jewels due to how sparse and low value existing minion damage nodes are on the tree as is.

And you most certainly aren't hearing about any broken ass armor stacking minion builds being able to put out a billion dps while tanking content designed to not be tanked.

"

Mashgesture wrote:

2) AG i think is fine, you put on gear for it that can make your build shotgun into S tier at a considerable risk. Without it though, eh.... you are putting it as defensive anyways with meat shield, unless you really wanna start risking your AG for some reason lol. And its not like your minions are ALWAYS standing within range for its buffs. Could lose it or use it, its conditional based on where its standing anyways. Stuff that isnt even a 4th of a screen away isnt getting any of its buffs or special properties.

Its bad because it forces hardcore mechanics on to softcore players. Hardcore is a niche for a reason. Most people do not want their progress erased regardless of how or why. And for that reason alone the AG is a terrible concept. It the same reason why despite all the things GGG keeps doing for specters people still bitch about them dying. Because it flat out does not feel good and never will.

"

Mashgesture wrote:

3)The rework to Necromancer, making it less summoner was probably the stupidest thing I have seen GGG do and their reasoning for it was ..... well see below:

Actually The necromancer is in a really good spot. Think about what we got from all the changes to that ascendancy.

by removing the free +2 minion levels GGG was able to make +minion levels more accessible on gear which considering how important that is for all minion builds made little sense to force it on just one ascendancy.

We finally got a method outside the baron to provide sustain to the summoner through minions. Before that many summoners were married to flasks , life regen and life on block all of which have common map mods that fuck them.

unholy might is actually amazing now and solves reflect for minions for the cheap price of 2 ascendancy points.

That is alot of good shit.

"

Mashgesture wrote:

Spoiler

Problem: The Necromancer's Unnatural Strength notable passive skill is extremely strong for almost all minion builds due to how well minion skills scale with gem level. This skill makes it hard to justify using other ascendancy classes for minion builds.

"We dont like necromancer being the strongest choice for minion builds"

What the hell kind of bullshit reasoning is that? This would be like saying "Yea man Berserker is just the most powerful melee choice for slams, we need to remove war bringer node because noone wants to run a slam build on trickster or deadeye"

Its called specialization you dumbos, you didnt HAVE to run necro for all minion builds back then. You still had people running occultists, guardian and ascendant.

Unnatural strength is actually a god tier node now. the ability to convert your physical minions damage to chaos means you can solve reflect and also not rely on something crazy like a 4 white socket triad grip (an item with shit stats)

Back when unholy might was just a % of physical added as chaos.. yeah you had a point because that really did not do anything interesting.

But now you can go all in on chaos, using despair, using a white socket crown of the tyrant, getting voidbeacon via forbidden flame, maxing out wither

My poison holy relic summer has been the best experience I have ever had in the game And I had a 250 million dps harvest summoner in 3.15 which I never thought would be topped ever.

having played minions for first time in YEARS (dom blow spinoff, fun cheap weak)

1) minion stats not being visible is beyond my understanding at this point. affliction corpses and their 2 line description - sorry, but is it a joke or something? POB is great but it isnt infallible and the interface starts to become an UX nightmare with how many options are there

just add the f.. minion stats to the character panel. no excuses. i do not care that the skill is not really a skill or whatever - just do it

2) melee minions needing accuracy / caster minions using mana (and some having pretty much none of it) - this shit gets old quickly. in general - investing into minion accuracy (without actually knowing how much of it they already have!) is one of the 'wtf' moments. same with mana - but that one hurts less and is easier to fix on support spectres (just lifetap them)

3) minion uniques are mix of horrid and must-haves.

4) poison. i do not know how but poison should not be a minion thing. 'zoo' applies poison incredibly efficiently making a) using other options kinda stupid b) non-poison compatible minions useless

5) spectres. you can write a book about how bad current state of this skill is. the 'auto pick' spectres that 'accidentally' have one stat 10 times better than all others is a staple each league. getting spectres from 'special places' is abhorrent. running safehouses for hours (or using chat channel) - sorry, wtf? all that dance with re-summoning - literally the most unfun thing in this game. it is worse than 2 soul-eaters in deep delve azurite node.. and that is very unfun benchmark to beat.

6) AG. just kill it. the idea is cool. but it seems to ambitious for now. either made it a pre-made minion with few trans versions or just remove it entirely

7) despite all these problems it is still the best no-investment no-brain required archetype in the game. despite several nerfs and several waves of 'minions r ded' posts - they are not. Offerings, corpses interactions, meat shield, reflect immunity and ranged power projection + good passive support and amazing cluster jewels - you can farm easy T16 on literally no budget and 20/20 gems. as any content scaling with gem levels - it gets better each league as GGG provides even more and cheaper ways of getting +gems (replica dragonfang is the latest greatest but you can go up to +4 simplex if rich AF)

asking for BUFFS is insane. fixes (esp the minion stat) - sure, but buffs? guys, play something else and see just how easy you have playing minions.

PS: bring back

all prophecy uniques were good, but this one actually opened great opportunity for melee zoo (yes, the 'inspiration' version is better but i couldnt get a 3 minion node timeless so stuck with this - more minions beat fewer stronger minions imo)

"

Saltychipmunk wrote:

Most summoners are basically forced to into cluster jewels due to how sparse and low value existing minion damage nodes are on the tree as is.

I tried my hardest to avoid using any cluster jewels on minion builds for at least a year after they came out but recently really started using them almost exclusively, usually 2 large 4 medium clusters but sometimes 4 large clusters even on some wacky builds.

The clusters are very powerful but when it comes to permanent minions i feel the mod pool is in need of 1-2 more mods for minion damage and 2+ defense nodes giving armor and spell suppression to minions for shoring them up in endgame content/ubers.

Perhaps The Large minion cluster should be split into temporary and permanent minions? This could solve some problems because now that i think of it temporary minion buffs also do seem like they could use one or two nodes.

I run generally on my primary necro 2 large clusters with Renewal, Feasting Fiends and Vicious Bite, There really aren't much nodes to choose than these one of them being dedicated to crit and another to life regen and double damage.

The last time i tried to do all the uber content it was during a league where i was making pretty good currency to the point i had run out of things to buy as upgrades and being a pure spectre player i was having severe difficulty keeping my pets alive in some uber fights despite having a lot of currency i couldn't really see a path forward to patch those holes.

Depending on the build I'll also use small clusters with Dread March as well which i started investing in after the experience with ubers and it definitely helps but its not everything i need.

In total that's generally 6 renewal nodes or 10 with the small clusters as they come with a renewal node as well.

Perhaps also putting minion armor and supression on ghastly jewels could be an even easier fix but may not work for every minion build and i've been asking for this one for quite a while now, can only hope they listen.

"

Saltychipmunk wrote:

Where did this come from?
Summoners have the exact same level of defensive investment as other builds do.
Max resists , block/ spell block endurance charges and armor are ALL centered around the marauder while branching into the templar and duelist. none of those three classes are particularly known for being good summoners apart from maybe the guardian subclass for templar.

You literally get refreshing enduring cry on a spectre now along with vitality with perfect warlord.

You also get discipline with judgemental spirit.

And then you get kingmaker on your ag for 10 free fort.

4 major defensives that you just... get... for no investment at all.

Up the top of the tree you cap off spell block/block easier than anywhere else. And you can scale ES better than anywhere with the lovely aegis. And you're also int.


So the only thing you have to "invest" in is spell suppression and max res. Of which everyone has to do that.

I get why you believe this though as you have adopted a more damage focus on your build, but its very unnecessary damage that you gave up MASSIVE amounts of defense for. Defense that is extremely cheap and easy to get for summoners.

"

Saltychipmunk wrote:

Most summoners are basically forced to into cluster jewels

Thats true about most builds... and I actually have to use more on melee slam than I have to use on a summoner. I only need a single large cluster for damage and a medium cluster for blessed rebirth on a summoner.

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Saltychipmunk wrote:

And you most certainly aren't hearing about any broken ass armor stacking minion builds being able to put out a billion dps while tanking content designed to not be tanked.

Because they dont need armour to do that. They cap off everything else and have recover on block. With the changes to bases on ES you actually can get broken amounts of ES and NOT go with eldrich battery.

I could make that with SRS on standard right now if I wanted to. Same with holy relic.

"

Saltychipmunk wrote:

Its bad because it forces hardcore mechanics on to softcore players. Hardcore is a niche for a reason. Most people do not want their progress erased regardless of how or why. And for that reason alone the AG is a terrible concept. It the same reason why despite all the things GGG keeps doing for specters people still bitch about them dying. Because it flat out does not feel good and never will.

I mean yea its bad because it doesnt feel good is your take. Thats fine

I personally dont really care either way for AG. It shouldn't be dying to really anything once you put southbound and dopelgangers on it. Along with the other spectres and of course Kingmaker.

"

Saltychipmunk wrote:

Actually The necromancer is in a really good spot. Think about what we got from all the changes to that ascendancy.

by removing the free +2 minion levels GGG was able to make +minion levels more accessible on gear which considering how important that is for all minion builds made little sense to force it on just one ascendancy.

I never said Necro was in a bad state.

Uh with the ascendancy +2 back it would ... be unanimously better than the changes that happened.

If you want to make up for that loss with the shield, be my guest, but you are losing out on MASSIVE defense when you take a +1 minion shield/ damage over something like aegis or the new svalin or the surrender.

Again unnecessary damage for stupid easy defense you are able to get as a necro.

"

Saltychipmunk wrote:

unholy might is actually amazing now and solves reflect for minions for the cheap price of 2 ascendancy points.

Minion reflect I dont know what build ever had a problem with this, can you link a POB that had issues with reflect?

Like I never had issues with this and I played fire SRS, didnt even convert to psn.

"

Saltychipmunk wrote:

Unnatural strength is actually a god tier node now. the ability to convert your physical minions damage to chaos means you can solve reflect and also not rely on something crazy like a 4 white socket triad grip (an item with shit stats)

Back when unholy might was just a % of physical added as chaos.. yeah you had a point because that really did not do anything interesting.

But now you can go all in on chaos, using despair, using a white socket crown of the tyrant, getting voidbeacon via forbidden flame, maxing out wither

My poison holy relic summer has been the best experience I have ever had in the game And I had a 250 million dps harvest summoner in 3.15 which I never thought would be topped ever.

It was better at +2 and still would be better at +2, I never have seen a minion build struggling with reflect. I would really like to see what you keep referring to with reflect being this huge issue.

This is usually solved by other means than conversion to chaos if it gets to that point. You want an ascendancy to not roll a map modifier? Ill take my two points for something better than that.


All this to say that I didnt say necro was in a bad state. Just the change and reasoning behind that change was absolutely a brain dead take on their part.