Witch Minions, totally unplayable

I'm have just been playing with infernal army warrior and archer skeletons and it works great. They run up burn explode keep standing basically until their revive time is up then stand back up and repeat. Last grasp is amazing for it. Recently moved on to using brutes as my infernal army rune. Only issue I have run into at all is minions not liking tighter areas and getting stuck.

Get a skeleton warrior scepter with + minion levels and that can keep you good until like end of act 3. When you have a lot more options other than warrior and archer combo.

Damage and Survivability goes way up by the time you "manage" to get to start t1-5 maps with "ok" gear (+2 Minion lvl weap no +5, no Minion lvl neck, +1 Minion level only helm).

My issues becomes problematic or even fatal once going to double digit tier maps, especially starting t12.

1. Minions will stop at the doorway on 50% of the maps, usually in doors. Forcing me to inch in or bait with a range spell. When everything almost one shots. (Yes my build is probably bad, I am squishy even with max resist in mind with the -Resist from high tier maps.)

2. I am forced to "waste" points on at least 3 generic Minion Defense nodes. +3% Regen, +22% All Resist +3% Max Resist, Physical Reduction, Chaos Resist nodes can stay, because are specially and they should mean something when I take it. The rest of the Minion Health Nodes needs to made base line, because minion dying is MOSTLY DURING CAMPAIGN.

3. Reavers - Well, most minions are not aggressive enough, please make a big node "Minions are now Aggressive". Or even just let us toggle in the skill gem between, "Defensive or Aggressive". My eyes light up when I heard Reavers are "Aggressive" minions on the skill video but they're useless pacifist grandpas. Mobs can body block me, I don't see why we can't have a build with 20+ melee minions that body blocks them.

4. Despawning and respawning from being too far away should not take the full 7 seconds. Minion that "died" from being too far away should respawn in only 3 seconds. This doesn't even happen in PoE 1.

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prankmaster#4456 wrote:

trash balance, rerolled witch, all passives into minion nodes zero dps zero minion survivability, trash game

So you got steamrolled on all bosses and came to the forums first thing to flame the game? Game is absolutely awesome. Finished a HC witch run also. I think the "trash" sentiment needs to be redirected towards your own skillset and not the game.

Minions really need some kind of rework, right now they are very underwhelming in comparison to PoE1.

The overall experience playing a necromancer is very bad, i tried a sorceress and it melts everything in it's path. Using the same logic to build the necromancer, focusing in minion damage/health and some nodes for the defense of the witch simply don't have the same impact.

You take ages to kill anything, and some minion skills needs corpses that don't exist in some boss encounters.

Very awful.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kl5SyQgLtRk&feature=youtu.be

Try this, thank me later.

PS: Schrödingers Witch

https://ibb.co/9pYtCBk

https://ibb.co/8M2rfBm

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Blackdragonbird#3321 wrote:

Minions really need some kind of rework, right now they are very underwhelming in comparison to PoE1.

The overall experience playing a necromancer is very bad, i tried a sorceress and it melts everything in it's path. Using the same logic to build the necromancer, focusing in minion damage/health and some nodes for the defense of the witch simply don't have the same impact.

You take ages to kill anything, and some minion skills needs corpses that don't exist in some boss encounters.

Very awful.

I've now finished the campaign and entered cruel difficulty, necro gets better later but I have not been taking any minion nodes for ages due to their poor performance. I only take minion life nodes since they mainly function as a meat wall to keep me safe while I shoot ED/bone shards at stuff. Sometimes when a fight is small I just watch them to see how they perform in isolation and it is pretty appalling. If you bear in mind that I am not taking any minion damage nodes then it makes sense but it's also their AI that is a serious problem. Some kind of skeleton specific ascendancy is obviously not necessary to the game but it would be nice, as for fighting bosses without corpses around: you can always swap out skill gems. I think a lot of people forget that.

I might make a post following up on my page19 post with my collected thoughts after completing one campaign

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TheMrBenis#4005 wrote:

I have begun to lose interest in the game but before I switch off completely I want to give an update on where I got my character, using ONLY occult skills.

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I wouldn't be surprised at all if I quit the game by Sunday, I don't need to play the other classes there are already 100,000's of hours of footage out there to show me how they work. Wake me up when they change the passives tree and make skeletons a specialisation in their own right

Now I have played the entire base campaign and tried to complete as much content as I could while playing "naturally" and not trying to 100% it. I tried to play the game in what would feel like the way the vast majority of casual people would play. This means taking a diverse skill tree, because people like to experiment. It means taking my time and not cowing to the pressure of running some meta-meme build.

So my regular skill selection for running around the campaign is
Sceptre with skele minions w/ + 2 summon skills
Skele reavers, 4 of them
Skele arsonists, 3 of them
Summon zombies
Vile Effigy
Dark Ritual
Essence drain + contagion
Bone shards
Bone wand w/ +3 to physical spells

Node selection focussed on chaos and physical damage, minion hp. No ES nodes were prioritised due to not having very good ES in general on my gear. My ascendancy was blood mage, which might have been buffed? because I can double my hp via blood droplets. At current I have 959 hp and this doubles to just over 2k and I have bout 700 ES. With a few ES % nodes I could probably hit mid 4-digits ES.

Contagion and ED have severe problems with target accuracy, I have tested this by keeping my mouse over an enemy with the red outline - the contagion triggers on some unrelated mob nearby seemingly at random. It is also apparently a hit-scan instant projectile which is very interesting because it means you can't cast it at an enemy that is behind another. ED is really annoyihg to use as well for the same reasons, it just flies off wherever it wants to and you will miss targets. Chaos spells in general lack damage and are pretty uninspired, for a group of skills that work better when stacked, vile effigy is a nice ability to gain a lot of extra dps during group fights, but the base damage of chaos means that I find myself using bone shards with shatter because the minions gain double bonuses from the shards damage proc and the lowered armor of the target. You can gain a lot more value from minions by using this skill since the broken armor also benefits later casts of bone shard, it makes sense to use this skill this way and if the armor-shatter support was available earlier it would be pretty overpowered to be brutally honest. So chaos spells are weaker than physical spells because they only work when theyre all stacked up, this is a lot of APM burden and the really short durations do inhibit proper function, your initial DOTs start wearing off by the time your final abilities land and you are struggling to gain any mileage off the work you're doing, bone shards skips this entirely by getting bleed+armor break nodes and gems and its proc effects compound on themselves by increasing damage and stun effects, meaning that per second if you had to choose between casting chaos spells and bone shards, shards wins 85% of the time because it just kills stuff faster, bone shards also proc blood drops for bloodmage which means you can keep your hp buffer topped up.

Chaos spells in conclusion need a revision due to their high APM burden, low damage and bugged accuracy. A lack of variety in chaos spells vs POE1 really hurts as well and I feel like playing a pure occult chaos build in POE2 today would be a poor choice, it is not effective at campaign maps or at bosses and requires too much support to compete vs a single spell (bone shards).

I will reserve my comments on minions a bit because I didn't take any minion damage nodes, I can only repeat what others have said since they get stuck in corridors and have too little "mass" to resist being pushed around by enemies. They also don't register as entities to enemies who will stand there and ignore minions if their target was the player. Frankly that sounds more like a bug in the AI pathfinding than an issue with minions. Having played a POE1 minion witch in the days leading up to POE2 releasing I can very confidently say that minions are underperforming vs their prior incarnation and the poor access to +spirit items in the normal campaign makes it very hard to stack minions to a level where they are impactful. Boss design is still a big problem, the over-whelming spam of AOE that kills minions will never EVER be fixed because the base game is designed to be Diablo2+darksouls and this requires access to functions like block and dodge roll which is a serious issue for minions because they don't block or dodge. The fight vs the viper in act 3 sees minions spending most of the fight dead or on cool down, vs Doryani they're either dead or on cooldown. As I said in my prior post: minions are subjectively really strong or useless and in situations where they can overtly bodyblock enemies from reaching you they are good but in any environment with AOE they lose almost all their value from taking way too much damage and in the case of bosses they will get 1 tapped by boss abilities which is really annoying. A lack of corpses and corpse generation means that zombies can't be used during fights with bosses - a better source of power charges could alleviate this issue. I intended on going for full skelespam but ended up veering off in to chaos spells and physical abilities due to the mentioned issues in getting enough spirit, bad AI, low damage and lack of faith in minions meaningfully improving through node investment.

Perhaps at the higher levels once you have gear giving >+3 to minion skills and all the other performance floor crap this issue goes away but minions from the outset are just straight worse than alternatives and were better in POE1. As I progress this character through maps I will probably still not take anything more than minion HP nodes as infernal legion works off HP and if you go infernal legion you're not even using the minions damage anyway. Flammability will offer you more mileage than minion damage for the sake of a single skill gem vs 20 nodes spent on damage for minions that can't even pathfind through a door reliably.

Blood mage update if anyone fancies, managed to get 3rd ascendancy, got 2932 life ,940 ES, still have 342 spirit, still using flame wall to proce SRS with minion instasbility and infernal legion, 2 tanky brutes, 1 cleric, 7 snpiers , I detonate the clouds on my SRS. Reached tier 8 maps so far.
Minions are fine for POE2 content, do not expect POE1 sheningans :P

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Sirrianna#7418 wrote:

Blood mage update if anyone fancies, managed to get 3rd ascendancy, got 2932 life ,940 ES, still have 342 spirit, still using flame wall to proce SRS with minion instasbility and infernal legion, 2 tanky brutes, 1 cleric, 7 snpiers , I detonate the clouds on my SRS. Reached tier 8 maps so far.
Minions are fine for POE2 content, do not expect POE1 sheningans :P

Why on earth would you go bloodmage with minions when it is synergistic with bone spells due to spawning life orbs on crit? Life leech on spell damage? Permanent curses?

So minions in general is very polar.

Early on they are bad, late game they are literally immortal. I can walk through T15 maps without doing much and they just murder everything.

Nothing saves you from minion AI though - they gotta fix that.