Alongside the release of the Blight expansion, we're introducing the Carrion Golem and a handful of new Support Gems that let you customise your minions.

Summon Carrion Golem

The Carrion Golem is a well-rounded attacker, using a rapid melee attack, a leap slam to get into the thick of combat, and a powerful cooldown-restricted multi-cascade slam. As its passive Golem buff, it grants added physical damage to all non-golem minions, including their attacks and spells. It has a unique feature among golems, gaining more damage for each of your non-golem minions around it, up to 80% more damage.

A single Carrion Golem fits well into established Minion builds as an extra bonus to all of your necromantic minions. It can also be invested in more heavily by taking various sources of additional golems (including a new notable passive) and using multiple golems alongside a swarm of zombies or skeletons.

There are also four new support gems that you can place on minions to change their behaviour and function:

Feeding Frenzy Support

The Feeding Frenzy support gem makes supported minions aggressive, increasing the range that they'll seek out enemies. It also gives hits from the minions a chance to give you the Feeding Frenzy buff, granting more minion damage and increased minion attack, cast and movement speed. While you have the Feeding Frenzy buff, the supported minions deal even more damage.

Meat Shield Support

The Meat Shield support gem makes supported minions defensive, causing them to only attack enemies that get very close to you. It also gives the minions a chance to taunt on hit, reduces the damage they take, and causes them to deal more damage to enemies close to you.

If minions are both Aggressive and Defensive, those effects cancel out, returning the minions to their original behaviour. All other bonuses from the support gems still apply.

Deathmark Support

The Deathmark support gem grants supported minions more damage, and grants you the Deathmark skill. Casting Deathmark on an enemy causes all minions supported by a Deathmark support to prioritise attacking the target, and gives them a further damage multiplier against that enemy. Casting Deathmark on a new enemy removes any existing Deathmark.

You can Deathmark to have precise targeting for specific minions, and the Deathmark targeting will override Aggressive or Defensive behaviour while it is active. The minions will fall back on their regular targeting if no Deathmark is present.

Different combinations of these three support gems let you use different minions for different roles. An example might be using your Zombies with Meat Shield to protect you, your Carrion Golems with Feeding Frenzy to clear groups of enemies, and the Deathmark Support on both of them so you can send all of them in after bosses while you evade the bosses abilities from a distance.

Infernal Legion Support

The Infernal Legion support gem causes supported minions to take a large percent of their maximum life as fire damage over time. They all gain a burning damage aura, dealing fire damage over time to nearby enemies. The effect doesn't stack, but is modified by minion damage increases and other support gems.

This support can be used to deal damage to large groups of enemies, and is available at quite a low level, so is an alternative to Melee Splash for some minion types. It also works well alongside the Minion Instability keystone, letting you use your minions as walking time bombs.

We'll be revealing further minion changes, including the new wand base type, Necromancer ascendancy, and passive tree in the upcoming teasers and news. In the meantime, check out a video of the new gems: