Minions need a massive change

zombies are in such pitiful state. it hurts. buff to base damage might fix it, coz currently there's no way to scale such zero damage. none. and yeah, i tried adorned:)

Haven't played minions in 4+ leagues, tried in ssf. Resummoning minions is terrible. You have such pressure on sockets/button bindings, you need to desecrate 20 times, before you get corpse of your spectre & corpse targetting. Animate Guardian - no way to inspect gear, loose it on death... gem should be either removed or fixed. No ingame info on minion stats whatsoever. Maybe it is not such problem late in game, but early (in ssf) it is all annoying.

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titiAlf wrote:

Haven't played minions in 4+ leagues, tried in ssf. Resummoning minions is terrible. You have such pressure on sockets/button bindings, you need to desecrate 20 times, before you get corpse of your spectre. Animate Guardian - no way to inspect gear, loose it on death... gem should be either removed or fixed. No ingame info on minion stats whatsoever. Maybe it is not such problem late in game, but early (in ssf) it is all annoying.

I agree its pretty rough especially if there's not adequite defenses available on literally any equipment and the new spectre's are kind of out of touch with the experience of spectre players with no tools to address them being killed for the most part, I'd love a support or a unique that re-summons them after a delay but costs me some dps.

I play primarily pure spectres, for anyone who doesn't know what that means its using only spectres and one type of them to maximize dps and synergy with equipment and supports, It's very tough without playing the direct meta builds to do endgame content and while i do enjoy making those builds sometimes but other areas are severely lacking and socket pressure is still very much a thing sometimes more than i feel i can bear.

They do need a massive change but ironically I think its the obfuscation of information that requires a massive change rather than the minions themselves.

The entire stat system for minions needs an overhaul, we should know how much life our minions have, their damage for each skill and the relevant cooldown, their accuracy, cast speed etc.

The passives on the tree probably do need a tidy-up as they are a little outdated and too similar to a cluster jewel when push comes to shove.

The only minion i'd directly buff right now is zombies, with potentially a rework of AG to be the spectre equivalent for animate weapons with the ability to just resummon it as their "commandeer" so to speak, a little like chains of command.

Minion buffs are difficult in general because there is a great deal of noise associated with them. The fact the stats are obfuscated so heavily is a big part of this but its also to do with the overall PoE trend to follow the herd without understanding the specifics.

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Draegnarrr wrote:

They do need a massive change but ironically I think its the obfuscation of information that requires a massive change rather than the minions themselves.

The entire stat system for minions needs an overhaul, we should know how much life our minions have, their damage for each skill and the relevant cooldown, their accuracy, cast speed etc.

The passives on the tree probably do need a tidy-up as they are a little outdated and too similar to a cluster jewel when push comes to shove.

The only minion i'd directly buff right now is zombies, with potentially a rework of AG to be the spectre equivalent for animate weapons with the ability to just resummon it as their "commandeer" so to speak, a little like chains of command.

Minion buffs are difficult in general because there is a great deal of noise associated with them. The fact the stats are obfuscated so heavily is a big part of this but its also to do with the overall PoE trend to follow the herd without understanding the specifics.

Id agree with information. There's definitely more that can be given in game, this is especially true for players that may not know how to use POB correctly as well as the db website to understand spectres. And what not.

I wouldnt press too hard for "dps" though. As i have mentioned in another thread, this can be said about any skill. The entire in game tooltip DPS meter ... is never something you should look at regardless of archetype. Game might just have too many parameters for this to really ever be solved. Which is fine really...


Zombies could use a buff. They have always been this disposable thing. Zombies can ... go the mile... its just really pushing it when it comes to gearing directly for it. They are pretty squishy WITHOUT minion damage support which would make them even squishier. You could probably say the same thing about skeletons, but they just nerfed skele mages like... 2x or 3x in the past year. Not sure why either.

AG I think I touched on already. Dont really care either way what happens to it.


Thankfully the new spectres they brought back are really just insane. Playing pure bleed phys spectres this league was possibly the most rewarding experiment ever. Such a cool and unique playstyle. And very versatile, moving things in and out of its setup. Can take reapers, slashing horrors, blades, runic skele...

As well as the insane supports that came back like the warlord, warrior, judgemental, tiger, spirit of fortune etc...

Very happy on the new spectre front, being excellent power and utility choices. Lots more options available than ever before.

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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:

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.

^ THIS! I couldn't agree more.

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Mashgesture wrote:

Thankfully the new spectres they brought back are really just insane. Playing pure bleed phys spectres this league was possibly the most rewarding experiment ever. Such a cool and unique playstyle. And very versatile, moving things in and out of its setup. Can take reapers, slashing horrors, blades, runic skele...

As well as the insane supports that came back like the warlord, warrior, judgemental, tiger, spirit of fortune etc...

Very happy on the new spectre front, being excellent power and utility choices. Lots more options available than ever before.

I finally got to make a legit dom blow build this league with support of the new spectres and it was fucking great, they definitely added plenty of options for some build types and the corpse spectres are pretty hot even ignoring the super expensive ones.

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Draegnarrr wrote:

I finally got to make a legit dom blow build this league with support of the new spectres and it was fucking great, they definitely added plenty of options for some build types and the corpse spectres are pretty hot even ignoring the super expensive ones.

May i ask what you used? Dominating blow is one of the skills i had always wanted to use but after it was changed i never wanted to play with it at least not in the old sense where i'd be dominating my foes and making them into allies which imo should be tied to the gladiator/marauder general area of the tree, It'l never be what i wanted at this point unless GGG changes it or adds an alternate version which would be nice, I'd prefer they not further change anything and remove peoples established builds though.

Many aspects as you said they enable some new options though they feel a bit "buff pet" heavy for my taste, I don't wish to discriminate against the style of play but it generally isn't very interesting for me, I was and am quite happy that these options however exist especially since the times when the selection of monsters was very limited and GGG finally unlocked the door to the base game and its content and has been doing so in almost every patch since But the above being said it just feels like the current batch is highly focussed on support spectres which again is totally fine but is only one style of play and i really hope to see spectres supporting some other play styles as well in the future.

Some are also a bit too large and become easily stuck on the environment or each other with the larger monsters becoming more and more likely for this to happen, Also having more than 4 spectres generally is where these problems start, Different monsters handle this better or worse but a lot of the new spectres are particularly bad at this and while it may not be a dealbreaker for some i do feel improvements could be made in regards to this to drastically improve the quality of these corpses and potential future ones in some cases by just making a few of these a reasonable size or somehow improving their path finding ability even slightly when it is detected that they are stuck.

Then there's the Visibility and Audio issues that come up with some of these spectres spamming voice lines and highly obstructive skills in some cases which i feel are small problems that can hopefully be corrected in future patches as have other spectre noises been reduced or removed due to being a bit too much for the user.

Zombies feel a bit flat and i think could use some attention to diversify the zombie builds just like where skeletons have been expanded slightly over time to include more types or support for play-styles.

The Animated guardian is a big one for me I'd like to see not only animate guardian getting some attention but support for multiple animate guardians creating an entire build archetype centered around the Templar and the Marauder region with that patch actually adding a way to manage their equipment which i'd rather they take their time before trying to implement such a thing.

Now again as far as changes that are truly needed? Minions in general definitely need spell suppression and armor to be more available somewhere somehow.

My character is on my account still I think SilentSymphony its DominatedByBlowing in the HC settlers league and I did it as a chieftain with the trans gem for dom blow and a cane of kulemak so I had really juicy attack speed.

Chief let me get 90 max res, giant warcry buffs and free ancestral call which seemed pretty value and honestly it was my favourite character of the league by far - the character is an absolute brick.

As you mentioned visuals get to be a real problem and on HC that is pretty much an automatic disqualification for a build but just about capped block and all that defence/regen really synergised beautifully.

About my only gripe is forest tiger is too expensive/rare so I never got to fill in the last piece of my build (I'm very tight when it comes to build investment) and Dominating blow itself needs some of the power offsetting from the vaal version, the base minions need to be like 50% more powerful and the vaal guys should be 33% worse to bring them a little closer together.

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Draegnarrr wrote:

My character is on my account still I think SilentSymphony its DominatedByBlowing in the HC settlers league and I did it as a chieftain with the trans gem for dom blow and a cane of kulemak so I had really juicy attack speed.

Chief let me get 90 max res, giant warcry buffs and free ancestral call which seemed pretty value and honestly it was my favourite character of the league by far - the character is an absolute brick.

As you mentioned visuals get to be a real problem and on HC that is pretty much an automatic disqualification for a build but just about capped block and all that defence/regen really synergised beautifully.

About my only gripe is forest tiger is too expensive/rare so I never got to fill in the last piece of my build (I'm very tight when it comes to build investment) and Dominating blow itself needs some of the power offsetting from the vaal version, the base minions need to be like 50% more powerful and the vaal guys should be 33% worse to bring them a little closer together.

Yeah the forest tiger is the only one i didn't get to test the full version of during that league being just a bit too much for me despite having blown an enormous amount testing the others, and the cane is a good item it has me considering farming my own from the syndicate, I mostly go for canes about the same as the one you've got in attempt to make some immersive (i deal damage) but also have minions setups but i think im going for the +3 version if i ever use the cane again.