Witch Minions, totally unplayable

Minions are pretty bad. I'd be willing to bet that most if not all the people who say they are fine are just using SRS. Unequip all your other minions except SRS and your damage wont change much.

Couple of things that really make minions suck imo
- cant use the same support gems on multiple skills
- no proper 'necromancer' ascendency. The two witch ones have almost nothing to do with them
- They get stuck constantly and despawn. And melee minions will just clog a doorway by themselves. It feels awful unless youre in an open area. The dreadnaught area almost made me reroll.

That being said it's EA so I don't doubt things will get better. For now though I'm just going to play a different class. In poe1 playing a mass summoner called for using many different tools and those just aren't available in this barebones version of the game. Trying to make melee/physical damage minions work just makes me realize playing an actually melee class would be better. Same with spell minions.

I hope they heavily nerf SRS tbh.

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energumenus32#1156 wrote:

Minions are pretty bad. I'd be willing to bet that most if not all the people who say they are fine are just using SRS. Unequip all your other minions except SRS and your damage wont change much.

Couple of things that really make minions suck imo
- cant use the same support gems on multiple skills
- no proper 'necromancer' ascendency. The two witch ones have almost nothing to do with them
- They get stuck constantly and despawn. And melee minions will just clog a doorway by themselves. It feels awful unless youre in an open area. The dreadnaught area almost made me reroll.

That being said it's EA so I don't doubt things will get better. For now though I'm just going to play a different class. In poe1 playing a mass summoner called for using many different tools and those just aren't available in this barebones version of the game. Trying to make melee/physical damage minions work just makes me realize playing an actually melee class would be better. Same with spell minions.

I hope they heavily nerf SRS tbh.

Why nerf it? Bring everything else up to it and not the other way around is much better. Not everything needs to be nerfed just because of some silly cases where they "overperformed".

I'm using minions, but I've gone the "deal damage with chaos" route. So I fire chaos spells, my skele warriors do wither on hit.skele archers poison. I feel like they do good damage. I kill mobs before they feel overwhelming. Yeah boss damage is low, but I expect that's pretty common. I can dodge while doing damage because the minions are still going. My minions did die quite often, but since I could still do damage, it wasn't hard to just survive until they respawn. I have taken the node that gives them 3% life regen and now they barely ever die. I'm not struggling so far, but I'm only on Act 2 so we'll see if that keeps up.

del

minions do seem to be bad early on, but I'm in A3 cruel using skele frost mages and they are doing work. Even with my shit gear

I will break it down to you. This is how you do it.

LV 01-12 - Skeleton (mace) + Snipers + Essence Drain (use clouds)
LV 12-27 - Skeleton (mace) Arsonists + SRS (start using support gems)
LV 28-80 - Skeleton (mace) Arsonists + SRS (use better support gems)

I'm on T3 endgame and I can't get my reavers/brutes to work nearly as ranged+SRS.

I just wish I hadn't have to rely on SRS.

Tier 3-5 Maps so far:

Minion Blood Mage:
Spirit 344
Summon raging spirit, infernal legion, minion instability, fire penetration
Flame wall x 2 to spawn the SRS

2 x Brutes burtality, heft, heavy swing
1 x Skeletal cleric - meat shield, ingeniuity , elemental army
How many you can (i got 7) x Skeleton SNIPERS - love them- feeding frenzy, marttial tempo, immolate


I cast detonate dead and firestorm for fun
debuff with vulnerability or flamability

pain offering.

Early game : wepon skellies + arsonists + srs, you need to be smart no lazing about you need to shoot snpiers cloud into immolated packs, still hits hard.

Build gets stronger with spirit, once you get +minion levels its fun
My brutes have over 11k hp with average damge of 4k, sniper average damage is 1666, so yeah its not much but it is honest work.

Minions alone suck - but they also did in PoE 1 when you were low level. So you had to bridge the gap with something else. In PoE2 you can use essence drain or contagion for that purpose.

Once you're past the Graveyard, you're almost there. Complete the rituals in Freythorn, get your 30 Spirit and choose SRS as your aura. Now put Flame Wall on your bar. Every cast of Flame Wall will summon 5 Raging Spirits, cast twice and you get the maximum of 10. These guys rock!

You may need to adjust to the boss - the damage against Zalmarath was meh because he has some fire resistance - he is weak to frost, though. So I swapped Skeletal Arsonist with Skeletal Frost Mage and replaced Unearth with good old Frost Bomb. Fight was a piece of cake later.

The one issue I have is that you seem to be tied to spam SRS via Flame Wall as the "normal" minions do indeed suck. The Arsonists are cool from the rear and can do insane damage but you need a wall of SRS and Bone Construct Minions in front to keep them safe.

And I saw a fight of Act 1 in cruel against the "Wolf" where the "Wolf" could not even transition to its phases because it was perma-stunned and obliterated in < minute.

So - Minion builds *are* totally viable. But you need to wait till Freythorn to get SRS and you will have to rely on spamming SRS - which is very different to the permanent army + Golem + Spectre you had on PoE 1 with a small skeleton army on call via Vaal Summon Skeleton. Until Freythorn you are better off with Contagion/Essence Drain. Keep the Skellies happy with meat shield and the temporary Bone Constructs can be turned into bombs when they run low on health. This will see you safely to and through Freethorn. After that it's SRS spamming.

So as I see all the s* being dumped on minions I feel like saying something.
I'm playing skeleton minions build and since act 2 normal I'm cutting through the monsters w/o bigger problems.

Maybe I got lucky to get the unique Enfolding Dawn early?

Right now running with 404 spirit:

Minions, specifically NON SRS minions are basically trash

Every person on here that says but my minions (SRS) are good.... stop using srs and watch the zdps. Problems I've personally seen with minions.

1. Melee minions get stuck on absolutely everything, they also lose target and stand there.

2. Minions are also squishy pop, they go poof on absolutely everything. There does not seem to be a difference in hp between the minions all die just as fast.

3. Focus on spirit is insane, you need spirit on every single piece of gear in order to have minions at all because of the high spirit cost. Made worse by all the trash affixes that will generally fill up the spots that you desperately need. Having only Scepter because of base spirit, then your forced to have minion HP + %spirit + minion levels on an item just to make it not dogwater with the massive weight to rolls and the fact you must change it out relatively often because of the skill being embeded on it.

4. Minions have no taunt at all. Mobs regularly bypass minions to nom on you.

5. Combo interactions that made them not feel like a complete dumpster fire are already gutted (gas arrow) if it takes 5 gas arrows exploding to kill a white mob 4 levels under you with how long it takes to setup and how easy it is to miss..... its not worth it.

6. No minion ascendancy, why?

7. Not being able to share gems. Absolutely horrible idea to only allow 1 of a type of gem in your entire gem setup. This is made worse when you see something like feeding frenzy that can only be used on one minion but makes them even worse with the massive HP loss to an already feeble hp pool for not much of a damage increase.

8. Presence is way to small of an area so you cant even buff your minions that are not in what is effectively melee range.

9. Minion re-summoning takes way to long, a base of 7 seconds that can stretch out to over a minute before getting minions back is absolutely insane. If its going to be 7 seconds make every single minion a separate timer and get rid of the reset on minion death bs. Its always good to get down to 1 second and poof 7 seconds again and again.

10. Specifically Reavers are trash, great you used their skill to make them do a tiny bit more damage, they have no life leach so you just put them on a countdown to death for a slow moving very squishy melee minion that gets stuck on every blade of grass, wall, stone, doorway.... or even air as they sit there and die. If you are forcing them to die then they need compensation for it, make them rage increase movement speed, attack speed, and give them life leech.

There are more points but you get the idea.

Using SRS and saying minions are good is only hiding how horrible the permanent minions actually are. A single acceptable skill blinds people to how bad the rest are.