Witch Minions, totally unplayable

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Teferi1109#6725 wrote:

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

Frost skelies go brrr. Love these absolute champions

i am act 5 on the end and i can kill everytihng easily only lacking good defence as my items are SSF and doing my own build where there are not yet any defence nodes .

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Judicas#5519 wrote:

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.

TL;DR Summons are great. Yo're doing something wrong, bruh.

Rushed through cruel with the speed of light. It was even easier than normal.

SRS are tough, you're right. But sometimes im too lazy to cast firewalls, just clicking through one-handed. So playable without 'em too.

The hardest is the beginning. So it's almost impossible to start full-summons only if you wish good speed. So until you get important talents you must rely on shadow spells too.


If you need huge AoE, try "Bone Offering". It erupts from every damaged minion. Meaning, you may have 30+ trash summons and each of them can have potential to proc damage from totem. That's hell of a damage + huge amount of stagger on bosses.
You may spam around: 10+ trash skellies + 15+ bone constructs + 2 skelly from scepter + 10 SRS + doge. Place totem wait for enemy's aoe and BOOM. All dead.

1. Also im not spamming arsoninst — too boring. Playing mostly archers+reavers. Balancing amount of reavers depending on map. If the map has a lot of narrow corridors: 1-3 reavers, remaining spirit to archers (+2 skelly from scepter). If the map has huge fields: up to 3 archers, remaining spirit to reavers.
Bosses: 2 archers, tons of reavers. They are melting bosses as butter.

So. If your minions are stacking somewhere — use more ranged minions.

2. As for surviveability — open talent tree and type "minions" in the search window on the right. And take all the red talents. My pets had surviveability issues only in the beginning.

3. Focusing on spirit is not hard. TBH at the start you don't need nothing more, except spirit. You can play naked glass cannon. Jut find spirit on scepter, amulet, chest piece.

Dont forget to take talent to -12% spirit cost for your friends :3

4. Taunt is not needed in most situations. You may alway run around your summons :)

5. Arrow explosion combo is one-shotting most trash in the beginning and mid-game. You must be doing something wrong.
Also totem combo is huge.
Spreading chaos through bone constructs is great too at the start.

6. Em...
Infernalist has +1 minion (doge). And final talent gives a huge amount of spirit. It's obviosly summoning-based.

7. Most summons need different gems. Don't see a problem.
My skellies from scepter are packed to ignite
Archers for split arrows / gas etc.
Doggo for huge hp. His aura depends on HP amount.
SRS are fire-based
Melees most likely will want to strip armor / stagger (stun).

9. After taking some talents resummon takes 4+ seconds. Not that much

10. Reavers are great. As said earlier — they are melting solo targets (bosses, elites). Amount of reavers/archer balance you may change on the fly. Sometimes I made it while fighting boss :D

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Vlkodlak80#7105 wrote:

i am act 5 on the end and i can kill everytihng easily only lacking good defence as my items are SSF and doing my own build where there are not yet any defence nodes .

stack some Str for HP + shield in off-hand + try Grim Feast
https://pathofexile2.wiki.fextralife.com/Grim+Feast

that was enough for me personally

So, after playing through the start some more (can't say anything about how minions perform at higher levels because I haven't gotten there yet, and it seems they're performing better than ok)

The good:
The clear speed through areas, even early game, feel pretty good to me when using contagion + unearth. Yeah, it's mostly contagion doing the work instead of your bone constructs, but your minions actually feel useful by carrying the contagion from pack to pack, and the occasional gas arrow helps clearing each pack even further. It lets you feel like a proper necromancer from the very start.

The 'infernalist' build, with SRS & arsonists synergises really well. Not only do the arsonist projectiles do a decent chunk of damage (especially when combined with the multiple projectiles and area of effect support gems), the fire wall spawning your SRS sets them on fire making them do even more. It's all fire damage too, so the Flammability curse ups that even higher.

The bad:
The infernalist build is really the one viable way to play minions in boss-fights, at least until you get a ton more spirit to have a real skeleton army going. All of your early non-reviving minions require corpses to get out, and the respawn timer for your reviving minions is really punishing at the start so you can't rely on those either.

I feel like there is a world where the bone-constructs from unearth or the zombies can be good in boss fights when combined with the armor stripping of the sniper's gas arrow and the vulnerability curse, especially if you also have minion instability on your temporary minions to let them blow up once they inevitably kick the bucket, but the corpses you need to support that just aren't there. It might still be good later on when you have enough spirit to get a bunch of reavers out, enough passive nodes to lower the revive timer of your recurring minions to an acceptable level, and have them take on the role of your temporary minions with some snipers for support, but from what other folks say this is terrible in clearing maps because they all get stuck behind each other.

Right now, I feel like the lack of access to corpses in boss arenas is really the missing piece of the puzzle that lets us tackle boss fights like a true necromancer. Fixing that would let us avoid leaning entirely on SRS, It would really let us feel that we're overwhelming them with our undead horde even if most of it would be temporary, it would let us use our limited pool of reviving minions as elite troops supporting and synergising the rest of our army such as having the sniper use their gas arrow to strip away armor and then blow up the gas by having the arsonist detonate one of our temp minions, and it'd more cleanly let us slot in zombies when we get them before we transition to having our reviving minions make up the bulk of our undead army.