Witch Minions, totally unplayable

I just happened to loot a gem this morning and cut it to SRS. What a gamechange THAT was.

I've think I have a system sort of nailed down.

For large packs,

Two Warriors, One Sniper

Contagion on one mob, flame wall, Enfeeble with Doomcast(?), the Sniper with their poison move. The flamewall explodes and clears, summons SRS. Mob that dies, Contagion spreads nicely.

For bosses, Enfeeble, Flamewall for SRS, Snipers, and run.

Flamewall was a nice switch, but SRS changed the build completely.

If SRS is the only option that is just flat out poor design. Witch minions are half baked at best, they should have kept the class out of the game until it was ready like the others they are still working on.

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telgalad#4727 wrote:

Persistent minions need a serious buff... like triple life and triple damage buff to be close to a viable archtype. Otherwise you are not playing a minion build... your a caster with minions.

And what happens to builds that actually play active minion builds combining spells with your tripple-buffed minions?


......

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dyneol#3245 wrote:

I don't think you are supposed to let your pets play the game for you in poe2. You have to see them as addition and launching pad for your further skills, which is why they automatically resummon.

then they shouldn't have nodes specifically for minions when they're trash.

Just chiming in to say that SRS flame wall is only spell I've been able to make any headway with. I play in a group with my girlfriend and the last boss we fought in the start of act 1 was Rath Breaker, it took 8 minutes 30 seconds to kill with us both staying alive till the very end with both of us on max minion damage nodes on flame wall SRS.

The boss fights are brutal. They have way too much life. The minions are all useless. They die almost instantly with all the AOE boss damage. Raise zombies requiring corpses and having a short duration means you have no reliable protection and often get overwhelmed by adds in phasing.

It's just severely under powered. I don't even know what to do at this point. I just want us to have fun but nothing is doing any damage. We already had to roll new characters to level 11 to get spirit gem to convert her character to SRS... we were certain heading into act1 that two SRS flamewall witches was the missing ingredient. She thought she just wasn't doing enough damage to compensate for the party inflation on monster health. Nope. Damage is just butt and I just don't know what to play.. so guess I'll research more.

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

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And what happens to builds that actually play active minion builds combining spells with your tripple-buffed minions?


......

You mean the minions you sacrifice for damage and unsummoned with each spell? Not to mention if one minion dies the counter resets. to increase your damage to the point any help they may provide is nearly irrelevant because you killed them for your own spell buffs.

It may be something useful if they add just a minion ascendancy.

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jpeter38#3798 wrote:

"

dyneol#3245 wrote:

I don't think you are supposed to let your pets play the game for you in poe2. You have to see them as addition and launching pad for your further skills, which is why they automatically resummon.

then they shouldn't have nodes specifically for minions when they're trash.

"I don't like active minion playstyle and so therefore nobody should"
Ok.

I've gotta side with the folks saying they're underbaked currently. Been playing witch since hour 1, and despite taking EVERY minion node (build is a complete mess) boss fights are quite simply just dodging for 10 minutes, casting a spell after every roll and hoping for the best. Going to finally re-roll a new character today, and put it on the shelf until they're adjusted. Game is in beta, they'll get it ironed out, I have complete faith, but minions feel entirely underbaked. The level design is too narrow for mass minion builds, minions are NOT grabbing aggro (like at all: do they even aggro? After 30 hours, I don't think so) and the ascendancies seem to have almost no thought to dedicated minion builds beyond infernalist, which basically negates the other minions entirely.

I've tried about every mix of skills at this point, and although I got further with the starting chaos bolt and bone wall, the only thing that seems to work is flame-wall with SRS. I KNOW their intention wasn't to make us all play the same Witch build, so just wanted to lend my voice to the side asking for the buff hammer to come in a swinging! From what I've seen however, it's going to take nearly an entire re-work, not just a buff here or there.

Love the game guys, this is going to be the best AARPG of all time, mark my words.

Literally the best I could come up with was skeleton warriors on a scepter + skeleton ice mages, spam the ice bomb attack to chill/freeze, use cold snap to freeze break, and fire wall for SRS. Multiple interactions of skills here, still does no damage. Also curses to lower resists. Ember fullicade works better (with SRS) for bosses than fire wall, and it does a little bit of extra dps, it might shave 10% off your boss kill time. Even after doing all this and it's still total dog shit, even when using more buttons than I'd like to be using.

So, spirit allocation might look something like this 2 skeleton warriors (scepter) + 2 ske

Immortal legion doesn't stack, so if you use it, you want it only on 1 pet as to not raise the spirit cost too much. It doesn't do any damage anyway even when combined with all of the other stuff above. Minions are so short in so many areas that there's really no single piece of the puzzle that would just magically make a minion build work.

The dog with infernalist is trash too, and doesn't change anything, those of you hoping it gets better once you unlock your ascendancy, I hate to be the bearer of bad news but it's a solid nope.

Even on a non-minion build, you have buffs, auras, cast on "insert situation here", etc that're all better than wasting spirit on minions for any build that actually does damage. Even if minions were considerably better than they are now.

Throw me in the club who wants a viable minion build, not minions as a side focus, but even minions as a side focus is objectively trash by any reasonable metric.

I wish immortal legion *DID* stack, and then I could report back after I boosted my minions with minion HP, capped their fire resist and run 8 of them with immortal legion so packs just burn to the ground when they get near me.

Boosting resists on pets seems to be pointless currently, you might as well grab nodes that make them revive faster. Only reason for boosting resists on pets would be fire resist if immortal legion was actually good (it's not).

It's not like I haven't gotten my thinking cap out for this. Immortal legion + minion instability + cast on minion death + boosted revive speed - already tried it. It's trash. If I could get my minions to go Aaron Bushnell before exploding like a suicide bomber, just to insta-revive them and send them back to the front, I would, but I expect to see cheeks get spread WIDE.