A few questions regarding auras and minions

So I've been playing since the release and my main is a lvl 60 summoner witch. I understand summoners are kind of niche/unfavorable build type do to the relatively slow killing speed of minions, but so far I'm enjoying my playthough which I've been doing completely solo aside from the dominus battle (in normal) and I imagine I will have to use a party for cruel too. As you can guess from the fact that I'm lvl 60 and still on cruel I've been over-leveling the zones for quite a while.

Anyway through my gameplay I've made quite a few observations and was hoping to get some questions I've had for a while answered, especially in regards to minions and auras since those are things I've come to rely on heavily.

1. Exactly what auras effect minions? I know it should be obvious, but take clarity for example. Minions don't seem to have any sort of mana pool. Even caster type minions like the mages in Battlefront seem to use their magic attacks at the same rate regardless or whether I have clarity on or not. Another example is discipline. Since most minions don't seem to have any energy shield to begin with does this add the energy shield properly and how exactly is it applied and do they also receive the 50% less chance to be stunned while having ES? Lastly Determination, this adds an increase in % of your armor. It doesn't seem that most minions have armor either, so how exactly would it add a percentage of increased armor if its 0?

2. What support gems affect auras? So far the only ones that I know effect auras are reduced cost. What about other support gems like increased area of effect and concentrated effect? What about things like added lightning dmg? Say your using a wrath aura and you have added lightning dmg. Will your wrath now give increased lightning dmg? What if your using added fire? etc/

3. What is the max amount of aruas you can use and which ways can you reduce the reserved mana? So currently I'm cycling through wrath, discipline and purity. Using wrath in easier areas and discipline and purity in harder ones depending on what kinda dmg the enemies are using along with clarity. I've tried to run three auras, but with my current mana and clarity at lvl 5, I don't have enough to use my basic spells like raise zombies, summon skellies, arc etc. I've yet to find a reduced mana cost gem so I haven't been able to experiment with that however I have picked up a few reduced mana reserved nodes in the skill tree. Together they give -5, 5-, -4, -4 and -8 respectively resulting in a total -26% reserved mana. However when looking at my auras I see that purity still reserves 30% and wrath/discipline 45%. So I'm guessing that means theres a cap for reduced mana thats different for different auras, atleast using the skill tree. Which means I should probly spec out of some of my reduced reserved nodes lol. I was wondering if this cap can be lowered any more using reduced cost though? If this can be done would it be viable to run atleast 3 auras if not more?

4. What support gems effect minions? Obviously the 4 standard ones increased minion hp, movement speed, damage and elemental resists. What other options are there for minions though? I've tried using added lightning which was fairly effective, but what about stuff like culling strike, multisprike etc? I've heard people who've attached lmp to their raise spectre and have their spectres cast more projectiles. If you attach mana or hp leech to a minion, does it leech the mp/hp to their own hp/mp or to yours?

5. Regarding minions and passive skill tree boosts, from poking around I realized that aside from minion specific nodes minions are NOT affected by passive boosts in the skill tree. So this means that if I have something like 30% increased fire dmg and added fire on my zombies it doesn't increase the fire dmg on my minion or the dmg in does when it explodes due to minion instability. What I'm wondering is when you have things like +3 life gained on kill, or +15 mana gained on kill leech 2% of dmg as hp etc, does this effect minions in anyway? Unless you put mana/hp leech on minions will they leech anything?

6. In regards to minion instability, is hp of the minion the only factor that decides the dmg. While I understand that increased fire dmg etc. from your skill tree won't work what if you have support gems on your minion like increased dmg and added fire/lightning dmg? Will those also stack with minion instability?

7. Lastly what kind of spectres do most people use? Perhaps there are some that I've never considered before. Personally some of the ones I've had a lot of success with are

Lightning mages from Battlefront/Barrack- Use chain and give allies a lightning shield that reflect dmg. Fast attack and stay in a back position resulting in high survival rate, I think they might also retain their ES.

Fire sentinals from Solaris temple- Very powerful and moderately fast attack, good hp, ES and survival rate, my only problem with them is that they're quite large and thus big targets and sometimes can cause lag with their flashy lmp fireballs.

Nipple Neelders from Lunaris- Yeah I know its actually -something- miscreation, but I like calling them that. Anyway they have a very very fast attack that is quite powerful and also pretty good survival rate, but still pretty low hp and I believe no ES.

Club guys from Wetlands- Honestly don't know what they're called but they carry clubs and cast warcry which is is pretty awesome cuz my minions can regain hp (and mp... still not sure if any minions even use that) and have a chance to get endurance charges for more survival rate. The only problem with these guys is that once they cast warcry they have to go up to attack with their clubs and can get killed off pretty quickly.

Enfeeble/temporal chain mages in Lunaris- Pretty basic stuff they cast enfeeble and temporal chains which is obviously quite effective. I tend to prefer offensive minion though, but in a pinch these guys can be quite good.

Flammability/Conducitivity casting Necromancer crematorium, prison- Like the above these guys are nice to have around, especially if your using that sort of attack. I really wish they retained their ability to revive dead though lol, but I guess that would be pretty OP.

Any giant statue mobs- These guys make fantastic tanks, especially if you have hp flasks that also give hp to minions. They're dmg is pretty decent, but yeah the tankyness is they're main appeal.

Void bears in the docks and spectre of god- Pretty damn powerful, but fairly low survival rate due to the fact that they have to be pretty close to attack.

Those explody glyph/shield guys in spectre of god- yeah don't know the names of these guys, but they're frikin awesome. Not only do they have great survival rate because of their shields that you have to be close to them to attack, but they also provide me with protection when I'm close and have pretty great dmg too.

Any ranged mobs- Usually when theres nothing really great around and my other spectres are down its worth it to pick up any ranged mobs, because they just tend to have more survival rate than melee spectres.

Yeah a lot of questions I know, but I'd really like to get to know this game better and optimize my playing experience so any help would be greatly appreciated ^_^

That's a huge wall of text so I'm going to answer 1 question right now, I think. May come back for the others when I'm less lazy, or I may not.

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Battosai03 wrote:

1. Exactly what auras effect minions? I know it should be obvious, but take clarity for example. Minions don't seem to have any sort of mana pool. Even caster type minions like the mages in Battlefront seem to use their magic attacks at the same rate regardless or whether I have clarity on or not. Another example is discipline. Since most minions don't seem to have any energy shield to begin with does this add the energy shield properly and how exactly is it applied and do they also receive the 50% less chance to be stunned while having ES? Lastly Determination, this adds an increase in % of your armor. It doesn't seem that most minions have armor either, so how exactly would it add a percentage of increased armor if its 0?

All auras should affect minions.

The developers have stated that minions do in fact have their own mana pools; Battlefront Mages might simply already be casting as fast as they can? Or maybe their abilities just have extremely high cost and they have lots of max mana, so flat regen doesn't help as much?

Currently, discipline adds flat energy shield. 0 + x = x. This means that their base energy shield will be equal to the ES provided by Discipline unless they already have energy shield. All entities in the game will have 50% chance to not be stunned when they have ES before the hit takes place.

Most monsters in the game have armour. I'm not sure why you think they don't. However, the developers have not revealed how much armour they have. It is also quite low, so Determination may not be the best choice.

Do Zombies have a base armor value?

Monsters and minions do have armor but it's generally so low they might just as well not have it at all. Some do have a little more substantial value but those are pretty rare.

Thank you everyone that replied and took the time to read through my post... I know it's quite the text wall lol. Special thx to Mark for actually answering all the questions, wasn't actually expecting one of the staff to help me out ^_^ One thing I'm still a little confused about is reduced mana reserved for auras. Like I said before I picked up several % mana less reserved nodes that add up to -26% less reserved then shouldn't wrath/discipline only have 34% reserved and purity 14% reserved? However what I'm seeing is 45% reserved for wrath/discipline and 30% reserved for purity. Is there another sort of mechanic/calculation that I'm not seeing here or am I just really terrible at math lol? When you say that reduced mana cost decreases the base mana cost by however much % before taking into consideration passive skill nodes does that mean they go by different calculations?

You're just terrible with maths :)

60% reduced by 26% is 40%, the amount it gets reduced by is 26% of 60%. Most interactions of percentages modifying a percentage is done like that, except for % block, that one will just add up.

Keep in mind Reduced mana gem is actually a cost multiplier, so it won't stack with reduced mana passives on the tree, it will just multiply the final skill cost or reservation.

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Battosai03 wrote:

7. Lastly what kind of spectres do most people use? Perhaps there are some that I've never considered before. Personally some of the ones I've had a lot of success with are

This may help.

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raics wrote:

You're just terrible with maths :)

60% reduced by 26% is 40%

I loled. Wrong place to make a typo there, raics.

For those watching at home, 60% reduced by 26% is 44.4%, which rounds up in PoE to 45%.

Heh, definitely wrong :)