Making Minions Matter: Brainstorming how to raise Necromancer minions out from meta irrelevancy

[Steelstickfig.9146]

It's no secret that Necromancer minions have never really been up-to-par in terms of having a defined niche outside of cheesing PvP 1v1s and acting as a flavor build in open world content. I figured it would be a fun exercise to brainstorm up a way to both modernize the Necromancer's approach to minions and recycle a few underperforming skills or traits in the process.

The general gist is that we take a bit of inspiration from Guild Wars 1 and rethink minions as either a resource to be exploited or a flock to be maintained, via streamlining the visually iconic little skull rats into the bread-and-butter workhorses of the Necromancer minion archetype. I took particular inspiration from Elementalist's elemental auras, in that I wanted to create a mechanic that is present throughout the profession in multiple ways, without necessarily being its profession mechanic nor forcing the player into interfacing with it. Fundamentally, minions should not be "core" to the profession, but should be something with a bit more representation, should the player want to go that route. On that note, I intentionally avoided adding minion-synergy to anything that's already commonly used in meta builds (wvw, spvp, fractals/raids/strikes), that doesn't already have a minion angle.

Here's the full deck, including design goals, trait/skill tooltip mockups, and the general approach: https://imgur.com/a/I2tblXK

TL;DR

• Bone Minions, Shambling Horrors, and Jagged Horrors have been streamlined into the "Horror" archetype: Temporary minions that function similarly, but differ in their primary role. These horrors were divvied out to numerous places in the Necromancer's toolkit.
  • Bone Horrors for meat shielding / CC
  • Shambling Horrors for defense
  • Jagged horrors for inflicting damaging conditions
• The Death Magic's minion-focused traits have been revamped to fit the above concept, while providing for two distinct builds: Blow up your temporary minions, or try to make them last as long as possible.
  • This required cannibalizing Unholy Sanctuary's spot to provide for one additional minion-focused grandmaster.
• Focus has been reworked as the minion weapon. Spinal Shivers is still there, though.
• Scourge and Harbinger are both given their own specific way to summon horrors, in addition to Reaper's Rise!

As with any of these hypothetical "let's larp as game designers" posts, anything numerical is basically placeholder, and it's really all just a creativity exercise.

Edited September 13 by Steelstickfig.9146

[ZephidelGRS.9520]

Minions only need a trait that makes them spread conditions on attacks to be good. The only reason why they're not good is because they attack using their own non-existent stats, and there's exactly only 1 Minion (Shambling Horror) that inflicts Bleeding on attack. And the reason why it has to specifically be conditions is because conditions use the caster's stats for damage. Imagine all the Minions stacking stacks of conditions on the poor victim, that would get funky really quickly.

Right now the only way that this works is using a condi Reaper with Rise and self-Corruption skills. It's fun, but could be better.

[Dadnir.5038]

You're going to make WvW collapse with those suggestions. And I mean it in term of "ping" which will probably lead to yet another witch hunt against the necromancer on the forum.

The major issue with minions is that all the (way too many) traits that affect them affect their "passive" side while none affect their "active" skill. What I personally dislike the most with your suggestion is that it's doubling down on this design flaw.

If you want to raise minions to the state where they can be useful in any meta, it's as simple as making your character fart boons whenever it use a minion's active skill. Whether such thing is done through a trait or a rework of some of the minions' active skills is entirely up to the devs.

• Make bone minions share 3 might stacks within the radius upon use of Putrid explosion and they will suddenly become popular.
• Get rid of Bone fiend's Rigor mortis, the skill have been absolutely unusable since 2012. Change it to Bone shrapnel: Explode your Bone fiend in a flury of bone that bleed foes in the radius and grant Fury to allies withing the radius.
• Add aoe regeneration to Blood fiend's Taste of death.
• Put aoe swiftness on Wurm's Necrotic traversal. Yes it's cheap but it's not useless.
• I'd prefer if both Shadow fiend and Golem's active skills were also "sacrifice" skill for the sake of consistency but I can live with them being as they are. Still, Shadow fiend and Golem could afford to share boons on active skill use as well.

Another point that feel "wrong" in your proposed change is that out of all your ideas about minions none involve the use of the shroud which is the main mechanism of the necromancer. Death shroud could have a more intricate relationship with minions (This shroud is trash compared to the others, anything that can help it would be welcome):

• Dark pursuit (Dark path's follow up) could also shadow step your minions to the target.
• Life transfer could afford to heal your minions for every point of life force gained through this skill.
• Tainted shackles could recharge your minions' active skills with each tic.
• Doom could apply Quickness and Fury onto all your minions for a few seconds.

The e-specs could have their own twist.

• Executioner's scythe could make your minions' next hit apply chill.
• Minions could benefit from the Scourge Blood as sand passive effect.
• Sacrificing a minion could grant blight to the Harbinger.

[Brujeria.7536]

I mean to be realistic minions will never be a core part of the necromancer in gw2, at least not like they where in gw1. Single pet specs can work to some degree, see engi elite spec, but the army approach cant work in balanced state in gw2 s combat.

That being said i think there are some reworks to be done for deathmagic and minion skills:

Deathmagic - get rid of the minion traits altogether, make the hp / damage increases baseline. Basicly it makes no sense that 1/3rd of our defense traitline is covered up by minion traits.

Minions - The trick here is to make them usefull by their summoning or active skill. See fleshworm, a teleport does see use across all gamemodes. That means giving them unique or desireable effects while keeping them as minions

- General: Active cooldowns are on CD after summoning.

- Summoning a minions triggers a 3 second global cooldown for other minion skills (except for the blood fiend)

-Summon Shadowfiend - Instantly summon a shadowfiend at your location causing fear and blind to nearby targets while providing you with stealth. The active skill will cause the shadowfiend to teleport to the target causing a smokefield and blind . If no target is selected it teleports to you.

- Summon Bone Minions - Instantly summons two bone minions around you, causing poison and knockback as well as a blast finisher.  Passive: upon creation and every 10 seconds thereafter the bone minions drain one condition from you. Active skill: one of your bone minions launches itself to a target area, corrupting one boon as well as spreading all of its conditions to all targst hit

- Summon Bone Fiend - Instantly Summons your bonefiend at the targeted location causing immob and torment to surrounding enemys. Active: your bone fiend frenzys, increasing its attack speed and causing each attack to cause slow and bleed for a short duration, while providing you with bone fiend poison which causes your next two attacks to daze and immob on hit

- Summon Flesh worm - Instantly summon your fleshworm at a location and then swap place with it, causing poison in the area. Active swap places with your Flesh worm

- Summon Blood fiend - Instantly summon your blood fiend at your location providing heal and protection. Active Skill: Your bloodfiend tethers all nearby enemys to drain life from them. During that time 30% of the damage you receive is transfered to it

- Summon Flesh Golem - instantly summons your bone golem to charge from your location toward a chosen location, providing you with stability. Active: You flesh golem rushes to a target location and applies stability to all friendly targets hit

As for traits: they could do a minion trait that massively icnreases all minions effects and skills but limits you to use one minion at a time.

 

 

 

 

 

[Steelstickfig.9146]

At the end of the day, this pie-in-the-sky brainstorming is really just a creativity exercise. The scale of what I wrote borders on being even more complicated than an elite spec. Ultimately, the same end experience goal could be accomplished just by revamping Death Nova to work without requiring deaths, so it can summon Jagged Horrors (which apply bleed) outside of open world mob clearing. It's just a matter of how inspired you're feeling when it comes to revamping this kind of thing.

13 hours ago, Dadnir.5038 said:

• Dark pursuit (Dark path's follow up) could also shadow step your minions to the target.
• Life transfer could afford to heal your minions for every point of life force gained through this skill.
• Tainted shackles could recharge your minions' active skills with each tic.
• Doom could apply Quickness and Fury onto all your minions for a few seconds.

This I really like -- not necessarily the exact details (but they are good!), but rather the idea of retrofitting core shroud to be more minion-focused. After all, when a new player selects "Necromancer", they're going to assume a level of minionmancery. And, unfortunately, the existing minion toolkit just plain bites.

I'm also a pretty strong believer that the Death Magic traitline should be allowed to have a substantial portion of its budget dedicated to Death Magic and minions. But that's a bit of my personal bias, as I don't believe that traits should be 1:1 relegated to a particular aspect of a build.

"This traitline is for power builds..." "This traitline is for condi buidls..." "This traitline is for healing"...

I much prefer something where traitlines serve a thematic purpose. The idea of "Death Magic" can do a lot more than cleansing conditions or giving you +10 toughness in various ways. And, again, I'd really prefer for necro minions to be kind of like ele auras or guardian symbols or something, where they are more than just a set of utility skills, and can be synergized with and obtained in more spots throughout the class's whole kit. But, of course, necromancer should always be able to function totally without minions (in fact the class should be 90% minion-less). Do note that, of the actual real not-made-up class's traits and abilities, I only added goofy horror presence to... I think 5 things that didn't have them before, and super rarely used things at that.

One last thing, I intentionally avoided touching the other core minions because I know some people do just want to summon the old gaggle of dudes. But me? I just like the rats.

Edited September 13 by Steelstickfig.9146

[Nefras.7314]

21 hours ago, Dadnir.5038 said:

You're going to make WvW collapse with those suggestions. And I mean it in term of "ping" which will probably lead to yet another witch hunt against the necromancer on the forum.

The major issue with minions is that all the (way too many) traits that affect them affect their "passive" side while none affect their "active" skill. What I personally dislike the most with your suggestion is that it's doubling down on this design flaw.

If you want to raise minions to the state where they can be useful in any meta, it's as simple as making your character fart boons whenever it use a minion's active skill. Whether such thing is done through a trait or a rework of some of the minions' active skills is entirely up to the devs.

• Make bone minions share 3 might stacks within the radius upon use of Putrid explosion and they will suddenly become popular.
• Get rid of Bone fiend's Rigor mortis, the skill have been absolutely unusable since 2012. Change it to Bone shrapnel: Explode your Bone fiend in a flury of bone that bleed foes in the radius and grant Fury to allies withing the radius.
• Add aoe regeneration to Blood fiend's Taste of death.
• Put aoe swiftness on Wurm's Necrotic traversal. Yes it's cheap but it's not useless.
• I'd prefer if both Shadow fiend and Golem's active skills were also "sacrifice" skill for the sake of consistency but I can live with them being as they are. Still, Shadow fiend and Golem could afford to share boons on active skill use as well.

Another point that feel "wrong" in your proposed change is that out of all your ideas about minions none involve the use of the shroud which is the main mechanism of the necromancer. Death shroud could have a more intricate relationship with minions (This shroud is trash compared to the others, anything that can help it would be welcome):

• Dark pursuit (Dark path's follow up) could also shadow step your minions to the target.
• Life transfer could afford to heal your minions for every point of life force gained through this skill.
• Tainted shackles could recharge your minions' active skills with each tic.
• Doom could apply Quickness and Fury onto all your minions for a few seconds.

The e-specs could have their own twist.

• Executioner's scythe could make your minions' next hit apply chill.
• Minions could benefit from the Scourge Blood as sand passive effect.
• Sacrificing a minion could grant blight to the Harbinger.

ill take all this please and instant cast wurm thank you very much 

[Drarnor Kunoram.5180]

9 hours ago, Brujeria.7536 said:

Deathmagic - get rid of the minion traits altogether, make the hp / damage increases baseline. Basicly it makes no sense that 1/3rd of our defense traitline is covered up by minion traits.

Nuh uh.  Death Nova stays.  The rest can go/become baseline, but Death Nova stays.

[Brujeria.7536]

7 hours ago, Drarnor Kunoram.5180 said:

Nuh uh.  Death Nova stays.  The rest can go/become baseline, but Death Nova stays.

Why? Genuine question, is there any real scenario for that trait?

[Drarnor Kunoram.5180]

4 hours ago, Brujeria.7536 said:

Why? Genuine question, is there any real scenario for that trait?

For one, it's simply the most interesting of the minion traits.  Jagged Horrors, Shambling Horrors, and Unstable Horrors all have timed lifespans, so they're guaranteed to die, Bone Minions want to get blown up anyway, and all of your other minions will have a bit more going on when they die.

Two, minion bombing was a genuine strategy in GW1, and I think it's one of the healthiest ways to have a trait for minions.  I think every utility skill type should have one trait for them, and Death Nova encourages you to go for the more active approach on minions as opposed to the other minion traits that want you to have as many up at all times as possible. Plus, having it be the only minion trait could allow it to get a bit more power budget.  It's good for tagging enemies right now, but any encounter where you regularly get an add kill (Dragonstorm and Siren's Reef are currently the two best examples) can result in this trait being a decent amount of damage if it had a bit more power.

Edited September 14 by Drarnor Kunoram.5180

[draxynnic.3719]

The nuclear option, which has been the trend for similar features for other professions (except engineer turrets, which are in an even worse state) would be to rebalance them all as short-term (or short-ish-term) effects. Strengthening the effect of the actives might be a less extreme way of achieving this taking a balance approach where the minion itself is really just a minor persistent effect on its own, but the main strength of the skill comes with the active use.

[Steelstickfig.9146]

2 hours ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

The nuclear option, which has been the trend for similar features for other professions (except engineer turrets, which are in an even worse state) would be to rebalance them all as short-term (or short-ish-term) effects. Strengthening the effect of the actives might be a less extreme way of achieving this taking a balance approach where the minion itself is really just a minor persistent effect on its own, but the main strength of the skill comes with the active use.

I think the best way to go about it would be to play on minions being temporary things that you have to manage or upkeep in some way, with a way to exploit their presence (death nova, blowing them up somehow, etc.). I hard believe that permanent minions, which includes the entire current utility skill lineup, should not be a thing. The utility skill Minions, as they are now, just like Engineer turrets, need a ground-up redesign to make them both viable AND healthy for the game. Conversely, the useful temp minions (Jagged Horrors and Shamblos), really just need to be made a bit more accessible for them to be something worth planning a build around.

And... Shifting the power budget entirely into the existing minions' active skills is actually a design trap, I think, as it fails to achieve the "minion master" archetype's experience goal of being the commander of at least somewhat autonomous dudes. If the minion is basically just a platform by which you trigger some active, then all you've really done is overcomplicate what should just be an active skill. The appeal of the summoner archetype is just that -- the summons, not casting Fireball by means of summoning the Imp-that-casts Fireball, who will just sit there and look pretty until you the player presses the "Tell the imp to cast Fireball" button. Hence why in the OP I focus almost entirely on temporary summons that don't need you to micro their useful aspect, but do you need your input to continuously summon them and keep them rolling. Again, most of this is inspired by how GW1 minionmancers work.

Also, I don't think that minions should *just* be a utility skill type. They absolutely positively should not be a hard requirement to playing Necromancer, but they're iconic enough to the necromancer archetype that I think they should be found in a few more places.

And, finally, because this always comes up when it comes to Necromancer due to how the class functions in a death or target-rich environment, WvW will always require a little extra thought. Maybe minions have reduced health in wvw, maybe they get prioritized by AoE (or de-prioritized, both have their pros and cons), maybe the player can only summon a reduced number of Horrors (bringing it back to the original deck, since nobody wants to talk about it 💀), maybe numbers are lower, yada yada.

Edited September 15 by Steelstickfig.9146