Firstly, it’s really nice to play an ARPG in 2025 where minions are actually viable. I have just come off the back of refreshing myself with the campaign and levelling up as minions to the end with a home cooked build ( pure necro, fresh start, no twink items or currency). Basically “roid mage” / golem / volatile zombies build with transplant and dread shade.
I mainly have played poe1 in the past (R.I.P) and i must say that really did the minion fantasy justice. Your design choice seems to be very much centred around having one massive minion and then buffing that minion with dread / infernal shade. It’s definitely fun and easily the best minion experience of any current ARPG to play.
It’s not currently possible to play a “horde of minions” in any viable way due to very limited action bar slots / the buff one “big minion” design choice. Would you ever consider going the POE2 / D4 route of having the minion’s selected / spec’d into on a separate panel and having the ability to turn dread / infernal shade into auras / upping the numbers on the minion counts? With both auras / transplant / movement on your bar that would leave two slots for V zombies and a utility spell. For me, personally, it would really improve the feel of the class fantasy. Zooming around with one big boy just doesn’t feel the same sadly. Classically minion builds are powerful but the trade off is clear speed.
Something like skel warrior front line then you could go really hard into mages or wraiths for damage or hybrid between them and a golem. In the current tree’s you have tech to split the golems and it reminded me of D3’s short mans finger ring, despite that games obvious faults that is awesome fun. If you could have 3-4 of them like poe1 carrion golem style that would just be chef’s kiss.
If it didn’t come across yet I’m a diehard minion enjoyer, I will always choose to level as minions though it’s sub optimal and I would just be over the moon if a current APRG did the class fantasy justice. This was my feedback as a veteran minion player, thank you for taking the time to read it and best of luck with your new cycle’s upcoming release!
I’m not very fond of minion builds myself, especially not the Necromancer ones, generally because of that, I hate minion hordes. When I play minions in LE, I tend to opt for the Beastmaster single companions route.
But I gotta add that this is not accurate, since there’s quite a few minion builds that are called “Zoo builds” for a reason, they run hordes of minions.
Other than that, I cannot help with any information about those builds, cause as I said, I despise them.
Not a big minion enthusiast here and I am not talking about pure power and viability, but horde of minion builds are msot defintiely possible. Especially on the Acolyte.
Between Summon Skeleton already giving you 2 digit+ minions with up to 3 different ones. You can very easily have 20-30 minions spread around Skeletons, Skeletal Mages, Wraiths, Golems, Secondary minions from items and tiggers (like passives and skills).
That will depend on what you mean by that. Using a minions only build is possible and it can clear 300c. You will get a bunch of skeletons+mages+golem+wraiths+zombies+knights. You can even spec them all into fire, or most into cold.
It’s not the strongest minion build, but it’s certainly viable.
Then you have the golemancer build, which runs 3 golems, a couple wraiths, some knights and a bunch of mages. It can even kill Aby.
People seem to be hung up on this one sentence in a wall of feedback so for context,
I make my own builds in poe, craft 100 div helms and fractured aggressive +2 wands, possibility not “the average minion player” and I might well have a far out their take.
Around the mid campaign these basic minions became basically cannon fodder and you are 100% incentivised to go the one “big minion” route with dread / infernal giving massive buffs to the minion it’s attached too. Like 100% crit, making them hasted, etc etc.
When I say viable, I meant to compete closely with the “Meta” minion build which are honestly fairly low down in terms of the power it’s possible to get in this game. Being unable to use the buffs like 100% crit, hasted etc unless you go down the one minion route is a pigeonhole. It’s extremely restrictive unless you want to play something very sub par.
My feedback summed up would be that it’s not currently possible to play the “class fantasy” in an optimally way. Which is compounded when you look up any guides for viable builds and they are all one big minion buffed with dread / infernal shade.
Yeah, I understand what you mean. Zoo necro definitely isn’t optimal. However, necro is actually an old mastery that is requiring a lot of tuning. I think it’s the only tree that doesn’t have any threshold nodes (those that give an extra bonus when you reach x points in it) too. This is despite the fact that Acolyte is one of the most played classes, though that could be mostly because of Warlock at this point.
Season 3 should bring a Lich rework and Necro is scheduled to be looked at as well. So maybe we’ll get some more options for zoo builds at that point.
But yeah, until then the strongest minion builds are more focused on a single minion, like Fred (single archmage), Wraithlord (still OP even after nerf), Abomination or Golemancer (though this technically means 3+ golems).
Might well be well timed feedback if they are imminently looking at Necro.
I only picked this up a few months before it’s release and it’s looking like another cycle of Roid into Wraithlord. That’s fine and it is fun but I do really miss the Poe days for 5-10 minions being your main dps and the same again or more as meat shields. I think this game has the scope and complexity for it to work and them do a good job at it honestly.
There’s hundreds of viable horde of minion builds, across all the classes, that can complete 100% of the content in the game and push further than that.
Please check Lastepochtools.com or any other build website. I could list 15-20 just off the top of my head and I don’t even really play minion builds.
Unfortunately that’s not what the word viable means tho …
viable /vī′ə-bəl/
adjective
Capable of success or continuing effectiveness; practicable: synonym: possible.
I mean ok… There is 18 Necro builds provided there in total with a few “full minion” ones being league starts designed to clear campaign and early monoliths until you farm up the items to transition. The post is my personal feedback about playing minions in the game, I’m not going to argue with you about subjective grammar, especially when I have already posted to clear up any confusion about what I meant. I’m not interested in playing other classes, Necro IS the minion specialization.
I run skeletons cold build just fine around 666 corr, it is quite slow but fun to play
I find I could push to like 700cc but it will be oneshot die fest cause not possible to scale minion and cahr sustain any farther. I can provide some video if u like to see how it is going. That’s the general archetype:
That was what I had in mind when I was playing with the idea on build planners except I was trying to do it low life ward, It’s possibly a bit to much pressure on affix’s / suffix’s to have life / ward, life regen / ward retention and then minion damage and minion health.
Also the new inheritance of the erased amulet stacking with the dread and infernal shade buffs on one big boy puts this idea even further behind.
I mean they could buff “horde” style builds for sure.
But I like that solo minion is viable and encouraged. I hate how PoE has treated HoAG builds.
I think the only issue currently isnt on a damage front. Skeletons/mages as armies do plenty of damage, hell they can certainly compare or even out dps anything that isnt wraithlord/abom.
The bigger issue is they require more gear, and are much more fragile, even solo archmage builds suffer where the archmage can die, abom/wraithlord basically cant die.
Beastmaster suffers a similar fate, Solo bear can easily get 20k hp with almost 0 minion life investment, and swipe has a node that says it fully heals the nearest minion if you hit with it, well when you have only one minion, its always being fully healed and proccing its ability,
Even the minions made for “Swarm” on beast master, like stormcrows? If you dont have literally perfect gear, solo crow is very competitive with multiple crows.
So I dont think its really an issue of damage, its an issue of all these crappy necro minions have really trash health and 0 way to get damage reduction outside of a tiny bit of armor or leech or res.
I think the main issue is that, besides this point, when a single minion build has a minion die, you simply recast it and you’re back in business.
Whereas multiple minion builds have the problem that you have to spend a long time recasting them until you have them all back online. And while you’re recasting them, others are dying.
If you had an easy way to “one cast” them on death, then they would be better to use.
Well patch is coming with health buff so maybe, just maybe I wont be dying that often so I could put more into minions. Will see next weekend I am not playing cycle so I would know pretty fast how is the state of skele army…
I do also enjoy playing the solo minion for a change. I’d just like that to not be the only competitive way to play necro minion build. I do really enjoy the class fantasy and just laying waste to everything with an army sadly.
I think you are most likely right about why base minions don’t feel the most impactful. The necro specialization should have more / much better defensive scaling. The base minions appear to be just about good enough to get you to the latter campaign when the big boy options are made available to you.
I think a part of it is also that the devs don’t really like lazy builds. And the big minion builds are usually more active, since the rest of your skills are for buffing him. Whereas zoo builds are mostly just cast them and then run around.
It’s also why there are so very little options for retaliation builds, or righteous fire style ones.
Still, as has been said, their tree is long overdue a passover, so hopefully that will happen soon and when it does zoos will get a decent buff.
That sounds about right. Some of us are getting older and don’t require getting RSI to have fun and it also let’s handicapped gamers enjoy the game. The higher end of what it’s capable of should probably be more involved which could well be steroid cooldowns or using a skill, Chaos bolt for example to give a stacking buff.
So if you have weak rig You will die just to this issue 