Hello, I wanted to give my feedback on some of the minions and their mechanics. For reference, I’ve been playing ARPGs for almost a decade, got about 800 hours in LE and made a similar thread last year, the topic of which I’d like to revisit.
I think there are several issues with the way certain minions function in LE. I’ll ignore the elephant in the room, the AI, because some of these suggestions are in regards to using game mechanics to circumvent it.
Here we go;
- A) Melee acolyte minions are inherently worse than ranged minions in the aspects of
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Movement speed - They are melee, therefore have to get in melee range, but their movement speed is atrocious, leaving you with another stat to build of which there is none, except the least cost efficient nodes in the skeleton tree and uniques that are sub-par and either don’t offer enough movement speed to patch the issue, aren’t intended for melee minions or both ( Raven’s rise + Eterra’s path )
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Point economy - Melee skeletons in particular need to spend a minimum of 4 points in order to LIMIT the skeleton warrior, who receives more HP instead of damage from the skeleton’s most powerful damage node, down to 1 max.
If you want any hopes of playing a melee skeleton build, you have to essentially waste a minimum of 4 points because the primary melee skeleton is a defensive one. Then 3 more to spec into the actual DPS skeletons
- Base stats - The most obvious example is the death knight. It’s a unit with ridiculously low damage. The skilltree of this unit has it using up 5 points for +20 base fire damage and that’s it. It can opt to spec into hungering souls as well, but now you gotta put another 5 points into adaptive spell damage. But say you do, what’s the result? A minion that still does obscenely low damage. At some point I had my dread phalanx skeletons hitting for 100k+ each while the DKs were trying their hardest to break 10k.
- B) Minion leash range and pull
The current leash range is great for skeleton warriors, a bit annoying for ranged minions and very bad for melee minions.
Whenever minions get out of their leash range, they bounce back to you with increased movement speed. While this movement speed buff might seem nice, it interacts terribly with player movement speed. When a player has 35% or so MS, they move almost as fast as the minions that are running up to catch them, making it difficult to keep up with the player.
This issue is exacerbated when you consider that you have to constantly A-move your minions in front of you to clear well, making it pretty much impossible to do this properly.
These are my thoughts and feedback after returning to the game this past month, hope it helps and I’ll be glad to clarify more on any questions.