Additional Necromancer observations + minion DPS testing

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(For context, I’m testing the maximum dps I could obtain from each fire-capable minion, as fire was the only element I could unify all minions under for stat bonus consistency.)

My minions each share (independent of their skill trees, which are all maxed to what should roughly be the same effectiveness toward dps) 14% critical strike chance, 343% critical strike damage, 809% increased fire damage and 226% damage from intelligence, on a level 82 necromancer. (since ignite is sorta universal and i’m not building for it, I won’t be factoring in it’s dps)

for total DPS, I will be multiplying the single minion dps by the minion cap for each skill, which for the purpose of this test will be:
Golems: 2
Mages: 5
Skeletons: 10 (I traded +1 skeleton on my chest piece for 89% minion fire damage, which is just better by a lot)
Wraiths: 2 (in order to test volatile zombies i had to make wraiths permanent, so attempted to squeeze as much damage out of them as i could, even though this meant accepting a significant net loss in damage before hand.)
Volatile Zombies: 5

Now on to the stats:

Skeletons (archers, since this was the fire option):
-Average hit: ~600
-Attacks per second: 2.2
-Average skill damage: ~800
-Average critical hit: ~2400 (this ranged from 1800 to 3000)
–DPS: 1,876 (x10) (TOTAL: 18,760 average)

Mages:
Average Hit: ~650
Attack speed: 2
Average crit: 2200
(no skill)
DPS: 1608 (x5) (TOTAL: 8040 average) (it should be noted that mages more consistently applied ignites, but due to having half the bodies it averages out to be about the same)

Golems:
Average hit: ~700
Attack speed: 1.3
Average crit: ~2500
Ability (fire aura): (either this doesn’t affect the dummy, or it just applies ignite, either way i was unable to monitor this damage)
DPS: 1260 (x2) (TOTAL: 2520) (ignite damage comparable to mages, but with better aoe)

Wraiths:
Average hit: 2800
Attack speed: 2 (or at least, not notably different from mages)
Average crit: 12,000 (I gave them a lot more crit damage from skill nodes)
(no skill)
DPS: 7,280 (x2) (TOTAL: 14,560) (note: ignite seemed to be applied with an almost negligible lower rate than mages)

Volatile Zombies: (this one was hard to test as i had to constantly resummon then sacrifice 4 of them to get the single damage, which coupled with decaying health was a tedious task, so grain of salt and all that)
Average hit: ~3000?
Attack speed: N/A
Average crit: ~12,000 from the explosion, as far as i can tell the vomit can’t crit (bug?)
Spell (fire vomit): 1320/tick x5 due to health regen (this was a very consistent number)
DPC (damage per cast): 4680 (explosion average) 6,600 (vomit) (x5) (TOTAL: 56,400) (it should also be noted that i used this skill to produce 3 skeleton vanguards, and 2 blood leeches per zombie, as the vanguards cap at 3, I will factor them separately)

Vanguards: (note: they do not benefit from the fire damage bonus to my knowledge)
Average hit: 450
Attack speed: 2
Average crit: 1600
(no spell)
DPS: 1124 (x3) (TOTAL: 3372) (note, they seemed to periodically apply some form of damage over time, though i’m not sure which one, possibly poison from a stray passive somewhere, either way i didn’t factor it in to the dps of any other minion, so this information should be accurate)

Conclusion: If we base these numbers proportional to the base health of each minion (the idea being that, the less health = the more damage they should do) and use skeletons as a standard (they have equal base health to mages under this circumstance, but by virtue of their increased minion cap have higher DPS by a lot) then for each minion we can say:

Mages need to be buffed by 132% damage

Golems need to be buffed by 86% damage (on account that they have 4x the base health, they should collectively deal 1/4 the damage by my earlier stated logic, and this number is tuned in such a way as to accomplish that)

Wraiths have lower base health than skeletons(60 vs 100), and thus should deal more damage (about 2/3 more based on my above logic) I’m going to give 2 numbers for wraiths, 1 based on the 2 perma wraiths with the following damage multiplier nodes, and one based on the 8 wraiths without (the equation being perma wraiths x2.13, as this is the inherent damage loss by going from 8 to 2 wraiths after factoring in the 75% increased damage)
Wraiths (8) need to be buffed by (drumroll please): 1%… congratulations, these are actually more or less the same balance as skeletal archers.
Wraiths (permanent, 2) need to be buffed by 114% (they would actually approach being balanced against archers within 4% if covenant of souls worked with them, but in this regard you would lose 2 skill nodes off of crit damage, which would still result in them needing to be buffed.

Volatile Zombies: (initially i found it difficult to determine how to balance a one and done cast skill against permanent minions, so i decided to divide the damage per cast by the cooldown, then multiply that number by the disparity in mana cost versus my personal mana regen, which resulted in a theoretical “permanent” dps of “9,396” and thus I will assert that zombies need to be buffed by 100% (the actual number was 99.6%, so i’m rounding, but basically zombies are almost exactly half as strong as they should be)

one last reminder: this was all based on minions that I could make do fire damage for stat bonus consistency, these numbers are not representative of minions that deal other types of damage, and also are based around skeleton archers as a standard, or in other words the notion that archers are “balanced” and that all other minions that are weaker than archers (which in this scenario, is all of them) need to be buffed proportionally to how their health and unit cap relates to the archers base.

Discuss.

1 Like
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I love stuff like this, thanks!

Factors to consider further - AI, AOE, pierce, range, item synergies, passive synergies, synergies with other skills, move speed, projectile speed, targeting, generic support functionality (such as golem threat), damage support functions (such as minion hits reduce armour), accessibility of skills in the tree, time spent casting, time required to micromanage, time to wind up (the golem auto attacks are so slow, even 1 trillion DPS may not be a good enough trade off!), mana cost, and most importantly - enemies and landscapes you face.

My opinion is that the bosses and AOE and circles of death in this game are so pervasive that minion damage is way down the list of priorities. I’d say this analysis points to a requirement to double most minions health instead.

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here are my responses in order:
AI: garbage, but ranged ai is better than melee ai.

AOE: i only have the one dummy to test on, and the problem with testing aoe is fundemtally tied to the “best case scenario” factor where something without a target cap could always do more damage if an enemy type with the smallest hitbox possible has an infinite amount stacked in the smallest possible area, but that’s neither here nor there, since the endgame progressions outside the arena are bosses, single target is the only real priority for this testing.

pierce (see above, but generally none of the minion projectiles pierce outside of abomination, which wasn’t tested because i don’t think it can be made into a fire minion, and even if it could, the skill itself is wack)

range: for ranged minions, their range seems to be larger than their aggro range, which is an odd choice in my opinion, but since the leash range is so small, range is almost irrelevant.

item synergies: (the test was adjusted for this, in that there were no specific item synergies outside of effects which benefited all minions, the test wasn’t designed to see how much damage i could make a minion do, but rather how their damage potentials compared to each other under similar circumstances)

passive synergies (see the above argument, the only argument i suppose being that the passive necromancer tree grants 1 bonus mage and a couple of bonus skeletons, but i feel that these nodes were already mandatory for people focusing on minions so i didn’t adjust for them)

synergies with other skills: minions do not synergize together, and any skills that i would have used to buff them would have resulted in the same change for all (since they were all fire minions) (again, this wasn’t a “how high can i make these numbers” test, it was a relativity test.)

move speed: something i notced is that basically all minions move faster than i do, but because their ai is so garbo they’re always behind me anyways, so move speed is likewise irrelevant.

projectile speed: i’m not sure this is a real factor in balance, since the assumption is generally that the projectile will actually hit, if it didn’t there would be a completely different issue outside of how big of a number it produced.

targeting: (see comments on ai)

Generic support functionality: the main issue with minions, regarding how they provide defense for the necromancer, is that they either provide ALL the defense by soaking every instance of incoming damage, or you encounter one of the 50 million enemies with aoe spamming abilities and get one shot from range (which is more a commentary on the necromancer than minions) but either way, all minions are roughly as effective at providing defense, while the golem specifically serves the function of providing additional defense for your other minions (which the test adjusted for, see my rationale at the bottom of the OP)

damage support functions: fire minions have no options to shred fire resistance, so the test did not need to adjust for this, additional reservations were made for ignite damage.

accessibility of skills in the tree: What do you mean by this?

Time spent casting: all minions are permanent except for zombies, which can only be cast once every 10 seconds for a mana cost that regenerates before the cooldown is available.

time required to micromanage: this is optional, and thus should not play a role in balance.

time to wind up: again, you need to explain what you mean by this. minion damage doesn’t increase over time unless you count ignites, in which case wind up time is a universal 3 seconds because that’s just how long ignite lasts, the only minion with an actual “wind up time” is the abomination, which was not tested here as it cannot be balanced under its current mechanical structure.

mana cost: in line with my above rational, minions are permanent and thus require a continuous mana investment of 0, aside from zombies, which as i also said, regenerate their cost before their cooldown is available.

enemies and landscapes: we don’t get to choose this so they should not be a factor of personal character balance between spells.

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Just that the common expectation is that a skill available at level 1 acolyte is supposedly weaker than one gated behind, say, level 30 necromancer.

I was referrring to the golem time to get off it’s first auto attack for clearing mobs. The golem lumbers up to a pack, raises its arms and slowly crashes them down. By now either the mob is dead from your archers or you are dead. The golem becomes useless no matter what it’s damage. As I now know you were thinking of bosses only, this is not as relevant.

I don’t have much else to add, I think everything else you analyse is insightful and spot on, except this:

I find that I could have 20 minions dealing damage, then one AOE boss skill wipes them all out, and maybe it takes 2 full mana bars to resummon them all, by which time the boss winds up the skill again and they all get wiped out. At this point I would go play a spell skill. The point is spells are immortal, so cannot get killed by boss AOE, / the pools of death in the landscape. If minions can get killed by such things, their effective damage gets reduced to zero sometimes, and this is a factor in balancing them to a state where people wish to or are able to play them vs difficult content.

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Healthy discussions… in its natural habitat! Crikey!

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my argument was more meant to demonstrate than, in the case of a boss like this: we can’t choose to not fight it, so naturally our minions ought to be balanced to be viable toward all content. personally i prefer the diablo 3 approach to this which was just: make the minions immune to damage since the defense they provide to the summoner is too inconsistent to balance.
i doubt we’ll get that, but the current problem isn’t necessarily one of minion toughness, but how enemy damage interacts with our minions.

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if we unlocked 5 new spells at every breakpoint, then i’d agree, as it would be clear that those 5 spells are meant to be what we use until the next breakpoint, but in a game where level cap is the goal, i don’t think this ought to be a long term factor.

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