Can we please stop with decaying minions?

Acolyte
8

This is really not an alternative. Minion focused builds are my favorite, but when I tried a full-on companions Beastmaster, it was not a good experience and absolutely does not fill the same gameplay fantasy as the traditional Necro archetype of “minion army”. It’s just not comparable to have only 5-6 pets that are designed with the intent that you’re fighting alongside them.

Just to be clear, though, I also disagree with the scope of OP’s complaint, because the minion army archetype is already met pretty well with Necro as-is. I don’t like decaying minions either, but you absolutely don’t have to take them to get the traditional minion army gameplay. You can very easily fill out a Necro with zero decaying minions (unless you count Dread Shade, which only barely counts IMO).

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9

I agree with a few points that you have, I disagree with already met as is, it is more split half and half, with the buffs completely on the decay of minions as such, adding in the other costs involved is to much in my personal opinion. Currently there are only 2 buffs for minions that you can utilize and both end up killing your minions fairly quickly. Dread shade, which I believe should be changed to dread commander as someone else brought up in another thread and set as a perm pet, maybe an option to make it 2 in the tree.
the other is infernal shade, which slaughters the pets at an insane speed.
If you go through the Necromancer tree, they get only a single non decay pet, skele mage, every single other thing in the tree is about killing the pet or decaying pets. To me this is just the opposite of what a necro should be and more of what a warlock should be, curses causing explosions, curses doing aoe fire, decaying minions to spread curses…
A necro should be about minions that dont just go poof, but atm they get sacrifice (kill pet) Dread shade (kill pet slowly) Abomination (kill all pets for a decaying hp pet) summon wraith (decay pet) the base class of acolyte is a better necro than the necro. hence the reason people are making lich’s and its a “summoner minion class”

Lich should be about nasty poisons and disease, Necro should be about undead army that stays around, warlock should be spreading curses burning your soul type stuff making some undead to spread the curse goes along with that, actively dumping minions is the exact opposite of what a necro is.

10

I mean, my Necro is running around with 17 minions that all never die while I command and support from behind. That’s exactly the traditional minion army fantasy as far as I’m concerned.

Bone Curse and Aura of Decay are two other options and neither of them kill your minions. Debuffing enemies is a different side of the same coin as buffing your minions directly.

It seems to me that you are fixating just on the skills that come from the Necro tree, which I understand, but don’t think is entirely appropriate. The Necromancer - just like any other class in LE - is not exclusively the Necro passive tree and Necro skills. It is the totality of what is available to you once you’ve chosen the Necro as your spec.

Not for nothing, but necromancers aren’t real. There are no rules about what they should or must be. Yes, that particular archetype often falls under the label of “necromancer”, but that archetype is not the exclusive definition of a necromancer. A well designed RPG class is not limited to a single archetypical playstyle/fantasy. We’re perfectly capable, right now, of building and playing a necromancer with minions “that don’t just go poof” - even when using Dread Shade, which we already agree on our dislike of. It is an exaggeration to say “almost everything for minions seems to want you to get rid of them”.

11

the real problem is that, by making the decaying minions (specifically wraith) last so long, and can be extendable by gear/talents to the point where you have HUNDREDS of them, it goes from class fantasy of disposable minions, to homogeneous clump of nonsense that occasionally inconveniences you by dying, and the same can be said for dread shade and infernal shade, there’s no REAL cost to using them, since you’ll just re-summon the minion and recast the buff, there’s no purpose behind the punishment, there’s no real trade off, it’s just a pointless inconvenience that would be better served just not hurting your minions at all.

12

The necromancer tree itself is almost completely about getting rid of the minions. Yes I am fixated on that as the necromancer tree is supposed to be the pet tree, except its not, its the get rid of your pets tree. It is literally fighting with itself to accomplish anything. Bone curse and AoD are not really minion buff spells, they can if specced, have a small benefit to minions but they are far from being a buff skill for them. The only actual minion buff skills delete your minions. At the moment the tree only gives a single ability for people who dont want to kill off thier minions out of 5? That is not a necromancer, that is either a lich or a warlock.

Generally with AoD most people just build into lich and put some points into necro, it is not a minion skill and should never be treated as such. AoD is your skill and everything else supports it.

My minion build atm is using 18- 19 minions, if i want 2 golems. problem is there really is no good option for another skill. We both agree dread shade needs a change so i wont even go into that. Infernal? that thing nukes minions so they die faster than wraiths not worth all the investment, it should be a warlock staple as a curse not necro. Bone curse is meh at best as you must gear for all minion if you want them to not be trash, transplant? Harvest?really what else is there?

Take a look at the other tree on the list. Lich, it completely fills its role of rot/decay master massive aoe, huge dots, drains, wards… all in the tree. It plays much faster, for the most part safer, and is just honestly better than necro as it actually focuses on its specialization. Necro fights its specialization.

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13

The shade spells only hurt people who dont go bug abuse wraith garbage 300+ minions build. It is not enough of a benefit to justify the cost, and the people who do basically abuse the bug dont care about the detriments because it doesnt matter to them at all.

14

I don’t understand these complaints. Necromancer has the option to play with permanent minions or with decaying minions. Or you combine them.

Infernal shade isn’t mainly a minion buff. It’s a spell that scales with character stats instead of minion stats. The minion buff is a niche branch for very specific builds.

Dread Shade is a great minion buff that can be specced into not hurting your minions (I do that in 90% of my builds).

Bone Curse can also be a great buff. It can apply 30% more damage and different on hit effects (bleed, armour shred).

There are two ways to play decaying minions:

  1. Work against decay with minion health leech, reg, hp and all the skillnodes that decrease the decay rate.
  2. Utilize the dying of your minions with all the proc effects on minion death.

Even if I personally favour permanent minion builds, there are people that like the other build options.

It’s totally ok to disagree with some skill designs. I agree on the clunkyness of Abomination in it’s current state.

But I have to say that I like the most skills and interactions that are presented as if they need to be changed to be of any use or fun. Not everything is 100% straight forward. That’s also a thing I really like about LE.

If you have a desire for more permanent minion skills or buffs, maybe suggest some additional skills instead of trying to change existing skills entirely.

15

I think of the abomination as the opposite of say D2 butcher (fresh meat) he was always dripping flesh off him (decaying) as he ran around the room. In that sense, the butcher is fodder for the player, much the same way an abomination acts as fodder for the enemies.

16

Don’t forget the freeze, chill and cull that Bone Curse can provide.

17

I will stop you there, Necromancer in its current form is about slaughtering your own minions, period. All but one skill for keeping minions around comes from Acolyte, not from necro. Dread shade, as was pointed out in another thread should be a minion, preferably a perm minion. It is not a point to combine or work with one or the other, you do not really have an option to have a perm only, you can easily make a decaying build, or 2 or 3 with all the decaying options granted. Think about it, you get skeletons (from acolyte) golems (from acolyte) and finally skele mages (from necro) thats it for perm minions. you can as a very sub optimal choice spec bone curse or transplant to grant you sub par trash minions. For decaying minions we have, any of the minions with sacrifice/dreadshade/infernal shade the new exploady zombies, abomination, wraiths and the afformentioned transplant and bonecurse minions that naturally decay.

The entire decaying option could just be put into warlock as it fits more into curses and burning souls and make the necro an actual undead army type perm minion class. While I have no problem with just doubling or tripling the options available to necromancers and i doubt most of the people wanting these changes would honestly mind, it does end up showing massive favoritism to a single class as it now has 3x the skills of any other class. Just let the necromancers have the perm pet route, let warlocks have the sacrificial pet route and that would honestly solve everything.

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18

It doesn’t matter if the permanent minions you build around come from the base Acolyte tree or from the mastery necromancer tree. There are tons if useful passive nodes in the necro tree to buff a permanent minion build.

No, they don’t decay. Skeleton Vanguards are permanent.

No, it should not. It is a shade and by its theme a debuff of the object it is applied to.

19

By your line of thought a lich should perform just as well as a necro as a minion build since they have a lot of stuff in passive tree to help minions, ohh wait it does perform almost the same. even though it also specializes in other things it does perform about the same.

1 Like
20

What game are you talking about?

In Last Epoch the Lich doesn’t perform the same with minions than a Necromancer.

If you really think this is true, theres absolutely no basis for us two to go on any further in this discussion.

21

I personally dislike necromancer playstyle so I don’t care about minions builds. However, the Big ones catches my attention like Golems and stuff. Those aren’t supposed to be disposable in my opinion and could be a fun no excessive army minion build.

22

While the Lich line does provide for some epic poison minions I was making a point, since almost everything the necro has that is perm comes from the base that even the lich has access to, most of its spells also buff minions as well. Having all of the necros tools be about getting rid of its minions is in direct opposition to having perm pets and thats the point I was trying to make. The necro needs to honestly be changed, having almost everything be about getting rid of your minions, or trying to provide a counter to your minions decaying that the class is forcing onto you feels bad to any player that likes to have a perm army. Even the passives are about making your minions die faster or about constantly summoning decaying minions.

If you play necro as a throwaway get rid of your minion class then yes it feels great, you have a multitude of options, if you want to play it as a perm minion class then you are fighting the class itself in order to accomplish this. You have few options and most of those many people view as basically abusing bugs to get a halfway decent minion class that honestly is still extremely slow to play.

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23

Hm… sorry, but i can just not agree here.

Yes, there are a lot of decaying minions. Yes, theres stuff for that playstyle in the passive tree.

But that’s only one of the options. You can build permanent minion builds with Skeletons, Mages, Golem and Vanguards. I agree, that there’s not that much options for more skills, but the diversity also comes within these skills. You can play skeletons as Archers, Warriors, Rogues, Cold, Fire, Phys, Poison. You can play Mages as Pyro, Cryo, default necrotic, Death Knights and also choose all this to play with an Archmage. Golem is a very versatile addition.

The Necro passive tree has so many nodes that not rely on killing your minions. Theres a lot of flat damage, increases of minion damage and defensive stuff, nodes that enable you to have more skeletons and mages, minion crit stuff and ailment chances, frenzy buff…

Type in “minion” into the search box on the Lich tree and see how many passive nodes support minion play.

Lich is all about dealing damage by yourself, Necro is the minion tree. I myself have had a single minion hybrid Lich that worked ok-ish but it fell off at around lvl 85. Theres just too much tradeoff with a hybrid build that makes it less effective than a full single branch build.

With the implementation of zombies (what is my favourite skill so far in the game) I love to combine my army with those walking bombs.

See, I’m not defending broken 200 minion builds or speaking against diversity. But from my point of view I see a lot of statements recently by people that want to “fix” things that aren’t broken.

Actually I have a lot of fun with several different minion Necro builds and cannot share the opinion that Necro plays or performs bad or has no options for permanent minion builds that scale very well into empowered timelines.

More options for additional minions is always nice. But theres already a lot of that present in the game that - by your statements (and those of some others) - you just seem to not have discovered, yet.

Also I honestly don’t see any point in arguing if a minion skill should be located in the base classes tree or in the minion tree. If they are easy accessible for your build, it just doesn’t matter.

24

I have tried pretty much every combination for perm minions, so it is not a matter of I have not discovered a build yet, and yes I have scoured the forums and builds of others to try them. Perm minions just do not feel like they are in a good place but like I said, decaying minions feel somewhat decent. I have tried Lich minion builds and… well suprisingly it felt fairly smooth if built for poison but it was not something that I enjoy as I dont want to fight along side my minions. I have tried every variation of both skele and skele mage build you can make, not a single one feels great, they all feel meh. Golems feel like they are in a good place for most of it, except blood golem that I have no idea about since it just seems to be meh. If it gained your rip blood tree it would feel amazing.

25

Infernal shade isn’t mainly a minion buff. It’s a spell that scales with character stats instead of minion stats. The minion buff is a niche branch for very specific builds.

As someone using said niche branch, I will say that it can be quite powerful and I do enjoy it…

26

I’ve nothing to say against that. My point was that infernal shade isn’t mainly an minion skill and so it should not be used as an argument that “all minion skills drain the life if your minions”.

27

Been rolling a Necro build with HS/SP, minions are Warriors and Knights from the mage skill spec with a Blood Golem for buffs.

I don’t see the issue with it, my build is working just fine atm lvl 80 doing all content. I don’t use wraiths as they are getting a slight adjustment soon. I can agree some of the other “buff” skills don’t attract me with all the minion death so I just don’t use them. The only real issue in the trees I have is the one that makes me use up a minion to use a pot. I kind of have to have it to get down the rest the tree and I hate it.
Other than that I feel like Necro has plenty of options if you keep it down to one or two main build choices. If you try to cram to much bloat it fails, you don’t need every minion the tree has to have an army.