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.
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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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.
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.
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…
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”.
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.
Anyone tried Dread Shade with Spectral distance, with golem and mage skellies ?
Spectral distance buff minions outside area. Are mage skellies outside ?
The golem should be able to withstand Dread Shade, may be with Pernicious Pact.
No it doesn’t make sense. Necromancers are all about using magic related to life and death, and raising and controlling undead minions. “Necromancer in role-playing games have always been all about hordes of disposable minions” is an artificial value which really makes no logical sense what-so-ever. The reason it’s this way - IS BECAUSE PEOPLE FAILED TO INNOVATE .
What LE did RIGHT and not WRONG with Necromancer, is best seen in Dread Phalanx and Archmage. The option to go for a smaller more elite crew of minions with various roles. It’s actually the main reason I enjoy Necromancer in LE - a developer who finally went away from copying that boring trite trope that Necromancers must be about many expendable minions.
One can still play many expendable, but at least LE gives us a choice to go the other direction.
I am so tired of every dev and their mother after the D2 era just uncreatively and boringly following a trope that never made sense in the first case. I mean many expendable minions fit the Necromancer, but there is absolutely zero logical, roleplaying, thematic or other reasonings that a Necromancer shouldn’t be able to control a few very powerful permanent minions, over many. Even a mix would be nice.
LE finally innovated here and gave us the option to diverge from an archaic age old rot of no innovation, by introducing the opposite alternative.
As someone who has been a roleplaying, fantasy fiction and gaming fan for over 20 years (yes I’m old) with the highest love for the Necromancer as a fictional class from a roleplaying perspective - I’d say my opinion on this should matter some.
The trope that Necromancer HAS to be about many expendable minions, has no real basis. A Necromancer could just as likely channel his power to control a powerful Death Knight and a small retinue of supporting troops, than half an army.
In order to keep this civil… I’ll have to stop here. LE finally went away from this arbitrary non-sensical limitation. And I’ve been waiting forever for that to happen.
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Let’s dig a bit deeper.
Necromancers use magic to give a “second life” to their minions. Two possibilities.
- They use a one-shot spell to raise a minion and give it “health”
- They channel energy to the minion to give it “health”
In the two situations, it’s not limitless. In the first case, the minion received all its energy in one shot, and this energy will eventuelly be totally used and disappear. In the second case, the necromancer can run out of energy and will not be able to send some anymore, which will result in the minion getting no energy anymore.
In the two cases, it seems logic to have a decay. Either brutal or progressive, it depends, but at a moment the minion will have no more life and will “die”.
I don’t really like the decay, but in a lore point of view it seems totally logic to me. So yes, I would say decaying minions make sense.
In a game point of view, I agree it is good to have a choice. I was not unhappy with the current system, but the new one seems good to. I’m totally ready to try it!
LE is not really bound to any one rule as it is its own IP.
In several cases /w Necromancers in fiction they don’t decay. Multiple rules and variations out there. Like one of them being - they are raised permanently but only so many can be raised. In dungeons and dragons for example, the animate dead spell lasts for a day.
In other words - there is really no precedence for minions immediately starting to decay.
If anything, the game mechanic should be that if you have (example numbers), say, 4 minions - no decay - 5-6, small decay, 7-8 medium decay, 9+ high decay. If a decay mechanic absolutely has to be a thing - it would make the most sense IMO that it’s tied to number of minions. The decay being an army wide debuff.
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I don’t understand this post. Currently, for neco, you can build minions in multiple ways.
- A horde that decays - mass amount of wraiths, and volatile zombies.
- A horde that doesn’t decay (you don’t need infernal shade for this) - multiple skeletons, and/or skeletal mages
- Powerful single minion build setups, such as bone nova golem, and arch mage
- Minion build that procs your own skills, to scale your own damage such as vz
And to the person who was talking about primalist, you can also make builds where you dont even need to fight “alongside your companion” it can do all the damage for you.
is this not enough build diversity for minion based classes, and builds?
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@Bankaikiller It is! Currently. And hopefully balanced more in the future (I think Archmage and Dread Phalanx need a buff).
I’m just terrified if people convince the devs to go away from the necro options of playing with fewer but stronger and perma minions. For me the issue was more an argument against people’s perception of what a Necromancer should or shouldn’t be - not a complaint or criticism to the game’s current state.
The reason this is a sensitive and big deal for me - is because it’s the game’s best feature for me, to FINALLY be able to play a necro with SUCH GOOD build diversity, and flexibility. Emphasis on finally getting options for Necros not having to fill the old “many expendables” trope.
So in my case at least I just wanted to voice my opinion in the hopes the game doesn’t go in the opposite way back to the archaic view on Necro gameplay mechanics.
Edit: TL;DR; I’m super happy as how things are, even more so with the next patch. Just wanted to discuss it further from the older posts.
You call it a trope, I’d call it a theme. I think the most important thing here is that you don’t like it (which is fine & I agree more options is good). But the class themes/archetypes are the “design space” that separate the classes/masteries not just lore/story/graphical effects (including models).
What separates a melee Sentinel (heavy armour, block, phys/fire/void) from a melee Rogue (dodge, glancing blow, phys, crits, ailments) if not those tropes? What separates a minion Beastmaster (fewer permanent pets, dodge, phys) from a Necro (many decaying pets, ward, phys/necrotic)?
Why do you want a Necro with fewer permanent pets rather than a Beastmaster/Shaman?
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Well i’m confident in the community testers, the devs, the content creators, the YouTubers, and main twitch streamers for this game, in steering this game in general, in what I feel is the right overall direction. I’m not worried at all in that regard, including necro, just generally everything.
if you were playing this game 3 years ago, you would be amazed, at how far everything has come.
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It’s a trope (or theme as you call it) which is arbitrarily constructed as such based on illogical values from previous iterations that did nothing new but just mimicked past iterations. Giving Necromancer as a class / theme an identity and restriction which frankly makes no sense for the class to have.
A Necromancer, as a fantasy class concept, can just as well raise one powerful Death Knight and a group of archers - as raising a horde of minions which decay (due to magic not being able to sustain control over that many creatures, which makes sense).
A Necromancer with 4 elite undead bodyguards constantly.
A Necromancer with a temporary army of 40 rampaging corpses which decay.
Both of these makes perfect sense for a Necromancer. The problem with the idea that Necromancers has to be about many expendable minions w/o an alternative, is simply faulty logic, an archaic limitation placed on the class identity.
In LE: Fewer permanent elite undead creatures, a horde, or a combination - are all possible. The next patch helping out the formerly mentioned a lot. So I’m not complaining, happy about it as is.
The thing is that the preconceptions of what a Necromancer “should be” has been twisted by lack of imagination and innovation, by too many people just copying the idea of a class because “that’s just how it is”, when “how it is” is a completely illogical arbitrary limitation.
To boil it down to the simplest essence here. A powerful Necromancer should be able to raise a few very powerful minions for a long time (days, no decay as an ingame gameplay mechanic), and a horde of undead monsters which decay (due to the strain of maintaining control over so many entities).
Both crowds should be happy now though. So I guess arguing about it is moot. I’m just, like I said, very passionate about undead characters like Necromancers or Death Knights in games which allow them as playable characters.
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But all of the tropes/archetypes are arbitrary, and the Necro has always been able to have a small number of non-decaying minions (both skellies & golem).
Edit: I’m also a bit confused as to what the issue was (pre 0.8.3) given you can have non-decaying minions just fine as a Necro.
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Sorry if my opinions turned into huge rants.
I’ve just always wanted to play Necromancer with a flexible army of perma undead creatures, each able to serve different roles in the army setup. Like with “abs aren’t made while working out, they are made in the kitchen”. I enjoy summoners in that “Your success playing a summoner isn’t achieved in gameplay, it’s achieved at the theorycrafting table”.
That being a response to the devs saying they “understand some people want a relaxed playstyle”. It’s not about that for me at least.
In any case LE is there, and enables that further with next patch. So there’s no complaint from me. I guess I just had thoughts on this that has been suppressed so long I finally had to get it out, after having been disappointed by the implementation of most Necromancers designed in games for the longest time.
you are in luck because the recent patch notes say they plan to fix these problems in the skill trees.
Not really. the devs want infinite scaling to the point you just stop pushing because you hit a massive brickwall you cannot bypass. Minions are painful to keep alive from corruption 200-250-300+ that the only minion user worth using at that point is disposable minions…
you also missed Manifest Armor probably the top minion build. Spriggan pet suffers at 200+, I cant imagine skeletons living more than 1 screen at 350+ corruption
So if you dont want to experience the higher levels of content sure theres build diversity - same as if you wanted to clear Greater Rift 40 in Diablo 3 theres massive build diversity. hell you could play with no gear on and still clear lower levels but once again because of infinite scaling the goalposts never stay in a spot to say ‘this build is viable end game’