All the bosses have these AOE screen wipe outs. It doesn’t seem to matter what health I take for minions, they go from all being up, to all being dead. I have taken all the resists from the passive tree, all the life regen I can, and have 350% increased minion health with crappy gear. But doubling this would keep them alive for an extra second or two in a screen of death that goes for 10 seconds after they currently die.
Is anyone else managing to keep necro minions alive?
(I should note that I am aware that 99% of necro ranged minion builds go crit and take life leech on crit nodes. I’m trying to see if it’s possible to not go crit at all. Here’s roughly the build idea: Necromancer, Level 100 (LE Beta 0.8.1e) - Last Epoch Build Planner)
I only go for low corruption (100-110) but my minions rarely die.
Here is the build I currently use:
I don’t really see a purpose in not going crit because of how much damage it is, but that being said, my necro’s archers - which don’t have leech on crit - don’t die any more frequently than her mages do. As far as I can tell it’s because of the leech from Reach.
But, it’s also good practice to use A to move your minions out of AOEs, especially if you’re finding they get wiped out by it. If you can dodge it, so can they.
Me neither to be honest, but at least for the devs, it’s worth knowing that players are currently being forced into building crit., since there are apparently no other viable defensive options, let alone offensive choices.
I’m using wraiths that cannot move, and repositioning mobile minions is almost impossible due to their slow movespeed, the fact that many boss abilities cover the entire screen except for a small spot (if we are lucky), the delay between boss abilities is tiny if at all, and moving minions do zero damage, so the A key is not a realistic option, even if it weren’t so unfun to use.
Why keep the minions alive when there’s Volatile Zombie? 
lol
Yeah, just like POE, the best way to enjoy this game is just to play the meta, broken, OP skill. However, there is a history lesson from POE, where non-immortal minions became unplayable for many leagues, until players were forced into taking the cluster jewel giving them damage immunity, or just stacking life and making minions explode.
The result there was that the passive tree, items, support gems and lots of interactions became totally useless - your little minions had 3 pretty dull choices: to be exploding, immortal or non-viable. So all the block, minion dodge, minion life, minion regen, minion resists, etc. give no joy or satisfaction by existing.
However, with such easy solutions to the problem it seems worth raising. First identify the problem = boss fights do not match the values of minion defensive options at present.
Then identify the solutions:
- Change the innate minion damage reduction from 50% to 75%
- Give minions more defensive and damage reduction choices on the tree, so that players can stack survivability for minions, but which do not make the already OP life based minion damage options even more absurd
- Change the design philosophy from ‘minions should be able to die’, which is clearly too difficult for them to balance, to a new philosophy of something like ‘30-50 passive points in minions makes them practically immortal, so players can be rewarded for investment into minion defenses.’
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I know this sounds radical, but just tossing it out there…
… what if minions inherited your defenses? i.e. if you’re dodge/block, they are too. If you’re life/armor, they are. Then, instead of having to pour points into defenses, EHG can design a few key boosts (in those areas - dodge, block, armor, life, leech) but not, like, overkill amounts, to then allow you to tailor the minions a bit more to your liking.
Dunno how the numbers would play out, but its different.
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I mean… That’s kind a choice you made, my man. It’s a huge damage buff to Wraiths that can’t just not have a downside. And besides that, the core design of Wraiths is to be transitory minions in the first place. You can’t marry a gorilla and then complain about the stench of bananas.
None of this matches my experience at all, so, I’m really not sure what to tell you. But, any build is going to have some drawbacks to it, and maybe the fundamental drawback that comes with how you’ve built your Necro is “in rare situations I have to press my skill buttons instead of not”.
And… Minions dying and needing to be resummoned is a balancing factor that adds effort into an otherwise extremely low effort but still extremely powerful build archetype. The fact is that a Necro can just run around giggling while their minions do everything. If they can do that for even the hardest content, I don’t know if that’s particularly fair. Consider that pretty much every other class and build has to balance the acts of dealing damage and avoiding mechanics in ways Necros do not. So, I don’t know that I can agree it’s a design problem that mobile murder bots are not eternally immortal.
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I use Volatile Zombies to create ward. In my build (in my two builds, because I have two Necros), they do very little damage. They are here only to give me ward. And these two builds work fine, even if they are not meta. That’s one big positive thing in Last Epoch: you arenot forced to play the meta, even if you want to be efficient.
A good analogy. To continue it, I guess what I’m saying is the balance at the moment is presenting us with a supermodel wearing perfume (crit minions) and 10 gorrillas. I’m asking for the gorillas to be at least given some makeup.
No one is arguing that achieving a tradeoff is not a worthy goal.
The problem here is that the tradeoff you mention does not exist in practice.
Eg. I could build crit, where I get the damage multiplier, and the 50% life leech together. If I get minion survivability and damage at once, there is no trade off, there is no choice “Should I build crit or build 10% increased minion life.” You take crit every time.
Eg. I could build volatile zombies, where minion life also adds to the damage, and also the minions are supposed to die, and this also gives me huge amounts of ward. There is no tradeoff here either. There is no choice “should I build minion life or minion damage, or my defences?” You take minion life and it automatically covers all bases.
Or
I could build trying to keep the minions alive using the 5% leech from the skeleton tree, the 16% minion resists from the passive tree, or the increased health nodes/affixes. These are designed to be a tradeoff, but if they do not increase minion survivability, then they are failing. If I have to choose them all and still cannot keep a minion alive long enough to do something, then this is not a choice, unless that choice is to go play zombies or crit. Hence, I stand by the claim that there is a definite problem here with some easy solutions, including this nice idea:
For melee minion builds like death knights and warriors/rogues the ring that drops from abomination is very nice. It gives your minions 100% crit avoidance.
One of the best minion def affixes is minion dodge rating. Most of the time i just go minion health and dodge rating and skip minion health reg. If you get around 1k - 1.2k minion dodge, your dudes are really tanky.
The Golem also helps if build as an aggro machine that lets enemies focus on him.
It takes some investment to get the minion dodge that high, but it’s absolutely worth it.
I made a build with Mages, Zombies and a Golem with 777% increased health.
Mage: 6006
Zombie: 11,242
Golem: 24,024
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