The biggest issue I have found playing with minions is that some of them refuse to attack or engage if you move much at all meaning in any fight you need to move in you lose a great deal of you chosen class mechanics if they are minion centric at all. This is pretty much breaks the viability of minion centric builds.
Playing Necromancer I tried a minion build centered on killing my own minions to do damage, sustain mana and create ward for defense, in theory it should do very well but in practice it is fairly clunky and has poor defense.
It relies on Skeletal Warriors being sacrificed by Skeletal Mages to sustain mana do sacrifice damage and create ward for defense. Sometimes this works very well summoning 3 skeletons at a time the 4 mages will sacrifice them within a second and I can close to chain cast the Warriors with a few spells in between. Other times the Mages will go 2-3 seconds if not more without sacrificing a warrior. This is pretty problematic for the build as without cycling through the skeletons the whole thing breaks down there are other abilities volatile zombies, infernal shade, bone golem but its set up so that they primarily trigger from the skeletons dying.
Minion death → Zombie summon -Zombie death → infernal shade on minions → triggers bone nova
All of this is mana intensive as well as needing to recast mages and the bone golem but if the warriors are killed regularly its not a problem. however if the ai on the mages doesn’t cast sacrifice very quickly this build essentially falls apart. To note I understand if the warriors are not close to enemies its probably not casting it but I can summon warriors on top of enemies and the mages still irregularly will not cast sacrifice.
Lastly the ward gain on minion death passives really should scale in some fashion (with the heath of the minion dying?) as it is the higher level you get the less worth those passives are.
The mages would only sacrifice your warriors, when the warriors are in melee range of the mages target.
They don’t sacrifice your warriors when they are not around the enemy the mages are attacking.
This is actally very good behaviour, since the sacrifice has an explosion radius you want the enemy to be in. It doesn’t deal any damage when your warriors explode just randomly with no enemies around.
Also the minion AI would behave as follows:
Minions would randomly attack enemies on their range (don’t exactly know how they choose targets, maybe the target the nearest enemy in their aggro range). They will stop they attacks when you move away a certain range from them. Then they would follow you. Also they switch targets, when you get attacked. For example, when your minions are all over the place and you get hit by some mobs, they would come to you and aid you.
Imho the minion ai currently works really nice. And you can command them with “a” by default. Press “a” when targeting a spot in the ground, will make the minions move to that spot and target new enemies from there. If you target an enemy and press “a” all you minions will instantly focus attack this enemy. This is also the way you can get your warriors to explode by choice. As soon as they arrive at the selected target, the mages will sacrifice them.
But only works with enemies around. No enemies, no sacrifice.
You can try this stuff on the training dummy to see how it works.
Have you tried to reduce cooldown of your skeleton mages skills? Maybe your mages have a downtime because they need to wait till their sacrifice is off cooldown.
It’s just a guess, though. I ran a version with an Achmage an I’m sure it detonated my warriors non stop as long as there were some.
And just to be sure: I think the warriors have to target the same target as the mages to be sacrificed. If your mage is attacking an enemy and you spawn another warrior, the warrior gets sacrificed only when he also attacks that enemy. If it is attacking the enemy next to the one the mage is focusing, it won’t explode.
Its not cooldown, as far as I found they use a similar version in base stats to the same named player skill. it does not have a cooldown.
But skeletons which are attacking, cant use sacrifice. So what happens is lets say its going to take your warrior 1 second to get to the target, then your mage is in the middle of casting. when it arrives, the mage then needs to finish casting, register that a warrior is in place(if it still is, if the enemy and warrior have since gotten out of range, then it fails this check) then sacrifice it.
If your mages have long delays or slow cast times, they will often be in an attacking animation while the warriors are fighting something. And because they are ranged they will pretty much always be attacking so you are at the mercy of their attack times I found scaling cast speed greatly helps in this regard.
Funny enough I also found that using a death knights or cryomancers also helps. Cryomancers have a faster action time attack then normal mages so they finish attacking sooner, and death knights are melee themselves but sacrifice isnt, which means they generally are not mid attack since they are also usually walking to enemies.
I found cryomancers the best just because then their attack that isnt sacrifice is atleast useful unlike death knights
I wanted to like Death Knights so badly, but the last time I tried them the melee vs range was just too much of a hurdle for them to be as good as mages.
So after playing quite a bit of beast master I can say two things about minions.
The range that Sabertooth will go after an enemy is insanely small considering all other minion types have an identical (and larger) range to target enemies. Many times I find that all my minions will go after an enemy except my sabertooth who will just stand next to me being useless.
You can only have one of most types of minions no matter your companion limit. I was excited to be running around with 4 bears, but it turns out you can only have one max which is very disappointing from a builders perspective. Think about the difference between having 5 scorpions running around that spawn babies vs only 1. I think it really limits your build and takes away from the fun of minions.
