Minion Stats are toxic to pet builds

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1

So i know there have been a few periodic posts on the subject, but a major issue that has been plaguing me in the post-story monolith content has been my personal ability to survive hits. (I am a necromancer player) If you aren’t interested in the lengthy preface, just skip down to "The Point"

normally i have been able to mitigate this by letting my wall of minions fight for me off screen where i’m generally safe from random monster effects and aoe’s, however, after defeating the abomination boss in part one and swapping out my osol tul chest for the maximum glancing blow chest, i actually got to sit up with my minions and hang out and see what they’re up to, just in time for them to start dying constantly in the level 62 monoliths (i’m level 67)

so now i find myself in a situation where i deal no personal damage, because it’s all on my minions, and my minions can’t survive, but i can a little bit better than before because of the OP chest which constitutes literally 90% of my toughness.

now really the issue of one or the other stems from one primary problem: Minion stats.

for necromancers, all of our minions scale their damage off of intelligence and, of course, minion damage, however the necromancer only personally gains from intelligence on the off chance they’re using a support spell like bone curse or etc., but if we don’t stack minion damage then our pets will be mostly useless as they take a year to kill an average enemy, but in the same vein we also have to worry about minion damage over time, minion armor shred, minion bleed chance, minion poison chance, and so on, and that’s just for damage stats.

if minions were indestructible gods, then clearly this would be a non issue as my play off the screen method of surviving would work in every scenario, however minion toughness doesn’t scale up at nearly the same rate as enemy damage, as (aside from golems) minions gain 5 hp per character level (500@lvl100) and gain (to the best of my knowledge) no resistances unless talented for it specifically, which usually comes at the cost of damage. in other words, an average minion at my current level (67) has an average of 600-1000 hp (based on talents and some of them being golems) and a boat load of armor because i got the unique ring for that, but practically no elemental resistances outside of the default 50% damage reduction all minions get, what this means is it only takes one rime giant, one sapphire spider, one soul flask flamethrower dude, and half my army is wiped. and until i got this chest piece, it took even less to kill me in most situations fighting against enemies 10 levels lower than me.

the point

the point is: why can’t my minions damage and toughness scale off of my own, instead of having an entire extra persons worth of stats that force me to make myself squishy to the point of being one shot by literal non-elite rat trash mobs that are 10 levels lower than me, or, in an effort to survive myself, sacrifice too many minion stats so that they’re no longer effective at their one role of fighting the enemy on my behalf?

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I understand you as a necromancer myself.
What I am doing is investing in minion dot and yes also need to invest in dodge and GB…also minion health regen for wraiths so yes there is no space left on gear for anything else.
But the play-style is really a long run one, no burst but survability via rip blood ward mostly.
also a tip is that I have 2 gear setup, one common echoes DPS one, and another with shield and lot of doge when I am in Boss quest to be able to survive it, even if I am loosing ton of minion damage in the end I’m still winning, just be patient, always your security first, recast pet as fats as possible, good positioning and win!

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i’m fine with being forced to invest significantly in an entire set of minion-exclusive stats. i think the issue lies in the baseline damage reduction for minions not being nearly enough to compensate for the amount of bad things they inevitably stand in (rime giant avalanches being one of the most clear examples). that baseline DR needs to be pumped up, if not globally, at least specifically for the super high damage danger zones which players are expected to dodge.

the other big issue i have with minions is the very slow clear speed. minion movement speed needs to be peppered liberally throughout the tree / other minion affixes. they move far too slow as-is. additionally, the fact that they have collision with each other is a big hindrance to their DPS uptime as they all struggle to squeeze into a spot where they can reach the mob, and the pathfinding involved there is probably highly responsible for the framerate drops minion builds experience.

and finally, minions should naturally try to pick targets that other minions haven’t picked; as it is, all the minions tend to flock to one target, mill around each other trying to reach it, then all flock to the next. most of them end up doing nothing.

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I agree with your ‘Point’. It’s always struck me as unfair to have to make sure your character health, resistance, movement speed etc and on top of that make sure your minions get all these stats plus damage. Any other class/playstyle where you deal your damage using other skills (minions are still a skill), you never have to worry about your sword having a resistance or armor, or your spell dying mid fight? It sounds silly if you compare it like that, but it’s a fact. I know a game that does what you propose, where minions are treated as a skill, and are therefore scaled off your character’s stats, though not fully either.

I believe it would be a fair comparison/balance only when any character class could be at the same level of defences by spending equal amount of points, and having an equal amount left for offences, whether it’s a spell, a melee skill or a summoned minion/totem.

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As more and more affixes seem to be introduced into the game, we are still left with the same number of affixes on the items we use.

Instead of rare purple tier 6 and tier 7 drops (or in addition too) I would have liked to see the rare 5 or 6 affix craftable item.

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It does sound silly when you put it like that. What if all minion affixes were prefixes so that minion builds only had to balance the “set” prefixes and your minion affixes (your damage skills) like every other class.

That said, minions do also provide some protection by dint of body blocking and taunting mobs. Hence your defensive minion affixes do also provide some protection to your character.

I do think there is an argument that minion builds are more affix-starved than other builds.

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Like any skill, minions have up and downsides. Yes, they provide some protection, but they are also slow (compare the time a minion needs to move across the screen to an enemy before it actually starts to deal damage for example), compared to ranged attacks. You also need time to summon them when they die, (setup time), no such problem with attacks or spells. They have an AI, which is imperfect and is partly out of your control.
That’s OK though, that’s the characteristics of the ‘summon minion’ skill, it defines the playstyle, like others skills do.

It shouldn’t be harder to use one playstyle over another though, it just should be different, so you can make a meaningful choice as a player of how you play. This should be separate from difficulty level, whether it is in setup, complexity, time needed to get to a certain level of power or anything else. Then you can call a playstyle balanced with others, and I agree that it’s not balanced this way with minions.

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at the very least, they should combine ALL minion damage stats (damage, physical damage, damage over time, etc.) into a single “minion potency” stat, and all the defensive stats into a single “minion toughness” stat, then make one a prefix, and the other a suffix. it’s more of a band-aid fix, but it means my minions at least get more stats out of less affixes.

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Honestly I specced most of my minions to hit with ranged attacks. The 2x2 idols can roll up to 60% chance to spawn the special wraiths so with no points in the flame/putrid wraith nodes you’re guaranteed to get ranged wraiths. Most of the minion health comes from the Minion Health affix which fortunately is a prefix as opposed to Minion Damage’s suffix. 2 well rolled Turquoise Rings and a Turquoise Amulet help a lot as well. Also as mentioned it really helps your own survivability if you spec Rip Blood to target minions and generate ward. If you go hard into wraith numbers (40+ at least) you can get up 40k ward. In general I expect my minions to start dying once things get tough but wraiths can soak up a lot of damage when you have a lot of them. Get some good cast speed and the rip blood tree can generate you a frankly disturbing amount of mana if you take even one point in the mana generation (combined with the minion targeting and ward generation and blood spatter) so you can resummon your skeletons and skeleton mages to your heart’s content.

The point here is that it can be worked around. That being said personally I don’t like the paradigm of relying on rip blood to make all the other pieces come together. Necro has the one node that applies +Armor and +HP Regen based on your minion count. Nerf Rip Blood’s ability to break minion builds and make that passive node apply to all resists as well as armor so that we’re not totally squishy. Everything else is workable with well selected affixes but it does certainly take alot of affix slots so it might be nice to have a hybrid minion affix of some kind like [+Minion Health/+Minion Damage] or [+Minion Damage/+Minion DOT]. Various combinations of that sort.

On top of this I will mention that Reach of the Grave really helped my minion survivability alot. The 10% life steal on your minions is huge although I really got the benefit from that because all my minions are ranged (Wraiths, Skele Mages and Skele Archers). Something to consider. It would be nice to have another unique that was helpful to minions though. The Pebble’s set is underwhelming but it is pretty low level so that checks out.

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In answer to the OP, the reason you can’t is because of still another bad design decision for the game.

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I don’t think they should scale off of the players stats. You get certain intrinsics from them that I think are extras compared to other skills. That said, however, Grim Dawn solved this a bit by having items/drops that usually defensively give the player some sort of buff but have much stronger pet affixes/suffixes to them.

LE already has a few ‘dual’ affixes/suffixes. They could potentially change any individual pet affix/suffx and make it a dual one that gives the player some sort of defensive buff. Or they could even make them alternate to potentially give hybrid builds a little more love. So if you want to have your character a more active part in the dishing out of destruction it could be player offensive and pet defensive buffs. You could then mix and match for a hybrid build or go full on pet offensive (making you tanker).

Just spit balling thing out there.

Instead of constantly talking about ‘bad design’ since this is actually a BETA which means the design most certainly is still being changed/improved upon/altered all the time, how bad actually providing some, I don’t know, maybe feedback?

12

it’d be nice if we could have a situation where necromancers are indestructible but deal no personal damage, and the minions deal tons of damage with just enough toughness that we have to periodically but not constantly re-summon them as they die.
perhaps a work around fix would be to alter the skills themselves to always summon the maximum number of minions possible to that skill, then have them all decay like wraiths, but are otherwise indestructible while decaying to get a nice rythm in there (although personally i’m more a fan of just having stronger minions in general that can take a hit and dish it back)

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