I’ve been trying to do succesfull build around skele minions and bigger pack of minions for Necromanser. Still no luck.
I am having the worst minion experiance from all diablo-clones I’ve ever played. This post came from my constant frustration over the state of minion army builds in LE and anty-minion (and anty melee of course!) design of the game, and well… also my love for the classical minion army builds. I hope it would help to buff this kind of builds in the next patches so I can finally play what I really like
So what’s wrong when you choose to play minion army build in my opinion?
Minions are even worst in 1.2 than before because of the layout of new areas: tombs and cementaries. But not only… also some side quest areas like the bridge for example.
So what’s wrong with the design? Well tight corridors, no space for doding shit on the ground for the char… and of couse for the minions. When you have like in my current build: 16 to 19 minions and you are on the brige or inside the cemetery, the summoned minions take all the possible damage, because there is no space for them to stand outside of many highly damaging pools on the floor. There are also many mobs that just throwing shit around: everywhere… so minions are dying a lot, meaning they don’t deal damage, meaning char is in danger… jada jada.
Conlusion, tip for the designer: make some more space in corridors, take off some “throwing around” mobs skills, make mobs slower with longer cooldowns so they don’t clutter all the screen with theirs attacks.
There is not enough dmg scaling from the crit chance side to give minions enough dps to be able to clear fast enough 500++ cc areas. Of course there are some combinations that can multiply dmg but my build is chosing perma minions and there is no way to make them fast clearing areas >500cc. Some would say, that 350cc is enough… ok, but comparing to the time needed to push this patethic minions to 500cc, to for example any of my FG buiilds, it is like FG build is 20x faster to get there.
Conslusion, tip for the designer: give more +crit chanse nodes in the skele, mages, bone golems skill trees. Give more cc to revenants and vanguards, give option too bust crit chance for these minions from the passive tree.
Also Acolyte char is not tanky enough. I need to spend too many of the prefix/suffix and gear slots to make Acolyte tanky enough to withstand dmg in around 500cc. I need to make her that tanky only because I neeed to stand still to revive my minions that are dying all the time.
Conlusion, tip for the designer: give more ways to boost dmg mitigation to Acolyte. Now I use: block chance, ward generation, HP regen. But it is still not enough if my minions aren’t killing fast enough.
I can also provide video to showcase the problems with minion army Acolyte. But fot now I just going to rest from this kind of builds. Just too much frustration. Game should be fun generator, not frustration generator.
I hope you are all well and have better experiances with minion builds that I am.
GL&HF!
ps. Dammitt is working on fixing LE planner issue with loading Acolyte idols into the planner, so keep in mind that my ingame HP is really: 4,2k HP + around 3k ward all the time. So for the Fore Guard todays standards I would be tanky AF, but in Acolyte situation I am just dying very often… the same thing with my minions
Zoo isnt strictly that bad in the damage department.
But gosh damn are minions squishy little bone bags.
Watching my 5 mages crumple to a fart in the wind is insane. much less stuff like nemesis or harbingers.
They drastically need to massively buff minion hp and recovery for zoo to function. cause unlike solo minions, when your minions engage with a pack not all of them get to do damage. sometimes the first 3 skeletons there take care of the pack, now the ones in the back didnt get any leech. and minion life regen is very limited.
I highly recommend pumping Minion Health and Minion Regen. Two moderately-rolled “Reptilian” prefix items and some Turquoise jewelry will pretty much have them unkillable.
Heck, I’ve got that permanent version of Dread Shade on my Bone Golem (so he’s taking about 2x damage) yet he’s still happily tanking stuff.
That should be avaliable in passive tree imho. No space for extra slots in my gear. Especially if you are HC, the priority is survivle ot the char. So no space to squeeze more prefixes unless very lucky 3lp slam on both rings which is very unlikely still good tip though for sc
It is, Necro has quite a few minion hp nodes, minion hp regen & some minion leech nodes, but you do need to actually take them & build for tank if you want tanky minions.
“I need to spend too many of the prefix/suffix and gear slots to make Acolyte tanky enough to withstand dmg in around 500c”
Yeah, you need to spend something to be tanky on 500c, what do you expect? Especialy int based characters, they don’t have def scaling from dmg atribute like str or dex. Why you even tanking? Don’t like narrow locations? don’t stand here, move on. The most important thing in any summoner gameplay is positioning. Don’t stand here or here, move your ass around and avoid things, if you stuck between monsters and walls - it’s your fault!
Btw ability to clear 500c with any speed without dying is enough good already. All rest depends on gear, at least your army should tank something.
I am gonna make some post like “I am clearing full screen only with 4 hits on 1000c, thats sooo slow!”
ps: character link is okay? Gear is kinda wierd. You can show us your actual character!
One more thing, I dont like minion builds here coz they have one mandatory item: Julra Gloves. If you dont have them, you need them.
boost dmg mitigation to Acolyte. Now I use: block chance, ward generation, HP regen
Ward generation and hp regen is not hit damage mitigation! It’s DoT damage mitigation and primary sustain mechanics!. Some non-FG values block mitigation is not enough. You need not only mitigations, but damage avoid mechanics so you can sustain damage. When you nearly const damaged in fight even good sustain can’t help. You need more EHP: higher block, dodge, parry, “%hit 0 damage”, DoT damage taken as armor, etc etc. Yeah int characters squishy, you need to compensate that with def layers.
Basicaly, if you can avoid big hits, (the ones that should be avoided like Shattered Strike) with enough sustain to recover damage you can tank everything. Leech is a very good mechanic for that, dunno about minions Never played acolyte seriously. If I remember correctly they all life degenerators ward maniacs
There are a lot of skills in the game that interact with the Skeleton Watcher summon. But they are very weak. If there were buffs for them on the skill trees that interact with them, they would probably become more useful. Perhaps it would be worth paying attention to them in the Skeleton Summon or Skeleton Mage Summon skill tree.
I agree my friend. It’s just not possible to build for minion health, minion damage, minion sustain, and finally character defense. There just aren’t enough prefix/suffix slots to do it unless you have LP4 on all your items and roll perfectly.
I finally gave up on the minion zoo and switched to Wraithlord. That allowed me to push much higher corruption, up to about 1000c. It’s still impossible to do Uber because he dies too fast/too often, but it’s better than the zoo builds. But in any case it’s too bad because I really wanted to have a bunch of minions following me around, I just think that’s really cool.
Personally I would just say make some minions invincible, which would allow the player to focus on minion damage + character survivability. I don’t think the build would be OP, it would probably be in a perfect balance state. Not as strong as a sentinal build, but still able to do higher content.
Never played acolyte seriously. If I remember correctly they all life degenerators ward maniacs 