As we all know, minions are right now in a bad spot (not as much as totems cause that would be entirely unplyable). I want to take a look at why is it that they are in a bad place and what to do about it.
To begin looking at the issues with minion we first have to separate minion builds into 2 types of playstyles. Active playstyles with non permament minions and Relaxed playstyles with permanent minions. You could make a case for hybrid but generally speaking people tend to go one way or another as hybrid has almost the same level of activity as active playstyles but they do less (or should at least) damage.
Non Permament Minion builds:
Who are they for? People who like active playstyles. Casting minions every time they encounter enemies or every couple mobs. They donāt differ much from other caster playstyles because they are quite active in how they work.
Right now, the most damage potential out of a minion build comes from Flame Wraiths scaling both fire and necrotic damage to insane levels and you play them like totems by making them stationary (funny how the minion is the new totem build). However hereās the problem, the damage is not enough and the reasons are two folded. First, is that they are close to approuching ok levels of damage, but the problem is that because they need to be significantly better than permament minions to justify the active playstyle, then you need to actually bump them up significantly because permanent minions also need a big damage bump. The solution here is simple, just increase the damage!
Second problem is mana issues. Active minion playstyle is not palatable if you summon 1 minion at a time. You obviously want to summon 6 wraiths at a time, the problem is, mana regen is bad and itās impossible to scale properly because you can only raise it percentually but have no way to add flat manage regen to then make the percentual increases worth it.
On top of that it doesnāt makes sense that summoning more minions in once cast costs more mana. No other game does this and the reason is simple. If you are spending your points into getting more summons per cast, you are not spending those points making them do more damage or making them tankier. You already have a trade off and therefore there is no need for an added penalty to it. LE is the only game that does this to my knowledge (which is probably rather limited but still an indicator). To better showcase the issue, I have to spend 7 out of 20 points (more than 1/3) of my skill points in wraiths just to summon 6 of them and I still pay +270% of their mana cost which with the current system of manage regen is unreasonable.
To solve this we can go about it 2 ways. We need to have a way for mana regen to have a form of flat scaling to top of with percentual scaling just like life regen has or we need to remove the extra mana cost for summoning multiple wraiths. Ideally, both of things things would be done.
The third problem with non permanent minions is what skills do you use. Wraiths and drad shade for sure but after that you got nothing. There is literally no skill that applies to it. You can bring zombies to explode on the enemy, but now you donāt have an active playstyle, you have the playstyle of a MLG champion requiring ludicrous APM so thatās not a solution. You cannot add permanent minions because they will all degen thanks to the staff that is the only thing that even makes non permanent minions playable. There really arenāt any other skills appliable for the build and this is where what Iāve been saying before comes into view. We need passive skills that are like auras which you activate and they just give you some boon. Either that or an extremely large portion of the skills need to have triggers happening from other skills so that they can be used without needing to click in order to keep the APM within sane levels.
The 4th problem I already said before but Iāll elaborate, zombies are bad. Popcorn builds as they are known thanks to PoE are always notorious for being very RNG with their damage output. Minions sometimes donāt hit the target, they target wrong things, they take time to explode. In order to make them viable they need to deal significantly higher damage and they need to not degen life, they should also explode the moment they touch the target and they need to move much faster. This would at least make them decent enough to play.
Last be not least comes survivability. Summoners tend to have a bit more luck with not being attacked as often in maps though AoEs still get them easily and on boss fights it tends to be a case of perfectly avoiding any and all damage in most cases. This problem actually exists not just for summoners but for all classes where it needs a lot of layered defenses and in LE, many of the defenses are activated by building them in through combat. This would be ward gained or leech and so on. They are layers you gain by doing something, the problem is, you need to avoid certain stuff which means you need to move and a lot of the time you donāt have the time to even start building up the defenses before you die. This is to say, statid defenses should be far more powerful than they are. Iād say up to 200 corruption itās should be quite possible to survive any 1 shot without layered defenses that requires build up.
Those where the problems with the non permament minions. Now here are the problems with the permament minions and this is actualy the primary focus even though there is less to talk about.
So who are they for? Quite simply, they are for the people who either want to play the game in a more casual form and donāt stress about having to use multiple skills at the same time, they can just focus on dodging and let the minions do their thing, they only need to ocasionally cast dread shade. Itās also a build for people who eiher play worse or they have a lot of difficulty (myself) dealing with multiple key presses at the same time or in a rotation.
So problem number 1 we face with this build is, minion die. It may not seem like a big problem to many of you but look at the target audience of permanent minion builds. The keyword here is Permanent, they are not supposed to be dying at all but they are dying to dread shade (more on that later) they are dying to enemy attacks and especially they just keep dying in boss fights. I am sure itās not hard to see why people who want a relaxed playstyle, whether because they donāt feel like being overly active or because they canāt, are not having a good time with minions that require constant resummoning. They essencially become a playstyle worse than all others because they require even more click spamming and on top of that, downed minions do no damage and since you relly on a large number of them to have any semblance of damage, it takes a while to bring your damage back up and while you are doing it, more minions are dying.
What minions need is a sizable HP buff and make it so that their damage reduction is at least 80% from all sources. This will not escuse them from still needing a bit of extra HP on gear or the tree, especially the higher corruption you go, but it will help bring them to a state where they are not constantly dying.
Then we have damage issues. Frankly speaking, even with all the minions out which normally is skeleton archers + skeleton mages + golem to draw away some aggro, they still donāt deal anywhere nearly enough damage. They need a big damage boost to even be playable and this is not including the fact that they die and damage just goes down the drain. However simply increasing their damage is good enough if we assume that their dying problem gets taken care of as well.
Lastly we have the survivabillity problem that the non permanent minion build has. Survivability on summoners and in general most classes needs to be improved drastically.
And I saved one skill for last. That is dread shade. This skill used to be the go to (and still is) for all necromancers because it empowers your other minions, however it was massively nerfed under the disguise of a buff of making it no longer kill your minions. In fact they added a node on the tree that does stop degen but what we lost was a lot of damage buffs and to top that off, it was all a lie about it not killing minions. The reason for taking dread shade was 90% making minions always crit which requires you to make the degen be the everlasting poison which is not affected by the node that removes degen. Now if this sounds bad to you I have even worse news. For the permament minion build, all that changed was a massive damage nerf but for non permanent minions, itās actually really bad to go for the auto crits due to the loss of a lot of added necrotic damage that is really good for the wraiths so we can avoid degen even though they are temporary minions so in their case it didnāt matter much to begin with, but the worst part is, there is so little to grab on the tree that improves the minions that anyone not spending the extra travel nodes to go after the crit are going to be left with points that literally have nowhere to be put. That is how bad dread shade has become. All build sstill use it because even though itās bad, itās not like we have anything better, but that doesnāt means the skill is good, just that we have no other options. What we need here is for the auto crit to no longer be subject to have degen and we need more nodes on the tree that we can invest into damage buffs.
Doing this will go a long way to fix the minions. There are still AI issues but those are far harder to tackle so this are the simple solution to at least make the skills goodā¦ Oh and one more thing. Please fix the lagoon boss fight. Minions have huge issues with pathing up to the top of the arena and moving there.
