MM: How to control minions?

Dual Superiors is an advanced method to reduce the impact of sacrifices and increase the efficiency of your self heal. It wasn't an error. Carinae, is right on as usual. Two, or even three, sup. runes is a way of reducing sac costs and the amount of energy you have to spend (or your monk has to spend) to counteract them.

As I've said before elsewhere, you want to run your health at the lowest value you are comfortable with such that 25% of it divides (close to) evenly into your self-heal's amount healed. (Example: If your self-heal heals for 100, then go (close to) 400, 200, or 134, whichever is the lowest you are comfortable with.) The purpose of this breakpointing is to avoid overhealing and/or underhealing because your sacs and self-heal are mismatche din size. In the case of regen-based self-heals like Mystic Regen, you don't need to worry about breakpoints, so just go as low as you are comfortable.

Now, on to the topic at hand, minion control. There isn't much, but it's not exactly true that there's none. Study the minion AI, and manipulating it will start to come to you naturally. I'll try to give you an overview here, but you're going to need to sit down and watch the litte buggers yourself.

Let's start with moods. Minions have two moods: Happy and Aggro. When minions are Happy, they follow you. They bask in your radiant glow of master-ness. They form a little circle around you if you stop. There's two things you need to know about Happy: (1) If you're using Heal Area, pause for a moment so that they circle up before casting. Get them all in the spell's range. This used to be called "the dance" or "the minion master dance." Maybe it still is, I just haven't heard it in awhile. (2) There are times you need to keep the minions Happy so that they don't run off and get themselves killed and/or attract monsters. In principle, this is rather easy -- just don't wand or cast any offensive spells, and make sure to cut a path that keeps the minions' aggro circles from picking up any enemies.

Getting the minions to go Aggro is the exact opposite. Wand something, cast an offensive spell on something, or get something into their aggro range.

The next thing is getting the minions to attack what you want. Generally, this is hard. If you sent them Aggro with a wand shot or an offensive spell, they will start out aggroed onto your target of choice. This means you should pick your first target in a battle carefully. There's also a chance they may decide to change target on you. You can usually prevent this through positioning and approach angle.

The minions' choose their targets (or choose to change their targets) in very much the same way monsters do. Each target within range (range = the thing that initially aggroed them, plus the aggro circle of the thing that aggroed them, plus the minion's own aggro circle (if you've ever done something with a stance tank/obsidian tank, you know this in reverse)) gets a numerical score. That score is some sort of weighted composite of whether or not the minion is already "on" that target, how close it is, how low its hp is, how low its armor is, and whether or not you are wanding it. The potential target with the best score wins -- that is it gets attacked. Minions seem to care more about proximity than monsters do. Wanding is also a surprisingly strong factor. (Actually there's a bit more to say about target selection, but it's nitpciky, so I'll leave it out.) So, if you want to avoid the minions second-guessing your choice of target, make sure to wand, and try to come at your target from a direction that keeps any substantially weaker monsters from ever being substantially closer to the minions as they make their way to the target.

If your minions turned from Happy to Aggro by a monster coming into their aggro circle, the minions will pause for a moment before attacking. This pause can be good -- if, for example, you don't want an aggro and the monster gets clear of the circle quickly enough that the minions don't bolt -- or it can be bad -- if, for example, you want your minions up front tanking right NOW and they're being slow about it. Lesson here: Use a wand shot or spell to set them to Aggro if you really want them to move out immediately. The minion's initial target will be whatever got in the circle first, though it's likely to change targets before it engages because of the great distance. One other point of interest: Your minions behave like a party when they are close together, so if one aggros, several usually will go with it, even if their aggro bubbles were clear.

Getting a minion from Aggro back to Happy is hard to do. Basically, you must kill its target. That will turn it back to Happy for a moment. If there's no more monsters around, it will stay Happy. If there are monsters around, it will quickly go back to Aggro because there's a monster in its bubble. During that moment, you can wand something to try to set its target. If you don't it ill pick its own. During this moment of Happy, the minion may run back towards you a little, since it's trying to follow. This was a BIG AI problem immediately after NF was released, since melee minions spent more time running than fighting. Previous patches shortened the post-target-killed period of Happy to reduce this problem. Recently I've noticed that you can sometimes get a minion to break off by far enough running away. This never used to happen, ever. It's a relatively new (silent) change, and I haven't studied it much.

Hope that helped you learn to think like a minion.

I only have Prophecies. Bolded for clarity

Any criticisms on the build? I usually summon two horrors to tank then load up on the fiends, which has been working well.
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Death: 12+1+3
Reaping: 10+3
Healing Prayers: 8

Animate Bone Fiend
Animate Bone Horror
Aura of the Lich
Blood of the Master
Taste of Death
Deathly Swarm
Heal Area
Resurrect Not really. That's about as good as you can manage for Prophecies only. IMO, Deathly Swarm is pretty terrible. If you want direct damage in the Prophecies-only death line, consider Rotting Flesh or Well of Suffering. Or, you might try out Moloch's advice (below) to see if that build feels better for you. I'd agree that, as between that build and your current build, it's largely a matter of taste. If you do drop heal area and go 8 blood, and you tend to play with unreliable healers (PUGs, Mhenlo), you might bring Well of Blood as utility.