Nerfing, Minion Masters, Secondary Professions and Hair-Pulling Frustration, Oh My!

First off, if any who begin reading this intend to reply "If you need more than 10 minions, you're not doing something right" , "omg u effin' nub" , "You obviously don't know how to play" or the classic "stfu and quit complaining" I suggest such users stop reading and get off of this thread immediately because no one is going to care what a pompous meatbag such as the aforementioned class of individuals is going to think, anyway.

Now, on to the good stuff!

Well, as I was playing Guild Wars yesterday, me and a few of my guild members decided to head out and enjoy doing some of the festival quests and games in spirit of the year of the ox.

So, me and my guild-mates head out to tackle a few festival quests, killing helpless Kappa and Mantid left and right, when I noticed that Aura of the Lich caused a strange glitch I hadn't seen before, it created a bone horror from nothing at all. Minutes later I also noticed that my usual ability to control and heal my minion train was greatly reduced. It was after this second oddity I looked over my skill bar, and as I began to suspect, it was no glitch or strange occurrence; Anet had once again brutally attacked Minion Masters, making us even more useless.

I've played a minion master ever since Guild Wars' beta and I must say we've been the most thoroughly screwed class of them all. Anet, in case you haven't noticed, minions aren't very powerful creatures.. we (by "we" I mean minion masters) must rely on numerical advantage to prove even a slight threat. Add on to our minions' weakness, we must constantly tend to them, as their bonds to this world cause them to constantly deteriorate, and within minutes reach the point of inability to keep them alive. We rely on a constant supply of bodies and battle to maintain our forces. As such, we are *already* limited the most of any other class. Before the 10 minion limit, minions would naturally die by massive degeneration. Many necromancer veterans learned how to maximize their forces and create amazing deathless armies, but this was hardly a common sight. Then, the limit was set in which forced Minion Masters to learn ways to make their small squads of minions as powerful as can be. We had to find ways to sacrifice as much as possible to keep these pathetic hunks of flesh going and now, you've taken one of the most potent skills for it! Minion making has become so useless, how many minion masters do you see any more? The vast majority you see, I guarantee, are the dedicated vets, like myself that refuse to play any other class. We keep clinging on, in hopes that you might stop attacking our class and let us find our power again.

Now, I know that Minion Master's haven't been the only class to be nerfed to oblivion. Whenever some whining child rants about how he can't kill some player in PvP, how's he's dying all the time to a good Elementalist, or just witnessed the devastation of a good Minion Master and his army of undead, Anet sweeps in for the little whining brat and nerfs the skills that veterans and build-makers have thoroughly studied and learned to have a character class they enjoy playing and can be quite formidable opponents with.

Rather than learning a counter to such players, or actually communicating with other players so that such veterans are brought down, they simply complain until their thick-skulls are satisfied with the child's game they wish Guild Wars to be.

I am, however, an avid supporter of Anet and watching builds and skills closely to avoid such blatant abuses such as the well-known 55-hp invincimonk, and it's variations which has practically no counters whatsoever. These apparent abuses should always be dealt with, but to nerf a skill or skills because a player has learned how he can use them together to protect himself better.. isn't that what our skill bars are for?!

The vast majority of these nerfs and changes to skills comes from the fact that we have the ability to meld professions. Aura of the Lich, for example used to be a perfect Elite skill for minion masters, as it effectively quartered the potentially high costs of sacrificing, allowing minion masters using Blood of the Master to maintain their undead armies. It was only after Warriors, Dervishes and other classes began abusing this skill, that it was deemed worthy of changing.

Anet, with all the time spent in altering skills, you could have released dozens of extra skills, greatly decreasing the need for players to rely so heavily on their secondary professions for useful skills! Or, rather than blasting these skills into Oblivion, why not make ALL of these changes pertain only to PvP, where the majority of the whining block-heads ask for them?

Secondary professions... why Anet, why? If players were limited to simply one profession, but had twice the skill-list size, as they do with having two professions, I am sure most people would be just as happy! Allowing a warrior to delve into the arcane, or a monk to experiment with the dark arts is possible without the need of two professions.

Pertaining to Aura of the Lich, which is the main reason I bring all of this up, I believe Elite skills should be class-specific anyway! Elite skills should be just that, skills for the ELITE of a specific character class. They are meant to provide amazing effects, which is why they are limited to only one per skill bar.

In the end, these are the things I ask of Anet:

1.) Remove the 10 minion cap, let us have our armies back. Those walking meatballs are pitiful as it is.

-or-

2.) Remove the constant degeneration on minions, they die fast enough as it is.


3.) Make Elite skills primary profession-specific. There's no need for a warrior to be using Aura of the Lich to become a deathless knight and no need for an elementalist to use Echo and Arcance Echo to string together endless meteor storms.

-or-

4.) As huge as it would be, remove secondary professions and give us more skills! You've proven you have the time.

5.) Make skill changes PvP only! There's no need to screw with our PvE play.. Aside from obvious abuses such as the invincimonks and shadow assassins that have absolutely nothing to fear.

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This is the end of my rant, and hopefully someone from Anet will come along and read this. Everyone feel free to comment, except flaming knuckle-draggers who have nothing better to do than appear "1337 on teh f012umzzz".

Long live the Brotherhood!

you sort of answered your own question right there

/notsigned

10 minions is more then enough for any MM and I like being able to utilize second profession skills to compliment my primary class.

Basically your asking for a complete redesign of how the classes/'skills work and its just a bit late in the game for that

Um, right.. considering I only asked (if I'm not mistaken) three questions in my entire post, and those three questions had nothing to do with that, I wonder what you mean.

If you're an expert and emperically know that "10 minions is more than enough for any MM" this thread would not exist.

I'm glad you enjoy being able to utilize second profession skills to compliment your primary, I said there was no point to it, not that people didn't enjoy it.

Lastly, I do believe you should take a look at the READ FIRST Guidelines of this section, specifically, number 10.

10 minions make a big enough wall of flesh already. Reintroducing armies would just mean players can just throw all tactics out the window and succeed. If having 100 minions blocking everything while you + your teammates can sit behind them in complete safety while you kill stuff is a good idea to you, you need to do more thinking, less ranting.

Probably wouldn't make too much difference. I don't want this, natural degen makes sense.

Theres no need but it's fun. Besides, the secondary profession is part of the core game design, a lot of people are going to get very angry if it got messed with. Besides, it's not like they'd do that now.

More skills = more imbalance. Buff old ones maybe, but Anet should really be working on more important stuff then major old skill rebalances.

If Anet cared about PvE then they'd get rid of/fix all the blantantly overpowered PvE skill garbage. They do the PvE/PvP skill split now though, which is nice for stuff that gets used in PvE.

/not signed to all, because it does not solve the "problems" you described. Why? Because theres no problem with them.

I wouldn't mind at all if they took the cap off. It used to be awesome walking with 30+ minions.

Perhaps you should re-read what I wrote, first off, you can't have 100 minions, their natural degen and lack of much health prevent that. Secondly, without teammates, Minion Masters can't function and their minions die in a hail of crossfire and battle with the whole team then stuck with nothing. Perhaps *you* need to do more thinking, and less pretending being elite.

To you, perhaps it does. That's great, then explain why it does, it'd be much appreciated.

I concur, which is why I find their nerfing particularly tiresome.

Well I am glad that for you, there is no problem. Now, unless you have any pertinent information to share, I suggest you do. If not, stop spamming your useless "there's nuffin' wrong" garbage.

Aura of the Lich was changed on December 11th. Check out the developer comment if you are interested about the reasoning behind it (Dev Update dec 11). In short: It was underused and surely not because a Dervish or Warrior (lol) could abuse it.

However there is already been some discussion here about the game mechanic change of that skill. Some favor it, some don't. After the update is was used mainly in low tier PvP like Alliance Battles or Competitive missions aka Jade Quarry or Fort Aspenwood. It made it's way as well to Hall of Heroes in form of the Gimmicky Build called Lichway, seldom seen in lower rank GvG's as well.

In PvE it is less this skill that destroyed MM's for Humans but Heroes introduced with Nightfall. Many famous Cookie Cutter Herobuilds like Sabway or Discordway run extremely efficient Minion Factories in the name of Olias, Livia or Master of Whispers. This is mainly due their ability to reliably use Death Nova, like no human ever could.
There are still some human minion bomber builds out there but that really is for your fun, if you want efficiency you want a hero doing this job.

Now to your suggested changes:

The pve/ pvp update split you suggest exists since May 21st 2008 in case you haven't noticed. Check again the Dev update for further information (Dev Update may 21)

The rest of them get a clear no go from me, because they either break core game mechanics that have proved to be rather balanced or only strengthen hero MM's even more then humans.

Have fun.

for someone who told all the '1337' people to stay away, your coming across as someone who think theyre pretty '1337' themselves.

as everyone in this thread is trying to tell you. minion masters seem pretty balanced at the mo. AotL is a major buff in the ways of a minion master. To have no degen on a minion & cap higher than 10, means you could constantly have at least 20 minions+. which is pretty imbalanced if you ask me. With skills like barbs and mark of pain, 20 minions attacking a foe would make the game too easy. everything would die straight away.

and as for my earlier remark, your basically saying that you dont want to change from being an mm. your complaining that other people QQ to anet because theyre not a good enough player to adapt to skill changes. well it seems like your doing the exact same. you seem to want ante to adapt to your individual needs.

i cant see many people who have played MM agreeing with you %100 on this. which is my opinion.

and as for not allowing secondary proffessions because of people casting 3x 'meteor storm', i have no idea where you have seen that. that just sounds crazy... infact so crazy it could do a full circle and it almost becomes awesome.

i mean, you must have played other types of necro. i mean what did you do for dasha vestebule? as much as you think anet need to change the mm, maybe its you who needs to change your play style a little.

/not signed to everything

Since when did warriors and dervishes use AotL? and how would that even be any problem to a decent player. A simple enchantment removal says hi. As bad as it is Defy Pain is a much bigger hassle. I think I've seen more use of AotL after the skill change on other classes than before. I always crack up when i do.

I'm pretty sure AotL was changed because it wasn't seeing enough use. Sure some MMs in CM/AB used it or some Necros farmed with it. but other than that you would never see it.

Necromancers have so much diversity outside of playing a minion master. anyways MMs are much better suited to heroes now anyways. They manage their minions better than any player can. Id like to see a real player keep Death Nova or Jagged bones on multiple minions as well as they do.

As for your last elite/profession points, just no. There's no need to change core things in this game at this point nearly four years in. GW was made with the intent to allow people to choose between two professions and people to take those skills to create their builds. If you haven't seen how effective some skill bars can be then its kinda sad. Id take two professions over one with twice the skills any day. But GW is honestly dying and changing these would cause many people to leave the game.

If you dislike playing MMs so much now go play a different class or a different build. Leave the job to your heroes. There really is no need for massive armies anymore as PvE is easy enough as it is.

Your arguments were rather weak honestly. The points your brought up have nothing wrong with them. If you want to MM yourself go to Ascalon and kill some lvl 3 monsters you can have your own minion army then.

suggestion: if you don't want a negative opinion then your own, you probably want to keep it to yourself. Once you post it on a forum, it attracts people, who like me, are going to say what's on their mind.

and still /not signed

Minion Master is not a class...Necromancer is.
It`s not that they are so nerfed, it is that (if you are really playing from beta) you need to learn new tricks.
And you know what they say..."It`s hard to learn old cat, new tricks"
Or something like that

As far as the heroes, who *doesn't* know that their extremely efficient? Heroes didn't destroy Minion Masters, nor a hero's efficiency. Secondly, they are heroes, if players have found that Anet's programming allows their heoes to become wonderfully efficent, so be it. Change the programming, if it's an issue, mess with skills and you screw over the entire community, not the heroes, someone can find them a new, equally reliable set of skills to use.

I know about the PvE/PvP split, I suggested *all* skill changes be restricted to a skill's PvP functionality, unless blatant intercession was needed, such as with the aged invincimonks or the more recent shadow-sins.

I don't care about dev comments or updates, my post is about suggestions, not where I can find some info as to why anyone did what was done.