Whether or not the AI uses OoU right or you are bringing EBSoH is irrelevant, as I've already stated:
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That leaves melee that can't use EBSoH on minions quite that well, but MMs put out more damage than MBs even without EBSoH/OoU anyway.
Masochism - Yes or No?
Kunder
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No, it works almost anywhere 1 MM does. It requires somewhat more startup time, but you don't actually need more corpses because your minions last much longer. With the right skills you can go literally entire areas without needing to replace a single minion. Bone Horrors simply do. not. die. to most things when they have nearly +100 healing per second, prot from spirits, and distribute the damage properly. I've done nearly every HM mission/vanquish/elite area and 2 MMs stay at near-max capacity almost the entire time.|
I'm not a big fan of the MB, but you are badly understating its usefulness. DN is usually pre-cast on most or all minions. That's why the MB hero lags behind so much, but the minions usually begin the fight with DN on. At 16 DM you're getting 105 armor ignoring damage everytime one of the little guys blows up, not to mention poison. Throw in dwayna's sorrow and you're also getting a great source of constant, party wide healing. The problem with the MB is not lack of damage, it's that your necro hero becoms a minion babysitter, constantly casting minion supoport or raising minions, not to mention the lagging behind problem. With the MM you can add utility or other damage which he'll actually use. I have bitter chill, deathly chill, and deathly swarm on mine, and he's always in the fight using those and his utility sttuff. It's very effective since the HM update, and the MB is less effective, but not as much less as you're saying I've already said that it is powerful in that situation. The problem is that no one intelligent has the patience to wait 30s before each mob to spam death nova on every minion. =XM=
A bit off-topic but...
I'm also in the MM > MB crowd. EBSoH might not work on melee for this purpose but it's extremely easy and quick to place on top of bone fiends for a caster. Definitely worth the slot. Heroes are pretty good at spamming OoU if you don't cram their bar with a too many long cast-time spells, it's similar to how you'd design the bar on an orders hero by taking cast time into consideration due to the requirement to cast every 5s. And in a low corpse area MMs are better as they don't need to use up as many corpses for bombing. As I mostly run AP-MoP on my necro, I don't need more adjacent range damage than 2x VoS and Splinter to trigger MoP, so Death Nova is superfluous and the opportunity cost of its cast time is too much. Not to mention the annoyance of the MB lagging behind if you don't continually flag it forward. I just need extra damage to clean up what the ball insta-nuke missed and extra bodies to confuse the AI. This then leaves things like: 1) AotL+Shambling+Masochism for pure minion wall (500 hp and 80 AL at 18DM, a bit more if you micro AotL). It's only 2 minion related skills (no BotM) and they spend very little time/energy casting them, so they have a lot of spare energy and cast time to run expensive utility, much more so than a MB. Sometimes I run this so I can stick things like SoH or dark fury or other expensive support skills on it. I hate waiting for minions to catch up, get raised (or recharge on spirits between groups...) so this is the least annoying combination of minion skills possible. Some pros and cons and quick number crunching (hopefully no mistakes!) below for those who are tempted to try OoU MM on a hero. 2) OoU+Fiends+BotM+Masochism for pure single target DPS and clean up. At 18DM, compared to melee minions, Fiends have 480hp and 60AL but 40% IAS. Including EBSoH, it's an easy (11/1.86)*(19+15+38) = 425dps (vs 60AL), 315(vs 100AL), 260(vs 140AL), 200(AL-ignoring only). Add another 100dps for barbs against bosses or if a poor pull makes them lock on an off-target and makes the casting time on barbs worth it. So that's 300 AL-ignoring dps (200 without barbs) and another 0 to 225 depending on mob AL, cracked armour etc... for 6 skill slots. A useful comparison is SoS+Bloodsong+Painful Bond and a full SogM rit (typical 5 spirits+sogm+boon) if all 9 spirits are hitting a target under painful bond and sogm was activated after all 5 communing spirits were up. That's about (32+21*3+21*2+5(21+10))/(2*0.66) + (21*3+26+21*4)/2 = 310 AL-ignoring dps for 10 skill slots. 185 dps without Painful Bond. Add a bit if you include paragon shouts that affect ally attack skills (envy mainly). Mostly, it's SoGM rits which are a waste of space if you already have some minions and/or spirits to confuse mob AI. The secondary effect of the spirits are not good enough to justify 6-7 skills on a hero bar and having to micro SoGM if it is to be used after all spirits are up. For those of us necros running AP-MoP it's more physical damage packets per second than a 25% IAS VoS derv if they could have splinter on them permanently. Of course you can't force fiends to pick targets so it depends on how you pull, including at times using MoP on the target most likely to take the first fiend volley (462 adjacent damage per volley). However, an OoU MM has very little spare energy to run any utility that's expensive, I stick to FF and withering aura, SoLS and something else. GoLE if you want to just get a couple of fiends and move on quickly after a mob has died. Once at 11 minions it's not needed tbh, due to SR gain from minion cap if they raise a 1 or 2 of minions as you are moving to next group. Aegis is fine but not PS for example (recharge time too low). After the great Soul Reaping nerf of 2007, the genius skill balancers at Anet never changed the cost of animate skills except for Flesh Golem (lol) so SR stopped acting as a store of energy and an indirect reduction on the cost of animate skills. Thus, 25e is limiting and bone fiends should not be allowed to die easily, e.g. from DoT AoE since they tend to clump together. Consider ST+Shelter to keep Fiends alive (worth it) or something that heals allies like Avatar of Dwayna if it fits with the rest of the team build. Decent mesmer disruption should be mostly sufficient. I usually run a dwayna derv for healing, pious restraint and SoH, so I don't run vamps on the OoU and the sacs are not an issue. Any other team build that doesn't keep healing to an absolute minimum shouldn't really need to waste dps on vamps. Without some external healing, an OoU MM with BotM will unfortunately need vamps or a self-healing skill however. Hopefully this is enough info for some to experiment with ditching MBs (and maybe damage spirits with stupid recharges...) and try OoU MMs. Kunder
Nice wall of text thar.
One thing I would suggest: If you run two MMs both Necros will have a lot more energy available. Double minion healing strength means you need to animate less minions per Necro, more targets makes individual minions less likely to be focus-fired and die (requiring even fewer minion animations). With that energy, there's no reason you can't stuff Protective Spirit or Spirit Bond in there somewhere. Especially if you go 1x OoU (fiends) + 1x AotL (horrors). AotL MMs have tons of energy and cast time available for Protective Spirit/Spirit Bond/etc, and once your OoU is loaded up on fiends his energy problems are gone (still a bit short on cast time though...) Cast time is by far the most important resource for MMs that run support btw. It's another reason I /facepalm when I see the MB builds with Death Nova + heal/prot spam skills. Just because you never run out of energy doesn't make a build good, your other resource is time. Time-efficient skills are an utmost priority. 2.75s for an adjacent 100ish damage nuke (that might not even hit anything) is just sad. At least Deathly Swarm is always 1 hit and usually 2/3, even if it only hits about 25% less damage per target. And I still wouldn't use DS unless going for a gimmicky spike along the lines of Discord. And yeah, SoGM rit heroes are just painfully bad unless you have time to spend pre-casting stuff before battle. SoS is still great though because the spirits don't occupy much bar space and make for a great energy generator that powers SW/Restoration/Smite support. Painful Bond completely optional.
Daesu
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Originally Posted by Kunder
Whether or not the AI uses OoU right or you are bringing EBSoH is irrelevant, as I've already stated:
I know that having melee bring EBSoH for fiends may not work well. But like you said, it can still work for caster classes. Therefore, there is still value investigating if the AI uses OoU right or not.
Amy Awien
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Originally Posted by Daesu
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Can you not read? Neither his post nor the context it was placed in could lead to an interpretation that it made a statement about the hero-AI.
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There have been many good builds for players that the hero AI could not work well with unless you micro them yourself.
Irrelevant. There is nothing for us to investigate about the effectiveness of MM compared to MB's, we run them because we found them to be more effective in the field. Not only will any MM outdamage a MB, the increased lifespan of the minions means you can run dual MM's. Relyk
MMs outdamage minion bombers? Is this a joke, because it's not funny.
Jeydra
There've been like ten different discussions in the past on how SoGM Rits and MMs / MBs slow you down, and ten different times nobody provided any hard proof that they really did. No times, no superior builds with all skills / stats listed, etc.
This is fast shaping up to be the eleventh time this happens. PS: I tried using OoU MMs with Fiends a lot. They were pretty bad. Kunder
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And I have already said that I tried OOU on a hero before and it did not work well, although I admit it was a long time ago.I am not still not convinced that the hero AI would run a more successful OOU build than a MB build. If you want to convince us, enough with the theory crafting and show us a build. |
As I said though, I tend to run 1x AotL 1x OoU:
AotL/Masochism/BotM/Bone Fiend/SoLS/Spirit Bond/2 open slots
OoU/Masochism/BotM/Bone Fiend/SoLS/3 open slots
AotL generally gets PS and SoA (micro), and can slot/unslot Bone fiends if you care in place of anything else. OoU can handle Dark Bond and Rend/Rigor Mortis (micro). These are highly changable though depending on area. For easy stuff just bring 2x Fall Back.
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... All they have to do to be good MM's is cast minion making spells when corpses become available, cast OoU frequently and cast BotM when neccesary. ...
to deduce a MM bar from that, Animate X, for instance, Animate Bone Fiend for or Animate Bone Horror, or both on separate bars if you're running dual MM's. Then Blood Of the Master, it helps, even with an ST prot-rit. Then, since the thread is about Masochism, Masochism. And since we were discussing it (and Necro's have no real must-have elite's anyway) Order of Undeath. The rest is for utility, depending on area.
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And I have already said that I tried OOU on a hero before and it did not work well, although I admit it was a long time ago. I am not still not convinced that the hero AI would run a more successful OOU build than a MB build. If you want to convince us, enough with the theory crafting and show us a build. I don't know about a long time ago but it works just fine recently. I don't babysit my heroes to see if the're using a skill right, I make something up, then I try it in the game. Then I tweak it, if necessary, or abandon it. The change from Minion Bomber to (dual) Minion Master brought a very noticeable, positive difference in the speed with which you roll through PvE. Quote:
Easily done. Screenshot here:
http://img69.imageshack.us/img69/8236/gw135s.jpg Post Invoke nerf replace Invoke Ele with EA Fire. Exact build is this: 16 Fire, 10 Energy Storage, 9 Command. Rodgort's Invocation, Fire Attunement, Elemental Attunement, Immolate, Glowing Gaze, "Fall Back!", Liquid Flame, Fireball. Exact skills on every other hero are visible, spec available on request. In today's world I'd probably try to squeeze more power from the UA Smiter (lol) and replace the UA with a more offensive Mo/Me, switching up other builds as well to keep the 3x Fall Backs, but let's leave that build for now and concentrate on this one, which has timed screenshots behind it. In case you're wondering the area is obviously Raisu Palace HM, and the time was achieved with mob skips, no celestial skill, Danika + Cynn, and no picking up of loot. Quote:
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