An open letter on the Minion Master changes

MM used to be the most fun build to play in this game, but I have to admit they were overpowered. On a good day, I could maintain maybe 25 or 30, but the 80 mentioned by the OP...wow. Nothing's gonna last long against that. However, anet have gone too far imo. 10 minions? How can you call yourself a master if you can only control 10 at a time?

Sure, a limit is necessary to prevent necros steamrollering over anything in the game. But maybe something like 2 initially, then 1 per level of death magic, giving a grand total of 18 - still nerfed, still below the capabilities of any good MM, but workable.

Heh, parties I've seen at Vizunah and Dragon's Throat are still looking for MMs. Guess 10 fiends still do enough damage to be useful.

But given the chance.../signed. I want my army back!

Well I was playing MM for a long long time. And I can say that the nerf wasn't so bad at all. You know if you want to solo-farm with MM, now it's impossible. But if you want to play some missions, that's enough. 9-10 minions is a average number for me. They can do a lot of damage [especially Fiends with MoP casted on attacked foe].

BTW; Correct me if I'm wrong. In every Canthan Mission I'm always seeing that ppl need MM. So as you see that nerf doesn't changed the valuability of MM.

Heres my conclusion to this after not only reading every previous, but also having pve/pvp experience on 7 lvl 20s pve, and MM was not, by far, the hardest to murder.

1~ try a smite monk, one cast of Shield of Judgemen + balth aurora= there goes army... hey watdya know A Net gimped these too, whole reason i made my damned MM

2~ As earlier menntioned , a R/mo using Barrage and Strenth of Honor or watever, i have a 20 barrage ranger, and basically you can counter anything on a ranger, easily, so mayb invite more rangers since we hardly ever get groups anyways. Or even a freking ranger using interrupts

3~Fire Ele (wow watdya know, gimped) need i even explain?

4~ Veratas aurora (oh whups there goes all the minions)

5~ Eoe, (there they go again)

6~ Kill the MM (its not hard to kill a damned necro, specially not one whose busy focusing on raising a minion army.. and come on plz, like you wouldnt notice which necro was spamming Bone Fiend/Horror/VHorror ect.?

So far as conclusion goes, ummm wtf were you thinking A Net, im sorry but there was no defined reason to Nerf MM so seriously, id go for a compromize, but ive had my necro since games release, and it hurts me that you killed him so.. IM now reduced to boring and yet more profitable forms of necro farming.. 55 necro + SS/SV necro... o wait im thinking a SS nerf is coming, and a 55 one, your killing any build that takes skill, and i completely agree with the earleir post that, if you so wish to do this why not just make 4 skills, Axe Attack +1 dmg, Sword Attack +1, Elemental attack +1, Life steal (steals 1/2 a health point), sounds like fun doesnt it, so we can all just blandly hack and slash eachother to death. If you were looking for balance, look at freking Mesmers (of which i also have one) who are so OPed pvp wise (speically in random arenas and the like) its not even funny.. O whoops what was that, you cant cast anythign cas i interrupt it all and deal dmg,... o backfire -147 dmg.. sorry im venting anger... i wont claim to ever bein one of the best MMs out there, i usually capped around mid 40s of minions. Mayb you should make a compromise instead of completely anihilating a build, and yes ive been playing MM in cantha but its just not the same... the rush isnt there any more, im actually prolly gonna delete my MM and go make another assassin or rit, atleast you havnt gimped those A~Net. I realy dont appreciate this, and for all those complainers up there, scroll up, is it that hard to run 1/ mroe then 6 counters? i mean come on, Eles are used in Pvp all the time, there goes your MM, so are rangers. If you want to continue nerfing classes, heres an idea, make monks heal for 30s, take ranger damage back down, give mesmers only 1 interrupt, and make warriros have 200 health. Ooh what a fun game, im sorry if i exagerate, but i feel very strongly on this, and to tell you the truth the MM was perhaps the only fun i had on GW ne more pve wise, now i can have fun running a 55 (boring) or a SS/SV (boring, but does almost as much as a full fledged 40 minion MM if you echo it). Whats said, is more ofthen then any other character now im resorting to playing a MESMER for pve, cas my mesmer looks cool, and well since you ruining the effectiveness of everything, why nto make them look lame while your at it.

PS: Signed and whatever else you want, this fix is Bull

I'm sorry, but you guys are being very stubborn and nearsighted in regard to this "nerf." For PVE, this was a nerf, and i feel that it was warranted. A good MM could easily solo just about any mob in the game once he got his army rolling. It was too powerful, and could have adverse effects in the long run. As for MM in pvp, youre stronger than ever! Instead of a few crappy level 18 and 19 fiends, now you get flesh golem and vampiric horror. You guys are completely overlooking what you have gained. Its not like youre going to have a huge army in pvp to begin with, so youre much better off with these stronger minions. If you all quit crying for a few moments and try out what youve got now, youll realize youre much better off.

I will break some things if I ever heard "this is not a nerf, you have Vhorror" one more time !

Idea : limit us to 10 pets and give us "pet attacks" (you know some thing like "Lacerating bones" : the next attack of your minions make the victim bleed... this kind of things )

Well, I wish I can say "I feel your pain," but I can't. The reason for this is because I never spent countless hours honing my MM skills to utilise the fine arts of MMing like some of you have. However, I do sympathize with all of you.

Should the nerfing of the raising of ordinary minions (fiends/horrors/minions) be the end of the MM?

It would be if you don't have factions. With Factions, you can have different types of summonables, like the vampiric minions and the fleshy golem. These new sets have given a MM some interesting ways to make others suffer. This also makes skills like VS and BotM more viable without the need of a well or a healing spell. Regenerate you minions and they intern will steal life for you.

The nerfing was also for the Ritualist, as the more points into their core skill, the healthier their spirits and summonables (undead minions) become. So you may see more Rit/N forms of MMs than true N/? MMs, but a balance must be made somehow.

Two vampiric fiends + 1 blood golem + VS = continuous VS and summonables for a MM.

Also, think of it this way. A new challenge has been brought upon the Necromancer. New powers and new restrictions, are you up to the challenge of making the ultimate MM?

For those MMs that dont have factions yet (myself included), the nerf is strictly PVE, where i still feel it was warranted. We havent really changed that much in pvp. Factions gives MM teeth for pvp, where i feel they are otherwise not very viable.

You see, the majority of people who play MMORPGs are in many ways similar to children. They are ungrateful brats with poor grammar who can only think about themselves. Because they are always right (and thus you cannot be reasoned with) they are completely happy to defend their standing with incomprehensible moonlogic (As seen in the find-a-way-around-the-problem-to-make-it-not-seem-like-a-problem approach instead of admitting the fix was needed). As a defensive mechanism they incessantly act as martyrs who are wronged by the uncaring higher powers to try and make other people side with them out of sympathy.

Most of them are 12 too.

/not signed gg and have a nice life.

I deleted my Necro after the nerf. There was simply no reason to have him clogging up character slots anymore.

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<---Here I sit all broken hearted

Well I was nuker when the Aoe fix came out....
I was a MM when the MM fix came out.....

Time to find something else to do Ritulalist here I come!!

I sympathize with you guys about the cap on minions...I will miss my favorite build too. Wouldn't have minded if the cap were closer to 15-20. I guess it's time for me and my necro to move on to another cool build that will most likely one day become overpowered.

Cheers guys..have fun

Troll bait notwithstanding above (Karmaniac, JimmyDean) this was a double damage nerf saccing verata sac AND limiting Minions to 10. As with a lot of things it was with the new classes (Ri/N bombing) and new missions (ridiculous amounts of things spawning and thus corpses in Cantha) that really pointed out a tweak was needed. Overdone? A bit maybe I'd say, yeah.

But my first suggestion is to keep up a max 10, you'll just have to spend 5 more energy to do it and you'll get Verata last 10 sec on 15sec recharge, by going /ele and Glyph of Renewal. Biggest bummer there is though you can't have the Flesh Golem at the same time

Second suggestion is more with BotM and Heal Area when you can get them back to you. Third is keep a band of 3 with Flesh golem in the mix.

Even there... why not allow at least 5 minions for a 10-15 sec Verata recharge at least? Dont even want instant, I'd rather it wait until it's worthwhile again. If anything some of these counter responses are more childish than some of the nerf cries - like they've done before instead of being gentle they went in with a hammer.

I think it'll still be viable, there are a use for other corpse spells now, and more MMs might even be useful in a group which isnt a bad thing. That said the 10 limit and hitting a key skill of it so hard in the nads certainly shook up the class. Most obviously it makes quality >> quantity with those numbers, minions look particularly out of place w/o minion bombing.

I don't know if 4 off the bat and 1 for each point in DM would have been so bad (20 limit) but so it goes. Again I'm guessing it's more about the new Ritualist skills mixed in and some of the dynamics of the new missions, pve and pvp with all those NPCs.

edit - kdhoney44 yeah first char Ele, second Nec, so I imagine next the Warr goes down lol
but with that said my Ele still rocks the house and my Nec will too, if I could use GoR with Flesh Golem would be better tho :b heh

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So, i suppose a troll is anyone that doesnt agree with you, Ckaz? Either way, from my own experiences, MM is still very viable even without the giant-40-minion-steamroller-army-of-death-that-clears-missions-in-seconds. A few fiends add quite a bit of DPS to the group, and they are very easy to keep alive with just botm now.

What if they had made summon degen dependant upon summon count? So with just 1 summon around you'd see almost no degen on that summon. When you get to say 10 summons, the degen on all summons would be what is pre update. Going to 20 summons would double (for instance) degen on all summons.

and of course revert VS to pre update status.

IF they're already counting summons, and they want to reduce the typical army... this would work. Or would the MM horde decry the "unfunness" of having to optimize summoning instead of just being able to spam between summon skills and VS/BOTM/HA?

I do agree that the dual change to VS and limiting summon count was a large reaction. I do not agree that somehow the game has become less fun for MMs... unless fun = easy.

I'd rather they increase either hte number of minions or increase the level of them. 30 Fiends at lvl18/19 could form a nice wall and make for a decent DPS but in high level areas got annihilated in about 2 hits. I'm simply not gonna waste my elite slot for the Golem unless i can get more than 1. How can you call it an elite when your limited to 1?

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