An open letter on the Minion Master changes

Well, I don't know about anyone else, but I morned the death of the mass minion armies of doom, and moved on. I have, however, taken a few of those new Death Magic skills, and working them into my new MM build. I dumped Verata's Sac. and I'm not lookin back!

Heck, it's actually a little more fun, now. The old MM was actually boring. So boring, in fact, that I had to switch up skills constantly, even purposely gimping myself to have a little fun. I now welcome the new MM with open arms!

"Come to me, my pretties!" *cackle*

Heres a great idea for a net, since vamp horrors do vampiric attacks, make their attacks act like vampiric spells and do a certain amount of dmg (make it like 15 or 20 even, hell i wouldnt mind 30 or 40 but that may be asking too much), just a suggestion, it makes sense to me anyways.. also i just got flesh golum on my necro anyways, and ill tell you, it rocks. it has a low energy cost, if degen on it gets to bad you can just let it die and recast it, ok on normal mobs mayb not so much but i rushed a friend through The Great North Wall (first mission) and it was hitting insanely hard (of coarse, it was higher then normal b/c my +1 (20%) had kicked in in top of 16 death) but still.. theres nothing like watching a pet 1 hit mobs for -243 and the like, and im dead serious i saw it hit that hard. I massacured every single charr at the end, the vamp horrors mobbed them and the Flesh Golum was just to much for em, cas it tended to 1 or 2 hit them. I miss my AoL (very nice for BoTM) but i have to say, i do appreciate them adding a good death elite. Id really like it if they maby raised cap to 15 minions, but its just not going to happen once A Net nerfs somthign, they dont un nerf it no matter how much we deserve it, look at Ele its been destroyed pve wise, but a net hasnt fixed them, or the smite monk... no more, so lets start looking up at the posibilities of future MMing, and unite as one, MMs United ~!

well heres another post, ive noticed how spammable BoTM is now, try this to keep minions alive instead of using Veratas at all, you just BoTM< Heal Area > BoTM, whenever they are near you, also i cant remember if this is new cas i sued to kind of neglect this great skill as a MM, but now when you cast BoTM they do not need to be near you and ~~heres the brilliant part~~ it heals other MMs minions without costing you, i recently did a canthan mission with 3 mms (includign mysel) and we kept up 30 minions majority of time, including 3 flesh golums, some bone fiends and some vamp horrors. We were constantly healign cas we had 2 good monks who would heal sac dmg when needed, and we coudl sac every 2 seconds each (wtih 3 mms this = 122 heal every .75 seconds = overpowereing healign power vs mobs on minions), this is very cool and i hope A Net doesnt call it a gltich and fix it, specially since you dotn sac additional health when you heal their minions

The amount of skill, and the hours upon hours of practice it takes to really work the system doesn't excuse the fact that Minion Mastery was wickedly overpowered in the hands of a talented player.

So it got a slap, and it was for the good of the game. Yes it was! It's just a bitter pill to swallow when Grenth pulls us back from 'grossly overpowered' to just 'mildly overpowered' We're still gods

The new system is interesting - there's some real scope for minion masters co-operating to pool their minion quotas and share the healing burden. There's good stuff in the new system, I know it

We're fiiiiiiiiiiiiine!

this is my two cents on the nerf:

I'm not terribly upset about the number of minions. with some of the new ones and the oldest minion being replaced with the newest one it's not too extreme (my army was never terribly huge like 80). Also with the golem it could still be ok to only have ten. What I do express rage about is veratas sacrifice. To put it into perspective it would be would be like:

blessed signet taking twice as long to recharge (or maybe a constant Rust like state on it)- the death of bonders

Stances taking time to cast - you'd hear endless bitching from the tanks who are saying "so what" to minion masters

making the cast time twice as longe for VS was unbearable for me as a MM. When I found out that the nerf took place (right after i got my MM armor - go figure) I was dumbfounded that AreaNet, who claims to have "balance" in the game, did this. I see NO balance in the extreme nerfing of this spell. I'll play curses from now on and have a really bad taste in my mouth right now about the whole thing - I almost killed my neccro in disgust and would have done so had i not spent so much loving time in making her. You will see a ton or people just dropping MM's because in my book they are complete RUBBISH now.

I don't know what their reasoning behind this was - it does go against being a neccro. Most people are simply not going to play them - it's not rewarding and not fun. I'm glad guildies got my Bortak's items for me. I'd NEVER buy em now. They're plummeting in price too. Hmmmm...........

To hell with the golems and vamipric horrors. Or bettter yet make a nerf ONLY when you control a golem if they think they're so damn powerful - that would be more "balanced".

I hope enough people will just not play MM's sending a clear message to Arena Net to carefully re-evaluate this nerf.

I love the new MM. It's fun, powerful, diverse, and a completly different experience than the old 'hur, how many can i make hurrr' system. now you can putrid explode stuff, be a sort of MM battery for the other necros in your group (2 minions die, instant E from SR), and so much more.

Fantastic change, ANet. You've given new life to my old boring MM.

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i know what you mean even i that just started to use the Necro and i love playing as a MM but the limit they addes is absurd only havin 10 mm is so stuped i thought it was MM not MMlimit.

Hey guys, it seems you have not read the description of the vamp minnion skill... it´s recharge time is 30 SECONDS, besides being really expensive and not healing THAT much (until now, on my experiments)..an Army of 10 vamp horrors, while very interesting, is not an easy task to create/mantain..

IMHO, now the way is the minnion bomber.. tons of AoE dmg (+poison!) from cheap dual bone minnions (imagine hitting a group of 12enemies with 10 of those little nukes packed and ready to blow them all at once ). With BotM and taste of death you can control theyre lives-and deaths!, so you can pack the dmg in a spike-like mode..

only have some trouble in targeting the minnions to cast DN, one at a time, with the cursor.. if anyone can help me on that, i´d be VERY gratefull!

Btw: Flesh golems are SO COOL! wait until a lvl28 piece of meat with an axe as a hand tanks and deals 40-50 dmg each hit at the same time, while providing a shield for attacks directed to you (dark bond) and an eterna fountain of health (taste of death), and whose death is most of the time associated with fireworks (death nova) followed by ANOTHER lvl 26-28 tank in the middle of the enemy aggro!

(if any of the actual MMs could contact me, se we can share experiences.. )

And @ warriors: you´ll feel the nerf bat too... and i think we won´t have to wait a lot for that...

i personally love the change to mm, with the limit to minions i spend less time and energy trying to heal my babies especially with how badass blood of the master is now. this leaves me with plenty of extra energy so i use it to play support, heres the mm build i use

Bone Fiend (my minion of choice)
Blood of the Master (awesome spammable heal for my pets)
Putrid Explosion (alot of leftover corpses, this is a great use for em)
Infuse Condition (combined with Martyr conditions disappear with no ill effects to you)
Heal Area (self Heal and a little somethign extra for nay nearby pets)
Heal Party (Soul Reaping leaves me with plenty of energy to throw this around)
Martyr (take care of all conditions for your party great support skill)
Res of choice

16 death 9 soul 11 heal sup soul and death, the lower health total helps with the sac cost of botm, steamrolled vizunah square with this setup, try it out you may like it

Personnally, I did Vizunah square with 16 Death, 9 Soulreaping, 11 Blood.. wells are always welcome and I don't like to let unused corpses behind me

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Lol... another open letter. I remember these when the AI was updated (dubbed "AoE nerf" by many, even though the skills actually weren't touched).

ArenaNet made a balance change. Live with it.

the 25% cost is a non issue as long as wou dont sac yourself to death, once i have 10 minions up im rarely a target so being able to fire off a couple botms in a row is quite handy to keep em up and killing, this health loss is almsot completely negated by heal area

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/sign FIX THIS SHYT

if limiting them was bad enough, they arent even useful in PvP to begin with, thy are destroyed by high lvl mobs in cantha, they are practically useless now...

it woudnt be so bad if they removed the constant degen from minions since they are limited now...spamming and wasting crap loads of energy just for a miion to get 3/4 of its health removed with the damned explosion thte afflicted have.

This is just stupid, 10 minions max (i havent gotten flesh golem yet so i do not know if this counts as a normal minion), degen on them as well, high energy cost, and a useless healing skill that lasts 10 seconds for a 60 second recharge...these people must be out of their fuking minds

1.) Removing Degeneration: This will lower the amount of basic Minion Bombers (basic meaning the noobie MMs that don't use taste of death), this will also help in the PvE aspect for minions, since they are now limited to a specific amount, they should not need such strain to maintain such a smally minion army.

2.) Removing Useless Skills: Namely Verata's Sacrafice, the recent nerf has made this skill useless and pathetic, a 10 second heal for a 60 second recharge doesnt go very good in the heat of battle, remove or fix would suffice.

3.) Classification of Minions: This is just a suggestion but perhaps minions can be classified in their own way and that can be added to the minion max count, i.e Flesh Golem would not count as a "basic" minion and would be allowed to have its own section for max count....with 16 death, you can have 10 minions, so that would be changed to 10 basic minions as well as lets say able to have a max of 2 advanced minions (each advanced minion is limited to 1 of its own kind...read next suggestion)

4.) New Advanced Minions: Adding skill using or magic damage dealing minions as well as the basic "run and attack" minions.

5.) Minion Healing Skills: there is only one really decent minion healing skill, and it is now the most spammed one, adding new minion healing skills wouldnt be necessary if the degeneration was removed mind you.

Certaain things can be fixed easy just be reverting a few settings, but if we are going to limit minions...why make them still die on the way from one mob to the next? or the fact they get slughtered in the middle of battle....too many stupid "fixes" were a applied to a NOT broken build.

Carinae I had not taken the time to read the other posts but I read yours to the extent. It was beautifully well written and I find no fault in it. Being an MM my self and a Nuker both nerfed now I am saddened at this. GW has taken an axe to both my character types.. And I still see warriors running places like the tombs. I have attempted to adapt though and it has worked out well in a structured group I just need to cap Flesh Golem to make my build complete. It relies on some of the new damage dealing skills in Factions and the FLesh Golem.
I have Full Death and 12 Soul reap with a major rune.
I use:
Deathly Swarm
Deathly Chill
Bitter Chill
BoTM
Vamp Horr
Fiend or Horr(depending on how I feel)
Animate FLesh Golem(I havent gotten this yet)
either res or VS
I use BC on the target then I use DC then DS I rinse and repeat until the foe is dead then I animate a flesh golem and keep him up and then I use the same damage tactics against my next enemies until I build momentum.I used this in the Vizunah Square mission without the golem and it worked wonderfully well. I call theis build the Damage Master. Rising Bile may also be a useful skill. I used to be able to carry a complete group of noobs through THK with the old MM I hope that even though now I can't I can help revive our strength LONG LIVE THE MASTERS OF THE DEAD!.....I wish I could revive the nuker....

I've basically stopped playing necro due to this. Its not a protest. Its good old fashioned boredom. Bomber was never a build I wanted to play, and having it shoved down my throat...

As for Golem, I still saying nerfing a build to make an Elite useful is overkill and un-balanced. 10 minions is unbalanced. It's painfully weak now, and no sign that Anet will even care.

I'd support a protest to this...I'd support several. a sitdown in HoH of every necro in the game might tell them that what they did was wrong. Sitdowns in THK are a waste of time. Lagging out PvP servers? That would get some attention.

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so i guess nobody really noticed how badly a mm could be abused

12 bone fiends+16curses mark of pain+massive monster aggro=GG

write a script for minion factory+go afk 10 min=enough minions to clear uw

but thats just pve, in pvp i actually find it hilarious to play a mm or come up against one, i think anet had reason to nerf it pretty hard, but i think they went about it the wrong way because they killed one of the funniest things in pvp
i've lost in halls to a mf because nobody noticed they were making minions for a full 8 min and they came in right after 2 min to completely own both teams
they should've jus done a 50 minion cap or something because only being able to keep a dozen minions at a decently high skill level is just too big of a nerf

I'm not going to argu against your statements, cause I were never into MM. The fact is that Ele nukers had a big nerf back in 2005. It was kinda obvious it was time for MM's too in future and here it was. The nuker still lives with different builds even though they arent as effective as before. The same goes for MM's. New strategy, new builds and more skill.

Hmmm, so im wasting my time making my necro MM arnt i....

Damit i wish i would have known about this update but i didnt...

Wow.....this is EXTREMLY dissapointing.

~Captain CCC

You're not wasting your time. MMs are still viable characters. They just aren't the uber area clearing monsters they used to be.

I like it, any party i have been in with a MM still works and now you can have 2 MM in a party and poof double the minions. The lower minion count allows other players to use a corpse exploit once in a while. 2 cents.

i haven't red thisforum s i duno if this have been up, an save for the MM:S can be the new factions elite skil healing burst

I really don't see what the problem is. Minions have been among my favourite spells since beta. They were too strong in some situations and that's a fact. What some people have said here is testament to that.

When I first heard about the changes and when I first tried playing my MM, I thought it was atrocious. What made me realise that the changes were warranted is that I noticed when I had even just a few minions up, I fully expected to completely steamroll in PvE. With 10 minions, you can still do that, just not to the same extent. I know I can still solo where I used to with my MM.

As people have said before, this isn't a nerf - They're addressing a balance issue. I know it hurts, but MM is still viable and it's still strong. Just adapt.

Rion nailed it on the head...the good Mm will survive this and adapt...work at your profession, makes changes, suck it up and move on. Come on ppl the MM is not done...in fact its far from it.

A MM now and forever,
Scourage of Death

Lmao. MM wasnt nerfed. Flesh golem hits harder then a wammo on steroids. So what if you can only summon 10 minions. Keep summoning them and reap in soul reaping for never ending energy and a net costs of 12 energy per summon with 13 in soul reaping. Spam blood of the master, dont even put veratas sacrifice on your bar. WTF is so hard?

I cleared ALL of luxon and kurz territory with 4 henchies , my necro with minions. Thats right a 5 man team with henchies. I maybe had 3 party wipes the entire exploration of both territories combined.

You ppl that are complaining are a bunch of cry babies. GW's is constantly evolving. adapt or die, it's that simple.

Necro is still the most powerful class in the game learn to play one instead of crying constantly for anet to do this and that.

It seems to me that this last update was unplanned, and put on the spot . Take this in...

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being a MM myself, it does suck, big time. but now i use my 10 minions + spam putrid and i can still do a shitload of damage. or i minion bomb. its all good, im playing around with different ideas and hopefully will come across somethign that works real well.

it sucks i cant have my 60 minions or 80+ (minion factory), but what can ya do? Smiters got RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GOed (have a monk), AoE got RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GOed (had an ele), now MM. just how it is sometimes...SS i play quite frequently now, but i still love minions, even if there are only 10.

I agree that perhaps MM was a bit over powered in the days before, but the nerf did completely go over board. Not only was individual MM fun to play but Minion factory was a fun build (both in pve and pvp although in pvp it usually loses terriblely to EoE)

Just the other day, I had a friend who just got GW and decided to copy me when I started and focus on a necro with the intent on being a MM. I just don't know what to tell him other than that MM is now just not as good.

um i dont see whats so the problem with the nerf
like kcp said pve is still almost just as easy with 10 minions
i never feel that i need more minions and since corpses drop like every 2 second in factions i can see y they limited the minions to 10 to prevent u from finishing everymission in like 10 minutes

Glad to see ANET really thought out what they were doing. They nerf the MM's then give Monks Air of Enchantment. Now GW is basically back where it was 10 months ago in the TOMBS. Every other team is SMITE. Except now they can smite forever with a 16 in smiting instead of 11 or 12 like when an E/Mo did it with Ether Renewal. Instead of relying on a ER to rebuild your energy every 5 seconds you just cast Air for free so that you 5 pointer cost nothing.

I am just so glad to see that they nerfed MM's which were really only used in PVE and replaced them with Zealots Fire Monks that will overpower PVE and PVP.

Brilliant work!

You can, at least, maintain 10 minions now. It's not too hard. Basically, what you do is run the build like the old school dual orders used to do: Low hp, healing breeze, mabye blood renewal for good measure, and aura of the lich if you want. With that, you can easily handle a 25% sacrifice every three seconds, and 120 hp every three seconds is 40 health per second, or twice the max degeneration possible. The best thing is, with just verata's sac, eventually they started to degen through that. With BotM spam, they're getting the equivalent of +10 health regen even if they have maxed out their degen after 3 minutes or so, so you might even be able to hold onto your minions for LONGER than before. Also, vampiric horrors help a lot with the health costs of BotM spamming.

Controlling 9 Minions and a Flesh Golem is also fun when u ask me ^^
1 last question where do i get Animate Flesh Golem {E} ? :P

There's a petition to unnerf MM's at GWOnline too that has reached epic proportions - 700+ posts...

Hopefully ANet will do something about this...

A necromancer with 10 minions is still one of the most powerful single characters in PvE. I think it's pathetic that people are so caught up on 'OMG I can't singlehandedly demolish all of PvE with 50 minions anymore!' to see that.

The buff to Blood of the Master was outstanding, it's a great maintenence spell now. The only complaint I have about the changes is Verata's Sacrifice, that skill was nerfed into uselessness. Granted it was unfair levels of good before, but it's basically never worth running anymore.

Peace,
-CxE