Minions: Level of Health Degen

Hi,

What level of health degeneration do minions have?

Can Verata's Sacrafice be used to keep them alive? well of power? Are there any other ways to keep them alive with nec skills other than Blood of the master?

Can you be a minion master as an ele/nec or do you need necro runes? Do you have to use major / sup runes to have effective minions?

Thank you so much in advance for you advice / help.

Isaac Ixbane

This was tested by Makkert a while back.

Minions have a cumulative 1 pip of degen per 20 seconds. That is, a minion starts degenerating at an accelerating rate.

Nothing will keep them alive forever, and a minion necro hates folks that feel like stopping to chat constantly.

Blood of the master and Verata's Sacrifice together do a decent job of keeping the minions standing.

An E/N will not have the energy supply to truly run a minion build.

For true minion goodness run a mission with a death necro (16 death, 15 soul reaping) using a variety of minions, but have a partner doing Soul reaping/Death/Curses for support on your minions. With 2 necros you can get a permanent +10 pips of regen essentially, and add spot healing to the mix, allowing your army to get huge - each one should last at least close to 5 minutes or so, a bit more with some heals, but 6 minutes tops let's say, so if you can keep the killing moving you can have however many enemies you can kill in ~5 minutes on your side.

I witnessed a N/Mo Minion Master using Heal Area to keep his minions charged up. Give it a try!

Dwig

With Death at 16 you will have level 18 minions and at the end game level 20-28 monsters are normal, so yes maxing Death via runes and head scar is highly desireable. Ele/necro would have level 14 minions and would not be nearly as effective.

Another view of minions is as "death bombs" (nova) and if that is your goal then max level is not as important.

Use both Blood of the Master and Veratas to maintain them between battles. Heal Area is another option and also works as a self-heal.

You can use Wells to heal minions, but you have to waste a corpse on the Well. An advantage is the Well covers a much much larger area than Heal Area or BotM

Yup. also heal area in conjunction with the well can help. But mentioned above, heal area becomes ineffective as the continual acceleration of degeneration <I know, I sound like Al Sharpton> will be too great to keep using heal area on. You have to get along with the fact most of your minions will die anyways, just rez new ones ^_^

--The Shim

Hi

N/mo and heal area is nice because verata's and blood of the master, both sacrifice life, and i think all minion masters use offering of blood as well, so the heal area is helpful to the monks so they dont have to keep healing you.

Never used OoB when minioning, don't need to.

Less important to have high death magic, but arguably even more important to be a primary necro, because of soul reaping from each minion death.

Agreed with all above for the most part - E/N could keep up with energy to be a minion runner but not a minion master because he/she would never get level 18 minions.

Veratas does noticably regen the health but as already mentioned there is a severe degen after a time and it does get hard to overcome. Having two Necs - 1 minions 1minion support/Curses......can't get any better than that IMO.