Yriel's minions still need a buff

This chest I was excited to try when it first came out but was unhappy that the minions "bestial ursa" in this case have almost no life.

Now i dont expect the minions to do a great deal of damage , but "physical damage to attacks while you have a bestial minion" is hard to maintain when they die every 2 seconds.

In act 10 non map content these minions die much faster than a non max level golem.

I sort of hoped at some point there would be a bug fix to these minions to make them not die instantly but they still seem to be paper.

I dont think even with minion health flask spamming i could keep this minion alive in a yellow tier map.

Could these minions be modified so they either:

a) have more life and some life regen

b) make bestial X (ursa in this case) a low reservation aura, if the reservation was low but i could keep the minions up that would be fine

I was going to suggest making them like the harbinger minions

But harbinger minions dont do damage, so these minions may need to be modified because i guess minions that do damage but cant die could be bad

All i ask is GGG tests these minions , it honestly feels more like a bug to me how fast they die and makes both the minion and the physical damage dead stats

TL:DR version: Bestial minions actually have better life than all golems except Stone Golem and that needs to be roughly 20/20. If the beasts are dying sooner than golems and the character doesn't have anything specific to boost golems then there are some defensive discrepancies we don't know about.


According to PoB, the Bestial Ursa has 17,618 health without any supports or minion health nodes. Unfortunately, the actual skill shown at https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Summon_Bestial_Ursa says it has a baseline 30% increased health which means its actual base health is 13,553 assuming a round down, and this can be seen by allocating a 10% increased minion health node and only getting 7.7% extra health on it or 1,355.0 according to PoB.

And this is true for all Bestial minions it seems. So they all have a baseline 13,553 life increased by 30% directly through the skill to end up at 17,618 life.

Now I add in all level 20 golem skills to compare. All of them say they have 68% increased minion life at level 20, so I'll give what PoB tells me first then reverse the 1.68 modifier:

Chaos: 14,571 /1.68 = 8673
Flame: 11,384 /1.68 = 6776
Lightning: 11384 /1.68 = 6776
Ice: 12294 /1.68 = 7317
Stone: 15936 /1.68 = 9485

Keep in mind these are all without any quality. 20 quality itself adds in 20% increased life for a total of 88% at level 20 gems. 20/20 golem gems therefore have these life stats:

Chaos: 16305
Flame: 12739
Lightning: 12739
Ice: 13758
Stone: 17834

So at 20/20 the only golems that come close to a Bestial minion's life total are Chaos (under) and Stone (barely over). Due to the Bestial minions having a better baseline life with lower % increased minion life on the skill itself, % increased minion life will give a bigger bonus to the Bestial minions and thus mean they will almost always have better life than golems.

Also, every golem except Stone Golem has some energy shield, but I'm not finding any stats on the wiki or in PoB to show this despite knowing it shows up in game. This is ignoring Brinerot Mark which grants ES to the socketed golem.

If the Bestial minions are dying much faster than golems are then there are some major defensive things going on for golems that the Bestial minions aren't getting. ES might be a part of this but for that to matter the minions would have to be taking comparatively small amounts of damage spread out enough for ES recharge to take effect and bring them back to full. I have my doubts ES is the defensive thing going on here especially if you're saying they die every 2 seconds. Even if that's hyperbole (and I expect it is), I would not expect ES to be the thing going on here because the situations where they take small amounts of spaced out damage for ES to work aren't going to be long-term lethal usually.

Which build did you run where the Bestial minions were dying much more compared to golems? Any Primordial items will generally be in favor of golems while doing nothing for the beasts, and the Elementalist node Liege of The Primordial makes the elemental golems immune to elemental damage so that situation needs to be nixed.

If everything from the character itself is taken out then it's a discrepancy between the Beast defenses (or even AI) compared to golems. I'm not able to find what the baseline resistances or armor/physical mitigation are for either golems or beasts so that might be a factor. Raise Zombie's page shows those have baseline 40% elemental resistance and 20% chaos resistance, as do Summon Skeleton, Animate Guardian, Animate Weapon, and Summon Raging Spirit, so it might be an issue of the wiki not being updated with those stats and/or GGG has not commented on whether all character summoned minions have baseline resists.

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Jackalope_Gaming wrote:

TL:DR version: Bestial minions actually have better life than all golems except Stone Golem and that needs to be roughly 20/20. If the beasts are dying sooner than golems and the character doesn't have anything specific to boost golems then there are some defensive discrepancies we don't know about.

Thanks for the quality post

the build was a generic melee build , molten strike , i was mostly just testing it see if the minion had been improved since first release.

Im not sure what it is , ive actually seen the reported life the minion is supposed to have. When the chest first came out i actually tried to see if i could even get it to survive map tier content with minion support gems in the chest with no luck.

I dont really do minion builds, my main focus is getting that physical damage added while you have a minion.

I have only tested with this one chest , i honestly should test with all 3 but the minion seems to pull threat and get focused more than a golem.

Its hard to say without me doing more testing , all i know is if you try and summon the minion and keep it up during general mapping its not going to stay alive.

I dont think the chest was designed as a minion focused unique (though the summons do look cool and have really nice animations), i dont think its even possible to buff that minion up enough to have it be good for a minion focused build.

Im pretty confident if it does have double the life of a 20/20 golem it has a lot less defences. I always assumed golems have no baked in resists \ phys reduction but maybe they do.

I guess i should do my part and try and test it a bit better in arena to confirm how much life \ defence they have . Ill see if i can get at least one of the other chests to see if all of them have the same issue

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colwyn wrote:

Im pretty confident if it does have double the life of a 20/20 golem it has a lot less defences. I always assumed golems have no baked in resists \ phys reduction but maybe they do.

I guess i should do my part and try and test it a bit better in arena to confirm how much life \ defence they have . Ill see if i can get at least one of the other chests to see if all of them have the same issue

All character-summonable golems have baseline 40 elemental resistance and 20 chaos resistance. One would hope that applies to all minions that aren't invulnerable, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if some got missed.

I'm unsure of how much armor or physical mitigation, if any, that character minions have baseline. Supposedly the amount enemies have default maxes out at something like 930 according to this post but the linked video is no longer available. Even if minions get that 930 armor though, that small amount is incredibly negligible and would mitigate at most 92 damage which happens with a hit of roughly 8,556. The best case scenario for 930 armor mitigating 90% of a hit is if the hit was just 10 damage or less.

Where you an elementalist with the first golem nodes by any change? It makes them immune to elemental damage which adds a lot of tankiness.

As for personal experience, they are decently tanky if you don't need the 6 link in your chest and got some spare gem slots. I used it in some elementalist bow build, and had my golems with minnion life and minion resistances in my chest. Had a couple % minion life regen on the tree, and he would stay alive recently well in general mapping.

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Tortunga wrote:

Where you an elementalist with the first golem nodes by any change? It makes them immune to elemental damage which adds a lot of tankiness.

As for personal experience, they are decently tanky if you don't need the 6 link in your chest and got some spare gem slots. I used it in some elementalist bow build, and had my golems with minnion life and minion resistances in my chest. Had a couple % minion life regen on the tree, and he would stay alive recently well in general mapping.

it was a marauder melee character trying to use the physical damage on the chest. i was mostly just testing , again i dont really think its primarily a minion build chest so needing to use part of the six link just to keep the minion alive seems a bit unrealistic.

Id say the chests suit ranged and melee attack builds the best who dont have any real access to something that would help keep the minion alive

The best way to keep many minions alive is to take a %life regen node for them. Sadly the one that used to be 2 points away from Retribution is now best gotten from the Purity of Flesh wheel so it's harder to get.

One of the better suggestions I've seen for this issue is giving %life regen on the Minion Life support as quality instead of its current .75% increased life per quality. If it was .1% per quality then at full 20 it goes to 2% which is plenty. Hell, it could be .05% per quality and thus 1% at max and it'd still be okay.