The Power of Minions (some feedback)

Thanks everyone for the answers.
I have some suggestions about how to handle the situation and just want to know Community's opinion and hopefully Developers' opinion about that.

1. Make minion summon reserve mana (like auras do) and/or penalize summoner's attack and spell damage. This wold force player to choose the optimal balance between summons and personal firepower (now summoners can excel at both).
2. Add some defensive components to melee attack skills.
3. Increase Immortal Call duration.
4. Buff chaos resist component of Elemental Adaptation passive skill (maybe to 20%-30%, 5% is just too low).
5. Add some defensive skills that require shield (like Tempest Shield).

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AAlex12 wrote:

2. Melee champions without Chaos Innoculation have really serious troubles vs chaos damaging monsters on lategame ("bouns") maps. Level 63 Duelist with 1,2k HP, 1,5k dps, 6% lifesteal and 2 healing flasks dies in 2 seconds to 1 (sic!) poisonous spider at lvl 61 map.

Are you kidding me? 1,2k hp at lvl 63? I usually have 1,2k by the end of Cruel. You die in 2 sec because you got terrible defense, not because Chaos damage is imbalanced. Shit, how do you even beat Vaal with that? Melee builds need 3k+ hp with decent hp regen to safely do lategame content.

Minions are a very powerful defensive asset. Sprinkling some minions into any caster build - or any build that can afford to pick up a couple of minion passives - provides a huge benefit for only one skill slot. Decoy totem has a similar effect.

Actually tanking the majority of hits yourself generally requires some pretty awesome gear and/or a carefully thought out build/plan. Most players instead avoid tanking by instead disabling enemies (ice crit freezing, stun lock, temporal chains, blind), or having something else take most of the hits (minions, totems, teaming with a tank).

That's not to say that tanking is impossible, but using summons is less risky and far less gear dependant.

A melee character is not automatically a tank in this game. In many other games melee classes automatically start with significantly higher HP, and exclusive use of better defensive gear. This is not the case in PoE, and you can build a melee glass cannon if you want.
With the complexity of PoE's various systems, building a tanky melee character isn't as straightforward as a new player might imagine, and can require a fair amount of game knowledge.

Of course there's nothing stopping anyone from having great defensive gear and minions/totems.
If GGG wants pure summoners to remain viable, and also wants to lower the disparity between having minions/totems and not having minions/totems, I believe the only way to do that is to make summons more gear dependent, especially with regards to their defensive stats.


I agree with others that have said minions are weak early in the game. Decoy totem is almost worthless throughout normal difficulty, dying in one or two hits, but becomes really powerful later on in the game, able to tank huge packs usually at least long enough for you to fire off a couple of attacks and summon another one.

100% agreed with Malice. Hope GGG would hear us and implement some balance tweaks into v.0.9.13
Again, thanks for your opinions.

i think ggg should weaken the minion nodes in the passive skill tree as following:

instead of "+10% minion life" --> "+7% minion life"
instead of "+15% minion dmg" --> "+11% minion dmg"

weaker minions = weaker summoner

I'm very happy with the Minion system this game employs, it's probably the best minion system I've ever come across.

The Passive skill tree is vast enough that the extent to which the minions are 'over-powered' is completely related to the extent of effort you yourself put into making them that way.

By only choosing one minion passive you have a couple of Zombies or Skeletons available to you. This would be a 'helper' level support, supporting almost any other build.

This can be extended piece by piece, passive skill by passive skill, to the point where minions are indeed very powerful and the only spell a character requires - no different to maxing out any other skill.

My target for end-game is 8 Zombies, 11 Skeletons and 2 Spectres with the exploding minions skill. Yes, I can, if I want, have more minions than the bad guys, but I have seen similar effects resulting from maxed out area of effect skills. It all goes the same way, all the monsters have to die.

What makes minions 'appear' over powered is that the character doesn't have to physically engage the enemy. This is a false assumption, the player still has to manage Mana, keep on top of undead resurrecting and often still has to have some kind of weapon as back-up should they ever find themselves caught short.

If a 'nerf' does come it seems obvious to me that the way to go would be to separate the Zombies from the Skeletons on the skill tree, similar to how the Spectres are separate. I go through most of the game with just Zombies, but when I add both the Spectres and hordes of Skeletons then it can appear 'too easy'. But then having a screen full of minions, your own personal army, is extremely fun. Surely the fun aspect is the most important aspect and Necromancers don't threaten PVP boasting rights as Zombies and Spectres don't play a part in PVP.

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cGramma wrote:

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AAlex12 wrote:

2. Melee champions without Chaos Innoculation have really serious troubles vs chaos damaging monsters on lategame ("bouns") maps. Level 63 Duelist with 1,2k HP, 1,5k dps, 6% lifesteal and 2 healing flasks dies in 2 seconds to 1 (sic!) poisonous spider at lvl 61 map.

Are you kidding me? 1,2k hp at lvl 63? I usually have 1,2k by the end of Cruel. You die in 2 sec because you got terrible defense, not because Chaos damage is imbalanced. Shit, how do you even beat Vaal with that? Melee builds need 3k+ hp with decent hp regen to safely do lategame content.

I'll second this, melee, while not perfect, are stronger than that if built with some defenses.

Although they do get pigeon-holed into defense more-so than ranged.