Minion Builds Need a Nerf

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Orbaal wrote:

I also understand, that this rant isnt about summoners but basically all builds that are:
- scaling gem lvl
- eliminate most map mods
- dont need specific gear other than getting basics covered to survive
I totally get that, but thats miners, trappers, totems and most chaos dmg based builds as well. They all have these perks and they all do fly through t15s on a budget.

all these builds share one thing in common: are very very squishy on a budget. summoners arent (excluding faux summoners like DomBlow etc, i listed them 2 pages earlier). like seriously - these builds can be shaped to do one thing well but will fail everything else (3k HP miners for bursting bosses etc stuff) UNLESS you sprinkle them with exalts and get proper defences.
summoners? it takes special effort to die playing one, after years of playing, leveling and enjoying melee builds ive played several summoners and that was shocking. i couldnt die! plays that killed melee characters with VMS etc were perfectly safe. and i dont sprinkle ex on my builds..


my issue is with that aspect. you are right plenty of builds 'fly trough t15+' - but most of them require at least DECENT investment to not die from time to time. summoners? for a small decrease of clear speed (if any, you can play reckless when you know you are not in danger) you get incredible survivability that no other archetype can get on a ZERO/low/mid budget.

miners? amazing burst, acceptable (albeit very taxing) clear yet when you try to keep the detonation sequence going you are stationary for long enough to something bad happen.

summoners? you get your pets that never die (or die so rarely you can safely move them to second skill-bar), you are never in face of danger and you get enough damage. for nothing.

but, hasn't that always been the trade off?

Summoners are slower, relatively speaking but safer.
A down side and an up side.

Plus, the never die aspect of summoners is only applicable if you are deliberately hiding behind said minions .. and therefore are slowing down to wait for them/ convocation.

The only real exception to this are the influence sentry specters. And those happen to be the main minion that happens to benefit the most from the recent universal powercreep.

they are the builds using convoking wands , 8 link helmets and tons of cluster jewels


Otherwise i can say with confidence that the difference in clear is often not subtle

hell even my budget lightning trap build i had in legion cleared twice as fast as my 50 exa summoner i play around with in standard.

and that thing was basically a rare 6l and some random wands

the difference was justifiable BEFORE minion AI has been fixed. minions were very strong since 1.0 but their AI was terrible - balancing that power out.

fixing minion behaviour was the only 'buff' this entire archetype needed. but GGG 'doubled it' and then 'doubled it again'. you can have more than one minion type yet you spend passives once, there is no extra cost if you want to include zombies with spectres, golems, AG etc. yet the scaling seems to be based on 'single minion use'

on a zombie or skeleton build you can get one utility spectre and 2 fire carpets (my favs, but there are far stonger picks) and suddenly that clear is not that bad. in fact it isnt even remotly bad with just explo-zombies, mage-skeletons (great fun) - the limiting factor is your movement speed and how much loot you decide to pick.

it slows down in stuff like deli - when mobs spawning behind you f.. the minions' AI. but any normal map? compared to normal builds? summoners are just fine (normal aka dont compare that to explochestBadgeOfBrotherhood etc one trick pony build)

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sidtherat wrote:

my issue is with that aspect. you are right plenty of builds 'fly trough t15+' - but most of them require at least DECENT investment to not die from time to time. summoners? for a small decrease of clear speed (if any, you can play reckless when you know you are not in danger) you get incredible survivability that no other archetype can get on a ZERO/low/mid budget.

Phase acro trappers and chaos dot builds would have a word with you.
They are about as safe to play, easy to gear and faster.


That said:
All builds require investment to do the real endgame and thats not t15s or t16s anymore. When is the last time you struggled to sustain those? Or the last time you were happy your build was able to take on a t16 boss successfully?
Sustaining T16s is a given at this point.
Clearing T16s easily is a given, if you want to tackle anything beyond t16 and lets be honest, thats what most players want to do. Half jokingly said: the rest is just the grind to get there ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

As you´d run t15s or t16s occasionally back in the days, you are now running your shapers, elders, auls, ubers and what have you occasionally.
Same concept but very different thresholds.

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Saltychipmunk wrote:

Yeah , if this thread was about how delirium should never have been added to core.

I would be all for it. because the amount of power creep we got from those cluster jewels, global plus skills and double influence items is astronomically greater than anything that has happened specifically to minion builds in the last 10 patches.

I mean lets just use minions as an example. We went from having no real way to scale crit.. to having a pretty easy way to get both crit multi and crit chance.

We went from chance to deal double damage being limited to an item and one passive to being able to get 10% on a notable in a cluster jewel

Remeber when aura effect stacking was supposed to be limited as to not balloon more multipliers?

now we have 150% + aura effect auras .. thanks cluster jewels.

How about impale? minions really did not have good impale options.. now they can easily get impale to 100% like a champion can...


double influence gave us the 8-9 link minion helmet. that does not need to exist

and of course +2 convoking wands is just braindead.


But again, crap like this is happening to many builds

You don't need to look far to see how powerful cluster jewels have made minions either. Ghazzy recently made a build guide showing off Redemption Sentries using mostly cluster jewels. They're expensive, but if you can afford it plus some high-budget gear like double influenced helm and shield, you can have 100m Shaper DPS. Good luck being able to afford it though unless you're good at making money and maybe running a build that isn't summoner to blitz through maps.

He also has a low-budget version that still uses a double influenced helmet and shield, no cluster jewels, but it only puts out 1/10th the DPS.

Indeed. 15million going to 157 million because of cluster jewels. I don't think we need to say much more on this.

There Needs to be a hard cap on cluster jewels by type, you should AT most be only allowed 1 of any one passive type.

If we do not do this, we end up breaking the game.

And yeah ghazzy isnt the only one doing this. If you look at the zombie build mentioned on the first page .. the 100 million dps zombie build

it is also 70% cluster jewel allocation. it was basically travel to 3 cluster nodes, fill them up, spend the rest of your passives on whatever is on the way.

And despite this.. despite only having a 100 es helmet and a 400 es chest... that build still had 11k es.

minions are fine. fuck cluster jewels

I mean fuck I have 89% chaos res. i have 15 chaos res on my gear.. the rest is jewels .. who the hell thought this was balanced?

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sidtherat wrote:

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Orbaal wrote:

I also understand, that this rant isnt about summoners but basically all builds that are:
- scaling gem lvl
- eliminate most map mods
- dont need specific gear other than getting basics covered to survive
I totally get that, but thats miners, trappers, totems and most chaos dmg based builds as well. They all have these perks and they all do fly through t15s on a budget.

all these builds share one thing in common: are very very squishy on a budget. summoners arent (excluding faux summoners like DomBlow etc, i listed them 2 pages earlier). like seriously - these builds can be shaped to do one thing well but will fail everything else (3k HP miners for bursting bosses etc stuff) UNLESS you sprinkle them with exalts and get proper defences.
summoners? it takes special effort to die playing one, after years of playing, leveling and enjoying melee builds ive played several summoners and that was shocking. i couldnt die! plays that killed melee characters with VMS etc were perfectly safe. and i dont sprinkle ex on my builds..


my issue is with that aspect. you are right plenty of builds 'fly trough t15+' - but most of them require at least DECENT investment to not die from time to time. summoners? for a small decrease of clear speed (if any, you can play reckless when you know you are not in danger) you get incredible survivability that no other archetype can get on a ZERO/low/mid budget.

miners? amazing burst, acceptable (albeit very taxing) clear yet when you try to keep the detonation sequence going you are stationary for long enough to something bad happen.

summoners? you get your pets that never die (or die so rarely you can safely move them to second skill-bar), you are never in face of danger and you get enough damage. for nothing.

Metamorph was the first time I ran a necro, and I didn't even start till it was more than half-way done. I got her to 94, and also set the record for deaths on any of my characters during league.

Performance was a big issue, as popping the metamorph usually lead to freeze frame performance and an inability to actually react. Other deaths were to abilities that spawn underneath my summoner despite being quite a distance from the metamorph.

Basically, I think you're over-exaggerating the survivability. It's the gameplay of a totem build but with damage that scales up better. Most of the things that killed my summoner wouldn't have phased a cycloner, either because stuff would die so fast they wouldn't incur major spikes or because he was constantly moving by nature.

If you're netting most of the power out of clusters, that's hardly reasonable considering how quickly they can get gutted to uselessness. Delirium may be core but it's not like you get reliable access to it.

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Orbaal wrote:

Melee sucks by comparison at the same lvl of gear. Ofc it does.
Just like bow builds will, because both do scale of their weapons not gems.
Gem lvl can be target farmed easily, good weapons not so much.
Melee (as in you actually have to touch your opponent, which already renders this point moot for about half of the melee-tag builds) has to walk into striking distance, doesnt get dmg boosts or dmg taken reductions that their counterparts cant have nor more speed or coverage or sustain or anything really to make up for it.

This is a given issue with PoEs classless system and therefore needs a much more complex approach to provide melee with meaningful boni that wont also be used by ranged builds of all sorts.
Just boosting dmg numbers like this league isnt helping melee a lot. I get that.

But how is that the fault of summoners or all gemlvl stacking builds in broader sense? They do highlight the issue and maybe amplify it in your mind, but they arent the problem.

Ill add that it's not just scaling gem level. That's gearing problem lots of players will override with currency.
The main issue is disparity of damage output while being mobile.
Mobility is the best defense mechanism in the game, "don't get hit"

Melee damage while being mobile is 0, with one exception, Cyclone. And that's why it's the most popular melee skill.

Summoners don't have this problem at all.
Also worth mentioning totems, brands, ED, Vortex, Blade Vortex, DoT archers...

Still with all that said, haven't played summoner yet since i started PoE.

Minion builds are obscenely expensive now, they have been nerfed into the ground, what are you talking about?

Just because *some* people can afford a ferrari doesn't mean Ferrari's are cheap. Minions are far out of the realm of possibilities for MOST players. They will NEVER be able to afford one that doesn't suck.

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Universalis wrote:

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Fruz wrote:

Private profiles that cannot do anything else than attack others because their knowledge of the game does not allow them to do anything else.

Thank you for confirming everything I just said by showing how you didn't get it at all.

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Saltychipmunk wrote:

My point is that there was a time, a time many people in your camp want us to go back too where they were not strong at all.

Your camp are complaining that 30 - 60k hp zombies are too tough. I know what 10k zombies feel like , i know what 20k zombies. I know one was garbage and I know the other was barely passable.

Strawman, plain and simple.

Zombies are stronger now than post buff montregul's grasp.
Adjusting them to that post buff montregul's grap power level would still make them strong, strong enough to be a "better" choice than maybe 90% of melee setups, self casting setups and bow setups.


Also nobody suggested to just lower HP zombies to 20k or 10, like wtf -___-"
Strawman after strawman ...

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Saltychipmunk wrote:

But so is everything else? you talk about how my input is irrelevant. How is yours more relevant? how is them being good in 3.2 any more or less relevant now than them not being good in 2.4 ?

You can't be f. serious, are you for real ???

Let me try to make it as simple as I can ( even though it is already bloody obvious ) :
- You said : we had so many threads of how minion builds were not shaper viable before the big minion buffs (3.8) <=> minions were weak before 3.8.
- I point out that this is a blatant, fat lie and that there were already budget builds doing comfortably shaper a year before that
- You come again with "Shaper is older than this build !!"

which is absolutely irrelevant, utter nonsense in the context.
ZOMBIE BUILDS WERE ALREADY KILLING SHAPER ON A BUDGET BEFORE 3.8, AND HAD BEEN DOING SO FOR A WHILE.
You get that now ?

tldr : you threw a big, fat lie, I merely pointed it out.
Don't like it ? why not start by not throwing stuff like this and both :
- speak out of experience
- speak with good faith
instead ?

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Saltychipmunk wrote:

Really? because it sounds to me like this is a thread bitching about summoners being too good at what? what is the thing we do in arpgs Fruz? What the hell do we do?

>CLEAR< >CONTENT<

I am sorry that you think otherwise, but this is ultimately what all of this is about.

No it isn't.

What you said makes as much sense as "Car prices are all about whether or not you can drive them".
Which would obviously be stupid of a statement, which I'm not going to develop because if you want to troll that bad, do it with somebody else.

Feel free read the thread again, it isn't hard.

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SeCKSEgai wrote:

Basically, I think you're over-exaggerating the survivability. It's the gameplay of a totem build but with damage that scales up better. Most of the things that killed my summoner wouldn't have phased a cycloner, either because stuff would die so fast they wouldn't incur major spikes or because he was constantly moving by nature.

are you really comparing minion builds with totem builds ?
You don't need to recast your minion, they just move faster than you and before you get anywhere, most things are dead.
You are then free to spam offering if you think there are potential corpse exploding threats since you ( usually ) have pretty much nothing else do to.
You are also free to move around faster than a cycloner because your minion do all the job.

Good minion builds ( yes, I'm adding good because there seem to be a lot of players here who don't know how to actually build a proper minion build here, the current power creep simply allowed them to get to level 90+ with it and now they think they know what they are talking about, which highlights the problem farther ) clear faster than totem builds, and are safer, and because they don't need to recast things constantly, are significantly safer.
( There could be exceptions though, not sure ).

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TorsteinTheFallen wrote:

Summoners don't have this problem at all.
Also worth mentioning totems, brands, ED, Vortex, Blade Vortex, DoT archers...

Precisely.
And the argument "but summoners are slow so it's okay" is a big fallacy as they are not slow anymore ( well, some builds are, it's not the ones that we are talking about though ).
Brands, ED, Vortex, Blade Vortex, Dot archers have also one thing in common : they don't have meat shields, and regarding safety that also changes everything.

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Rakie1337 wrote:

Minion builds are obscenely expensive now, they have been nerfed into the ground, what are you talking about?

Just because *some* people can afford a ferrari doesn't mean Ferrari's are cheap. Minions are far out of the realm of possibilities for MOST players. They will NEVER be able to afford one that doesn't suck.

no.
Players who are both :
- not capable of building a proper summoning build on their on
- not capable of finding easy summoning starting guides on the internet
might indeed never be able to afford a build that does not suck, because they are not capable of building it to begin with ...
And that seems pretty fair I'd say.