PoE 2 Early Access Notes. Played as Minion Witch

I am playing as summoner mercenary and you're right. Also every mob's HP should be reduced. Now they are bullet sponges.

60 lvl Infernowitch player :

start a game - was kinda fine, buy 400g+ scepter early on with +2 to minions and 450+g wand with +1 phys skills and unearth carried me throught almost all act1. Act boss was brutal. ~7-8 death, ~hour to beat. No corpses for zombies are big issue.

TIPs :
Use 1 poison archer to remove armor from rares/bosses.
Use SRS asap as 1 srs does same dps as 1 skellie. And you get up to 10 for 30 spirit vs 1 skeleton for ~30-40. SRS still far from being strong.
SPAM arsonist explosions on wounded SRSes. Get +2 projectiles and +40% aoe to overlap. Still hard.
CORPSE EXPLOSION if there is a corpse.

act2 was very rough, very slow ~2 minutes to kill an elite. Still i manage to get to act3 (w/o ascending).

Ascend at ~30 lvl. Hellhound +50%hp meatshield for extra burning.

Currently get to maps, 8x15(+3=18)lvl arsonists, get lucky gambling +3 minion scepter. Flamewall+SRS with exposure, Arsonists with +25% attack speed, fire penetration and +2proj. Most of nodes for minion resists, damage, aoe, health are takes (others are just bad).
Gameplay is one of the worst of all minion builds i ever played in any games. Minions themself are useless. Currently they didnt die (but the witch can easily), yet they do very low damage even penetrating all resists and doing 3x damage due to overlap (i fear swap to other minion types as my excel calcs show there will be no better, not even close).

At act4 drop rare 2H hammer ~180-280 damage per hit. Pass to my friend playing titan (ahead of me in progress). He stun bosses or half-shotted them with it. LOL

The most humbling experience ever

LVL 23 witch here , minion build

Majority of my gear has +2 to minion skills , and a great weapon that gives +47% spell damage

My best attack does 146dmg, chaos bolt or something like that. White mobs are now laughing at me.

My resists are largely fine for Act2 (67% electric, 47% fire, 13% ice). So I can take a few hits before I need to worry. But jeez the enemy sure far outpaces my ability to keep up, yet alone exceed them.

I feel constantly weak.
I constantly revisit my build.
I am constrained by the lack of resources.
Mana draining affix mobs are a game over for witch.
I hate it, the challenge was fun at first but now it's just extreme.

Something I feel would significantly improve the "fun" would be significantly improved crafting drops and scaling back white mobs.

This needs more attention. As someone who played exclusively minion builds in PoE 1, if you can't rely on minions to do most of the work then it isn't a minion build, its a build that happens to have minions in it. Minions themselves are way too weak to do any TRUE minion builds at this moment.

I dont know what people are talking about here? 20min boss fights in acts? Minions made of paper? Yes, at the very beginning of the game - this was the case, they did no damage and died from 3 hits from white mobs lol. But after getting SRS + flame wall, speccing into minion damage/life/resists, getting gear with + minion gems, properly linking support gems to them, im flying through the campaign, bosses die super quickly. My minions dont even die anymore, or very rarely. Using 2 warriors, hell hound, arsonists and srs. Im at end of act 4. Have +3 minion gems on scepter, +1 on helm, +1 on ammy, besides that gear is trash, most of it is from act1 and 2, and im lvl 50+. Maybe it will get worse later but so far its great, not amazing, but great.

your build is probably just not that good. I'm in act 2 and I've used my currency to turn my gear into rares then add a bunch of modifiers to the gear on top of combining the correct support gems I dps pretty good. skeletons I would agree though tend to die quickly but mine tend to live longer because of mobs dying quicker from my raging spirits. Raging spirits were insane in poe 1 and they still are dam good in poe 2 but not as good as original. also forgot to mention that I still use unearth for extra bodies and it works dam good when combined with chaos dmg.

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jimbe4mXL#6156 wrote:

I dont know what people are talking about here? 20min boss fights in acts? Minions made of paper? Yes, at the very beginning of the game - this was the case, they did no damage and died from 3 hits from white mobs lol. But after getting SRS + flame wall, speccing into minion damage/life/resists, getting gear with + minion gems, properly linking support gems to them, im flying through the campaign, bosses die super quickly. My minions dont even die anymore, or very rarely. Using 2 warriors, hell hound, arsonists and srs. Im at end of act 4. Have +3 minion gems on scepter, +1 on helm, +1 on ammy, besides that gear is trash, most of it is from act1 and 2, and im lvl 50+. Maybe it will get worse later but so far its great, not amazing, but great.

You have most important spots covered with + to minion skills, so your gear is far from trash, most crucial pieces are there. I am also level 50 and never seen +minion helm or ammy, in fact I hardly find any ammulets... still running without any +skills :(

SRS - broken, try minions without srs. It's viable, sure, they kill bosses, while your character is safe and standing doing nothing, BUT! it comes with the price - painfully slow map clearing. If there are many small enemies it's getting tricky. If your minions die, you are doomed, but I am getting there. I find MOM perfect for minion build, since I have lot of mana and don't use it anyway, so it helps surviving hard hits from bosses without any price (shame I can't use two bottles of mana, but well they took fun and customization from flasks in PoE2 and we have to live with that). Alchemist Boon for life flask being useful for minions (turn hp bars for your allies) + on flask = 100% flask goes to minions. I am looking for better AoE, snipers with gas and explosion from hound is great, but it doesn't solve everything.

I don't like that storm mages are not shocking at all if you don't use command skill and even if you use it, it's impossible to tell where the corpse of your skeleton actually lies. I would like to apply shock in more consistent way, but maybe with t3 of support I can maintain it with ignite=perma shock.

I am using reavers, cleric, snipers with corrosion, storm and 2 warriors from weapon, procing bleeding for reavers with support more damage against bleeding. For curse -fire res, because of explosions and Hound. It's fine, safe against bosses, very easy, cake-walking, but getting through regular locations could have been faster. If I get more spirit, maybe I will try adding brutes or arsonist and experiment more.

Boss Arena are absolutely WAY too SMALL. For a ranged character there is literally not enough room to kite anything around at all.

Act 1 boss is absolutely over-tuned for a Act 1. In some ways, the Act 1 boss is harder than some of the mini-bosses or side bosses in Act 2. What's worse is, you are so gear dependent that it doesn't even matter if you over level the boss, if your gear is garbage, you will not kill him.

I have a Ranger, Witch, Monk, and Sorceress. Monk with garbage gear and 2 total exalts dropped in Act 1 had to get my son playing his Witch with 20 exalts dropped in Act 1 to kill the Act 1 boss.

Sorceress with mostly garbage gear, a little bit better than Monk, finally killed the Act 1 boss but only after getting a couple decent enough upgrades and kiting the boss for better than 10 minutes. Was also over leveled.

Ranger, garbage gear, needed help from son's Witch, again.

Witch with decent enough gear and warriors/frost mage minions, probably could have killed Act 1 boss alone but was playing in a party with another Witch. Couldn't kill it, so had to get my son's NEW witch to help, and two of us still died twice on the fight.

Which brings me to another point. WTH is the idea of not being able to resurrect at checkpoint when you are in a party? I get why not in a boss fight, which is it's own problem because there is never enough room to res anyone and the interrupt to resurrecting someone is total BS.


For new people coming to the game, Act 1 is a mood killer. My play partner regularly rage quits every time we bang our heads on a boss and he dies a couple of times to stupid mechanics or the fact that the arena is too small. Part of the reason I have 4 characters, so I have something to play while he cools down.

If you want new people to stay with the game, you're going to have to fix Act 1 and carry that forward.