Act 1 minion build feels terrible.

It is not a enjoyable experience.

I am sorry to say that the feeling of playing with minions on the first act is awful.

To be more precise about it, the offensive minions I've played are the Skeletal Sniper and the Skeletal Arsonist.

They deal pretty low damage, but if that was the only issue it'd be ok'ish. The thing is that they die in one hit even after investing points in minion life nodes in the tree. As the bosses have a lot of aoe mechanics you need to avoid, they are down for about 90% of the time of the fight. I've been dealing more damage focussing on my lvl 3 Chaos Bolt granted by my wand than my fully specced in minions have.

I've been fighting the act 1 boss for over 3 hours, getting to learn the mechanics and getting better at it. I am still not able to beat it, being over the level of the zone and having all the act one map objectives completed. My minions turn out to be useless in that exact situation.

I have no suggestion to give as I don't feel experienced enough to but i hope you will find a way to make it possible to play minions early.

Thank you for your time and attention.

idk how you've been doing it but I got through act 1 relatively easy with a minion build. There are many skills you can use to make the build feels better. I like pining my ennemies to make it easier to kill, also wall of fire is pretty fun with the sniper cuz there are lot of synergy.

around lv15 your minions even if specced into all hp available are like wet paper and get torn through by everything in 1-2 seconds.

Minions are very hard to make tanky in this game I agree.

But they are still better than most other damage methods(though this is just me doing a raging spirits build). In that you can actually find a lot of minion nodes near witch start. Other classes have difficulty getting damage and sustain.

Having to use other spells to carry your build instead of minions makes it not a minion build. Minion builds are supposed to have center focus on minions doing most of the work. I loved minion builds in PoE 1 but they are too weak to make it through in PoE 2.

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Castel02511#7774 wrote:

It is not a enjoyable experience.

I am sorry to say that the feeling of playing with minions on the first act is awful.

To be more precise about it, the offensive minions I've played are the Skeletal Sniper and the Skeletal Arsonist.

They deal pretty low damage, but if that was the only issue it'd be ok'ish. The thing is that they die in one hit even after investing points in minion life nodes in the tree. As the bosses have a lot of aoe mechanics you need to avoid, they are down for about 90% of the time of the fight. I've been dealing more damage focussing on my lvl 3 Chaos Bolt granted by my wand than my fully specced in minions have.

I've been fighting the act 1 boss for over 3 hours, getting to learn the mechanics and getting better at it. I am still not able to beat it, being over the level of the zone and having all the act one map objectives completed. My minions turn out to be useless in that exact situation.

I have no suggestion to give as I don't feel experienced enough to but i hope you will find a way to make it possible to play minions early.

Thank you for your time and attention.

My minions sort of stopped dying after getting the uper left part of the skill tree with HP and defense nodes. At that was only at the end of act 2. Up until then they were probably more often dead than alive. This definitely needs to be tuned.

i'm hard stuck on ektab & iktab right now cause my minion witch is too weak and i'm getting zero drops that are useful :(

They just need more life in the early levels. By mid act 2 using ONLY persistent minions such as warriors and archers They were rolling content and rarely died. By Act 3 though with gear they start power spiking. Now they NEVER die in combat and roll act bosses in like 25 seconds. In fact they die so rarely now that the on death/low life commands for arsonists, lightning mage, and instability make these abilities unusable now. I think the commands should just work on cooldown like the snipers and balance the damage accordingly. I think the most important gear stat is simply plus to minion skills this makes the minions cheaper, stronger and more durable, stack as much as you can.

I think one of the biggest issues with minions as you play through the acts is the fact that minions get stuck on EVERY door and choke point. Then they die because they won't follow and get left behind. This happens like 30 times a zone its horrible, I never seen this in POE 1. They also get left behind on elevators making the trials of chaos impossible for persistent summoners.

I think one of the design parameters is you are an active participant no matter what. Game designers as a whole do not like wallflower builds.

Contagion+ED is absolutely excellent clear. Unearth the corpses to spread your contagions to the next batch being sure to maintain your unearth minions (with contagion on them) and you will find yourself cruising through packs.

Bossing was more difficult. I was just using ED hit damage and keeping the boss simmering with contagion. Most bosses don't provide corpses. The ones that did got a horde of skeletal scorpions with a strong contagion on them. They went down did. My hardest boss with this setup was the djinn who even though it had adds they didn't drop corpses (Rude!).

After ascending I moved some stuff around and started summoning Raging Spirits with Ember Fusillade. Took down ED, Pain Offering (borderline useless at this level) and put up flammability with Impending Doom and Decaying Curse. The curse now spreads with contagion and blows up. Clear time has gone down a very little, survivability has gone up with hound, bosses go down quicker.

I've found relying on corpses to not be good early.

Edit: Minions too tough to use your arsonists or instability? Put Infernal Legion on disposable minions.

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dofkin40#3130 wrote:

Edit: Minions too tough to use your arsonists or instability? Put Infernal Legion on disposable minions.

Hmm I actually didn't think of this, good comment. But for my current build I wonder if this would be a DPS loss by keeping warriors on respawn. I'm in cruel right now and the basic Skeleton warriors slap. So much so I don't see a reason to use reavers. Actually as I type this reavers suiciding with rage might be a solution too.