Spirit, Summon, Minion, Witch

The Spirit limit either needs to be a farmable increase where we can permanently up Spirit by grinding some type of consumable or the price of Minions has to drop from 30-60 down to 5-10 per minion because this is absolutely BRUTAL.

Im only lvl 42 and Skeletal Reaver (lvl 10 Uncut Skill Gem) is the highest level I've been able to summon but I can say after 40 hours of non-stop testing that Minions are pathetically weak compared to their astronomical Spirit cost. Ive been dumping nearly every single skill point I have directly into minions and my little darlings still die in 1 hit and don't do any damage outside of me using their special ability (Ice Bolt for skelly ice mages, Poison Arrow for skelly archer's etc etc etc)


I don't really know what the end vision for permanent Minions is? Its sort of like the team in charge stopped at a half way point. Do we want low Spirit cost Quantity or High Spirit cost Quality?
My self, I will always prefer Quantity over Quality. I would rather have 100 minions that have 1 hp and do 1 damage over 1 big Minion that has 100 hp and does 100 damage. I enjoy PC melting amount's of guys on screen but I may be an oddity in that regard haha


Temporary summons are actually perfect! They seem to be working as intended where you can spam them out like no tomorrow, they carry you through the fight and go away. The only improvement I could suggest would be having a skill that makes them last significantly longer/Lets you summon MORE but I'm extremely bias.

I'm fairly sure the passive skills for Minions don't actually apply to permanent Minions and only apply to temporary ones because those temp's really carry the day compared to the crushing worthlessness of Permanent's.



Ive had very little sleep so hopefully this is actually legible and not pure schizo-ranting haha Thank you for the (already) amazing game. It has a solid foundation but just needs some tweak's, thankfully that's what EA is all about :D

Also, why does using a skeleton ability like gas arrow use a GCD on your witch? Why can'T i toggle it to auto cast on CD?
Why do minion feel so bad.

I'm right there with you, friend. I LOVE having massive armies of fodder to throw at the other side. They really dropped the ball with minions, which I didn't think they would do a second damn time after doing it in PoE 1. Hey, at least the MAJOR problem of Supercharged Slam was quickly nerfed. Great job at priority there Devs.

Early game minions need a lot of work. Especially melee minions need massive help.

HOWEVER. I am currently around lvl 50 and my skeleton archers are absolutely wiping packs with gas arrows + explosion trigger. Even in 2 player maps.

I also can't say much about spirit vs minion #, I definitely would prefer a few more minions, but I also have no clue about how much spirit I am missing out on because of gearing issues. I have not found the spirit base ammulet nor do I have any spirit on mine. My scepter has a low spirit increase and my chest has only 30~ spirit on it as well.
Also minions reserving less spirit the higher the gem level is also seems off, it is imo the one stat that should not change at all from lvl 1 to lvl 100.

I hope minions do get some buffs however, because at this point while fun, they do seem just like spells with extra hoops to jump trough for no extra payoff, only extra downsides. Imagine playing a poison arrow/explode deadeye, except your bow could break and you need to wait 5~ seconds to restring your bow. Yea, minions feel like that at times.

You guys bring up some excellent points. I would LOVE to have my minion abilities be autocast. It would really save a few slots on the quickbar.

I only have 190 spirit because I cant find or make anything that ups my spirit. ive been wearing the same armor for 20-30 levels because I keep getting bent over by RNG. It really, really is a gigantic letdown. Ive been grinding for gear for the past 24hours solid and my game refuses to drop anything but whites/blues so I cant even roll the dice and try upgrade for a yellow >.< I( keep spending gold buying whatever yellow I can get my hands on but im only making 1000(?) gold an hour so its painfully slow.
Every white->blue I make is complete garbage so I cant even get set up on the road to upgrading my gear.

Honestly, I just dont see where GGG was going with Minions. Its a half in, half out approach that I cant seem to wrap my head around.

Your melee guys dont last long enough to block enemys, enemys rush past your minions to attack you anyway and your guys also dont do any damage.

Archers and mage abilities are amazing. I really love them but a stiff breeze or a stern glance makes them explode so you are lucky if you can get their ability off before they spawn die.


I finally switched from trying to use permanent minions, I slapped Raging Spirit on a Fireball and haven't been happier. I'm 99% sure your passive minion talent's dont actually apply to your perm-minions base states. It seems to work for their abilitys. It definitely works for Temp-Summons because my Raging Spirits out DPS my skeletons 1000%.

Hmm minion nodes not applying to the permanent minions base attack would explain a lot.

I haven't tried SRS but i've had success at clearing with both unearth and raise zombie. Unfortunately most boss arenas have few to no mobs to make corpses out of, and then you have to use only the permanent minions and run around until either you get tired and die or the boss dies.

SRS not needing a corpse makes them actually usable on bosses.

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Gugurila#1722 wrote:

Hmm minion nodes not applying to the permanent minions base attack would explain a lot.

I haven't tried SRS but i've had success at clearing with both unearth and raise zombie. Unfortunately most boss arenas have few to no mobs to make corpses out of, and then you have to use only the permanent minions and run around until either you get tired and die or the boss dies.

SRS not needing a corpse makes them actually usable on bosses.

Yeah, thats the tricky thing. If bosses had more trash spawns for corpses then a guy would be laughing. You could just drown them in a tide of zombies, pick up their loot and laugh your way to the bank.

Overall there definitely needs to be some sort of bonus stats to the minions from player leveling/gearing imo, the biggest oversight in these sort of games with a pet class is lack of a way for the pets to scale with the player's stats and gear which tends to leave the pets linearly scaling vs the difficulty and player scaling in a more exponential manner.

On the cosmetic side, my only disappointment is they don't look all that cool or interesting, basically it's all just skeletons. I feel like the Witch herself has the right idea in saying throughout the campaign, how various creatures were things she would want to be able to summon later, like the candle werewolf boss being I think the earliest I can think of.

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Morghus#4174 wrote:

Overall there definitely needs to be some sort of bonus stats to the minions from player leveling/gearing imo, the biggest oversight in these sort of games with a pet class is lack of a way for the pets to scale with the player's stats and gear which tends to leave the pets linearly scaling vs the difficulty and player scaling in a more exponential manner.

On the cosmetic side, my only disappointment is they don't look all that cool or interesting, basically it's all just skeletons. I feel like the Witch herself has the right idea in saying throughout the campaign, how various creatures were things she would want to be able to summon later, like the candle werewolf boss being I think the earliest I can think of.

100%! I guess a 400% damage bonus on 1-2 damage isn't going to make a huge difference, same for minion health buffs. That's probably why Temporary minions slap and permanent ones are crap. Temp minions scale off the spell where permanent ones scale from 2-3% passive Skill tree upgrades or something silly. It has to be a bug. I cant see them intentionally hamstringing minions like this.



Now, this is probably going to get me shot, id be willing to pay cash money to have my minions look different compared to just an average skeleton. They could honestly go crazy with it. Give us lovecraftian monsters, corrupted abominations, demons, you name it as cosmetic skins.

If they fix the issues with just how god awful the current system is im sure that I wouldn't be alone in wanting to hit the MTX shop up for Minion skins.

The startling thing is that an entire class is gimped and instead of rushing a hot fix to address any issue, GGG nerfed warriors OP ground slam. Im getting Helldivers 2 flashbacks where the devs torpedoed their own game by aggressively nerfing the fun out of it.

I mean, its not just witch summoning that's broken, lots of other people are having class problems too. Idk. I know its only day 2 or day 3 or something but if your priorities are to limit stuff that works instead of fixing stuff that doesn't, it gives me a bad feeling.

Bit of an update.

I finally got gear that gave me increased spirit and minions are 100% amazing.

It looks like all my problems were stemming from extremely limited Spirit. 4 Skelly Ice Mages with 3 frontline Reavers is so satisfying. This is how its meant to be done!

I still say they need to severely drop the Spirit requirement's on Minions. I shouldn't have to play for 50+ hours before I can even test my build, that or give us free respec's during EA so you dont get locked into a class thats unplayable until really high levels.