Minion master needs some heavy nerfing

[glass zebra]

The summoning tree seems to offer way too strong buffs for having minions, making minion master gear easily surpass magic gear and in part ranged gear, even if you want to play a pure mage (and for most of the game also ranger)?! You get 10% magic damage, 10% ranged attack speed, 75 magic barrier.. per minion.

That means that every piece of gear that grants you another minion effectively grants those stats on top of what the gear already does. Maybe I have not dug deep enough into the game yet, but it seems those (passive extra) stats surpass the stats that early ranged damage gear and even later mage damage gear can offer you. 10% magic damage and 10% ranged speed is such a huge boost for some cheap early game gear that just grants "+1 minion". When I am looking at level 13 sorcerer gear, it still does not break even with the set bonus while at max mana vs. level 5 chieftain tunic + pants + level 3 witch doctor hat (171% total magic damage, while the 4 extra minions grant 140% magic damage + 140% speed).

If you are high enough in the summoner tree, you can also end up with a much bigger barrier, since those 4 minions grant 75 each (so 300 total) and it seems even a max level sorcerer set does not even reach half of that (based on wiki numbers). Not only does that make you extremely tanky and you can just shrug of minor damage when exploring, but with "the best offense" in the mage tree you can also get 50% of that directly on top of your magic weapon attacks. Since magic has the ridiculously high speed (3.3) Arcane Staff, that is another flat 150 damage (the staff does 67 by itself on level 8 and 149 on max level) from having those 4 extra minions.

With the high speed of the staff (and the big extra from minions) and ranged combat's "Weakness detection" and magic's "Mana channeling", you also have infinite mana an perma crit at least during boss fights, so that extra mana you would get from the sorceror set that you lose does not seem too high. Even if you consider mana, you could just use the corrupted warden set, lose 1 minion but get lots of othe stats. That way you can even look over having those extra points in ranged combat and still have a similar amount of mana, a bigger shield and more speed + damage on your mage attacks... while wearing a minion focused set.


On top of that, you have what the minions do, but that does not even seem important. It looks a lot like if you want to be a strong mage, you go for the minion set and shoot with a magic staff. That way you level 2 trees at the same time, do more magic damage (even with really early game gear), have a big shield even before reaching endgame gear and got minions on top of that. The minions do not only do damage (though need some seconds to catch up in dps), but their shoots seem to also destroy a lot of projectiles that get shot at you, making it sometimes feel like you can just stand there and shoot at enemies and ignore what they are doing. Even if you run into a moment where there are too many or too strong, you can just run behind a wall and let your minions kill them while you are in no way in danger.


Currently it feels way too much like minions are supplemental and while they really do nice damage considering their lasting effect, make for new ways to combat without really putting yourself at risk/kiting/mining in single player while enemies still die around you, it seems the real power comes from the buffs they grant for mage and at least early on also for ranged combat in general. That the last part reaches dimensions where minion gear surpasses pure mage gear even if you just account for the magic damage done and ignore what the minions themselves do, feels rather wrong.

I started playing minion master and then wanted to try mage and put that in my 2nd gear slot. When I also wanted to have a mining and harvest gear set, I was faced with the decision to either ditch my summoner gear or mage gear (that I have not used a ton). When I tried both to check how much magic power I actually lose, I was surprised that I actually gained magic power with the minion set, leaving me no reason to even consider mage gear again. That was before I got higher into the skill trees even. Now it is just a non-decision unless I want to build something super specific and when I found the sorcerer gear I thought "maybe finally a set to swap to for mage?" looked at the numbers and.. no. Summonings still add more.


I know this stuff is new, but even just looking at the numbers and seeing "oh you can have 5 minions, so that can add to 50% magic damage, 50% ranged speed, 450 magic barrier" that does already sound a bit much right? I expected minions masters to be strong on minions and maybe allowing to boost some other stuff while still being mostly minion master but.. it seems you are just the better mage that way.