Defensive minion too passive?

[cayenne_spicy]

My Deadeye character has an ice golem, and I'd linked a Meat Shield Support to it so that it could taunt and help with tanking, but I've noticed ever since I did that, the golem spends a lot of time ignoring ranged enemies that are attacking my character. It just stands nearby her and doesn't go try to engage them to do its job of taking the inbound attacks off of her. But previously, it would run ahead of her to try and help attack. Is that normal? Does the Defensive mode added by the support really decrease the aggro radius of the golem to one that's extremely small? It hardly wants to go after ranged enemies at all, and if I move close so it will engage them, and then I back away a little bit, the golem disengages. :(

[general_windu512]

so what meat shield does is it cuts your minions aggro range in half. this is useful since the minion gems this gem is linked to will also stay close to you and only attack enemies that get too close to you. in other words : they become your personal bodyguards.

the opposite to this gem is freeding frenzy where minions aggro range is doubled and they will prefer to move away from you to attack far away enemies (enemies who you sometimes can't even see yet , because they are off-screen)

[cayenne_spicy]

Originally posted by general_windu512:

so what meat shield does is it cuts your minions aggro range in half. this is useful since the minion gems this gem is linked to will also stay close to you and only attack enemies that get too close to you. in other words : they become your personal bodyguards.

the opposite to this gem is freeding frenzy where minions aggro range is doubled and they will prefer to move away from you to attack far away enemies (enemies who you sometimes can't even see yet , because they are off-screen)

Is there a support gem to get minions to taunt that doesn't also include the Defensive stance for them? Or, alternatively, if I gave the golem both the Meat Shield and the Feeding Frenzy gems, would the two aggro range adjustments cancel each other and I'd end up with a regular aggro range while retaining the other benefits of the gems? :)

[general_windu512]

i don't think there is another support gem that causes them to taunt enemies. i actually had to look up what happens if you support minions with both meat shield and feeding frenzy : the aggro range returns to normal and only the other modifiers of those support gems apply. so you could do that , but typically it's a waste of sockets. unless you have a lot empty sockets that you don't need for the more important skills in your build.

the stone golem has a taunting attack by default (and increases life regen) so you could use that , though i don't know how important your ice golem is in your build since as a deadeye i'm assuming you can only use one golem in your build ?

[ignis]

Minion AI in PoE is deliberately keps extremely inefficient. Devs just hate minions, nothing you can do with that.

[cayenne_spicy]

Originally posted by general_windu512:

i don't think there is another support gem that causes them to taunt enemies. i actually had to look up what happens if you support minions with both meat shield and feeding frenzy : the aggro range returns to normal and only the other modifiers of those support gems apply. so you could do that , but typically it's a waste of sockets. unless you have a lot empty sockets that you don't need for the more important skills in your build.

the stone golem has a taunting attack by default (and increases life regen) so you could use that , though i don't know how important your ice golem is in your build since as a deadeye i'm assuming you can only use one golem in your build ?

Yeah, I'm stacking crit, so the ice golem helps with that. :D But I do currently have room in slotting to use both of those gems, so I'll give that a try and see if that makes the little guy a bit less lazy. Thank you!