Necromancer

[Pinnacle of Pineapple]

What is the sense of playing a Necromancer, when enemies break through the line of minions to attack you instead, completely ignoring your thralls. And that is also with sending the minions at the enemy first. I can agree to some enemies doing it (bosses, enemy Necros and Mages), but it's too many of the enemy units doing this.

[Josch]

This needs tweaking, I agree with you. Grim Dawn had the same enemy behaviour, it's making the Necromancer gameplay very stressful to play, the opposite of what you want from a minion build.

[Topei007]

You have a point about your thralls being ignored by the boss, that can totally happen however I use that to my advantage as I have the majority of my minions go ranged so they rain death on the boss that I run circles around. I just keep an eye on my minion commands to build of freeze and then go ham on him when he's frozen.

[Krezo]

I agree with you. Minions have absolutely disgusting gameplay.

--- Monsters practically always run at the player. Instead of standing behind summons, you have to constantly run somewhere and dodge, and with AI summons, the gameplay turns into catching up
--- Minions are constantly stuck somewhere, stand behind a wall and all attacks fly stupidly into the wall. 6 seconds to move a summon to the player is some kind of joke (it's instant in PoE 1), and there are no skills to move them to yourself. It turns into endless running and waiting for them to start doing damage.
--- Narrow spaces are some kind of hell, you stand and watch as one of 10 summons hits one mob from the other side
--- Visual effects also turn the game into hell, I absolutely do not see what is happening under my feet or boss attacks.
--- There is also no auto-targeting for offering. If you don't target the skeleton or during resummoning (there is a window of about 1 second), your skill will simply go on cooldown, but will not be used.

I think GGG should add a skill to summon minions or make the summoning without delay, and increase the movement speed or AI of minions. They can also add brightness effects in the settings menu.

[Slavik]

There is a taunt support gem but i did not experiment with it yet as vast majority of my horde is also ranged.

After you get 10 + minions as long as you reposition behind them npcs will usually get distracted by the minions. Note usually but not all the time, which seems almost intentional as some kind of different AI set up for specific npc tipes. That's just my impression thought and I might be reading too much into it.

[underd0g]

I would've answered 'Bone Cage' but alas, it does nothing to stop the hordes of enemies that are already up in your face.

[code]

Originally posted by Pinnacle of Pineapple:

What is the sense of playing a Necromancer, when enemies break through the line of minions to attack you instead, completely ignoring your thralls. And that is also with sending the minions at the enemy first. I can agree to some enemies doing it (bosses, enemy Necros and Mages), but it's too many of the enemy units doing this.

https://youtu.be/ga5IDtszdmA

[JinxTheWorld]

Originally posted by underd0g:

I would've answered 'Bone Cage' but alas, it does nothing to stop the hordes of enemies that are already up in your face.

The funny thing with bone cage is that half the enemies don't even get affected by it lmao. Just run right through it.

[Pervy]

Originally posted by Josch:

This needs tweaking, I agree with you. Grim Dawn had the same enemy behaviour, it's making the Necromancer gameplay very stressful to play, the opposite of what you want from a minion build.

In grimdawn you can make minions taunt for you, and you can keep enemy off you just fine.

[underd0g]

Originally posted by JinxTheWorld:

Originally posted by underd0g:

I would've answered 'Bone Cage' but alas, it does nothing to stop the hordes of enemies that are already up in your face.

The funny thing with bone cage is that half the enemies don't even get affected by it lmao. Just run right through it.

It's quite pointless, yes. I used it with a lacerate support gem when kiting but I didn't feel like the enemies procced bleeding damage, even though blood were spraying around them when they were coming after me.

[Tikigod]

It depends how many minions you have, their damage and your builds passive tree.

All enemy including bosses will go for whatever is dealing the most stacked damage on them, skeleton warriors for example do next to no damage compared to your character and auto-attacks early on, so enemy will seem to always just "Ignore your minions and head straight for you".

However minions just like everything else can body block and a pack of 4-6 warriors can do a reasonably good job of that if you've kept the skill gem levelled up and pushed minion health on your passive tree with some good health increasing support gem.

By early Act 2 if you're keeping a eye on vendor offerings, and crafting better items using currency it's relatively easy to get a decent sceptre that will have your spirit sitting at around 160-170, which again providing you're making sure you're levelling up your minion gems should be sufficient to operate around 3 to 4 warriors from your own minion gem and then another 2 from your sceptres innate summon skill, whilst still having some spirit left over for a single archer or similar.

At this point, you can start to see your warriors actually rushing forward and forming body block walls which can help a lot in various boss fights and it was around mid to late Act 2 as I pushed minion damage higher I started to notice bosses especially start to split their attention between attacking me when I was focusing on them, but then shifting their attention to my warriors and hellhound when I stopped directly attacking to evade attacks or reposition myself.

By Act 3, having slightly more than 200 spirit is pretty much the baseline you should be aiming for as a bare minimum if you want to have a practical minion tank wall going on, and I've found with such a lot of the time general enemy are largely focusing on my 6 warriors and hellhound for the few seconds such enemy get to live, giving me more than enough time to stand back, cast contagion, fire off chained multi-projectile essence drain attacks and such all the while debuffing enemy making it easier for my now chaos damage infused minions to just rip through them and take the brunt of the hits.

But if you're going for a big burst damage caster build that wants to use a handful of warriors to rush forward and just magically tank and aggro the enemy.... yeah you're going to have a rough time getting your warriors to really tank much, because the enemy aren't dumb.

They aren't going to go "Hey, that caster is doing serious damage, but hey let's focus on these 3 warriors that are just tickling us". You need to make something a real threat for the enemy to care about them more than you.

It's doable, but you do need to invest your build around doing it. It's not just something you can slot in for free and have just work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7G2jccl3Hg

Footage from my build in Act 3 that kind of showcases my minions taking the brunt of attention in various occasions. Less so in the two particular boss fights shown there as I was generally always attacking the boss and ramping up the DoT and direct damage on them throughout, but in the Queen of Filth boss fight section you can see almost all of her adds just bee line straight for my minions rather than me because I'm ignoring them and my minions are their main threat as a result.

But in the general maps clearing them out, you can see countless times I'm just standing back attacking and the enemy are all about focusing on my minions.

[Bishop]

I mean you want your minions to kill, not to tank. Its actually a good thing that mobs and bosses focus you, not them. Kite, tank, summon more raging spirits and let arsonists do their work. The less they are distracted the faster mobs will die.

[Sel Und Irae]

Another day, Another tourist whining about Necromancer.

I'm on Act 3 devouring all mobs with my Necro build, Sounds like a you issue.

[Faptor]

If im not mistaken, the Witch is supposed to get a "Necromancer" Ascendancy in the future but its just not released now, hopefully its really good and not another hybrid build.

[Tachyon]

I'm only lvl 15 atm, but I think I have the basics of being a Necromancer. I only use my Warrior minions as a minor distraction, really, because they're almost no use against bosses. One nifty feature I found early on is putting a Sceptre in both of my weapon sets, because quickly changing weapons and back again means BOTH of the Scepter's minions are active, so atm I have 14 warrior pets (12+2) with me at all times. I currently have 241 Spirit (I go for Spirit gear) and can have 10 temporary Unearthed pets, and a total of 24 pets can cause some pretty good damage and distraction. I'd use archers, but honestly I find the Warriors greater numbers more useful as they get in close to fight, and I have a support skill that causes them to explode for fire damage when they are reduced to low life.

My tactics are: I select a suitable spot, such as a bridge, doorway or other choke point, stand there, spam Fire Wall and Bone Cage and use Sparks almost non-stop, getting the added fire damage for particles going through the ring of fire. Sometimes I drop a Frost Bomb (52 to 78 damage) on my location. Every now and again I'll pop off an Unearth to get some short-term cannon-fodder minions.

The enemy DO focus on me, I agree, but that's fine because my minions are therefore attacking the enemies from behind while they're being spiked, pinned and burnt and Sparked to death. As long as I watch my HP I usually do very well.