Idea: Standardization of "Zergling" Minions with QoL Changes

[FalsePromises.6398]

We all sort of know what "zergling" minions is referring to, but for anyone who doesn't play a lot of necromancer, here's the rundown: shambling horrors, bone minions, jagged horrors, unstable horrors, all of those are zergling-ish strength-in-numbers style pets. Sources of these "zerglings" range from Summon Bone Minions to "Rise!" to even Lich Form skills that summon a small army of time activated suicide bombers. These minions are very great when you really want a lot of minions to stand between you and your enemy, but they don't shine for much else than their meat shielding and thousand-cut style, completely avoidable damage. However, I believe that these minions could prove a lot more useful with a mechanical standardization that may bring some refreshing new style to "zergling" based necromancers and allow a bit more reward for not being asleep at the keyboard while your minions bite and claw paper mobs.

 

I propose a standardization of these minions, to all become jagged horrors, but with mechanical updates to their command skill and summoning abilities. Hear me out on this.

 

First and foremost, the Putrid Explosion command from Bone Minions has two issues: you need your bone minions to crawl over to your target for the command to be effective at all, and you can't control exactly where they explode. If this were to change to a ground targeted skill that allowed these minions to perform a quick leap to said area (and explode prematurely if interrupted), both of those problems would become solved. With such a buff, should come a tradeoff, which would become a cast time (short, likely 1/4 second) and a slightly longer internal cooldown (perhaps 2 seconds instead of a fraction of a second), which makes more sense with the next proposal.

 

With the standardization of these "zerglings" into jagged horrors, these "zerglings" should all have the Putrid Explosion command ability (in the form proposed above) as a flip skill after casting any "zergling" summoning skill (perhaps with a stronger version in Lich Form, maybe without a cast time or internal cooldown, or one that applies lockdown conditions or area denial). This would mean after casting "Rise!" you would gain the ability to cast Putrid Explosion from that pool of summoned minions, up to six times (given the skill has the ability to summon six "zerglings").

 

With this new idea comes a concern: how would you ever maintain a decent amount of jagged horrors if you were constantly throwing them like water balloons? Or rather, how would you maintain a decent number if you even sparsely tossed them? To that I propose a change that I feel even if one disagrees with the concept of standardization and command changing, they'd agree with just for the sake of quality of life: update Summon Bone Minions to work like an ammo/mantra skill and recharge/respawn its summoned pool over time, and update Death Nova (currently a trait that summons jagged horrors on nearby enemy deaths) to summon jagged horrors while in combat, on a decent interval, but only up to a certain threshold (which will be elaborated on later). To unpack those ideas, Summon Bone Minions would respawn a jagged horror on an interval if one from its pool was exploded, and Death Nova would summon jagged horrors while in combat so long as you had a skill that summoned jagged horrors activated, on a decent interval to prevent immediate swarming (and would not have a special action key to detonate its jagged horrors since it's a trait, which ties into the next topic) and would only cast Lesser Poison Cloud from detonating jagged horrors through Putrid Explosion.

 

With proposed changes, jagged horror summoning skills should have a stacking buff to represent your threshold or maximum number of jagged horrors you can have alive given what summons you have casted. This is where Death Nova's changes come in. Let's say you cast "Rise!" and hit five enemies. That would temporarily increase your threshold by six. Death Nova, with proposed changes, would essentially increase that threshold by whatever amount the trait would give, and then would spawn extra jagged horrors as the skill persisted (and specifically not immediately as the threshold increased). When the skill's effects ended and the summoned jagged horrors died, so would the Death Nova jagged horrors unless another jagged horror summoning skill was casted. This means that Death Nova would increase your summon threshold by a specified amount until you expelled all your jagged horrors or ran dry out of jagged horror summon threshold, and Death Nova would no longer grant threshold increase if there was no sustaining threshold ability maintained. With this in mind, Putrid Explosion would gain an order of detonation, targeting whichever minion is tied to the shortest duration threshold for detonation, until you were drawing from your pool of permanent jagged horrors, prioritizing Death Nova jagged horrors over Summon Bone Minion jagged horrors.

 

With these changes, I feel like it would greatly revitalize the minion style of necromancer, at least in the scope of "zergling" swarms. You would be able to throw explosives around, and (with Death Nova) apply area weakness and poison on demand ground targeted, allowing for more active playstyle from minionmancers to deny area and weaken enemies to not only reduce damage towards the necromancer but also towards their other minions (that in honesty die rather fast against any capable foe otherwise). Furthermore, in Lich Form, if they were to have said skill, they would be much more capable towards self sustenance seeing as they'd be able to soften damage from enemies that otherwise shred them (given Lich Form is a haunted traffic cone beacon for pain with 0 damage reduction). If the Putrid Explosion command skill were to gain aforementioned cooldown/cast time reduction and resultantly immediate and on demand weakness fields, they'd be much more capable towards tanking enemy hits, having their semi-slow attacks dodged, etc. To the concern of too much weakness uptime, I say adjust the weakness duration of Lesser Poison Cloud as one sees fit to prevent such, or perhaps instead keep it as is so as to work weakness into death magic line more to have an additional damage reducing and dodge-dampening ability.

 

**tl;dr turn all those chihuahua-looking (and chihuahua-level damage) minions into jagged horrors that double as dangerous, not-for-kids water balloons and replenish themselves based on a stacking summon-threshold buff**

 

This is just an idea I've bounced around among a handful of people for a while, and felt like it was worth sharing. If anyone has anything they'd like to reflect on, criticize, agree with, or demean me for, feel free to: discussion in any form is good, and I'd love to hear any feedback. My hope is that this idea gets picked up or at least seen and considered by someone able to bring it up at a table discussion. Necromancer has good styles associated with it, but I feel like the minionmancer style remains the least touched version and could use some refreshing.

[Methuselah.4376]

I like the idea of ground targeted Putrid Explosion, reminds me of Blast Bones from ESO necromancer. I do love Summon Madness (Lich Form minion skill) as it is, with the only thing I do not like is it being locked behind such a long cool down skill. Which is why I think, as bad ass as I find lich form to be, the skill should be reworked to Aura of the Lich (gw1 call back): Upon activation you basically activate Grim Specter and Summon Madness, while pulsing stability for yourself and allies for 5 seconds. I would also increase the health of unstable minions, increase damage they do by 50% and add a daze effect upon explosion.

[LucianDK.8615]

Minions first and foremost needs bugfixing to not randomly despawn when mounting up or down, as well to not go on cooldown when you are under any transform effect.

[Nimon.7840]

Guards spirit weapons say hi

[Dadnir.5038]

While I don't dislike the idea, I think some minion's active skills are a bit to far from what you envision to be able to convert them to such a system.

 

Thought, just talking about _bone minion_ I'd 100% agree to make this specific skill summon jagged horror instead of the minions they summons. They could even totally remove _putrid explosion_ from the skill for all I care.

 

The issue with GW2 necromancer's minions is that they aren't a "main mechanism". They are just a side mechanism (thematically fitting) that work poorly despite the amount of resources (traits) that ANet dedicated to them. These minions are just bound to perform poorly in the game, the best one can hope is that ANet will somehow release a necromancer's e-spec that generate minions via it's F skills (either passively or actively).