Minion master

A minion master is a Necromancer or Ritualist specializing in raising minions and corpse control.

General principle
The minion master relies on an army of undead minions created by exploiting the corpses of fallen fighters. The minion master does little direct damage to enemies and instead, concentrates on raising and maintaining minions, who in turn damage, distract, or overwhelm foes.

Details
The basis of every minion master build are the minion skills and minion caring or buffing skills, which define what types of minions the minion master will be able to control. Most builds contain the elite Aura of the Lich, Animate Flesh Golem or Jagged Bones, together with one or two non-elite minion skills, to ensure a constant supply of undead servants.

Minions die faster than normal players, because:
 * They have natural health degeneration, which gets worse as time progresses.
 * They are almost always used as cannon fodder or meat shields.
 * They do not scatter from area of effect skills.
 * Holy damage inflicted upon them is doubled.

Since exploitable corpses are not always present in abundance, minion masters ensure a steady stream of healthy minions with one of two approaches: healing minions or non-corpse minion replenishment, such as Jagged Bones. Minions are healed through Death Magic spells (e.g. Verata's Sacrifice or Blood of the Master) or by utilizing secondary Healing Prayers spells (e.g. Healing Ring, which takes advantage of minions clumping around their master outside of combat). Their numbers may also be replenished using the elites Jagged Bones or Aura of the Lich, which effectively respawns minions that die.

If using skill combinations such as Jagged Bones, Explosive Growth, and/or Death Nova, it can be more effective to cause damage by allowing the minions to die, allowing you to trigger these skills repeatedly on foes, generating more corpses and repeating the cycle.

Side skills
Since the basis of the minion master build only requires 4-5 skills to work, minion masters have plenty of room on their skill bar. Usually this is used to bring either some direct damage to help the team gain the first corpses or some healing skills (like a hard res) that make use of a secondary profession. Another opportunity is to use minion based damage mitigation like Dark Bond.

Battle behavior
The role of the minion master can be compared to that of a steam roller: taking time to get going, but once momentum is gained, very difficult to stop. Most minion masters only become useful once a few corpses have been generated. Minion Masters using skills such as Aura of the Lich and Jagged Bones require fewer corpses to be effective, as they are able to spawn minions constantly.

Since minions suffer from increasing health degeneration over time, traditional minion masters are also somewhat rush builds; they are more useful in killing enemy after enemy and less in letting enemies pass by via clever maneuvering. Additionally, they are a bit of an all-or-nothing build. Minion masters usually are very safe characters, having a wall of minions in front of them and powerful self-heal spells on their skill bars. However if the Necromancer himself dies, the minion master's minions will also become hostile towards the remaining party members.

PvE
Minion mastering is predominantly found in PvE. Apart from some very few missions, minion masters can be helpful additions to a party in any PvE area with exploitable corpses. When not playing against humans, minion masters thrive off the weaknesses of the AI, which often attacks the minion meat shields instead of bypassing them and does not concentrate on the minion master. As minion masters are limited by corpse availability, the faster your team can kill, the more minion masters it can support. Minion masters are often helpful when multiple locations need to be simultaneously defended (e.g. Dzagonur Bastion). In PvE, minion masters can benefit from killing charmable animals for additional corpses. Minion masters especially excel in areas filled with large numbers of weak foes, while they have a harder time in areas with small numbers of strong foes. They also excel in defending against onslaughts of enemy waves.

PvP
Minion masters rarely make it into the fast-paced PvP arenas. They sometimes can be found in specialized pressure builds in Heroes' Ascent or GvG. The only area of PvP where minion masters are very common are the large scale Alliance Battles and Competitive Missions, where corpses are more plentiful than in other forms of PvP. A PvP minion master's skills will vary slightly from a PvE minion master's skills in that they must concentrate more on survival since other players are often intelligent enough to eliminate the minion master so as to make his minions hostile to both teams.

Choosing your minion
The recharge time of most minion animation skills is short, therefore there's little need to have more than 2 animation skills. Your choice of which minions to take is often defined by your elite skill:
 * Builds which make use of Order of Undeath tend to focus on maximising raw firepower, therefore Animate Bone Fiend is generally preferred, often with Animate Vampiric Horror due to its ability to offset the health loss associated with Order of Undeath.
 * Builds using Aura of the Lich are often the most compressed, only requiring perhaps one other minion skill to allow you to summon during Aura of the Lich's long recharge.
 * Conversely, Animate Flesh Golem tends to lead to less compressed skillbars as often another two minion skills are required to fill out the numbers. These additional skills are usually chosen to complement the damage soaking nature of the Flesh golem, such as Animate Shambling Horror or the basic Animate Bone Horror.
 * When you are dealing with areas that have long gaps between fights, you may want to use skills that sustain your minions for longer. You can use Blood of the Master for this, although heroes often kill themselves if you have multiple minion masters, so it should be avoided if possible. Better alternatives include using Jagged Bones and Animate Shambling Horror to allow new minions to be created from expired ones.
 * In tougher areas where minions are often depleted in each combat, or areas with limited exploitable corpses, you can use Aura of the Lich to generate minions without the need for corpses. It can be slower, as the skill has a long recharge, but it does allow you to begin each fight with a decent sized minion army (usually 3 or 4 minions per minion master).
 * Minion bombers rely on skills such as Death Nova to deal large AoE damage, rather than the relatively weak attacks of the minions themselves. These builds depends on quantity rather than quality, so they require skills that help generate minions quickly (e.g. Aura of the Lich) or can produce multiple minions from a single corpse (Animate Bone Minions, Animate Shambling Horror, or Jagged Bones). These builds use lower ranks of Death Magic and do not include healing, because the damage depends on turnover. Ritualists can take Explosive Growth (for additional damage), Boon of Creation for energy management, and Spirit's Gift (party support). Dwayna's Sorrow also works well for bombing.

Disadvantages
The single largest disadvantage of the minion master is its dependence on corpses. Deaths provide the corpses needed to raise minions and the energy to cast those spells at the same time (via Soul Reaping). The minion master needs a good group to kill the first enemies for him, and he needs a constant flow of new corpses afterwards. Some enemies in PvE do not leave exploitable corpses (for example, Titans), a serious problem for minion masters. The minion master also has problems in missions that do not involve large numbers of enemies or have long periods without enemies.

Minions are undead which will take double damage from holy damage, found mostly in Smiting Prayers and Mysticism. There are also some specific skills that deal with minions, such as the Mesmer's Spiritual Pain, the Monk's Banish, the Paragon's Holy Spear, the Dervish's Banishing Strike and the Ritualist's Elite Consume Soul.

In terms of AI, minions are the dumbest unit a player can control, much less controllable than henchmen or pets. Usually, the minion master can only hope that the minions will overwhelm the enemies with their sheer numbers; getting minions to attack priority foes first is very hard.

Lastly, the death of a minion master is always a risk to the whole party since the minions are set loose and will attack everything in sight.

Trivia

 * Historically popular names for this type of caster have included: Necromaster, Minionspammer, Minionfactory and Minionmancer, none of which could be applied to Ritualists.
 * The minion master is often considered the Guild Wars equivalent of zerging.