Minion master
From Guild Wars Wiki
A minion master is a Necromancer or Ritualist specializing in raising Minions.
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[edit] General Principle
The minion master relies on his undead minions to do the fighting for him. By exploiting the corpses of fallen fighters, the minion master creates an army of undead, which he then directs to fight against his enemies. The minion master can do little or no direct damage to enemies, instead concentrating his skills on raising and maintaining minions, who in turn damage, distract or overwhelm foes.
[edit] Basis
The minion master is often considered the Guild Wars equivalent of zerging.
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 to ensure a steady stream (energy permitting) of healthy minions, minion masters usually bring a means to heal their minions. This is done by utilizing spells in the Death Magic line, such as Verata's Sacrifice or Blood of the Master or by going secondary monk and using skills from the Healing Prayers line, such as Healing Ring.
[edit] 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.
[edit] Battle behavior
The minion master can be compared to a steam roller: He takes some time to get going, but once he is at it, it is very hard to stop him. All minion masters only become useful once the first few people (ally or foe) have died since they rely on having exploitable corpses to create minions. However, once a minion master has a full army of minions up, he almost becomes a party on his own and can possibly deal more damage than all other fighting characters in the party combined.
Since minions suffer from increasing health degeneration over time, 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, disaster strikes. Not only will the party lose a member and its meat shields at once, but the minions will also become hostile towards the remaining party members, who now have to fight the minions in addition to whatever killed the minion master in the first place.
[edit] 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 profit from the weakness of the AI, which often attacks the minion meat shields instead of bypassing them and does not concentrate on taking out the minion master. It is important to note that minion masters are always restricted by the number of corpses available; therefore, parties usually contain only one minion master, in rare cases two. Two or more minion masters may be needed 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.
[edit] PvP
Minion masters rarely make it into the fast-paced PvP happening in the 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, 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.
[edit] Choosing your Minion
With most builds, having 4 or 5 skills which perform similar purposes to each other is often just a waste of skill slots. This remains true with minion builds as most animation skills recharge quickly and adding more animation skills does not alleviate the main problem of being limited by the number of corpses you have available, 2 or 3 animation skills is usually sufficient. Usually, the minion which is best suited to you is defined by the elite skill you wish to use:
- 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.
- A special type of minion master is the minion bomber. A minion bomber relies on skills such as Death Nova to deal damage, rather than the attacks of the minions themselves. Because such a character relies on quantity of minions rather than quality, Aura of the Lich, Animate Bone Minions, Animate Shambling Horror, Animate Flesh Golem and Jagged Bones are useful to produce multiple minions from a single corpse. For Ritualist / Necromancers, Explosive Growth is useful to deal additional damage, Boon of Creation is useful for energy management and Spirit's Gift is useful for party and minion support.
[edit] 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 Unnatural Signet, the Paragon's Holy Spear, and the Dervish's Banishing Strike.
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.
[edit] Notes
- The maximum number of minions per minion master is 2, plus 1 for every 2 ranks in Death Magic. The max is capped at 10 minions at 16 Death Magic. Using skills that would create more minions then allowed (such as Aura of the Lich when you already have 10 minions) will result in the death of the minions with the lowest health until the number of minions you control is equal to the maximum.
- The death of a minion will trigger the effect of the soul reaping attribute. This will allow a minion master and party necromancers a useful method to help Energy Management.
- The level of the minions is based on Death Magic and the level affects the minions' max health, armor, damage output, and physical size.
- Since increasing Death Magic has an exponential increase in the power of the minion army (more minions who live longer, defend better, and do more damage), it is best to have Death Magic as high as possible - usually from 14 to 16 depending on the Death Magic rune used. Higher levels can be attained through skills and blessings such as Aura of the Lich or Masochism.
- In most situations, a hero will perform better as a minion master than an actual person. They have the capability to easily target and discriminate between individual minions when using skills such as Jagged Bones and Death Nova, something that is difficult for most players. They are also very good at using Signet of Lost Souls, as they are able to automatically switch targets to one below 50% health when they need energy.
- Some skills can be used to help maintain another character's minions. For example, "Fall Back!" can be used between fights to passively heal minions and reduce the delay between fights.
- Traditionally, minion masters are a necromancer primary, as the damage, armor and health of minions all scale with Death Magic. However, a player may sacrifice the energy provided by soul reaping and the benefits of higher level minions by instead using a ritualist primary for skills such as Boon of Creation and Explosive Growth. This is particularly useful for minion bombers, as they do not need powerful or durable minions.
