High minion damage on sheet, still no damage

Necromancer
1

Level 100 Necromancer with Two-handed weapon 809+25 Item power.

Damage with minions +105%
Damage with Skeletal warrior +355,1%
Damage with Skeletal mages +471,7%
Damage with Golem +516,3%

Still, they deal no damage, mages blizzard hits for 612 damage but sometimes when all is stacking they hit for 6000 ish per tick, but still far from okay. Melee skeletal warrior hits for about 800 - 1500. Golem hits for 3000 - 4000 but most of the time golems just standing still and do nothing, and skeletal mages hits for about 5000. Also have a lot of attack speed on sheet, but they still attack slow, and high damage resistance, multiple stacking of damage reduction, still they die instantly if running 40+ NM Dungeon and takes a minute to kill one enemy.

If I change build to bone spear with no minions, I deal millions and millions of damage instantly with no effort but I choose to play necromancer because I’m a summoner at heart, and Necromancer made sense to me, but really struggling here…

4 Likes
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I agree with this. If i knew playing as a caster would be that much better, i would play as sourcerer instead of necromancer.

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and when disable all paragon bonus u have same dmg and best is lvl 100 with 809 ip weapon when my lvl 75 necro have 2h 829 ip its super motivation play more gratz blizz

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yeah, necro technically can’t scale the minion damage. All the stats with regards to minions are either broken and not functioning or gimped and add no real value. Unless you use the ring. Which scales off your stats and lucky hit but summons for the minion position. No point whatsoever scaling minion damage. The design philosophy is bad. Minions are designed to be a support structure for the necro but take up a spell slot. Its dumb.

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I am not saying minion damage is great, but I deal more damage with minions at lvl 81 (running tier 41 NM dungions at the moment).

I agree that Warriors hit like wet noodle, at the moment their value is in making corpses (reapers) and taking hits instead of you.

Mages - blizzard scales with your damage not with minion damage. In general you want to stack total damage (int, +damage%) because it affects your minions too, minion damage bonuses, vulnerable damage because it is multiplicative with overall damage and any kind of % damage from legendaries and skills because these are multiplicative too.

Especially unique peragon node from cult leader, golem board, corpse eater, hellbent commander, passive bonuses to minions from skill tree. Some of them might not show up in your stat sheet but they work. It is crucial to take Shadowblight key passive instead of Kalans Edict (which does not work most of the time due to damage taken anyway). Once you have Shadowblight you can use most powerfull minion buff available to necromancer - Blighted aspect, which is available from dungeon but can roll up to +120% bonus damage to all damage done including minion damage once your blight ticks 10 times (+240% bonus damage on 2H weapon!). Best way to get ticks of this quickly is bonestrom with the shadow damage aspect, miasma corpse explosion, and blight. As mentioned above this is multiplicative bonus. On top of it you can combine it with inner calm (up to 30% damage when standing still) and conceit (up to 25% bonus damage with barrier on, you need barrier aspect for bonestorm too).

Golem - doess OKish damage with auto attacks, but its main purpose is to bash with the active (either blood or iron golem) with blood golem you can deal huge damage if you have the 50% bonus damage when healthy for the golem and you hit single target such as boss, though most usefull one is iron golem because it has only 10 second CD, does better AOE damage than blood golem (15 sec CD), stuns and can apply vulnerable.

Now other very important detail is decrepify, and crippling darkness passive, both of these can proc stuns, so you can jump into middle of enemy group with bonestorm, proc some stuns, stun enemies with your golem and freeze them with your mages while you are effectively immortal (due to barrier from your bonestrom).

Last but not least, decrepify can also proc CD reduction, so if you already have bit of CD reduction and got the 3 legendaries for bonestorm you can have almost 100% uptime with it, and your golem can bash (and stun and proc vulnerable) almost constantly. Finally you want to have oh shit button in the form of blood mist (which can also produce corpses for summons, bonestrom duration increase and it can tick CD reduction from decrepify aswell).

At least thats how I play late game and it is working so far.

However I agree that minions (and some other builds like blood) should be buffed or bone should be nerfed. Especially bonus damage on warriors is absolute waste due to their abysmal base damage.

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6

This is good advice for minion damage focus. Personally, I just kinda gave up on trying to scale minion damage - it just required too many concessions for too little reward for me. Since ring of mendeln exists, I just use it and then scale my damage and my minion damage at the same time (in a sense). I find using mendeln I can maintain good damage with my skills and also get the minion damage procs. I’d like to be able to run minion damage at some point, but they still need to buff them more before it’ll make more sense than Mendeln for me. I still use blighed, conceited and graspign veins aspects for overall damage scaling.

One cool tip/thing I’ve found or noticed is that the bone golem’s taunt seems to reliably proc Mendeln pretty hard. It’s not quite bone prison proc, but it’s pretty good and I find bone golem’s taunt to be more fun and useful than bone prison or iron golem. I ue bone spear or sever + corpse tendrils to get pretty consistent vulnerable uptime and then use one golem taunt to pull enemies, avoid damage and proc mendeln + crowd control. Since it hits the whole screen you can send bone golem into dangerous rooms to taunt before jumping in and killing everything.

I’ve also found post patch 1.1.1 now that the Temerity pants are really good with minions. Between Temerity and bone storm barrier I can maintain pretty much constant barrier which helps more than anything else I’ve found with keeping minions alive (I also have some life on kill and +heal % chance gear).

Currently running a sever/BCE/tendrils/bone golem/bone storm build with shadow blight. Mostly scaling crit and lucky hit for a nice sever/blight and mendeln minion damage combo and can hit hard. Using the auto cast hearts to keep decrepify on without needing to cast it and have tendrils crit chance bonus up pretty much 100% + the barber heart to further scale all the mendeln procs + sever/shadow blight crits and add more AOE.

I’ve found this build now in season one to be competitive with bone spear and more fun to actually play. Using the Greaves of empty tomb boots and the aspect that procs Blight off my sever casts 20% of the time gives me a ton of lucky hit and damage reduction using shadow damage. With blighted corpses and blight procing constantly + sever casts Mendeln is constantly procing. The blight procs also add a nice 15%x damage boost to it also, then conceited for the 25%x bonus damage since I have barrier up constantly.

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Minions only annoying, i played t80+ nm with mendeln build, bone spear, but still blood mist is best build for hight nm.

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As i see minion build is almost useless without the ring. And i still have to drop it at lvl 88 after 7 Mother’s embrace. If another one drops i swear i’ll switch to the bone build

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Considering you need really specific itemization in minion build,honestly anything hitting less than hundred of thousands is a massive fail on blizzard’s part.

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Are u sure? My last position was that absolute damage figures scale with nothing.
Dmg from that is okay for low content but absolute useless for higher content.