Talk:General minion mastery guide

A Critique
This build needs a serious facelift. Right now it's half a skill bar, telling you to bring a minion creation skill, the only two minion-specific healing skills, and Taste of Death -- each of these is an MMing no-brainer -- as well as Deathly Swarm for direct damage. Despite the talk of sacrificing your minions to do damage and gain health, there is no actual mention of Death Nova, a staple in many MM builds.

Other skills and the specific usefulness of other secondary professions are not discussed. Neither is summoning more than one type of minion.

The big issue that this article needs to address, other than the general style, is this: There's a dozen minion-related skills under the various Necromancer attributes. If this is going to be the Minion Master article, it should really say a lot more about minions than just "here are the four minion skills everyone uses, and now we just throw in a nuke".

I think the best example of this is the following quote: "Dying [sic] is a bad thing. Your party now has to deal with their original set of enemies as well as 15-20 MASTERLESS minions. Your party WILL wipe. Apologize and move on." - bad! If you're an MM strutting around with 25 bone horrors and you die and they butcher the party, it's your fault. I've been on numerous farm runs with an MM who can easily create 20 minions but can't keep himelf alive, which means I and the rest of the party have to quickly put down all his little toys, despite the fact that he's back on his feet five seconds after dieing - a scenario that can easily be avoided by good use of Verata's Aura to rope up the errant minions (either to ToD them all later or just keep casting it often enough to keep them bound perpetually) or Dark Bond to avoid getting splatted in the first place. Yet I've never seen an MM actually bring either of these skills, or skills like Verata's Gaze and Malign Intervention. Most people just play something like this five-skill build with a few nukes thrown in and don't look into any of the other useful minion-related skills, courting disaster at every turn. (The point about using Consume Corpse to make sure you have enough energy to animate the other corpses around you is a good one, though. Bring it into the build instead of leaving it out as a variant!)

(It would be useful to mention that minions can be good for things other than damage somewhere, too: e.g. the traditional Barrage/Pet MM, which is mostly about tanking with minions, or bombing with Bone Minions.) --130.58 13:46, 15 March 2006 (CST)