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 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)

Moved
I moved it to general minion mastery guide, it has a lot of general tips and isn't a specific build, maybe we could link all these zillions of minion master articles to here or something 18:39, 15 March 2006 (CST)


 * Agreed with turning this into a "minin mastery how-to-do". Most of the content was not directly related to any specific build. However to be a proper guide, this still needs some serious work (like doing away with the attribute box and the skill bar and describing individual skills instead). --Xeeron 21:54, 15 March 2006 (CST)

Consume corpse
''Consume Corpse is another favorite of mine. Not only do you gain a substantial amount of health, but you also teleport yourself away from enemy aggro...''

Um, if you are doing MM right, woudln't most of the corpse be on the enemy side, and thus teleporting you into MORE enemy aggro? o_O""" -PanSola

I see...
You're right... I didn't mention in the overview that this was a "Destruction Specced" Build and that you could create a "bomber" build with basically changing the Animate spell and using one of the 3 empty slots for other spells of your liking. Right. I completely neglected that. Did you even READ the build? Obviously not since I stated that the 3 signets are for your flavor and change, and the only skills considered a "must have" were the ones listed. You see... some builds may list things a plethora of damage dealing skills... there really is no plus or minus to simple damage spells like Vile Touch or Deathly Chill.

Summoning more than 1 type of minion is discussed... I stated this was for a "Destruction Specced" build. One type only... you DO have 3 more slots to put skillz in... this is why. Once again you need to stop looking at pictures and read please.

You said if i "butcher the party" it's MY FAULT - I never said it wasn't.

"Um, if you are doing MM right, woudln't most of the corpse be on the enemy side, and thus teleporting you into MORE enemy aggro? o_O"

You're absolutely right... you will NEVER be in a position where YOU take aggro... I've NEVER been the target of an enemy attack... ever... because I'm not expected to HEAL my Fiends... so I won't get close to the aggro. I just let them die. You see... Fiends often move as a group, enemies target who THEY want to target, not who YOU want them to target. IE... usually you want to take the healer out first in a fight... enemies think the same way. Try attacking a regular animal like a Lynx or something... if you have no minions, I guarantee they go for the Monk... it's rather odd... but that's AI. YOU DON'T CHOSE WHO YOUR ENEMIES ATTACK!

Seriously... this build is an extreme "generalization" - the MM is not entirely in the skills you bring with you, but how you USE THEM that makes a difference. Common sense is all you need to interpret this article. It's now on sale at Wal-Mart - GET SOME!


 * Cool it.. ~_~ 19:05, 15 March 2006 (CST)


 * Still, corpses thend to be where the aggros are. Sure there are ppl who are suffering from a lot of degen and die from degen while running away.  But in a typical battle setting, my impression is corpses would be where the greater action is at, thus more aggro.  Doesn't matter if all your minions are attacking different targets.  The teleportation can be handy at getting away from whoever is CURRENTLY attacking you, but my common sense (I got mine at Target, not Walmart) tells me it's usually just going to get me to another place with aggro. -PanSola 19:14, 15 March 2006 (CST)


 * Hy Ninja dude. Cool it, ok? No need for the snide remarks about buying common sense from Walmart. People will critique and edit and flat out manhandle your work. You need to put up with it and defend and explain. --Karlos 19:37, 15 March 2006 (CST)


 * I think adopting something like Wikipedia:No personal attacks as an official policy here is worth considering. This is not the first instance where Ninja or that other anon fellow who disagrees with him have flung insults back and forth. 22:10, 15 March 2006 (CST)


 * Actually, I thought this goes without saying. But feel free to take a look at the Category:GuildWiki policy and start a new article along those lines there. --Xeeron 22:18, 15 March 2006 (CST)


 * Heh, people attack me for months, no one cares.. PanSola gets assaulted once everyone jumps in. PanSola's plan for world domination is taking effect!! :D Seriously though, I try not to get involved in disciplinary action (because I am too much of a disciplinarian), but these guys were taking it too far. I have seen them talking angry for several days now. --Karlos 03:38, 16 March 2006 (CST)


 * I read it. It wasn't a build. The four basic skills everyone uses already, a subpar nuke, and three empty skill slots make a guide, not a build. This would be like me making a page that says "R/Any Barrager" and then just lists Barrage as the only skill and an extra note about how Favorable Winds is handy, too. Can you make a Barrager out of basically just Barrage and anything else you want (or, hell, nothing)? Sure. But this not something we call a build. Ditto with your article, which is mostly just about how you like Blood of the Master and Consume Corpse (the rest of it is basically about as much information about MMing as you'd find by just looking at the N/Me Minion Master prebuild).


 * Variants are fine. Optional skills are fine. Discussions of the pros and cons of various skills are fine. But you're only offering half a skill bar, and it's basically the same half a skill bar that goes into every other MM build. What I said above was that, given that you've already started writing this more as a generic guide to MMing, it would make sense to cover the MM skills that nobody understands, rather than just the four "duh" ones and Consume Corpse.


 * My point about butchering the party is simply this: this guide only covers that I would consider "noob" MMing - spam one type of minion, spam your heals, spam Taste of Death, and run around really fast. It's a good start, don't get me wrong, but it really needs more about how to be an effective MM in difficult situations, such as how to recover from being spiked or what, if anything, you can do to keep a pack of Terrorweb Dryders from killing all your minions. Statements like "your death will wipe out your party," to me, definitely indicate that this aspect of the guide is quite incomplete.


 * Bottom line: you made an okay starting point; now it needs to be editted and expanded mercilessly.


 * Also, please format your comments. You can use : to indent things when you reply to people, and ~ to automatically sign your posts. It's much easier to read your comments when they follow the general style. --130.58 13:22, 16 March 2006 (CST)

Serious restructuring
Since this is a guide now, I have done some serious restructuring to the articles (the individual sections are far from done though). I feel the Attribute discussion, skill discussion, equipment discussion, general playstyle order fits the guide much better. --Xeeron 22:18, 15 March 2006 (CST)


 * Also: first person references, ego and exaggeration need to be removed, as well as atypical typography such as capitalising whole words. Shandy 22:19, 15 March 2006 (CST)


 * I removed all of the first person references that I could find. I think the majority of them (maybe all?) were in the very paragraph about soul reaping -Zenox