General minion mastery guide

This guide discusses the professions of Necromancers and Ritualists who specialize in maintaining large armies of animated creatures, generally known as Minion Masters or "MM".

Why bother?
The average minion does slightly less damage than the average ranger or warrior against the same foe, and attacks slightly slower. At first glance this would suggest that a minion master is simply wasting their time. Why bother to maintain minions at all if henchmen like Devona or Aidan can deal more damage faster? The simple answer is quantity.

Whereas only 8 members can join a party at the higher levels of the game, the minion master can control up to 10 minions at all times (11 in PvE with Masochism). The damage from one minion may seem to be minor, but ten minions is quite a formidable force.

An army of one
A general does not attack. A commander does not wield a weapon. A minion master's life and strength lies not in their own combat ability, but rather in the army they control.

For the majority of players, this represents a fundamental shift in thought. Whereas an Elementalist or Ranger will try to find the best set of skills to use directly on a target, the minion master must find a balance of skills to preserve the army and give it the strength to roll over whatever is placed in its path.

Starting up
The minion master is a build based on inertia. A large army makes it easier to kill enemies, which in turn makes it easier to maintain a large army. Overcoming the initial barrier of the first 3-4 minions is the hardest part. Players new to this build will most certainly wish to bring some damage skills, such as Deathly Swarm or Rotting Flesh to ease the first few kills.

With the Factions campaign, a modest investment in Blood Magic will allow Rotting Flesh to combine with Life Siphon and Vile Miasma, resulting in -8 or -9 health degeneration on the target, and -4 degeneration on nearby targets. This will greatly increase the speed in getting the first corpse to animate your first minion, which in turn will usually provide the next corpses in short order.

Corollary to this is the absolute necessity to maintain your army. If your army dies, you'll need to start a new one, which means dealing with the "first corpse" difficulties all over again.

Rolling thunder
Once a small army is built, your focus should change from building to maintenance. Stop casting damage spells. Your purpose is no longer direct damage: the army will cause sufficient damage on its own. Experienced Minion Masters can continue to do damage while avoiding enemies, but should always give priority to raising and maintaining minions.

Maintaining your army should be your only goal at this point. Freshly animated creatures require less healing than aged creatures, so creating new creatures should come first, followed quickly by healing. The army, once rolling, will ideally take care of creating new corpses, which you should re-animate as soon as possible.

It is important that you spend as little time as possible between engagements. Minions live on a timer, and their inherent degeneration builds with every second alive up to a maximum of 10 pips of degeneration. They can also possess hidden degeneration, so if they live long enough, skills like Verata's Sacrifice or other health regeneration spells will have no effect on maintaining their health. If you spend a lot of time between engagements, your army may become very hard to maintain and you will not have any corpses to animate.

Note: Attempting to maintain an army of minions via healing is in most cases inefficient. Animating a new minion is always preferable to extending an old minion.

Engaging the enemy
When approaching an opposing force, the Minion Master should lead, or be one of the first into the area of combat. Minions follow blindly behind their master, and only move forward to attack when their master attacks, is attacked, or a creature comes into their aggro bubble, which is slightly smaller than a standard player aggro bubble.

If you are using horrors or minions it is advisable to attack once, then step back and allow the minions to cluster around the foes. This is traditionally called a minion block, minion wall, or meat shield.

After the first attack (preferably with a wand or other ranged weapon) the Minion Master should concentrate on healing and maintenance.
 * Create new minions as soon as possible. It is sometimes helpful to watch for a soul reaping or experience signal rather than watching the field for falling foes.
 * Keep casting Blood of the Master. Blood of the Master affects all of the minions you and your allies control, even if they are out of normal casting range, much like Heal Party works on party members. Over sacrificing can kill you fairly easily, as the sacrifice cost increases with each minion you and your allies control.
 * When using fiends, move as close to the center of the clump as possible, cast Heal Area, and step back away from any attacks. Large clumps of fiends are usually prime targets for area of effect attacks, such as Meteor Shower and Ignite Arrows.
 * When using horrors, vampiric horrors, or minions, it is usually safe to step in close to combat, as the animated creatures will prevent the foes from attacking you. Do not use heal area with horrors, as it will heal foes as well as minions.

It is important to remember that animated creatures are ruled by extremely simple laws. They attack everything not friendly to their master, have no ability to differentiate targets for tactical or strategic value, and never disengage. If you or the party decide combat is not worth fighting, your minions cannot be told to escape. Sometimes this can be beneficial, as a minion army will give the foes a target as you and your party escape. Disengaging any combat normally means you will lose most, if not all, of your army.

Worst-case scenario
The most important note on dying: DON'T.

As a minion master, your existence is the only thing keeping your army from the throats of your allies. Should you fall, your army will become masterless, and attack everything in sight -- the party (humans, heroes, henchmen, and pets) will generally be the closest, and hence will be the first targets.

Everyone in the party should know that you are playing a minion master build. Healers playing with a MM on their party should focus on the minion master in an emergency situation. No single party member can cause more trouble with their death than a MM. Many parties have been obliterated because a MM lost control of their army.

Should the worst case happen, quickly use Verata's Gaze or Verata's Aura to reclaim some or all of your army. Reclaiming one minion means one less minion your party members need to kill, and one less minion trying to kill your party members.

The same holds true if you need to leave a party. Stop healing your army, and either wait for the minions to degenerate naturally or use Taste of Death to destroy them. If you leave a party, your minions will become masterless and attack the remaining party, possibly causing them to wipe.

Opposing forces
Should you find yourself facing a Minion Master, either in PvP or in one of the RPG Campaigns, it is important to focus on attacking the army where it is weakest. Simply hacking away at the minions is slow, and gives the minions time to hack away at you. Here are some example tactics to use against Minion Masters.


 * Targeting the army
 * Holy Damage: Minions, like all undead creatures, take double damage from holy and light based damage. Monks equipped with smiting skills and certain Dervish skills can quickly destroy minions.
 * Area of Effect: Minions are not smart enough to flee from area of effect spells such as Fire Storm, Meteor Shower, Balthazar's Aura, or combined Splinter Weapon and Barrage.
 * Stealing the army: Verata's Aura and Verata's Gaze can quickly turn minions against their creator.
 * Targeting the master
 * Killing the master: Once a minion master dies, the army will become masterless and attack everything. This will level the field with the opposing party.
 * Interrupting: Interrupting key skills such as Blood of the Master can leave a Minion Master with a much weaker army. Skills like Distracting Shot and Power Spike are moderately effective and skills such as Power Block can be devastating. However, skills like Debilitating Shot and Power Leak are less effective, due to Soul Reaping and large numbers of dying minions.
 * Targeting the field
 * Corpse Denial: Minion Masters rely on a steady stream of corpses and cast slow spells to animate their creatures. Use the corpses before they can with fast spells such as Consume Corpse or Soul Feast.
 * Spirits: Ranger spirits such as Edge of Extinction can be very destructive. Be wary of spirits that may assist the Minion Master, such as Quickening Zephyr or Predatory Season. Please note that Edge of Extinction will only affect the minions if they are under 90% health, but because of their natural degeneration, unless the minion master is spamming minion healing spells, this won't be a problem.

Minion Bomber tactics
The minion bomber relies on enchantments that trigger when minions are destroyed, like Death Nova and Jagged Bones, and on skills that destroy minions, like Taste of Death, Feast for the Dead, and Putrid Flesh. Unlike a standard minion master which keeps minions alive for direct damage, a minion bomber kills their minions to trigger Death Nova. Melee minions in large numbers, such as bone minions, guarantee that they end up close enough to foes and explode often. By employing all melee minions bomber builds provide better body blocking than builds that use fiends.

There are a number of potential pitfalls to watch out for with this sort of build. Enchantment removal can remove your primary source of damage. In general, skills that remove enchants from a single target are not a problem but skills such as Chilblains can clear many minions of enchants very quickly leaving relatively useless low level minions. Minion creation takes place at a much faster pace in a minion bomber build than a standard minion build so more usable corpses are required to sustain it. Jagged Bones and Animate Shambling Horror can help offset this somewhat but their long recharge times limit their effectiveness.

Perhaps the largest obstacle to running a bomber style build is that Guild Wars has no support for automatically selecting minions. Selecting manually is a skill that can take some time to pick up and requires a degree of patience. The easiest moment to apply death nova is when minions are first created so keep a close eye on where your minions will spawn before spawning them to aid targeting. Death nova can be chained the same way two different spells can be because it has no recharge time, take advantage of this by targeting the next minion and hitting the skill button for death nova again while the first one is casting and then selecting the next minion. When the cast animation is complete you will automatically start casting the next death nova with no pause even if you have already targeted another minion. In thick battles be patient, Guild Wars is designed to get unnecessary information off the screen as fast as possible. As such, moving your cursor around frequently will cause tool tips, such as minion names, to disappear. As a warrior this is great in that it helps keep your screen uncluttered, but here it works against you. If the cursor is paused over a group with minions in it, the minion names will take a few moments to be listed with the others, keep the cursor still and wait for the names to appear and you should have no problem picking a name from the group.

Death Magic
Death Magic directly affects the number of minions you can control, their survivability and damage potential. One of the reasons why there are no Necromancer-secondary Minion Master builds (except Ritualists) is primarily due to the fact that minions are a great deal weaker with less than 12 Death Magic.

Note that Bone Minions are significantly less useful in high level areas, due to their limited level, but can be very effective in low level areas, due to the larger numbers

Soul Reaping
Since a Minion Master's purpose is to utilize corpses to create an army to support the party, Soul Reaping is the major way in which the MM will be gaining both energy and targets for animation spells. Minion masters should take a very serious look at Soul Reaping.

Soul Reaping is the best way to recover the cost of casting corpse spells, and should be as high as possible, to keep the army rolling.

With a Soul Reaping of 10, casting Animate Bone Horror costs a net 0 energy. At 10 Soul Reaping, one death fuels Verata's Sacrifice, 2 castings of Blood of the Master, or Heal Area, providing enough energy to keep the army alive. This makes creating and keeping an army a much cleaner prospect. Bear in mind also that you animate corpses soon after they die, that is, soon after you receive the Soul Reaping benefit of doing so, serving as a very effective way of having the energy when you need it most.

Soul Reaping should be at least 10, though skills such as Offering of Blood and Mantra of Recall can help mitigate a lower Soul Reaping attribute.

Don't waste Soul Reaping: You can get energy for everything that dies, excluding spirits. Try to keep your Energy at least one "death" under your maximum, to ensure no energy is wasted. If you have extra energy, spend it on healing your minions, or healing yourself.

In addition, Signet of Lost Souls can play an important role in milking a dying enemy for energy and expendable health before it dies, making it easier to summon expensive minions such as Bone Fiends and Vampiric Horrors.

Blood Magic
While relatively useless compared to Death Magic or Soul Reaping, Blood Magic has some benefits for Minion Masters. Offering of Blood sacrifices health for Energy while Dark Bond ensures survivability.

Spawning Power
The Ritualist's primary attribute, Spawning Power affects animated minions as well as spirits, passively giving each minion an extra 4% health for each point in Spawning Power. In addition, Spawning Power includes skills that work well with minions, such as Signet of Creation, Boon of Creation, Explosive Growth, Spirit Channeling, Reclaim Essence, and Spirit's Gift.

Explosive Growth and Boon of Creation will trigger twice upon the creation of Bone Minions. At 14 Spawning Power or more, Boon will recover 80% of the casting cost of the Animate skill. Actively, Boon of Creation or Reclaim Essence replaces Soul Reaping's passive bonus. Spirit's Gift works as an ally-only Heal Area and condition-removal, with variable effectiveness.

Skills
Discussion and comparison of skills for different uses.

Minion creation skills
There are eight minion creation skills. Each has their own set of pros and cons.

Minion support skills
In addition to creation skills, there are a number of support skills commonly used and the pros and cons of each.

Keeping the minions alive
All animated creatures begin with a -1 degeneration and gain an additional -1 degeneration for every 20 seconds they remain alive. After 3 minutes (180 seconds) they have -10 degeneration. Actual health lost due to degeneration is capped at 20 health per second (i.e. 10 degen), but minions can have much more than -10 degen, eventually to the point where strong regeneration skills like Verata's Sacrifice and Healing Breeze will have no effect on the health lost by the minion.

Several skills are available to counteract this degeneration and to provide battle healing.

Blood of the Master provides a one time spike heal to all friendly animated creatures within target range. This skill has a short cast time, high healing return, and fairly low energy cost. Despite the high sacrifice cost, Blood of the Master is one of the most efficient minion healing spells.

Verata's Sacrifice provides your minions with health regeneration. Its recharge (60 seconds) is long compared to its duration (10 seconds at high death magic), which makes it nearly useless in maintaining an army. However it instantly recharges when you control 3 or fewer minions, which makes it a very good way to start an army. In addition to providing healing, Verata's sacrifice transfers any conditions from the minion army onto the Minion Master, from whom they can be purged, passed back to the opposing party with Plague Signet, or otherwise handled.

Feast for the Dead provides a one time heal at the cost of one of your minions. It is recommended that you use this with a Flesh Golem that can be reanimated or on minions enchanted with Jagged Bones. Otherwise, you may find your army quickly dissolving while attempting to keep it alive.

Monk Spells are effective on minions in the same way as they are effective on party members. Contrary to popular belief, healing a minion with a monk spell does not increase its degeneration. Heal Area heals the master and all nearby minions, granting Minion Masters the ability to negate the sacrifices from Blood of the Master and Verata's Sacrifice while healing minions at the same time. Single target spells such as Orison of Healing and Healing Breeze are too expensive to use on minions.

Keeping yourself alive
Staying alive is especially important to a minion master, as a masterless army will turn on the party, and a large masterless army stands a good chance of winning against even the most prepared party while the enemy keeps attacking you.

Dark Bond provides an excellent way to reduce damage to the minion master by redirecting 75% of the damage to a nearby minion. The master can take approximately 4 times as many hits before falling and minions are more expendable than party members.

Infuse Condition counters degeneration by redirecting conditions such as burning and bleeding to the nearest minion while the minion master suffers no ill effects from this. Combined with Verata's Sacrifice, this can move all conditions from the army onto a single minion, who acts as a scapegoat for the rest of the army. Also, minions are immune to some conditions, such as bleeding.

Taste of Death is a very useful emergency heal. It almost always results in a full heal, since minions usually have nearly as high or higher health then the caster (thanks to the superior runes). Additionally, a minion's death due to Taste of Death triggers Death Nova, Soul Reaping, and many other "on death" functions. Taste of Death is preferable to Soul Feast for several reasons; It provides additional energy from soul reaping, it can select a target, consuming the oldest minion with the highest degeneration, it does not consume a corpse, and it has a very fast casting time, making it difficult to interrupt.

Signet of Lost Souls and Taste of Pain can be used for an occasional quick heal. However, you must time it such that the activation ends as the target is below half life but before it dies. Due to the relatively short casting time of both spells, it is generally not a problem, although when managing a large undead army, you may find some foes die before it is cast. Signet of Lost Souls is useful against tougher foes where your army grows slower and soul reaping returns are less often, as it costs no energy to cast. Either skill may be particularly useful to have around if you have difficulty defeating your first foe prior to starting your army; it is likely in such circumstance that your foe will be below 50% health at this point.

Other skills
Verata's Gaze is used to capture an opposing minion from its master, or to tame a masterless minion. Because it is a single target skill and must be cast twice to fully turn a minion from an enemy master, it is used less often than the broader Aura. However, Verata's Gaze creates a permanent bond.

Verata's Aura can be used as a quick way to regain an army after being resurrected, or steal an army from opposing necromancers. It immediately turns all minions in the area to you, but has a drastic downside, in that when it ends, your entire army, regardless of how they were accumulated, will turn against you. Keep in mind that this spell will cause you to lose your bond with your minions even if you recast it, so use this sparingly.

Death Nova is used to turn minions into walking explosives. Most often used with Animate Bone Minions, due to the much lower energy and corpse cost per animated creature. Taste of Death, Putrid Flesh, and Reclaim Essence are sometimes used as triggers, but often minion bombs are allowed to take damage during combat, often detonating in a melee attacker's face. Apply this skill to as many minions as possible before you enter combat. The result will be that even when they die, they will hurt nearby enemies and poison them ensuring a quicker death.

Putrid Flesh triggers your minion to explode in disease-ridden glory. Stack it with Death Nova to place a -8 degen on fleshy foes around the minion.

Order of Undeath raises the damage output of your minions at the expense of your health.Consider using Animate Vampiric Horror to gain health each time the minions attacks. This skill can kill the caster if there are enough minions, so care should be taken when using this skill.

Spirit's Gift is a special case, as it's effectiveness is largely based on luck or circumstances. Any allies near the summoned creature gain up to 41 health and lose one condition. Animate Bone Minions triggers this twice. Best results are seen when allies are in a small area around the corpse, either in a battle with close quarters, or Animating after a battle, standing on un-exploited corpses. Combines well with Putrid Flesh.

Dwayna's Sorrow is a good addition to the repertoire of an N/Mo Minion Bomber or a Monk Hero accompanying a Minion Master. In addition to generating energy for soul reaping, and exploding for damage, now your minions will also be providing party members with a heal when they die.

Energy Recovery Skills such as Offering of Blood, Mantra of Recall, Energy Tap, Signet of Lost Souls and others are used to balance minion creation when nothing is dying, such as early into or just after combat. Use these skills to create energy to heal or to animate your army.

Recharge Time Skills can be quite beneficial, as recharge time is one of the limiting factors for minion masters. Carrying 20/20 items can reduce this effect, but skills such as Glyph of Renewal, Mantra of Recovery and Serpent's Quickness can allow for more minions, and continual healing from Verata's Sacrifice.

Ranger Spirits affect all non-spirit creatures in the area, including minions. The most useful spirits are Winnowing, which provides additional damage to all minions, and Predatory Season, which heals them.

Paragon Shouts can increase the effectiveness of your minion army. "Fall Back!" will provide your minions with more mobility while healing them on the move, and "Go for the Eyes!" will increase the critical chance of your party members and minions.

Armor
Any necromancer armor may be used, and opinions vary significantly as to which armor is preferable.
 * Tormented insignia provide extra armor against all attacks, giving extra resilience to the minion master. This extra armor comes at the cost of extra damage taken when struck by holy damage.
 * Bonelace insignia provide extra protection against piercing, which a MM is more likely to encounter given the fact that a large army will keep warriors outside of arms' reach.
 * Radiant insignia provide extra energy, but provide no additional armor of any kind.
 * Survivor insignia provide extra health, to help offset the health cost of a superior rune. However, it should be noted that extra health increases the sacrifice from MM skills such as Blood of the Master and Verata's Sacrifice.
 * Minion Master's insignia provide extra armor against all attacks when you control 1 (+5), 3 (+10) or 5 (+15) minions. While providing no benefit during the painful starting phase, the extra armor will help you survive when you (and your party) need it the most - when you control many minions.

In addition to the base armor, the following equipment is considered necessary for a minion master:
 * A Bloodstained insignia to provide additional speed when using corpse exploition spells, including animation spells.
 * A headpiece imbued with a superior rune of Death Magic.

Weapons and focus items
Equipped items have different uses to Minion Masters compared to the other profession and build types. Sacrificing direct damage in favor of higher casting speeds or faster recharge times are worthwhile.

The ideal weapon set for a Minion Master should have as many of the following characteristics as possible:

(On a scale from 1 to 5, with 1 being very important and 5 being not that important)


 * (1) Halves skill recharge time of death magic spells
 * (2) Halves casting time of death magic spells
 * (2) Additional Energy
 * (3) +1 to Death Magic (20% chance)
 * (4) Additional armor
 * (5) Additional health

Some example weapon sets:
 * The Bone Staff from Luven Underwood, combined with a perfect Staff Wrapping of Death Magic and a perfect Insightful Staff Head.
 * The Death Magic Truncheon from Arliss Vaughn and Death Magic Focus item from Sir Pohl Sanbert
 * Bortak's Bone Claw and Bortak's Bone Cesta//Armind's Focus
 * Bortak's Bone Staff
 * Ghial's Staff
 * The Nightbringer
 * The Bone Spiral Rod from either Gertrud or Telamon and a Bleached Skull from Dai Waeng or Dmitri Scharkoff.

Minion Bomber: In builds that specialize in using Animate Bone Minions and Death Nova, the hierarchy of useful mods changes from those of the above. Half Skill Recharge is almost entirely discarded in favor of other mods. Instead, the focus is more on casting and keeping Death Nova up on as many minions as possible, as long as possible, for maximum effect. For Ritualist Minion Bombers, this is even more so, since they have more enchantments to keep track of.


 * (1)Lengthens poison duration on foes by 33%
 * (1)+1 to Death Magic (20% chance)
 * (2)Halves casting time of Death Magic spells
 * (2)Enchantments last 20% longer
 * (2)Additional Energy
 * (5)Additional armor or health
 * (5)Halves skill recharge time of death magic spells

Some example weapon sets:
 * Poisonous sword or axe of Enchanting paired with Bortak's Bone Cesta//Armind's Focus. The weapons from Shichiroji are favored for their +5 Energy mod, and lack of +damage.
 * An Insightful staff of Enchanting, possibly with an Inscription of "Aptitude, Not Attitude" (Death)
 * Rod and Focus from Sheco
 * Various Collectors.

Note: Items which provide 15 energy at the cost of energy regen, such as the ones provided by Kraviec the Cursed and Isabaeux Navarre are very useful, but can carry significant drawbacks. When using these items, Necro-primary's must have high Soul Reaping, and carry a second set for traveling or when deaths are sparse. Ritualist/Necros must have high Boon of Creation(Spawning), Reclaim Essence, or other Energy recovery skills.

Secondary Necromancer minion masters
Minion Masters have traditionally been primary Necromancers because they enjoy many benefits. For these reasons, groups may not take a Necromancer-Secondary Minion Master seriously.
 * The ability to utilize scar patterns and runes allows the Necromancer to increase Death Magic to a base of 16. This means:
 * A primary Necromancer can control up to ten minions, as opposed to eight for a secondary.
 * Minions are 20-33% higher level than those created at a secondary Necromancer with 12 Death Magic. This results in higher minion health and armor levels as well as higher minion damage.
 * Typical minion master support skills such as Blood of the Master are more effective.
 * Soul Reaping is the Necromancer's primary attribute. Without the periodic source of energy flowing from dying minions, a secondary Necromancer may quickly find it difficult to cast the high-cost minion creation skills.
 * Only Necromancers can equip their armor with Bloodstained and Minion Master's insignia.

Ritualist
In spite of the drawbacks, the Ritualist may take on the role of minion master with some success.
 * For each point in Spawning Power, minions gain 4% max health, allowing a minion created at 12 Death Magic and 16 Spawning Power to have more health than a minion created at 16 Death Magic. However, the lower level still means it will deal less and take more damage in combat.
 * A level 21 Flesh Golem created by this Ritualist would have 820 Health, while a level 26 Flesh Golem will normally have 600 Health.
 * A level 14 minion created by this Ritualist would have 590 Health, while a level 18 minion will have 440 Health.
 * In addition, a few Spawning Power related skills work with animated minions. Many of these skills make a Minion Bomber variation an attractive choice and work well with Jagged Bones.
 * Boon of Creation grants health and energy from each animated creature, acting as a replacement for Soul Reaping. Its main problem is enchantment removal.
 * Spirit's Gift can be used to take the pressure off of monks. Not only will it heal nearby allies and remove a condition, it will heal nearby minions whenever you summon a new one.
 * Explosive Growth deals damage as minions are created.
 * Spirit Channeling grants an impressive amount of energy, at the cost of the user's own health. Combined with a spammable self-heal (such as Mend Body and Soul), the energy can be put to good use spamming Blood of the Master as well.

In short, the Ritualist will have fewer and weaker minions compared to a Necromancer, but they will have more health and a few specialized skills are opened up.

Basic army master
These three core skills form the basis of a general purpose Minion Master build. The idea is simple - create minions (both ranged and melee) as soon as you can, and use Blood of the Master to keep them alive.

Minion bomber
A Minion Bomber is slightly different from a normal Minion Master in that the aim is not so much to keep minions alive to deal direct damage, but rather to raise them quickly then detonate them in the middle of enemy mobs. At 16 Death Magic a minion enchanted with Death Nova, when killed either by enemies or Taste of Death, will cause over 100 damage to all adjacent foes as well as poisoning them for 15 seconds.

Nightfall Hybrid
Nightfall specific skills allow a hybrid between the traditional minion master position of maintaining an army and the minion bomber goal of deal damage when the minions die. Using Jagged Bones to ensure bombs are reborn, the army can be maintained while killing off some in Death Nova/Putrid Flesh explosions.

Other sources
For additional information on...
 * animated creatures, see Minion
 * the bestiary, see Animate minion quick reference
 * Factions, and its impact on Minion Masters, see Factions skills
 * Nightfall, and its impact on Minion Masters, see Nightfall skills