Nercro Minion Tweak

[whitelion]

I was messing around with necro minions and it sucks. Not so much because it's weak, though it may be that's ok not everything has to be temporal hounds, but because it's super tedious. darkgod recently mentioned he might make a few tweaks to Necro to improve QoL, which would be welcome. I have a suggestion for a minor change that I think would at least make playing with the minions less tedious.

The main problem for me is that when you autoexplore, the minions walk behind you and thus when you find an enemy, they are general behind you, rather than between you and the enemy. Skeleton mages then immediately manathrust you, and the melee guys are like 5 turns away from doing anything useful.

Idea: When you cast create minions, all your existing minions are also teleported into the target cone (and maybe healed a bit.)

Now at least I have a way to open fights by getting my minions into position to be useful without having to let them all fall apart and create new ones every time. The healing suggestion is due to annoyance #2: when auto exploring your minions lag behind/get stuck on stuff and then go out of your necro aura and fall apart, often even at max radius. This can be avoided by not autoexploring and waiting when they start to fall behind, but again super tedious.

It might also be nice to reduce the cooldown on create minions a bit, if it's also going to be used to get them places, or more long term to add a separate skill that positions them offensively.

[SDY]

My main gripe with minions was the decay outside of the aura. Made it almost impossible to keep them alive without a lot of management.

Some options I’d propose:

1. Minions don’t decay outside of range.
2. Minions that stray out of range despawn and respawn in range.
3. Despawning minions is a second ability that refunds the souls and resets summon cooldown.

Necromancer is a darkness direct damage caster every time I play it. The minions just aren’t worth the hassle.