ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Minions are great early game, but by Dreadfell their damage output suffers badly. Partly this seems to be from little or zero stat scaling. For some of them the primary stat may be increased, but not always (to do with what weapon they're equipped with?) For ghasts and ghouls there is zero stat increase, meaning their damage output is hideous.

On a sidenote I can't help but think that Necrotic Minions / Aura Mastery should reduce decay rate by 10-50% instead of 1-5%.

Not actually a bug, per se.

Having said that, I do agree that Ghouls are jokes by Dreadfell(Enemies often have a baseline of Defense that you don't necessarily have until quite late.), and that Ghoul/Ghoulking accuracy is unusably poor for most of the game-they feel like wastes of a slot.

Considering that, past L20 or so, most of what your minions command really does is give you durable meatshields.

It only really becomes a massive issue in High Peak, though-They're still pretty useful in Dreadfell, I found, and the areas become wide open soon after, which rewards archers and mages a fair deal. In High Peak, I began not casting Minions at points because they were straight up useless when I didn't need bait-their raw accuracy was poor enough to be unable to hit anything notable, and only the mages did real damage(and not all that much of it by then). I watched enemy skeletons straight up slugfest down mine, thanks to them getting reraises mine did not(Kinda a shame you don't seem to get Reassemble revives for your undead), too.

having aura mastery 10-50% instead of 1-5% would do the exact same thing.

With no points, minions lose 10% of their life per turn they are outside of the aura. Each point of aura mastery reduces that by 1%, so 9%, 8%, 7%, 6%, then finally 5%.

If it was switched to reduce the life lost by a % of a %, it would be the same thing. Reducing 10% by 50% with 5 points into mastery would still have them decay at 5% per turn.

I think you just read it wrong


But yes, ghouls and ghasts are horrible. I usually just blow them up if anything. The elite skeleton warriors arent as bad, because at least they have a chance to stun the enemy. But minions, other than the really good advanced ones are mostly just meat shields. I almost never run around with minions up, instead I will just drop them on top of tough enemies to soak up damage like boss's, wyrms, rares, etc.