Geonor Sucks As Necromancer

I spent 6 minutes fighting him with my Witch Necromancer build, which only kept getting slower and slower, because by the end of the fight his every attack just kills all your minions in a single hit, and then you have to wait for them to come back. There's nothing you can do in the mean time, so he's more boring than challenging.

So lets talk my options. Unearth only works on corpses, and you have no corpses after the first couple of casts, so that's not useful. I have Contagion + Essence Drain because it generally almost does as much damage as my minion right now even with ZERO investment in spells. So that was fun to cast. Minions are not good right now.

But as a Necromancer, most of your damage, is in your minion abilities, right? Command skills, Gas Arrow, Explosive Demise (nevermind it doesn't work most of the time because you don't have any minions that can be blown up) and Ice Bomb.

Except you can't do them if your minions are dead. And they die all the time in this fight constantly.

In the add phases where he summons wolves to fight you, you just get swamped and when all your skeletons die you are just left there getting piled on because the boss keeps killing your minions, and your damage abilities, your big ones, are locked behind your dead minions, through no fault of your own.

So I ask, what am I meant to actually DO here? Like, what if I told you that I sat here for 100 hours and just never was able to beat the boss, because every attempt ends the same where I get to the last phase, and I can't do enough damage or survive long enough?

Like, what do you expect me to do here? What do you want from me? It's Act 1. So long as I'm cruising through random maps, there's no problem, but once you get to a boss that you can't beat, you're just stuck there and you cannot progress.

Additionally, as is typical for many bosses like this, the only part you struggle on if you struggle at all is the bit at the end, so every attempt is just like 5 minutes of what feels like just waiting, dodging attacks on autopilot and doing the same thing that you did to every other boss so far which is run around them in a big wide circle so nothing they do can hit you.

Like again... I just have to reiterate, what exactly, am I meant to do as a player when I can't respec, when I can't just 'get' some extra resists, when I have no runes or artificer orbs, WHAT am I meant to do in order to beat a boss this early, if I struggle on it?

Let's say I have no resources available. Like what do you expect me to reasonably do? The idea in a game like Dark Souls when you only have a couple of different ways of interacting with the boss (you just hit them with a sword probably) is that you just learn the attacks of the boss, and do better.

That's not an option in a game like POE2 when you are being swamped or taking damage because your build only conditionally gives you the options you need to take care of threats when your options are being taken away from you.

This is why in POE1, you can just resummon your minions whenever you want. I know in POE2, on some level, I am sure, resummoning minions automatically is why we have minion life on the tree. Someone thought to try and make that stat valuable. Well guess what, it's not, because more damage is always going to be more valuable when your minions are ALWAYS TEMPORARY.

No minion lives forever, minion life just delays that and only rarely, only if your minions don't instantly get obliterated and die in a single hit like they do on every boss in the game.

By the way, the randomness of his lasers just... sucks. I don't know how else to describe it but if you REALLY want to make it completely random, you need to make those attacks visually MUCH EASIER TO UNDERSTAND. By this, I mean, those lasers should appear, then you should have a full second to do something about it, as it is, because the screen gets so visually cluttered by lasers, and the depth is hard to judge, it's often very hard to tell where the laser's ground AOE even is.

You need to take cues from MMOs if you want to have MMO bosses. The reason why games like FFXIV typically just show you an AOE for like 5 seconds before it actually happens is so you have time to react and adjust. Especially when we're talking about, a boss that is THE BOSS OF ACT 1.

This ties in with what I am just going to call his 'one-shot attack'. Every boss in this game for some reason has some kind of slam, and let me tell you I'm very sick of seeing them when every single boss has one. This guy's slam sucks, because by the time you even realize what's coming, the tell being him disappearing, you probably are just going to get hit by it unless you INSTANTLY dodge when you see the tell. It's way, WAY too hard to dodge.

It doesn't feel like I'm learning anything or improving, I managed the last phase on my first attempt, I just can't seal the deal because I foolishly decided to choose to play Necromancer and now I am paying the price.

You DO realize that your witch has access to sorceress skills right ?.... right ?

Minions in general are terrible in this game, clearly none of the devs actually played this game with a minion build. I tried it and at level 40 with ALL passives put in minion damage nodes and a couple +minion level on my gear, I had 15 minions struggling to kill a single mob for several seconds. In the meantime, essence drain, with no bonuses to spell damage dealt more damage...

"

TheRedVex#3529 wrote:

You DO realize that your witch has access to sorceress skills right ?.... right ?

You do realize some people wanna play a minion build right?... right?

"

TheRedVex#3529 wrote:

You DO realize that your witch has access to sorceress skills right ?.... right ?

Yeah, I know. I know that.

"

radiosityy#4420 wrote:

Minions in general are terrible in this game, clearly none of the devs actually played this game with a minion build. I tried it and at level 40 with ALL passives put in minion damage nodes and a couple +minion level on my gear, I had 15 minions struggling to kill a single mob for several seconds. In the meantime, essence drain, with no bonuses to spell damage dealt more damage...

I agree. They are terrible. I know that in POE1 the devs clearly hated minion builds there as well, but in POE2 it feels like they really doubled down on it. It looks like Lich is apparently 2nd most played ascendancy at the moment based on poe2.ninja, but seemingly all of the top DPS players aren't even really running it for the skeletons, they're just using Cold Snap.

And yeah by comparison Essence Drain is the destroyer of worlds, Contagion is good too, it's absurd. It's VERY noticeable that most of my horde clear does not come from my minions, it comes from me getting annoyed at mobs not dying and actually casting a stupid spell that has nothing to do with them.

"

radiosityy#4420 wrote:

"

TheRedVex#3529 wrote:

You DO realize that your witch has access to sorceress skills right ?.... right ?

You do realize some people wanna play a minion build right?... right?

Private account, you're probably a SOFTCORE TRADE (lmao) random with terrible skill issues.

i'm just talking about my perspective (HCSSF) :

There's a level 91 Lich that is using storm mage and frost mage + cleric

if this guy managed to go 91 without dying the problem is ON YOU ALL.

You guys must have a huge amount of skill issues and a terrible gameplay.

Maybe learn the game, the support gems, the affixes.

Git Gud

Its gonna be a bit annoying to pure minions on your first character for count if you are rushing it. You need some stuff.

But you should be using some fire skills, as SRS is something, at least I think you will, be running.

Pick up some flame skills yo!

"

Mashgesture#2912 wrote:

Its gonna be a bit annoying to pure minions on your first character for count if you are rushing it. You need some stuff.

But you should be using some fire skills, as SRS is something, at least I think you will, be running.

Pick up some flame skills yo!

I appreciate the advice but I have only found a single spirit gem and I used it on Withering Presence which I am not even using right now...

If I could use Raging Spirits maybe I'd try it but that's not something I have access to right now.

took me 2 minutes yesterday on normal and 3 minutes this mornig on cruel......so..?

"

radiosityy#4420 wrote:

Minions in general are terrible in this game, clearly none of the devs actually played this game with a minion build. I tried it and at level 40 with ALL passives put in minion damage nodes and a couple +minion level on my gear, I had 15 minions struggling to kill a single mob for several seconds. In the meantime, essence drain, with no bonuses to spell damage dealt more damage...

What??? Im running throug cruel right now, its a breeze, i mean what are you even talking about?