Minion

Minions are Zombies, Skeletons and Spectres, which can be summoned with certain skills.

Minions have their own base damage. Zombies and skeletons do physical damage, spectres do whatever damage they used to do before they died. Their damage is affected by minion damage passives skills, support gems linked to the minion skill, and Auras.

Other damage stats from your gear or passive skills do not affect minions.

Whenever you or one of your minions kills an enemy, all of your Flasks gain charges.

If one of your minions gets a kill, the minion's Increased Item Rarity is added to yours and the total is used.

Totems, Traps and Remote Mines are not counted as minions, they are Remote Skills.

Passives

Minion Instability causes your Minions to explode for 33% of their life in Fire Damage once they reach Low Life (35%). This explosion damage is boosted by minion life (obviously), and also minion damage.

Necromantic Aegis will take all the stats on your Shield and apply them to your Minions (removing it from you in the process). This includes the base block-chance of the shield. What is not transferred are "X... while holding a shield" passives, since you are still technically holding the shield in question. You will gain these benefits. However, you will lose the other shield passives bonuses (like block and +defenses), as the minions do not actually have those passives and you have effectively zero shield.

• Please test and confirm these new intended mechanics. Zharmad (talk) 09:08, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

The following Basic Passives affect your Minions:

• Minion Damage (15%)
• Minion Life (10%)
• Minions (+1 summonable of each type)

The following Notable Passive affects Minions:

• Lord of the Dead (10% Increased Minion Life, 15% Increased Minion Damage, +1 Max Zombies, +2 Max Skeletons)

Spectre choices

As players progress through the game, there are several mobs that present interesting choices to supplement summoner and hybrid-summon builds alike. Even for a non-summoner build, a single curse-casting spectre whose AI helps them stay away can be quite useful. In practice, it's not that easy to keep a sole spectre alive without having other bodies around to shield it - this means parties and hybrid/full-summon builds. NB: Spectres keep their original monster-level, so you can't take a normal mob into Merciless and expect it to survive 1-hit.

The following short-list are spectres that are compatible with parties in general since they are both useful and have a relatively low graphics load for others' sakes:

• Enduring Cry Bears, various (Act 2)
• Chaos DoT Bears, Waterfall Caves 1 (Act 2)
• Frenzy-inducing Gorillas, Old Fields.
• Curse-specialists (who doesn't want auto-curse? :D)

Here is the full-list of potentially useful ones sorted by their abilities + location. Act 3-specific ones have been renamed to reduce the spoiler-potential.

Ranged multi-shot/AoE: High DPS, and generally compatible with traditional ranged/spell supports such LMP, Chain, Faster Projectiles, etc.

• Arc - Barracks mages
• single-target Arc - Solaris lightning mages (slow to cast)
• Spark - Sins-3 skeleton mages
• Spark/Thorns - Crematorium & battlefield lightning mages
• Spark/Shock nova - Prisoner’s Gate goatmen
• Poison Arrow - Upper Prison Archers Sins 1 skeleton Archers, Western Forest archers, etc.
• Poison-Bomb - Sewers "Mages"
• Lightning Arrow - many skeleton archers
• Fire-bomb - Crematorium "Mages"
• Fireballs - Rocky Climb Goatmen, Slums/Marketplace Queens
• LMP/Fork fireballs - Solaris fire mages
• LMP ele projectiles - Pyramid cold mages (NOT Waterfall 2), Crematorium fire mages.
• LMP chaos/phys projectiles - Warehouse Serpents
• LMP chaos bolts - Pyramid constructs
• Flame totem attack - Docks monkeys
• Machinegun fire-bolts - Lunaris 2/3 mob

Combat Support/Distraction: Those that make better tanks and are melee.

• Flicker strike - SGcave pirates, Weaver spiders, Sewer leaders
• Frenzy-inducing cry - Gorillas in the Old Fields
• Leap slam - Melee Goatmen, Sewer Maws
• Whirling blades - various undying crawlers (use Marketplace versions, they come with Puncture too)
• Roll-attacks - golems (doesn’t seem to hit many, use Crematorium versions)
• Fire-rolls - Crematorium Golems.
• Enduring Cry - many Bears in Act 2 (attacking decoy totem).
• Chaos DoT Aura - Waterfall 1 Bears (the DoT itself is not as impressive since monsters have more life).
• Unrighteous Fire - Lunaris mob. (FIRE)
• Temporal Chains/Projectile Weakness/Detonate Dead - Lunaris Mages
• Long-melee Vulnerability-on-hit - Lunaris 2/3 mob

Curse specialists: Because it's cheaper to summon a single spectre . Comes with lvl 20 curses in Merciless.

• Projectile Weakness - Waterfall 1 Skeleton Archers (high cast rate)
• Warlord’s Mark - Oak’s Devoted (high cast rate, easy to get!)
• Elemental Weakness - Church Necromancer
• Flammability - Crematorium Necromancer
• Conductivity - Chamber of Sins Necromancer
• Enfeeble - Lower Prison Necromancers
• Vulnerability - (Upper Prison Necromancers?)
• Temporal Chains - Shipyard Grave Cave Sirens (low cast rate, prefers Freezing Pulse...)
• Vulnerability - many Sirens in Act 1 (low cast rate, prefers Freezing Pulse...)