Also unintended thing:

The item upgrade slot in NPCs, stores the item there instead of shooting it out when you close the interface. This isn't normally a problem, however I just encountered something rather stupid ..

So those Golden ladies, one of them takes you to a new stage with chests right? And she can bless one of your items. I put my item in, rolled affixes on it, put it back in the slot, then closed the interface, since it's stored there, she disappeared with my item lol! I lost my weapon

im not too familiar with minion builds other than clones (adept/hashashin), but at least you won't repeat the mistake of leaving an item in the upgrade window anymore haha

one big helpful thing for this game is the public data. you can essentially find a ton of useful information throughout this document
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BfKgYtFYOS5y8MMacgA_Um9wyUyivQtlY0_-v8Q1mog/edit?pli=1#gid=1425712529

here you can find all item affixes, whether they are prefix/suffix. you can have 3 each on an item so this makes it much easier to see what mods you can and should roll for your build.
it also gives you a bunch of information on skills and how they scale and such.

for instance, under creatures, you said you used crows.
they have movement speed, hp regen, attack damage, skill damage, max hp, avoidance, and accuracy.

could be your minions need some avoidance. i don't know. again i never played minions

don't be shy to test things out either. one mistake a lot of people make when starting/in the early game is to include skill modifiers that give MINUS, -skill modifier, which means your minions/skills will do less damage. this is often done for another desired effect, but make sure you don't have any -skill modifiers linked to your damage dealing minions/skills
you can double check the skills tooltip to show what modifiers effect it (highlighted ones do) and see what the damage is.

if you'd like i can put together a small early game guide to a proven strong build which blasts through the game just so you can do some hell gates and get a char where you can test things out

Thanks for the spreadsheet, I think I might have just not had a viable build. I've looked at Ravens vs Crows, they don't have a sizeable difference, except for 0.7 missile reflect. So pretty useless, unless there's some interaction I havent experimented with, but using them already locks you into picking 2 classes, Sentinel and Feral. The absorb, and health regen doesn't look useful on them at all.

On Creatures sheet, I'm not sure what the Z/AA columns are for, there's no denotation for them. But if it's the sum the pet gets total, considering Lower/Upper value and all the BonusPerLevel at max lvl, then there's no difference between Crows and Ravens (not sure on that one). Anyway, as far as I've seen so far, avoidance is hard to get, it requires exorcist or glyphs. I looked at the ItemAffixes sheet you gave me, Minion Avoidance is only on Awakened which is pretty much not going to be accessible to me right now.

I broke and looked at other pet builds, doves just look better at least they heal and you don't need to worry about their damage output. I guess I'll try some more stuff, I just feel bad about spending like 8-10 hours on something I have to delete.

Anyway thank you for the resources. On another note, I made a Feral, Geomancer melee character, and he's absolutely destroying in Weretiger form, with the fire aura buff on me activated on transformation, I added Hashashin at lvl 30 for extra crit multipliers and I'm having a extremely opposite experience to struggling to kill anything before.

Is there an easier/faster way to try builds? I would assume you just take one char, and respec him with the book when you find more gear. It's probably better than keep repeating the campaign. I'm not sure. I didn't have the coins, so I wondered if there's a character editor tool or something. I'm the type who likes to tinker

Originally posted by Psixi:

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this game does have mods, and there is a QoL mod you should get, and you can also get one that makes the respec book cost 1 gold so you can use as many as you want.

yeah you just make one character (i have 3) and keep trying stuff.
i have one char for item find to farm for glyphs, gear (for the breakdown shard things) and hell gates. then i have another char i tinker around with builds on, and another char that is currently specced fully into XP then i'll be making him into my planned immortal unlimited DPS build, which is also a weretiger build

another mod i use though allows single use skills to combine so that you get the most amount of skill modifiers you can.
i use weretiger on its own, not its transformed version (white tiger or w/e) because the buffs are better. and with this mod i can still get 2 columns of buffs to modify it. great mod.
and yes, once i get finished with gearing up the build should be immortal, as in unable to die and actually unable to take damage. and its damage should basically be unlimited.

weretiger is great, but i find it very slow even with max movement speed and very high attack speed and ignite (spreads to nearby enemies). its clear just isn't great.
my farming builds all use the talisman skill because they auto target and pierce but has very low base dmg. with 3-5 pierce and focusing base damage/skill damage/poison damage and trigger on movement skill, i blink once (adept) and several screens instantly die. its pretty fun

i really like to tinker with games like this too. the one problem with this game is resources. this isn't the most popular game (unfortunately) but i love it, and so there is a lot of info that just isn't available and you kind of have to figure it out yourself.

like i said i haven't done minion builds but i'd like to. the weretiger combine skill minion thing gives insane buffs which i think can be very much abused.

you will get to a point in this game where defense basically does not matter. it won't matter how much avoidance or absorb you have, if you get hit you'll die. keep this in mind. so really the best defense is a great offense. killing things off screen and super fast so nothing can even get close to you. if you keep dying to projectiles then block and proj deflect are very useful.

Hmm, keeping an eye on this, maybe minion tank stats need a buff? I think the normal minion builds usually prioritize DPS over tankiness.

As Junk says it is sort of a fundamental problem with the way things scale that defenses in general get kind of useless once you have massive packs of monsters. Open to any ideas on the direction to take this.

Originally posted by adam:

Hmm, keeping an eye on this, maybe minion tank stats need a buff? I think the normal minion builds usually prioritize DPS over tankiness.

As Junk says it is sort of a fundamental problem with the way things scale that defenses in general get kind of useless once you have massive packs of monsters. Open to any ideas on the direction to take this.

honestly im not sure how much you could do about this other than make damage a percentage based thing eventually, or something.
this is a very common problem with any infinite scaling endgame in games like this.

i did finish gearing up though, and i actually have achieved 100% reduced damage taken and i cannot take damage (from hits anyway). i can still take damage from DoT effects it seems, so not sure when the damage scaling of those will become my full hp bar every tick.

im kind of exploring some minions stuff right now
if you had the trigger on minion attack linked to your minions, so they trigger themselves. that has a -50% skills damage multiplier, and 2 of them will make your minions do zero damage. just stuff like that to watch out for

so far as i can tell the strongest minions look most likely to be taming sari (exorcist/hashashin). just they all look to have such low base damage, which isn't raised by attack or skill damage and as far as im aware isn't affected by additional damage (fire/lightning/ice/poison). taming sari does has a base of 12 minions though, so you could easily get upwards of 80+.

yeah this game i don't think minions are all that strong offensively or defensively. you can however get minion modifiers on just about everything, so maybe that would make up for it IDK

haven't done the testing to see if minions share some of your stats, like crit/crit dmg or not either. if they don't theres just zero chance they're worth building into at all IMO

If i recall correctly somewhere around hell gate 12+ this problem starts happening. Basically any elite enemy that has the vampire modifier becomes invincible to minions. Later hell gates this is a very common mod to get. They attack one minion instantly killing them and they heal back to full.

Minion damage is really bad with how diminishing returns work and not getting any true way outside of leveling up and a couple of flat skill damage sources to scale flat damage. Minions are not viable at all long term.