I agree

Idol minions shoud either cost gold to summon (base of 50 with an additional 50 for each level should do it) or they should provide gold and xp when killed. 

Unique minions (like spirits, yetis, etc.) should not provide gold or xp, but their health should be about 20-30% lower for the damage they do - right now with support they are too effective imo

Providing gold from kills on these would be foolish. It would feed the other team and actually help them, you would be a hinderence to your team for using minions.

I already don't use minions with a general, building them instead as assasins, why would we want yet another reason to not use them?

/Agreed

You want to get rid of the Yeti's?  Find Sedna and kill her (they fade away if you do). 

Your whole complaint is what makes Generals good/diffrent than Assassins and I personally don't want to see them merged.

-Jara

I think this thread should focus on thinking up a penalty for letting your minions die, rather than be a tunnel vision of "give XP/gold when killed".

For example, consecutive summons could cost more mana, or the minions will be weaker. Another idea is making a minion's death hurt your HP and mana.

The former two would obviously be on an internal cooldown of 3 minutes or so. It shouldn't be too difficult to get your minions to last 3 minutes, considering their HP. This penalty would also reset immediately if your Demigod died.

These penalties would multiply by a certain factor, say 2x, which would stack. If you summoned them twice within 3 minutes, the second time would cost 2 times the mana. The third time would be 2*2x = 4x the mana, and so on. The same goes for the health and mana you'd lose if they died.

The internal cooldown will not reset back to 3 minutes when you summon them the second time, because that could lead to a very nasty penalty which you end up having to spend 3 minutes without minions to remove.

As a disclaimer, I'm just throwing numbers and ideas. I'm not saying it should be exactly like this, but I think making them give XP/gold is the wrong way to go about it for the reasons stated by previous posters.

IMO it could be that Sedna might need a nerf.  In the past I've had a very hard time killing her, but it's hard to say what gear was she using, was she just healing likee crazy etc.

But your discription with max out yeti's and the like, that's mid to late game right?  Most demigods should have leveled up a ton, so your argument for denying experiance is a little weak imo.

I play Erebus primarily.  I can bat form through your yeti's and then just move on searching for you.  I'm faster than you.  I can bite you which slows you down and reduces your armor.  You try to potion, heal or teleport, I can stun you (or all your yeti's).  Late to mid game Erebus can have crazy good health regen (if you've speced for it) and he can be very hard to kill.

Anyway, just trying to show that they're are counters and it might be that she is best countered via another general. 

I'd also suspect that the Unclean Beast would do very well against her as he's very fast has a ton of damage over time spells and his ooz ability would most likely make quick quick work of you're minions.

You know what, sit there and think up counters all day.  I'll sit at my fountain then, you cannot counter that.  I'll have 5 QoT's sitting at the fountain throwing 10 minions at a time at you, mulching 5 every 7 seconds to deal 3750 damage to an AOE every 7 seconds to boot.  The whole concept that is in question here is the absolute lack of consequence for martyr armies, not how to counter a guy who is behind a wall of minions or simply not available to even be attacked.

Unclean beast is definately not a counter to minions.  He never got to me once.  He'd make an attempt to attack me, he'd spray his DOT if he got remotely close, I'd heal, and my minions would rip him apart until he ran away.  Unclean beast has 0 chance at killing sedna like this if sedna has half a brain and stays clear of him.  By the time he was remotely close I was camping my towers.

It's about the constant harassment of 10 minions who are beefy as hell without any way of stopping it, and getting nothing for killing them.  If they fed the enemy team this would have serious reprocussions.

Sedna and Queen are on the same page here as they can summon at will.  Oak and Erebus are not since they have to do something to get minions (kill enemies, kind of).

Yes, this was mid-late game, I was 0-3 to start, but ended 5-3.  I struggled early on and primarily played defensively using heals and capturing flags, soaking up exp, etc.  Once i got my 10 minions I was completely untouchable.

To me the simplest thing would be increase the cool down.  If it takes longer than 25 seconds to kill them, the cool down should be long enough to give another demigod a chance to kill the minions and then go after the general who's minions they just killed.

A gold penalty as Ke5trel is suggesting leaves a bad taste in my mouth (I.E. I don't like that solution much).  I understand it would provide a penalty and make you care about them, but that penalty would be hard to make right.  Too high and no one will use the minions.  Too low, and why bother?

Yah we are aiming for the spot in the middle.  That's why it's called "balance"

I'm not attached to any particular mechanic here, but the problem is an old one and never really got addressed in Beta. 

At one point Oak and Sedna had effective uniques and just as rain9441 says - people would sit at the crystal, trigger wand of speed, and send their yetis and spirits off to destroy the citadel.  So they radically nerfed minions and no one used them after that.

No one has ever really used idol minions effectively (with the exception of Sevenix, maybe)

Now in release we have effective uniques again and good idol minions, which is great.  But in a week or so people will be screaming to nerf them...

As an example, I played a 1 v 1 game this morning where I stacked three levels of priests on my Oak and pinned my opponent to his crystal while my spirits downed his citadel.  We were at his crystal and I was getting better health regen than he was.  No I'm not going to hit 6 priests until level 10 or so, but Generals barely need to invest in equipment beyond mana at this point because they get more cost-effective damage and health from idols.

Take the stacking exploit out and you still have an issue with the cost-free summonables...CD and mana don't count, you learn to time and budget to maintain the advantage...

Minions don't need a nerf, they just need to reward careful management and punish poor management.  How do we do that?

@Jaradakar:  As the game is new, and none of us have been playing in beta, I would say "I don't know if they were utilizing the best of their character".  We were playing a 2v2, all of us on vent, over hamachi (With the latest patch, we just can't seem to get a 4v4 going in custom game ><).  It was pretty evenly balanced.  It was Oak + Sedna vs Queen + Unclean.  They were doing great, the war effort was hand in hand close most of the game.  Then suddenly it shifted and my minions became out of whack.  I'd camp the flags when they came.  They couldn't take me down and ended up running away.  I'm pretty sure it occured about the time I could get 4 yetis.  I didn't even have maxed level idols, they were only rank 3!

It was very noticable though how I was abusing my role.  They were unhappy about it during and after the game.  It was really cheesy but I think that just comes into play quite a bit when developing new strategies.  They just couldn't handle the massive amount of minion spam I had, and thats all there was to it.  They could collectively take out the minions without a problem but it took time, effort, and didn't payout at all.  When they were all said and done I'd just resummon the force anyway.

@Kestrel:  I believe the summoning of multiple different level idols is a bug.  Until official word comes out I would frankly stay away from discussing it's balance.  For now assume players are abiding by the 6 idol minion maximum instead of the theoretical 24.

"Minions don't need a nerf, they just need to reward careful management and punish poor management.  How do we do that?"

A) Make it so minions give exp/gold.  Feeding minions would be a bad idea, and have certain minion types (Priests/bishops) give significantly more than average.  Demigods could pick off minions for bonus exp/gold at will and force the other guy to micromanage better.

Make it so minion bonuses from generals are an aura.  This includes morale.  If you're minions arent within 20 feet they are baseline minions with crappy stats.  The power comes through the upgrades.  And make it so they give gold/exp.  Aura is for player owned minions only, not entire team minions of course.

C) Increase cooldown of idol summons to 1-2 minutes.  1 yeti summon = 30 second cooldown, 2 = 1 minute, 4 = 2 minutes.

D) Timed life minions: Some last X duration then die.  Forces user to be hard-pressed on mana to keep resummining, which results in heavy mana pot usage, pricy helmet purchases, etc, to reliably keep a minion army alive.

E) Minions on a leash: Minions will always try and regroup if not within 30 range of the controller.  Keeps you from constantly harassing enemies from across the map.

F) Anti-minion items.  EG purge stick vs warlock in Dota (For those who don't know, you could buy an item that had 11 charges of purge which wuld instantly destroy the Warlock's ultimate ability, which was to summon an Infernal).

*) In combonation with any of the above: Minions do not die when the demigod controlling it dies.  Thus kill a minion-heavy demigod and reap the benefits of slaughtering his minions before they can retreat, giving you extra gold/experience for the effort.

Didn't bother reading all the replies Ill check back later.

If you make them give XP/Gold GENERALS will be utterly useless at start of the game as a "general". Minions 1+2 and maybe 3 would be just xp/gold food for enemy....


If they give xp/gold Ill be not using a general as it should be since it would be very wasteful knowing my army that can be slaughtered in seconds or killed by a rook smash just fed him a ton of gold and xp.

Yes..I too find this a terrible idea. A General who's away from the front isn't getting any, EXP, so that's it's own penalty.

Quite frankly, I've never seen this problem. All the assassins have warp/stun/snipe to disable your ability to run away. Are you sure you just didn't face terrible players?

Honestly a simple enough solution, if any is required, is to just lower the movement speed of minions. That would lessen the impact of someone just sitting back and sending them in.

But I don't really think that is neccessary. All the games I've played have been heavily in favor of assassins, to be frank.

@Jaradakar:

It's extremely debatable, and we are debating it!  I know the dev's are smart enough to take forum posts like these with a grain of salt, especially after 2.5 days of a game being released.  As time goes by though, we will begin to see what strategies are more effective and less effective.  I'm very certain upgraded minion spam is an effective mid/late game strategy.  I'm also very bound to putting in some sort of gold/exp reward for killing them.  Maybe it's my dota heritage and being extremely mindful of my scout hawk giving 100g for free or the necrobook guys giving 100...  Nothing like saying to your enemy "+100 gold tyvm".