It's a balancing problem. If they would make minions stronger some assassins would have a really hard time. A good minion build can do a LOT of damage to a demigod without strong AoE. Torchy will roast the whole bunch and ask for seconds though. It is really hard to find a good balance without blurring the border between high burst damage to a single target and AoE. I think they did a pretty good job on the balance mostly.

eh, some minions are good and others aren't.

Archer Idols, Priest Idols, Erebus' Nightwalkers, and Oak Spirits are all good minions. No issues. I use them all the time and get great results.

Minotaur Idols, Queen's Shamblers, and Sedna's Yetis are all crap. need buffs. needs buffs bad.

i don't think anything needs to be done except improving the underpowered minions. the rest of them seem to work well and be quite balanced. 

I have tried numerous minion builds but they rarely seem to work, 2 problems:

1) AoE wtfpwns them

2) Enemy demigods can just run away from minions easily

I would say in reality they are crap. Going minion build with Erebus, actually really gimps you very badly.

The only reason why no one complains is that they are free.

QoT and Sedna minions cost a lot of Mana, and are just not efficient enough.

Oak is the only viable minion build general IMO. He can run a minion build in any game, as he has a lot of powerful synergies with his minions. His minions are highly movable and ignore creep waves.

QoT and Sedna, can run minion builds, but will be especially weak against TB and a mine heavy Reg (even an Ooze UB, can make your build ineffective). Seen as most games I play usually include one of those characters, it makes it silly to run the build. They definately need some more buffs as far as minions go.

I will disagree with this, in terms that Sedna and QoT minion builds, they are effective in certain games.

Against any AoE proficient player, it is a waste of time.

I think the idea is that there needs to be some careful balance, with minions to make a minion build a little more effective.

It should be a viable alternative to an assassin type build, at the moment it is simply not. I find minion builds fun to play, I use them quite a lot, but I acknowledge them as being fun. They are ridicuously expensive with idol cost, and minion items.

I would really like to see a complete split in the item shops for Generals and Assassins, that would be completely cool. Where Generals would get specific items that would help them, rather than having a choice of Assassin items and a lot of expensive minion items.

I think Stardock/GPG have got it wrong with the next two DGs being assassins, because people play them more. It is simply because minion builds are not that viable and Generals (Sedna and QoT especially) are usually gimped with at least two skill trees and 1 stat upgrade tree that are completely ineffective.

I still think that a great way to improve minions is to give them status proccing effects. For example, Sedna is in woeful need of a snare, Yetis that could snare would make them far more tempting to use. Maybe, Shamblers could have a vines skill, where your opponent is rooted for 1 sec. Make it a 5% proc effect. Just little things to improve their use.

I think the HP/Damage is fairly OK, they just need something a little more special about them.

Edit : Also, I would like to see minion idols being scrapped as they are. The general should purchase the idol for a nominal fee like 500GP, then the idol should summon minions based on the level of the DG. The idol should be non-sellable and this would also remove the summon multiple minions problem.