I agree with basics of what you are saying but, the minions get pawned in any pvp game for instance hammer slam will kill all you minions as will mines, fire nova, wave of spikes, post mortem/plauge. so its unlikley they will even survive the first few seconds of an encounter the exception being rook's minions since they seem to fly in a pretty large are and most avoid the aoe. If you then couple this with the fact the AI is retarded even on nightmare level and dont use AOE or even target properly switching between minions and the player to spread damg etc.
You should do a 3v5 human with all human players with the 3 ppl all abusing minions and post the results.
To be honest as someone who tends to prefer the general class i would rather have minions that are harder and won't die from a single aoe spell but have reduced damage or less of them...
This is a good point, and something I had planned on doing. I had played a game of myself (Oak going Minions) vs my friend playing Torchbearer, which I thought would be a good matchup. I told him in advance the precise tactic I was going to be using so he knew exactly what to expect and was able to plan ahead to try to counter it.
While he was obviously more effective than the AI, I pushed him back every encounter we had. He was forced to play defensively losing ground the entire game, because he simply could not counteract the spirits. Even when he was able to take them down, they were very reasy for me to replace. When he tried to push forward, I could send my spirits after him and he was left with two options: 1. Stay and continue his spell(s) and die or 2. Run.
Like I said, he did fare better than the computer, and we did only play a few games with him tweaking his strats, but it was never really any contest. Note that it's not that he sucks, when I'm playing Oak with another build or another Demigod, it's about 50/50. When I play Oak this way, I haven't lost yet.
I still need to play more online against various people, though.
