Just tried to play a multiplayer game with a support QoT, that is mostly with Brabmle Shield (for using on myself and allies) and focusing on minions for damage instead of myself.The idea is to have a general be...well, a general. Mainly fight from the back and help support her army and allies.

At the start of the game, it was a bit ok as nobody was yet very powerful. Using brable thorns on myself and allies allowed a competitive edge (although not big enough to kill warlords).

I focused mainly on Bramble Shield, morale and as an afterthought, shamblers. I spend most of my money buying miinions, hoping that the extra damage and Hp might make them formidable. As a result, I only had very few leftover gold for items, which I put on armor and mana (with the occasional mana potion)

The build sucked.

While at the early game it looks balanced while you don't have much damage from opposing DGs, as the game progressed, it became harder and harder for me to do anything other than run away from battle. The problem here is that for assasins it's absolutely trivial to kill the QoT, bypassing all the minions. What would happen is that as soon as I neared a DG, they would warp directly next to me and start smacking me around. At the start I could hold my own but later on as they focused on items and artifacts, there was no chance, even with all the firepower of my minions upon them.

The problem seems to be that while the minions individually have good HP and can survive damage, nobody bothers to kill them. This means that a DG who focuses on Armor and Damage has all the bonuses on one place: Himself. The QoT and generals have it all spread out among their forces. Even worse, as soon as the general dies, all their minions go as well, which means that if you have your opponent at death's doorstep, your minions can't finish the job.

At some point in the late game, I remember I was running away from an UCB which seemed to have all the broken artifacts and items (warpstone, wyrmskins, mage slayer). OTOH I had morale at max, Shield at max (on me) and all my minions around me. I run next to a friggin fortress and a tower for the extra oomph. I still didn't manage to do kill him while he simply followed me without problems wherever I went. I even cast the shield twice but it wasn't enough.

There's also the problem that minion focused generals have it very hard, if not impossible, to kill DGs. If your opponent starts running away, then forget it. Your minions are slow as molasses and your pitifull DMG won't manage to make the kill even if you do catch up to them yourself. Thus you have to focus on creep and tower killing if you want to make some money. Of course the problem is that DG assasination is hugely more lucrative than minion killing and in any case, an assasin can kill minions and towers as well as a general. Only the assasin can have a chance at killing other DGs as well.

In the end we did pretty OK for the times we had been killed but, I'm afraid it was despite the Build I chose, not because of it.

So some suggestions

Bramble Shield

Although this is my favourite skill, as it allows me to play a somewhat supporting character, at the moment this is ok in the early game but totally impotent in the late game. I suggest the following.

• Make it do damage on a hit. It's a bramble shield after all. This will really help the QoT to not always be selected as the only target and perhaps DGs may opt to go for the minions if hitting the QoT is too painful. This gives the extra benefit that it counters somewhat DGs (like the UCB) which focus on attack speed as they get more damage back. The damage should increase exponentially as you reach the later levels in order to be of any use.
• Halve the recharge time. This is really annoying if you want to play support, as it basically doesn't allow you to protect anyone worth a damn. By reducing the recharge time, you still have it balanced through the (considerable) mana cost. If you don't want to reduce the charge time, at least reduce the mana to allow more casts.
• Increase the absorbtion at the later levels.

These of course don't all need to be applied at once, but at least one of them should be considered.

Minions

There should be a way to help a general focused on minions stand around to fight for longer. At the moment the only ones moderately useful are the siege archers, and that is mostly because generals can realistically only focus on buildings for some gold.

Minotaurs

These should get some kind of ability to allow them to do anything useful. Suggestions (choose one)

• Guarding: Make the minotaurs impassable objects of some sort. In the sense that DGs can't simply walk over them to heard to the General. This would allow them to block the passage until they are killed (hopefully). This is probably quite difficult to implement however so an alternative would be...
• Protection: Either allow the minotaurs to absorb part of the damage dealt on the general or make the general.
  
• Berserk: If the general is killed while the minotaurs still live, they do not expire with him/her. Rather, they get a 100% in damage and attack speed and stay alive for 10 seconds or so. This would at least give the general a chance to kill a DG who went for the suicide attack.
• Slowdown: Minotaur attack slows down attack and movement speed. 5% per level of the minotaur. Something to not only help the general survive, but also give them a chance to make a kill.

Actually, I think the berserk idea might be good for all minions to have regardless. This would mean that if I have 6 minions around me and the assasin comes and tackles me one on one, if I die, my 6 minions suddenly go apeshit and slaughter the enemy as well. This should give second thoughts to enemy assasins going in the middle of a fully surrounded general without any fear, as it should be

Siege Archers

As I said, these are moderately useful. I can't think any change.

Priests

They are generally useful by themselves due to the healing but they don't do anything interesting in battles. They've got a lot of HP sure, but since nobody attacks them, it doesn't really matter.

Suyggestions (choose one)

• Make healing a priority: Currently it seems that there's isn't much difference in level 1 priest healing and level 4. Healing is generally slow and not really useful in battle. I think we should make this much more powerful by making the priests focus on that instead of shooting bolts. Perhaps there can be an ability to force them to explicitly only heal, or it simply becomes more powerful. The idea should be that a general with priests around (with a level relative to the game length, so level 1 priests for the early game, but you need level 3-4 on the late) should be much harder to kill due to his HP going back very quickly. This will force assasins to focus on killing the priests before taking on the DG. At the moment, they are irrelevant.
• Give them other minion boosting abilities: Perhaps instead of simply having levels of priests with extra bonuses each, we can give them extra abilities depending on their level. So all priests should have healing as their primary job, but other than that it could go as
  • Level 1: healing
  • Level 2: Healing + Bloodlust (slowly give other minions and creeps at 100% increase in attack speed)
  • Level 3: healing + Bloodlust + Sloth (slowly give opposing minions and creeps 50% decrease in attack speed)
  • Level 4: Healing + Bloodlust + Sloth + Ressurect (Percentage of ressurecting dead (non-priest) minions and creeps within a range)

As a matter of fact, something similar might be possible for my ideas about Minotaurs as well. so Level 1 = Guarding, Level 2 = Guarding + Berserk etc.

So, this is big enough already. Hopefully we'll see minions get some boost in the future because otherwise the RTS element of the game will be impotent.