I only play erebus and Oak now

Two minion swarm Erebus' fighting it out? That's like... dividing by zero or something.

That was a crazy ass game. I kept bitching at Peter and Murder to buy catas when the game was our warscore 9 to your 6. I bought angels myself but we didn't get catas until like 20 minutes later by that time the game officially turned into your hands.

How very lazy of you

Whatever will all these generals do when their abilities continue to erode owing to the "I only play oak" or "LE" or "sedna" nubbinz's that are going to cry when things get adjusted?

If you get speed buffs you can run fast and your minions are all fast and blah blah blah. But I do one aoe and they are all dead since you dint buy hp items for them. Pet erebus is not a killer, he pushes and destroys.

Hey you!

I bought currency, and then I geared up, and then I bought sigils....and....then....I was expecting kills....but...then.......very few kills came...so .....I bought more sigils....expecting 1 kill....then I began to die. That was a hell of a fucking game. GG!

Umm yea what AoE are you ganna use on a 1.2k minion? And those speed items aren't the only thing you can afford since they are rather inexpensive. 3 Speed buff items cost 8650 gold + lvl4 idols 6560 gold. That isn't all that much gold for late game and you can pretty easily afford a few HP items.

Then again who cares if all your minions die. So long as they don't die in a time of need, you can get them all back with just 1 or 2 creep waves.

I play Oak minions a bunch and like the suicidal aproach for my spirits. By 10 minutes most towers are normally down and I've gotten at least 1 or 2 kills.

There are some pretty easy counters however that I won't mention just yet.

yeah lifekatana 1 AoE isn't gonna kill anything. In fact, it may just spawn up more minions. Lvl 4 store minions each have about 2k hp. The vampire's personal minions get to be around 1.5k usually. I also usually buy the hauberk of life. Oak's personal minions are a little more squishy, so I tend to prefer the erebus ones. The oak ones have their advantages though.

Or I could just go back to using horn of battle, then you're AoE's are gonna struggle to even kill my first set of minions.

I don't mean to say that erebus and oak have no weaknesses. Minions are a lot less effective when enemy giants show up. I'd much rather be playing as my usual torch bearer when that happens. The game usually doesn't reach giants though unless the enemy team is good.

Minion builds were definitely underrated. And I see a lot more minion builds than before, which is great. Before breaking out the nerf bat, though, it's best to give the metagame some time to adjust.

One of the reasons I started using minion builds was because I was facing lots of UBs and Sednas with high priests; I think minion builds are particularly effective against these two characters, both of which lack an AOE or a mass stun. I'm not sure how Ooze UBs do against minions, but minions seem to work well against spit UBs.

Some adjustments to make if you're facing minion builds:

1. Focus on armor as well as health in your items. That is, don't just stack pure health. Minion hits are mitigated by armor. A lot of the people getting torn up by minions in five seconds don't have any armor boosts at all (they go for unbreakable boots + hauberk early on). Scalemail is a worthwhile early investment.

2. Buy priests (the troop upgrade) at first opportunity. Minions, particularly spirits, will get distracted by lots of troops on the battefield.

3. Try not to stand still and tank against an Oak or Erebus using a minion build. Instead, run back a bit, move around and then re-engage; minions don't chase as well as demigods because of targetting. Furthermore, it's also harder for the demigod with the minions to repeatedly target a moving demigod in a crowd just because of all the bodies. If you sit still to fight the demigod and let the minions beat up on you, you are playing the minion swarmer's game.

4. Consider upgrading tower firepower early to get some splash damage.

5. Mass stuns work better on minions much better than on demigods. If you or your allies have frost nova or mass charm, use it.

6. Parasite Egg? I haven't used it myself yet; as I thought it was bugged.

I'm sure there's plenty of other strategies people use vs. minions that they could add.

Perhaps we should wait and see what happens for a little longer before we demand nerfs. There are some decent counters to minion builds in your list there. I'm not certain that they are good enough to really justify the awesomeness of minions, but we shall see I guess.

Oh, but about #4: Why does nobody seem to realize that towers start off with splash? The lvl 1 tower damage upgrade adds 10% more splash. It doesn't mean that they didnt have splash in the first place.

I wont disagree with you that minion builds are bad, I play them myself. However you are listing treads as a viable item to get. This is wrong, the boots almost add nothing to the build since getting the buff means getting in battle wich means exposing yourself. Boots and wand cost money too. Instead of buying some speed for 10k, I can buy 750 extra hp and a pletorha of buffs for myself. 750 extra hp combined with skill buffs will make them very sturdy indeed. Off course the item stacking have a few bugs which need to be fixed. @Regabond, that amount of money which you will only get in the very late stages of the game are better spent on buffing your minions/creeps/allies, speed is a total waste.

P.S. Taking only speed and thus no or little extra hp means that one or two aoe will kill them. For example mines will instaclear them, as will any combination of TB's aoe's. Ooze will kill them in 10 secs. Then you have divinejuctice+SoF combo, hammerslam, mass free/charm. Obviously horn is a great item for survival, but a good team will synchronize their aoe and instagib your rolly pollies.

The suggestions above arent particularily effective for the real problem with minions. If you are dying to minions a lot you are just doing something very wrong. Dying to minions isnt the issue. The issue is that minions generate tremendous map and lane control and can take down strucutres very quickly. And while all that is happening, the DG responsible for them is under absolutely no danger.

Hit and running against a minion swarm that is taking down towers fast will keep you alive, sure. But it wont save your towers and it wont get you lane control because while you are running around, the host DG is just generating more minions as you kill them.

The real problem is that preventing the minions from doing their thing requires a lot of effort. And you get no reward (gold or xp) for taking out the minions. Plus, a LE or Oak can generate minions about as fast as you can kill them. That means even if you can hold off the minion tide, you are just going to be hopelessly far behind on gold and xp very quickly.

Thats the real problem and nobody has really had any practical suggestions on how to consistently stop it. You might be able to do something about it in some situations (say a 2v2 on Crucible or something with an Ooze UB and Sedna), but in general its overpowering, annoying as hell, and very very very boring to play against.

Buying things like creep upgrades are nice, but minioners are going to be doing the same thing and just as fast. Plus they are usually going to have strong warscore due to good lane control, so they will be getting the creep upgrades sooner anyway.

Response to Jomungur's points:

1. Armor helps alot, but minions can take down a tower early on and are replaceable on the spot, leaving you with less support and the pressure of pushing out a respawning army.

2. True, but they still get mowed down quickly.

3. True again, but you're also not accomplishing anything.

4. Not useful against full minion swarms. As said, they already have splash damage in a area of 2 I believe. Plus the damage isn't near enough to take the minions down fast enough.

5. One of two real counters to a HoB minion swarm. The other is multiple AoE nukes such as hammerslam and mines at the same time.

6. If you do enough damage to kill the minions, the general probably over-extended and is about to die anyways.

However, I do believe there's some major changes coming in the next patch that'll change things around a bit.

P.S. Taking only speed and thus no or little extra hp means that one or two aoe will kill them. For example mines will instaclear them, as will any combination of TB's aoe's. Ooze will kill them in 10 secs. Then you have divinejuctice+SoF combo, hammerslam, mass free/charm. Obviously horn is a great item for survival, but a good team will synchronize their aoe and instagib your rolly pollies.

Sure, and while you are using multiple DGs to clear out a wave, the other team is capping flags and can quickly generate a new wave of minions. You got no gold or xp for your synchronized AoE either.

The issue is never dealing with a wave of minions. There are lots of ways to do that. The issue is dealing with wave after wave after wave while keeping up in gold, xp, and warscore.

Clearing out a wave of minions gets you nothing. Its just treading water. Yeah, you can come up with methods (usually involving multiple DGs) that will allows you to tread water for a while against good minion players. But eventually you are going to lose due to the lack of gold, xp and warscore.

A big problem is that minions are generally stronger than DG AoE damage if properly supported by things like HoB. They can take the AoE hit and still have subtantial hps leftover. Regulus mines do the trick for a while, but they arent going to take down 2k hp minions who are supported by a HoB once you get very far in the game.

SPEED ITEMS MAKE YOUR MINIONS FASTER!!!!! Treads are a VERY GOOD item for minion builds.

Boots of speed +10%, wand of speed + 25%, journeyman treads +15% or +65% with the proc.

15 minions hitting for 80 damage with +100% movement speed will run you down and kill you. I don't have to expose myself. In fact the journeyman treads make it even easier for me to bait an enemy after me while staying just out of there reach. All the while my minion swarm is beating on them. If I'm in a creep wave, AoE will just generate more minions for me. I would submit a replay, but we can't do really do that.

*edit*

by the way, in the op I mentioned that I killed an erebus at his health crystal with minions. This was after him bat swarming away from them either once or twice. They easily ran him down despite his efforts to bat swarm away. He did manage to make it to his health crystal but it didn't help enough .

The idea that minions are powerful, but easy to escape...is false. People just don't realize that speed items make them run faster too.

Faster minions means you can't escape the 10+ minions chasing you down. Who cares about 2k or 3k hp minions if they only move as fast as the Rook. They may be good at taking on structures but that's it and that won't get you any gold. By level 10 Erebrus can deal 1k DPS with his 10 night walkers alone, plus all his other 6 idol minions. So would you rather have 1k+ DPS that has to stand still and can't kill DGs or would you rather have 1k+ DPS that can hunt down any DG that thinks it can take on a full wave?

Oh, but about #4: Why does nobody seem to realize that towers start off with splash? The lvl 1 tower damage upgrade adds 10% more splash. It doesn't mean that they didnt have splash in the first place.

Because the in-game description is ambiguous. "Buildings gain 10% damage and splash damage." I think many people read the 10% modifier as applying only to base damage, and that the mention of the splash damage is to indicate something new. Probably should read "Buildings gain 10% to base damage and splash damage", or better yet "Buildings gain 10% to damage".

Well I suppose that I knew that was the reason that people think they don't start with splash. I just figured that people woulda noticed that towers of light kill multiple minotaurs and minions at the same time even at the very begining of the game before anyone buys tower damage upgrades.

Now that they've temporarily removed the horn of battle, you might as well use Swift Anklet.

There is no reason to nerf minion builds, as these are the one of the only things that makes Oak and Erebus competitive. After trying for several months to find success with an Oak assassin/ light minion build and getting my arse handed to me, I gave up, played Erebus with Horn of Battle, figured out how good minions could be, and switched back to an Oak minion build and have been on the winning side a lot more often. But the point is, even though I'm not a great player, I have tried a dozen different Oak builds and only with minions have I been able to run with UB, Reg and the other dominant DGs.

The best counter to a minion build is to concentrate on the Demigod himself. If he's dumped all of his gold and skills into minions, chances are he's pretty squishy. If he dies, they die. Easier said than done, sure, especially against a good general player, but very doable.

And I switched to the anklet along time ago and find it to be more usefull than the HoB; not only does it make your minions faster, it helps you stay away from UBs and Regs who can drop you in a few seconds. The Horn is great, but once you have Vlemish and level 2 or 3 minion generating skill they replenish so quickly that the speed is worth more than the HP. It doesn't matter if they have 2k HP and are regaining 200 every second, if they can't catch that TB at 600 life as he heads for his towers.

There is no reason to nerf minion builds, as these are the one of the only things that makes Oak and Erebus competitive. After trying for several months to find success with an Oak assassin/ light minion build and getting my arse handed to me

Thats your problem, not the DGs. Assassin Oak is strong if you know what you are doing. Assassin Erebus is also strong in many situations. When HoB was around, there was no question that a HoB based minion build was better for each, but thats just because that item was pretty overpowered.

It doesn't matter if they have 2k HP and are regaining 200 every second, if they can't catch that TB at 600 life as he heads for his towers.

I dont think that you understand why HoB builds were good. The point is that there wont be towers for very long with a HoB Erebus build. When you go full minion you dont care that much about killing generally. You simply take down structures at an unbelievable rate, get extreme map control, and win without killing much (all the while never putting yourself in actual danger). I lost a number of games to minion builds where there were 0 total deaths.

Minions are generally an inferior way of killing good opponents since they have no burst damage or special abilities. They only get kills if the other team screws up.

The argument against Swift Anklet is that the relatively cheap Wand of Speed does the job very well also without taking up a favor item slot (or even an item slot).

Double UBs are a very good counter to minion builds, if your opponents will let you use them. Ooze + Post Mortem + Plague + Nature's Reckoning works pretty well.

Passive skills don't stack, do they?

Like I said earlier, I've switched my stance on minions. I'm gonna wait and see if people can come up with some good counters. I have lost games using minion erebus/oak. It usually felt like their team was simply better coordinated though.

As for favor items. I was using ring of divine might because I didn't feel that was OP like the horn. Now I'm kinda undecided between tome of endurance and swift anklet. Tome of endurance gives your minions some extra hp and give your hero 400 HP. That extra 400 really helps because I don't really get to do any health stacking since minions alone are so expensive. Swift anklet is nice for outrunning people and making my minions faster though.

I've played as a minion lord eb and against them. The good ones are nearly impossible to stop, and the same for oak, and is impossible to stop when their team is co-ordinated. It's fun when minions are in your base tanking your towers while the lord or oak caps your portal flag, and your their as whatever class AOEing everything. It is even more fun when you AOE the minions to half hp only to see them back up at full in seconds.

I think the insane bonuses that minions pick up off their DG need some nerfing, I've seen 2.5k minions who can survive hammer slams to kill rooks and every other AOE as well, the only annoying thing can be mines. At the moment most of the time I'm forced to run or double/triple team the oak/lordeb. I've tried many counters and yes only going after the DG seems to work, ignoring the minions even though they are tearing your base up.

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