style="font-family: tahoma;">Minion Combinations
By
Darkgolem
Minions are key to Gods and Heroes
(G&H). A hallmark of the game, you will have access to
followers who are able to be ordered around individually. What
type of minions you want in your squad depends upon quest you are doing
and the needs of your class.
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The Holy Trinity
The first thing to
look at is the so called "holy trinity" of most MMO's. In most
games, there are three basic needs to a self sustaining group able to
do quests or missions. One is healing, another is tanking and the
final is damage dealing. Healing, of course, applies to be able
to heal damage done to members of a group of heroes. However, in
addition to this, this can mean removing debuffs (such as disease,
poison, curses, whatever that makes one less able to do damage), and
bringing back dead members from the dead.
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href="http://tth.tentonhammer.com/modules.php?set_albumName=album113&id=soldier_volta_caere_png_jpgcopy&op=modload&name=gallery&file=index&include=view_photo.php">
alt="Tanker in Battle"
src="http://media.tentonhammer.com/tth/gallery/albums/album113/soldier_volta_caere_png_jpgcopy.sized.jpg"
style="border: 2px solid ; width: 250px;" align="left">The second
part of the trinity,
href="http://www.gods.tentonhammer.com/index.php?module=ContentExpress&func=display&ceid=88">tanking,
implies being able to take damage, being able to draw aggression (agg),
and in some cases, being able to mitigate damage. Mitigating
damage includes the concept of being able to survive being hit, by
making it hard for enemies to be able to hit you by having good armor
or being able to dodge, but also includes ways of preventing attacks
all together or making the attacks less effective, such as stunning
enemies so they cannot attack (often called "mezzing"), slowing enemies
(sometimes called "snaring") so they cannot reach you to attack, or
making enemies have a harder chance to hit anything (as opposed to
being just hard to hit yourself), known often as "debuffing".
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The final portion of the holy
trinity is damage dealing, usually separated by direct damage and
damage over time. Direct damage usually is just more damage but
in most games wears the damage dealer out (using up the energy they
have to power their direct damage effects). Damage over time is
about killing opponents quickly over a short period of time.. less
immedeatly effective than direct damage, but more able to be sustained
(often) in most games to require less rest in between combats.
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Applying the Holy Trinity to
Gods and Heroes
After a thorough
search of the articles about Gods and Heroes, the following seems to be
the trends about what character abilities will be like in Gods and
Heroes.
style="text-decoration: underline; font-family: tahoma;">At this point
style="font-family: tahoma;">, I wish to note that there might be some
differences between what inferrences I make and reality; take what is
below with a grain of salt, instead applying the concepts about
choosing what minion combos to use since until the game is publicly
available, exact information might be off.
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Ability Chart
Drawn
When picking a squad, look at your
character and see where your weaknesses are. For example, if you
decide to play a
href="http://gods.tentonhammer.com/index.php?module=ContentExpress&func=display&ceid=129">priest,
you have the healing down (under damage recovery).. but you will need
damage dealing and agression to be increased.. meaning you will need to
get minions who can do that sort of thing. On the other hand, if
you have a Magus or Gladiator, you will have damage taken care of, but
you will need tanking (either damage mitigation and aggression, plus
defensive ability) and healing to better. Once you have an idea
of what your character will be able to do and what they will need, you
need to decide on what minions you will want.
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Picking Your Minions
There appear to be 4
types of minions, from what information I can find. These are:
Infantry, Skirmishers, Spellcaster (magus) and Spellcaster
(healer). Again, I will have to venture off to speculation, but I
would expect from playing previous MMO's that Infantry will be tankers,
Skirmishers will be ranged "damage over time" damage dealers, Magus
will be "direct damage" damage dealers, and Healers will be, obviously,
healers. I should note that I wouldn't be surprised that there
are melee damage over time types, magus who have damage mitigation as
their main ability (mezzes and debuffs), and so on, since this seems to
make sense, but again, I don't
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Ability Chart
Looking at this chart, you now
should pick minions who supplement your characters abilities in Gods
and Heroes. For example, If you have a preist, you have the
healing portion of the holy trinity covered. Now pick a damage
dealer (most likely a magus) and a tank (an infantry) to go with
that. Combat would have your tank drawing agg, your magus dealing
damage, and you healing them both.
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Multiple Minions
href="http://tth.tentonhammer.com/modules.php?set_albumName=album113&id=large_battle_formations_png_jpgcopy&op=modload&name=gallery&file=index&include=view_photo.php">
alt="Multiple Minions Galore"
src="http://media.tentonhammer.com/tth/gallery/albums/album113/large_battle_formations_png_jpgcopy.sized.jpg"
style="border: 2px solid ; width: 250px;" align="right">Now that
the basics are down, lets complicate things. In Gods and Heroes,
you can have up to 4 minions, in addition to your main character.
This makes combinations of minions much more flexible, since once you
have the full trinity figured out, you still have 2 more minion
slots. In this case, you can specialize your squad to fit your
playstyle more. Lets look at an example using the priest
character I just used.
Previously you had a priest, with a
magus (for direct damage) and a infantry (for tanking). Now this
preist has access to 2 additional minions.. but what should the priest
get? First, skirmishers are (I have read) said to be able to be
use missile weapons. Let us get a single skirmisher to "pull"
targets (seperate a single target by shooting them from a distance,
pulling them from a group of enemies), and then for a forth minion, get
another infantry. It is safe to assume that preists will have
access to area of effect healing spells at some point in their
advancement. Typical battles for this group would include the
skirmisher pulling a single target with a ranged attack, then (once
succesfully separated from their enemies), the tanks would draw
agg, and the magus would blast the opponent with direct damage
spells. Meanwhile the squad leader (the player character priest)
would use area of effect healing spells to heal the tankers.
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Lets look at some other combos a
character could use:
Combination Chart
initial agg, then magi blast opponent down quickly; very quick combat,
but bad at pulling
functions as needed.
opponent, then infantry tanks opponent. Skirmishers and scout
then take opponent down quickly at range before agg taken off
tank. Flexible, and good at surviving, since most of the damage
dealers are out of reach.
them up, and magus finishes off opponents. This is all
about doing damage quickly and letting the healing minions keep one up
(rather than tanking, one just recovers faster than damage
taken). This works well when one can't tank damage (such as
against spell casters, or similar, in most games).
The nice thing about Gods and Heroes
seems to be being able to switch minions out in a camp, so for one type
of opponents, you can have one squad set up, and then change it for
another. Have fun hunting when Gods and Heroes comes out, and
remember, think about what minions you want for your squad!
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Think this a good mix of ideas?
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