Minions: an in-game display of their stats

G'day. I play a bunch of summoner characters, because I really love the general gameplay style. That also means I get involved in a bunch of summoner discussions because, hey, you love it, you talk about it, right?

One of the most annoying parts of playing, say, SRS in PoE is that I have literally no in-game idea how much damage I can do. This makes it very hard to, for example, trade-off minion damage vs defensive stats, because I can't see the effect in-game of what "+7-14 minion damage" on a gem is actually doing in real life.

I also can't just go look and be all, dang, spoopy bois, you are kicking ASS, you Kitava Herald Specters, you! Even if tooltip DPS is really, really far from the full story, it is kind of nice to have at least some sort of feedback as things get more powerful.

For melee and caster characters, I absolutely get that. Maybe it is more complex than the tooltip (hello, Blade Flurry), but even there I see *something* get bigger numbers as I get more powerful, and it might be silly, but that is kind of nice to see concrete evidence of that progress.

Because I get involved in a bunch of discussions, I also know that this is super-opaque to a lot of other people. I regularly have to explain, for example, that pretty much none of the passives in the tree apply to minions: you might get a +10 percent physical damage node, but it doesn't touch your minion.

I feel like that, combined with people literally saying "I have no idea how to work this out", and the popularity of Path of Building recommendations as the only way to see this stuff in these threads, points to a fairly strong need for more transparency in-game on our minions.


To make this a more concrete suggestion, what I'm thinking of is one of two things in terms of how this is communicated:

One is to add the minion information to the same place we have the offensive and defensive stats in the character sheet "skill" display: for, say, SRS, put a horizontal rule across under the couple of stats it shows for me, a nice big "Minion Stats" heading, and then, like, my minion stats. Whee.

The other is to add the "skills" of my minion to the list in the character sheet, so my Kitava Herald specter adds "Kitava Herald Cleave", "Kitava Herald leap slam", etc, skills, showing the relevant stats.

Finally, adding a "tab" for minions into the character sheet would also work, or heck, a whole extra dialog, if you want to go there. I like those ideas much less, but they would probably totally work.


Really, though, however you approach this, my request is: bring some transparency to minion stats so that players can learn through doing, and understand their little spoopy chompers that much better!