Minion master type hero?

[Lessingham]

Hey I've got a basic idea I would like to discuss with you, people much more skilled in WE than I am. I've got an idea based on the minion master build of Necromancer in first Guild Wars game. Whole idea of this build was to command a vast army of undead minions while at the same time controlling their degrading health, managing who they attack and so on. Would something like that be possible in Warcraft 3? I know that there are some heroes who rely on their summons, but what I wanted is a whole spellbook crafter around summoning minions and buffing them. I think that hard cap of 4/5 spells per hero can damage that idea, but I'm not sure.

 

[cleavinghammer]

You should be able to have spells with the effect of "all minions go here/attack here/stop moving".

 

[Pyrogasm]

I think that hard cap of 4/5 spells per hero can damage that idea

You can use a spellbook to hold up to 11 spells, vastly increasing the number of spells available. You could even make a second custom spellbook to 'level up' the skills inside the first spellbook in conjunction with some triggers and a bunch of no-target, instant-cast spells. This would function like the normal level up process in every way except for showing a number on the level up spellbook to indicate the number of available level-ups.

 

[Cespie]

You can use a spellbook to hold up to 11 spells, vastly increasing the number of spells available. You could even make a second custom spellbook to 'level up' the skills inside the first spellbook in conjunction with some triggers and a bunch of no-target, instant-cast spells. This would function like the normal level up process in every way except for showing a number on the level up spellbook to indicate the number of available level-ups.

If we are being honest though, are spellbooks nice to use?
The standard UI leaves 7 slots for spells (6 if you wanna use hero spells). That seems like more than enough if these are all active spells, and passive effects are hidden while being described as a passive bonus to one of the active skills.
I'd say that managing 6-7 actively used spells is more than enough, especially if you include usable items as part of the game's design. I usually find that a full set of 4 spells (QWER) is more than enough, which is also the basis of MOBAs

Hey I've got a basic idea I would like to discuss with you, people much more skilled in WE than I am. I've got an idea based on the minion master build of Necromancer in first Guild Wars game. Whole idea of this build was to command a vast army of undead minions while at the same time controlling their degrading health, managing who they attack and so on. Would something like that be possible in Warcraft 3? I know that there are some heroes who rely on their summons, but what I wanted is a whole spellbook crafter around summoning minions and buffing them. I think that hard cap of 4/5 spells per hero can damage that idea, but I'm not sure.

I don't know Guild Wars, but you can easily make some auto-scaling minion summons using either triggered upgrades or the new native stat manipulation actions.
4-5 spells should be enough, if you throw in an extra 1-2 spells as normal spells. If you go for full out normal-spells instead of hero spells, you have 7 slots in a standard UI. That's more than Diablo 3 and all major MOBA games.
You shouldn't want more than 3 types of summons. Then the rest can be control and support.

You should be able to have spells with the effect of "all minions go here/attack here/stop moving".

This is a very good idea.
Personally, I'd go for a ground targeted Channel spell that orders all summoned units to "Attack-move-to".

 

[Banelingline]

There's a number of ways to go about the design of such a class, though the mention of health management of constantly-decaying minions makes it a lot more complicated. One of the biggest things would be having the largest sources of redundancy, with regards to healing and AoE buffs, be present on items, and have other Heroes also get stuff where this is important. Maybe throw in Beastmasters and some sort of tinker and have mercenaries/followers of some description, to make such things useful regardless of Hero.

As for ordering the minions, we're talking about Warcraft 3. Unless you're wanting dozens, plural, of each of multiple kinds of minion (at which point the pathing is going to be more of a barrier than selection), then you can just be using the RTS gameplay interface to select and attack whatever you want, instead of locking to an ability. Which also allows for the minions to have some activatable abilities of their own without needing the Hero's interface bloated by other needs.

With regards to the actual particular "style" in question, a key would be multi-purpose abilities, filling multiple "roles" with one slot, such as having life-on-hit be attached to a Parasite-type ability, summoning the "chaff" units and applying a DoT alongside the heal on those who attack the target. This allows for having a lot more options in how you level up abilities and makes quick function easy, so you're not dealing with having to get a point in every ability just to be working smoothly.

 

[Lord Siler]

As was already mentioned you can use a spellbook to get up to 11 extra spells, you can make summoning spells and spells that direct the armies to attack a specific enemy. What I would reccomend is spells that raise a particular unit from corpses, if you want a large army you're gonna have to create dummy spells that summon an invisible dummy unit that has the raise corpse ability or an ability that creates a particular unit from a corpse (e.g. carrion beetle) basically lots of things can be done as long as youre clear on what your final result should be like. I would suggest sitting down and thinking about what you want the gameplay of your map to be and going from there.