Player Controlled Minions

[tennesay]

I got kind of bored of the current classes and during after hearing of a build one of my buddies made called Ash Catchem of Pallet where he had a wizard, ranger something combo that had all three companions (Spirit, Familar, beast). It got me thinking of what it would be like to take the beast aspect of the ranger and expand on the idea.

My current plan is to have a pseudo warlord build character who may or may not be decent in melee depending on how its minions work. My idea at the moment is that the class feature gives the user the ability to summon a minion to the battlefield. The number of minions depends on the tier. Each tier gets command points 4, 8, and 12 where each tier costs 1, 2, 3 points respectively. The minions per tier do not scale that well and you have to choose whether or not to get alot of weaker ones or a few strong ones.

Each minion would share its move action with its controller and have its attacks based on the leaders at-will powers. The first at-will basically has each minion attack the closest target to it not already targeted by another minion. The other would do the opposite where they all attack a single target. The attack(s) would be based on a single roll, speeding up attacks and theoretically making it possible to hit on all attacks in a turn or fail horribly on all of them. The leader would also have an aura giving bonuses to its minions in a short range to prevent the leader from just standing outside of combat and throwing people into the fight. My

My idea for the minions is that they have a threshold damage of 25, 50 and 75 damage where if that number is exceeded the minion outright dies and the leader loses a healing surge. Normally minions can take a number of hits determined by their tier; the heroic ones take on hit before falling over, paragon 2 and epic 3. If the threshold is not breached then they teleport or fade away.

The class sort of has the feel of a planes walker from magic where they bring creatures to fight for them.

Any thoughts or opinions?

[FireLance]

Have you seen this thread?

It has the first five levels of a class (Noble) which seems fairly close to what you have in mind.

[BendBars/LiftGates]

Don't do this. It's going to either take a lot of work or you're not going to get it right. This is a giant subsystem to shoehorn into the game to appease one player.

But the biggest reason you shouldn't do this is because it's already been done for you. Just make a summoner. It has all the important stuff you want already: fighting with pets, a controller. Wizards and druids both have summoner builds that'll let you cast mostly summoning spells, and invokers have plenty of summons, too.