[2022] Minion snapshotting

Since this poison minion build post a few weeks back i wanted to start a discussion about minion snapshotting.

For people that dont know: Gear affecting minions needs to be worn at their creation, cause their stats and damage modifiers are locked in after that point.

So if you change chestpiece from a white to a piece with „50% increased minion damage“ this modifier will only work on your minions if you resummon them. Same for skill nodes.

My 2 main concerns with this are:

1) At high level it makes gear swapping the best method to maximize your build. As shown by the aforementioned poison minion build having dedicated „summoning gear“ with all the minion modifiers and seperate „fighting gear“ is an easy method to increase your strength.

I personally am not a fan of having gear swaps as a source of power. It cheapens the experience of making your limited slots on gear work, cause you have effectively double the prefixes and it adds unecessary tediousness at the start of every playing session

2) My second concern is about the new player experience. My first time leveling a minion acolyte i hit a really hard barrier around act 7-8 and i couldnt figure out why my minions were so sh*t (they didnt die, they were tanky). I dropped that char at this point and played some of my other builds. I came back to that character recently and as i was playing it again it felt great actually. You can guess what happened. I had a long playsession before i dropped the character and played from act 3 to act7-8 and upgraded my gear happily, not knowing that i need to resummon my minions for them to do damage.

In the campaign you upgrade gear constantly get skillpoints and having to resummon them all the time is tedious and boring. Also as it happened to me it maybe even hinders your progress if you are unaware of it.

Is minion snapshotting something that should stay in the game? I can see that it is for sure easier on the developers side, as frozen stats are easier to handle than changing stats. But imo it would be worth for the devs to take a look at it.

Whats your opinion regarding snapshotting?