Speaking as a torch bearer my anti-minion damage has to be supremely strong, otherwise there is nothing keeping them from killing me and I can't do anything about it. I am not saying I should one-shot your entire army, but there is a good reason minions can't just shrug off AOE damage. Because for many of us, it's the only protection we have against them.

i suggest investing in items that increase your minions health. this greatly mitigates the impact of AoE spells against them and makes them much more useful in general. most of these items also have extremely nice boosts to the DG's stats as well. Plate of the Crusader is a good example, its a great item for a general.

i do agree with your other point regarding item procs, particularly defensive item procs that trigger on being hit. these should probably be regulated with internal cooldowns so you cant get an unlucky streak and have your opponent suddenly heal 1500 health because you're wailing on him with 10 Oak Spirits. 

Yea, this is sort of a difficult thing to balance.  I think the real problem with the minions though, is that they tend to get thrown at the enemy in one single mass.  If there were ranged minions with a long enough range that they could attack while being far enough away from the melee minions to not get hit by an AOE that targets them, then I think that might solve the problem.  Then at least it would take 2 aoes to kill all the minions (or more if you really spread them out).  It would also let generals pay much more attention to positioning, and let them play in 'RTS' mode like they're supposed to, lol.

Plus, this would mean that assasans would want to get a jump on generals and AOE their minions before they get into position.  I'm thinking with better ranged minions, minions would still tend to group together before a fight, but then would naturally spread out when a fight starts.

what abilities insta-kill minions? i havent seen anything like that, everything is damage based. even if its a large amount of AoE damage like a Circle of Fire, having more minion health gives them a chance to survive it if you run them out of the circle quickly enough. 

and some of the minions get VERY beefy. Shamblers can get well over 2000 health and a good amount of armor on a high level QoT. 

For testing purposes I tried this out.
I was sedna, and it was in a 3v3 human game, where towards the end 2 on each team had dropped.

I figured sedna could probably do the best with minions given her health buff, HPS aura, heal, and her yetis having AoE.
So I only put 1 point in pounce, 4 in heal, maxed yeti's, maxed the cooldown/minion passive, 2 in silence.

I got 4 items which buffed minion health and damage out of 7 of them. (I even spent 10k on god plate! )

Yetis had 2085 health.  My other minions where really high too.

The result?  My yeti's and minotaurs would get insta-killed by 4 giants slamming at once.  They where worthless.  Sure, I can retreat them away from giants slam, but then I'm basically not using them.

I knew this would be bad just thinking about it.  The +minion buffing items are just CRAPPY.  And giants are so good.

Not to mention, when both teams get giants, the game can really sort of stalemate.  I was handily winning until the other team got giants.

However, this game lasted 48 minutes.  Every other game I've played has been 14-26 minutes long.  This is the cost of me trying to make a minion build.

Now, if I used minions with pounced maxed, and focused on her movespeed instead of healing wind, and so on, I'd have done much better.  But when you try to actually focus on your minions, instead of just using them for cheap heal and additional cheap DPS, you'll fail.
And that's not just when going aganst giants.. but giants are a big way of owning minions.

Boulder, fire nova, and there are 2 items(1 is favor, and 1 is cheap, iirc) which instakill anything labeled as "small".

hmmm. interesting test results. didn't realize giants were so ridiculously brutal on minions. 

i did know about the effects that blow away small reinforcements. from what i've seen though none of the idol summons are affected by that and neither are shamblers or yetis. correct me if i'm wrong, but i thought only the portal spawn soldiers and archers could be blown away. maybe Oak spirits and Erebus nightwalkers too, not sure. 

Yep, I think that's the correct base damage too.

But level 4 yetis get about 15% damage reduction through armour. That's pretty low armour (~450) but it still counts a for a fair amount, that means the giants would do more like 1900 damage in 4 hits. That's against base yetis with no bonuses at all, with god plate alone they should have almost 25% reduction, so 1650 damage.

Though I must now admit did forget the first couple of damage upgrades at citidel when I tested, which are pretty potent, so yeah on second thought it's feasable that normal strength giants can do it with a little help in the form of damage upgrades.

That does bring up the point that 4 upgraded giants aren't something you just tank without thought even as an assassin, they're still slow as cold fudge and there's very few demigods that can put out 2200 AoE damage in the same period of time they do. Having all your minions synch pounded by 4 giants is pretty much the worst scenario I can think of for minions.

Ok, yetis are confusing, got around into digging in the game files for answers, they have 0 base armour, but "heavy" type, which I'm not so sure how the armour types work yet.

Anyway, Giants do 500 damage per hit in 5 unit radius, Catas do 188 damage in 2 unit radius (which is tiny, big enough to get 2-3 minos packed in a line). Mino kings have 600 base armour and 2010 base HP.

Not much of a point, just like to have the solid numbers there.