ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

The necromancer is my least favorite class, and looking at the mage forums I'm not the only one who thinks so. I've seen a lot of suggestions for "fixing the class" but I don't think it needs fixing. It simply doesn't fit in the game at all anymore.

First with the class uses the wrong resource. Necromancer shouldn't be a mana using class at all. Rather than using mana and stealing "souls" to represent the life energy of foes we have VIM in the game which actually represents the life energy a player controls. This energy is ripped from the dead when you kill them passively and if a damaging spell KILLS the enemy its entire life force (soul) fuels the spell making it free. Having souls + mana is a hack work around for a problem the game already solved elsewhere.

Second Dark Power makes no sense . . . why are my minions decaying outside my range? These are the exact same undead I encounter wandering around the world everywhere and those don't have some necromancer nearby supporting them. Plus when I play a skeleton or ghoul I don't decay after having killed MY creator. Third this aura is otherwise used just to create souls and I've already complained about THAT mechanic. lol

Third . . . The class lacks focus. You have one tree devoted to becoming a lich and most of the skills there aren't worthwhile. One tree devoted to cold damage that doesn't even give you the ability to gain the wet effect. One tree devoted to summoning minions. One tree devoted to darkness damage. One tree devoted to trying to make souls useful (souls again! lol) . . . and at the same time you have almost no support trees. Plus if you want the full effect of lich form you are going to have to either find an amulet supporting the necrosis tree or you need to waste a category point sinking it in a spot that is otherwise useless.

In summary the class makes NO sense and I suggest that it needs a complete rewrite both to be worth playing and to fit in with the remaining lore and mechanics of T.O.M.E. I will make some suggestions as to what I personally think a viable necromancer looks like in the next post and invite others to write similar comments as well.

Obviously I think the necromancer should be a VIM using class, and to solve the problem of not having any good support talents I would start him off with both hex and curse so he can better support his undead army in battle. After that I'd replace the entire grave tree (vampirism) with Vile Life, and I'd replace the entire animus tree with the Torment Tree.

I'd also forbid the class to any undead race. The necromancer should start off with one point automatically invested in Blurred Mortality and that talent should both become a passive skill and force the necromancer to count as undead right from the start. You are automatically on the quest for immortality. Blurred life should also scale with spellpower; 250 health is less than you get from a mid game shield, let alone a five point talent!

The rest of the necrosis tree should further support your transition towards undeath . . . that means none of the remaining talents fit. The second talent should increase your armor based on your spell power. Your body is becoming more durable. The third talent should be an improved form of undead mastery as your link to both death and your minions becomes deeper.The improvements I want for minion mastery is simple. It needs to protect you from your minions damage AND your minions from yours. After this lichform can remain unchanged.

Obviously the minions tree also needs some help. I already said minions should NOT decay and we need to get rid of the dark aura entirely. After that create minions needs to be split up into several talents as follows:

[*] Reanimate flesh: This talent creates the utility undead you first encounter in the blighted ruins. These guys disease, imprison, and weaken your opponents while doing minimum damage. I'd also note that the necromancer starting in the "blighted" ruins suggests what I already implied; that the necromancer was the first attempt at a defiler class.
[*] Shambling Corpses: This should call up your basic skeletal archers and warriors, bone giants, plus zombies and other minor combat minions.
[*] Mindful Minions: This is your skeletal mages, ghouls who heal you and other undead minions with blight pools, vampires, liches, etc . . .

Two trees in class skills we now give the necromancer access to the blood and bone trees representing your work with both corpses and your own body. We also give you (locked) the corruption rot talent to replace advanced necrotic minions which has already been merged in with the Necrotic minions tree.

Nightfall is fine just the way it is except that it needs to use vim instead of mana, and the shades tree needs a similar transition. Since we got rid of the cold spells having ice locked also makes no sense . . . we replace that with the shadows tree from the cursed. Unlocking this will, unfortunately also unlock unnatural body and auto invest one point in it . . . making you cursed. Plus it should reveal FEED as a locked skill.

Given these, rather major, changes the necromancer becomes a class focused on raising undead minions, twisting life force, and utilizing both blight and darkness damage. Unlike other defiler classes he or she has NO way to restore points other than either killing things himself or having his minions do it for him. Thus he relies on keeping his army alive long enough to pay for themselves, and on constantly killing to restore his VIM.

Obviously this becomes easier once he either goes lich and gains access to damaging spells that use darkness as a resource, or once he unlocks shadows and has minions powered by his ever growing hatred for the living.

Some interesting ideas here, though I think perhaps some could use further thought.

The Spellblaze for example puts a bit of a limiter on what resources can be used by the class due to conflicting with the existing Lore - it isn't like Vim (or Paradox for that matter) existed before the Spellblaze as its corruption hadn't taken affect on Eyal (or if playing with Ashes of Urh'Rok, on the Demons). Necromancy however existed long before the Spellblaze - literally existing around the time that the early Shaloran Kings were experimenting with it, and being used on a mass scale during the Allure Wars which happened a few thousand years before the Spellblaze.

To be blunt, Necromancy might be this terrible evil, but it is done within the scope of the reality that Eyal is set in - Vim (and Paradox) however only began to exist when reality broke and reality itself began to become corrupted.

In regards to some of the skills on a Necromancer - The Aura is obviously there for balance reasons. Address that and you begin to address the class needing the Aura. In Diablo II there was an limit on the amount of minions you could summon for example.

Additionally, I don't necessarily think a Necromancer's end goal in Tales of Maj'Eyal is 'always' to become a Lich. Some Necromancers can aim for that goal but not necessarily all Necromancers have to aim for it. I'd also caution against race/class restrictions unless there is a good reason for it; plus there is the issue of restricting Infusions.

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Uhm, wrong board? I think you may have meant to post over here?

Moved to ToME4/Ideas.

I agree Necros need rewriting. I think everyone wants something different from it, though.

I don’t have problem with them becoming a Vim class, or even a hybrid Mana/Vim class in the way that Psyshot is Psi/Steam. While the necromancers of old did things one through mana and souls, it may be that the Spellblaze making Vim available changed the traditions of necromancy in signficant ways. It’s not like people still make prolific use of abacuses and slide rules now that the personal computer is around.

My perfect world Necromancer would have the following things:
- A skellie sustain tree similar to temporal hounds or thought forms. First gain a warrior, second an archer, third mage, as well as some activatable skills (heal and teleport seem good). You’d be immune to their damage from the get go.
- A Haunting tree. This one would still use souls, and the first skill would be similar to Raze, while the others would use souls to either directly summon wraithform undead or created haunted terrain features that would summon & leash friendly wraithform undead to a specific area. Whenever you are within the zone you’d gain the Hunted! effect so enemies would be drawn to it, but be careful what you wish for...
- A Binding tree. This would allow you to curse a living enemy such that when they died they would become your permanent minion. You would have heal and teleport effects for them, but they would also have limited numbers of body slots that you could add the body parts from the Alchemist’s quest to in order to create buffs (troll intestines for regeneration effect).
- The Bone and Sanguisurge trees.
- The Divination tree.
- The Staff tree.

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the distinction between vim and souls is that vim is the vitalizing force of the body while the soul is the consciousness of that body.
for a more vampiric necromancer vim would be perfectly fine as its more about taking others life to empower yourself.

but many of the necromancers most thematically distinct traits are tied to souls as a concept if not resource.
like the minions ghouls might be more or less mindless corpses for whom vim would be an acceptable power source, but skeletons are thinking things that can remember how to fight, use magic, and make suicidally stupid bets.

and lets not forget lichdom is achieved through magically manipulating your own soul in order to survive past death.

vims closest parallel to skeletons is demon seeds as they effectively serve the same purpose of magically enslaving conscious beings whom you can summon to do your bidding, but no vim class has anything like lichdom or anyother class for that matter.

don't get me wrong I've won with necro but the class is a dumpster fire the overall theme is good and doesn't need to be changed like your suggesting but a ground up rewrite might be for the best.

I agree that it needs a quite major rewrite. I don't think it should become a defiler though. There's a lot of classes that use multiple resources, most commonly stamina plus something else, but you also have the alchemist with gems + mana and the psyshot as mentioned above. Doing mana + vim wouldn't be that weird.

I'd prefer souls be drastically changed as a resource rather than outright removed though, and made more similar to gems or tinkers. Rather than being a primary source of power for the necromancer, and provided in multiples from single beings (and while two-souls is a thing in real-world religions, it's kind of weird in a game like ToME), souls should be semi-rare, only used for specific purposes, and hard to lose once gained.

Most spells should simply be mana, or maybe mana + vim if going down that road. Many cases of animating the dead wouldn't need a proper soul; ghouls, bone golems, degenerate skeletons and similar could usually be soulless. That's where I think vim could work well, as it would both be quite fitting thematically and not necessarily go against established lore; the early necromancers seemed more interested in transhumanism (transalorenism?) than hordes of flesh.

Souls could instead be dropped only by certain kinds of enemies, that have souls strong enough to remain relatively intact after death. Elite humanoids and bosses, for example. And in general, they would mostly be used for creating powerful, sentient undead (skeleton mages, wights et cetera), or for gaining lasting power (such as lichdom). And creatures created with such souls would again "drop" those when they die, so they wouldn't be "wasted". Balancing this could be tricky, in order to make the resource relevant but without making it frustrating (whether generally too scarce, or too prone to RNG, or too prone to downward spirals).

Might need to edit the 'how to be a necromancer, part 2' lore if not every enemy drops a soul.

My thoughts on Vim being used by the Necromancer class - is that it isn't a Necromancer class at that point. If going that route I would recommend making an entirely new class to play with.

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Its amazing what the mind can come up with, but it shows talent to make something of it. - Davion Fuxa
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Lore-wise Necromancy is pre-Spellblaze old magic. It wouldn't make sense for necros to use vim.
As for talents rework there are at least two sizeable addons out there that revamp the class.

I'll admit it was some time since I last read the HtBaN, but did a reread now.

I think that having them use vim as a *secondary* resource for specific trees might not be out of flavor with them being pre-blaze mages; after all, necromancy might have evolved over time, and so may the magic; things that might have worked off of pure magic pre-blaze can have become corrupted to the point where vim is involved. After all, the HtBaN:3 hints at a connection between necromancy and the demonic, and notes that one of the major necromantic schools embrace becoming "corrupted" by the demonic forces.

Of course, there's no *need* to include vim for the necromancer - I just don't think it would be inherently wrong or out-of-flavor. If all of their skills needed vim I'd agree though that it would be weird. It should be possible to make a successful necromancer that never touches the stuff. But I don't think it would look off to have one or two of the trees - especially if they are initially locked - use vim. Neither would it look off to not have them use it. Either way seems like it would work.

Note also that it's not like every single talent the necromancer has is deeply thematically tied to necromancy as a magical art either, just like not every alchemist talent is tied to alchemy. Ice, Conveyance, Divination and Survival are all more general-purpose things that a necromancer (as a person) might come in contact with, while not being inherently tied to the ancient school of necromantic magic.

And in regards to HtBaN:2, I don't see how that would conflict with not everything requiring a soul? In fact it seems to almost support the idea, with the Trenë advocating soulless reanimation. That not every kill *gives* a soul as a resource doesn't necessarily meant that the creature is soulless - it just means that for whatever reason it's not deemed appropriate to be used by the necromancer (whether it's too damaged to safely bind, to inherently primitive to be useful, or the necromancer simply doesn't like the taste of that one).

However, I will definitely concede that tying soulless slaves specifically to vim would be off, considering the split in the lore; the Trenë are both the most in favor of soulless slaves, and the most against demonic influence, while Beinagrind insist on besouled slaves and also embrace the corruption.

please do not give necro vim, its probably the second worse resource right next to souls (that being the worst).
just change souls to make them less dumb and you're good to go, i'll even throw some random brainstorming idea out. Not saying its good, but at least its better, imo.

Souls as a limit: When souls are consumed to summon something, they are returned when the summon dies. When souls are used to cast a spell, they return x turns later or when the effect that it applies expires.

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This is a good idea that the game doesn't have right now, and opens up a number of interactions with your minions that are potentially interesting. Blowing up a minion is lame right now but if it's lame and a precursor to you getting a soul back that lets you cast something impressive it's a useful intermediate step. There could be an offensive version of Disruption Shield that sucks in souls from the immediate area, crumbling your minions and hurting enemies, that gets more powerful as your souls decrease.

It also removes the need to have minions decay since they're occupying a resource when extant.

The biggest issue I found with Souls was actually that Animate Minions made too many minions.
You could easily empty your soul pool when you didn't need to.
Just a few small tweaks is all that the Soul resource really needs.

As for Vim, you could make it work thematically. But mechanically you don't need it (and it already has Souls as the awkward limiting resource).

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A somewhat weird thing I just noted that actually supports the OP's argument in terms of *theme* (though I still disagree with the approach mechanically) is that the description of Vim states the following:
"Vim represents the amount of life energy/souls you have stolen. Each corruption talent requires some."

That, in combination with HtBaN:3, makes me think that there is a stronger lore-wise connection between souls & vim, and between necromancy & corruption, than appearant at a first glance.