ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Necromancer already has a lot of class trees and difficulty assigning class points. They don't have nearly enough generic trees and are dependent on getting celestial/light from an escort or playing a race that rewards heavy generic investment in order to have somewhere to put generic points. My cursory examination of necro winners supports this - everyone that I checked had celestial/light.

So, my suggestion is to make the Animus tree generic.

Out of all their trees it is the one with most utility, so it's a good candidate and fits thematically into generic. It's also not unprecedented to have a class exclusive tree as generic, as was done with Dream Forge tree for Solipsists (it was originally a class tree and it's class exclusive).

What do you think?

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<darkgod> all this fine balancing talk is boring
<darkgod> brb buffing boulder throwers

I think that your assesment concerning class points vs generics points is accurate. Even a 12 point investment in racials let's you get pretty much everything you want on the generics side (Except premonition which has a non-negliable max mana cost): And that is with Celestial/Light.

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1.4.X Paradox mage guide for high level play

Animus seems like a good candidate for being Generic, since it's a heal and a bunch of resource-helper stuff.

While we're trimming Class talents, I'd like for Lichdom to move to Generic -- or a Prodigy -- instead of a Class talent which must be 5/5'd to be useful.

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Check out my addons: Nullpack (classes), Null Tweaks (items & talents), and New Gems fork.

Would need some modifications to be generic, since it is only useful to Necromancers.

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My feedback meter decays into coding. Give me feedback and I make mods.

Being generic doesn't necessarily mean it's available to anyone other than Necro, as is the case with Dream Forge, for instance.
Or that mindslayer tree that I don't know the name of.

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<darkgod> all this fine balancing talk is boring
<darkgod> brb buffing boulder throwers

Both of the Mindslayer specific trees.

Also several of the Solipsist trees.

Also there's stuff like Gestures which is class-specific.

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Check out my addons: Nullpack (classes), Null Tweaks (items & talents), and New Gems fork.

As most of you know, I've made numerous attempts at fixing the Necromancer but here's one that might help fix this problem http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=42943&p=192019#p192019. It's at the bottom of the page.

It changes the function of Animus Hoarder in a big way such that I find it unsuitable for the generic category. However, I made a new generic category and move Blurred Mortality and Lichform to it.

I'm also thinking about eliminating the Ice category in favor of another offensive category… one that uses HousePet's grasping claws with the addition of causing disease… then, the next skill would cause his blood burst effect on any diseased enemy as blight damage which could heal undead. Then, an additional skill would cause further blight damage to any pinned enemy.

The last skill is what I call a "blood golem." It requires that you have a ghoul and a vampire and it consumes both in addition to another soul. The blood golem would have low life and a finite duration. However, it would have no max life and any damage it inflicts would heal it. After it's duration, any damage it has above its starting life is granted to you as a heal. If it ends with less, you would suffer the difference.

I realize that this is a radical change to the Necro but I think it's a good one.

Thoughts?

The difference is that those categories could be used by other classes.

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My feedback meter decays into coding. Give me feedback and I make mods.

On the one hand, I cautiously like the idea of replacing Ice because I feel that the overlap between Uttercold and Frostdusk is inelegant.

On the other hand, I generally like re-using trees.

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Check out my addons: Nullpack (classes), Null Tweaks (items & talents), and New Gems fork.

I was looking at this from the: "lets fix this in an easy and non-coding-intensive-way" perspective, not "lets rework necro". Mostly because I think necro is fine as it is, the talents are great and fun and allow for different builds - just the balance of class and generic is wrong. One less class tree, one more generic tree and it's golden. Animus is a tree that was added when souls were turned into a resource and it seems like it could slot better into generic in purely mechanical terms.

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<darkgod> all this fine balancing talk is boring
<darkgod> brb buffing boulder throwers

I agree… I had a thread a while back that made minimal changes to the Necro (just a little bit of shuffling to solve this same problem) and it went nowhere, including the suggestion of making Animus a generic.

I gave up on that a long time ago and the Necro is a class that has gathered unusual attention due to its… problems. Happy to revisit it though.

This seems like a good idea. It would solve one of the main complaints about necromancers.