Frumple wrote:
Ah... insofar as the name goes, I do believe "Dread Necromancer" is a title you could cheerfully rip off from some pen and paper franchise or another that sounds pretty nice.
Could also mine the lore files a bit to find out if there's any notable names or concepts you could riff on. Can't think of anything in particular, but maybe there's something in there.
Good suggestions, thank you.
Frumple wrote:
As for the aura, I'd kinda' say you might want to stick with it, just decouple the soul/minion bits thing from it, getting rid of the nuisance aspects. It's a mechanic not many other classes (sun paladins and gloom users, mostly) have, and could be put to fairly interesting effect. I could see tying it into stuff like the will o' wisps or various minion buffing talents, both as something of a balance measure and bit of thematic design, emphasizing the whole necromancer in the center of a horde thing that's fairly common in depictions of 'em as well as the somewhat shorter optimum range they're rocking in the base design. Could maybe even work it into something like the chant/hymn system, where you have to choose somewhat as to what your aura actually does.
If nothing else, the aura does look cool. It might be worth creating an entire talent category just for improving the aura. There's a lot of things it could potentially do: slow enemies inside it (harder for them to reach you), weaken resistances of enemies inside it, slowly heal minions inside it, buff minions inside it, etc etc.
In any case, the latest branch on my repository has completely removed the aura. As I figure out a place for it in my mod, I may reintroduce it.
Frumple wrote:
And yeah... vampires would probably need some reworking. As enemies, they've got fairly consistent and relatively effective roles (debuffs via banes, smattering of necromancer talents, one of the potentially most annoying summoners in the game), but most of what they do works poorly (friendly fire issues) or not at all (the summoning) as minions. Only thing that comes to mind off the top of my head would be mixing up a sort of debuff-via-summoning, but with summons unique to the minion vampires. Bats, rats, wolves (giving a clear talent level progression)... probably specifically as swarms/packs, with some kind of negative effect to enemies they hit/are near. Short duration, relatively low cooldown/cost, probably very flimsy but highly evasive. Could also forgo actually summoning things and just theme some talents (aoe/debuff stuff, probably) around the concept.
Good ideas.
Frumple wrote:
E: Also, looking at the talents you've got... can I just say a number of them look like they'd work really well as something like the TW's temporal hounds? A sustain that generates up to the number allowed by the talent, putting a new one up if there's room every few turns. Throw in some kind of targeting talent (something that changes your minions target and gives them a movement speed buff?) and you'd be pretty golden, and it'd differentiate this class from the vanilla necros even further.
Yes, I agree. I played a Doomed to level 30 or so and remember the shadow mechanic. It could work that minions were summoned in such a way, although probably only the weaker kinds.
Thanks for your reply.