ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

I recently unlocked the necromancer class and leveled a necromancer to level 23, only to be underwhelmed by the summoning side of the class. It started out strong but by level 23 my minions were pretty lackluster. More often than not they'd die to their own friendly fire than to the enemy, plus the randomness made planning difficult. If you've invested all your points into minions then your survival/effectiveness is basically a die roll.

As a big fan of summoning and summoners, I wasn't content with this. So I decided to fix it by making my own necromancer class with minions in mind. The repository for the True Necromancer class is here. Feedback and criticism is welcome, especially regarding balance.

I've also got a few questions that someone may be able to help with:
1. When enemies die within my aura, no souls are claimed. How do I fix this?
2. I want to restrict some talents by the player's level. How?
3. I'd like this class to be 100% harmonious with the vanilla necromancer, so that my class doesn't affect it in any way. I think I've already achieved this but I'm not sure. Any advice?
4. "True Necromancer" isn't a very cool name. Any suggestions?

Well, found out why my aura doesn't grant new souls. I need to modify this part of the Actor.lua file:


Edit: So I did that, then just superloaded the Actor.lua file. Seems to work.

I leveled a skeleton-oriented True Necro to 24 and a flesh-oriented to 10. Both approaches seem fun and balanced.

Found the following problems though:

Vampires suck: They're weak and never seem to do any good in a fight. They seem only good as meat shields. I'll have to rework them or replace them.

Terrifying Minions sucks: Liches, Dreads and Wights are somehow just not that great. I'll have to totally rework that category. The only thing I liked about dreads is that they can float over things.

Aura unnecessary: I feel like the aura is unnecessary. It's just a skill-point dump that takes 5 points away from things that would be more fun to invest in. So the aura will have to go, but that gives me some room to come up with something more fun. Souls will instead be earned whenever you or a minion kills something and there will be no more minion decay.

I see what you did there.

Hahaha

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.

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.

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.

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.

Good suggestions, thank you.


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.


Good ideas.


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.