BETA3 Necromancer Feedback/Thoughts

[Mr Frog]

(new thread so the actual feedback can be comfy up on the first post)

Did a run in Beta3 with the new necromancer. I decided to try doing a build more focused on the death-themed trees (Animus, Death, Eradication) while also experimenting with the friendlier skeletons and the now-functioning Spectre tree.

My thoughts:

-The balance in damage between Night Sphere and Erupting Shadows feels a lot better now. Thank you!
-Skellies are very powerful -- they're reasonably durable, deal high damage especially with their various talents (Overpower in particular is nuts), and also stun things for you (important because I don't think Necro has a native stun?). Just 4 points in Call of the Crypt (none of the higher talents) gave me an army capable of felling trash with no problem and dealing significant damage to big targets -- I believe they felled more than a few Rares with little to no aid on my part! I found I didn't need to clear debuffs very much because my skellies were more than capable of finishing off whatever crippled me while I twitched helplessly in the corner. It's scary to think what they could have done had I invested in them more aggressively.
-On that note, the Master made a Lord of Skulls that proceeded to hit me for 700 damage with Overpower (normal difficulty)
-Consume Soul can crit making it insanely potent
-I really love Drawn to Death's UI presentation. The visual and audio feedback in the class in general is INSANELY good -- massive props to Rexorcorum, DarkGod, et al for continually topping themselves in this regard!
-I didn't really feel motivated to put more than one point in Drawn to Death. All that increases is the lifetime of the markers which I never felt was particularly restrictive.
-Sometimes my minions would be standing on a Drawn to Death target, which blocks it from being used entirely. Quite annoying.
-I think Eradication plays off of the Animus and Death trees (which I think are intended as its "base" counterparts as part of the Master of Death theme) very very well, along with small synergies with many other things in Necro's arsenal.
-To The Grave is a really neat mechanic -- at first it seems like it just brings enemies towards you, which seems odd for a caster class, but it actually teleports any enemy in your own radius directly to the boneyard, wherever it may be, so it's actually extremely versatile for controlling enemy positions esp. when used in conjunction with Ghost Walk and other teleports. I love it!
-Unfortunately, it tends to throw Lua errors quite a lot. The error message I was getting gave me the impression it's sending a malformed string to LogDisplay, but I suspect that might simply be a consequence of the talent breaking.
-Impending Doom tears a soul immediately upon its first tick which I'm not sure is intended? Useful tho
-Doom dealing Frostdusk damage makes it disproportionately bad against flat DR because of the split damage and DoT nature (Mindrot syndrome lol)
-Ghost Walk's description should probably clarify that the return is instant; it took a while for me to notice
-Intangibility doesn't seem worthwhile to me. A (fairly low) % chance to ignore a given damage proc or status effect is way more unreliable than I'm willing to gamble with in a roguelike. It's better for cases where you get hit by lots of little damage procs at a time but it's still not a game I'm personally willing to play.
-Spectral Sight feels like a strictly inferior Track, although the passive undead detection is pretty okay.
-I wish Path to Beyond summoned the li'l bunnies from the late Curse of the Meek (I was actually very surprised that it didn't)
-I experimented a bit with Dreads but refunded the points once I saw that they'd sometimes just... run away from targets (???). Also I'm not sure if Burning Hex is that helpful given how fast I was ending fights; I'd much prefer something like Confusion that more directly hobbles foes. I think the li'l bastards generally need some tightening up designwise to figure out what I'd actually want them around for and communicate this to the player (the first talent's description is incredibly bare and doesn't even explain that it's a persistent summon, let alone what exactly its talents are).
-The Dread category description should (imo) say "annoy" instead of "harass", and the second talent should say "annoying" in its description somewhere. The fact that it doesn't is annoying.

The Master proved to be a very hard (and sudden!) wall for me this run. I got killed very very quickly by his skeletons. At one point I devmode-rezzed and IMMEDIATELY got one-turned again by an Armored Skeleton Warrrior using Overpower (why do enemies get an attack that deals literally 400% weapon damage in one go again?). On the flip side, I struggled to deal meaningful damage to his minions, and the Master himself (obviously, as is intended) laughed off all of my attempts to magically debuff him. Eventually I decided to just call it a failed run and gave up. It was definitely at least partially my own fault -- I didn't go into the fight with any sort of functioning plan at all and naturally got destroyed for it. That said, combined with my own experience using them on the player end, I feel like skellies might deal a bit too much damage. I'm not 100% sure what the critical difference is between this run and my previous test run in which the Master got curbstomped; I suspect it might be that the latter run had much more (and stronger due to balance differences) AoE damage (especially Across the Veil and Spikes of Decrepitude, which I eschewed this run in favour of putting more points in Spectre) which made dealing with the zombie swarms more manageable, or perhaps the Master simply didn't roll as many levels in skellies. I also had a rather stupid death to Aletta Soultorn (didn't have a Clear Mind lol) but that's not really important.
If I were to do the run again I'd probably invest less in Eradication, because as much as I loved it overall it didn't help me much against the Master; Boneyard and Impending Doom wouldn't proc on him due to his high spellsave, and To The Grave refused to function at all for whatever reason, leaving Eternal Night as the only talent in the tree that actually pulled its weight (and even then I was struggling to penetrate the baddies' resistances). That's about six class points that I could have put elsewhere -- spawning more and better minions, bolstering Hiemal Shield, or dealing more damage to a wider area. I'd probably also move some of the points I put in Spectre over to Necrosis as I don't think the later talents in the tree really helped much at all sadly. My inscriptions were also very bad and could have been picked much more intelligently.

I'm liking the class a lot and I'd love to experiment with it more even as it stands. It's still got some rough patches but it's already astronomically better than it was in Beta1 (which isn't to say it wasn't good to begin with, mind!).

[Delmuir]

Nice thoughts...

I will note that your build choice seems to have been rather dubious. As far as I can tell, there are four core builds:

1. Ghouls

This is best with Nightfall and Age of Dusk and Death. Dreads are a secondary option...

2. Skeletons

Pairs well with Grave and Glacial Waste or Rime Wraith and Eradication.

3. Pure caster

This seems to be either Grave or Nightfall plus Eradication and Death or Age of Dusk.

4. Pure Summoner

Skeletons, Ghouls, Dread, Age of Dusk, Master Necromancer, and maybe Rime Wraith if you can afford it (Cornac).


Any one of those builds tears up The Master pretty reliably... so long as you avoid the Lord of Skulls because those SOBs can dish out some pain.

[hexxy]

So I just got an Insane win with Necro Beta3, here're my general thoughts about the class.

- Got a cold (mostly) and darkness build with a little investments in minions. This gives crazy damage output to single targets as well as groups. You can literally walk through the game using 2-3 spells
- Race: Higher. Damage boost/reduction as well as Highborn Bloom to cast soul consuming spells is great
- Prodigies: Lichform and Adept. Adept allows you to use most of the talent trees using 1-2 points for each skill and after you get it you become a killing machine.
- The only thing this class misses is a little mobility. Single ghost walk is not sufficient to disengage from the hard enemies from time to time. This led to a couple of stupid deaths.
- On my nightmare run I got 350 crit multiplier and 100% crit chance. This gives around 4k cold damage with 4-turn cooldown from Black Ice and around the same within 6 radius from Chill of the Tomb
- Final fight ended within 15 turns, so did all the Pride bosses fights.
- Active talents from the Ghoul tree do not worth using a turn, it's usually better to kill stuff with your attack spells faster
- Never used bone giants in fights. Lord of Skulls is usually sufficient
- Rime wraith is fun but I rarely used it in this run. Next time i'll try to go with Master necromanser
- So far new Necro seems to be the strongest class in a game

Here're some screenshots from the run:
https://ibb.co/CbBWvyR
https://ibb.co/0q2hCvD
https://ibb.co/MDH5sXG
https://ibb.co/mDW4FF6