make enemy necromancers cheat less

[Bananadine]

They are too irritating and (sometimes) dangerous, thanks to their bizarre ability to endlessly regenerate souls. Infinite souls plus Consume Soul means infinite health and infinite mana. Infinite mana plus Impending Doom and Invoke Darkness means unending danger and/or hassle for the poor chump who has to fight them. Infinite health is frustrating. Blurred Mortality of course makes this even worse.

I've been playing on Madness lately and so far I'm finding the mighty ritch flamespitter to be the deadliest entity in the universe... necromancers don't even come close. They aren't enormously dangerous, if you're experienced and careful. But they are often enormously irritating, and they need to be fixed I think, unlike some of the more overpowered enemies, because the overpowered enemies are just strong, whereas necromancers are strong because they cheat--and they rub it in your face while they're doing it. It is really frustrating to deal with that.

I see there's another thread here about how to rework the souls resource altogether. If that is to be done, then I'd advocate throwing in a simple patch for this problem first, because it's so trivial to do: Just reduce the soul regeneration rate. Maybe divide it by 3 or 6 or something, I don't know. That should help a lot. The number should be juuuust high enough to stop necromancers from becoming comically helpless after they run out. It's okay if they run out and become weak, as long as they aren't completely helpless. They'll still be strong enough to kill you for a little while, when you first meet them. That's good enough; they don't need to be that strong for the entirety of a half-hour fight. If you're worried it would make them become weak too fast, no problem, just multiply the maximal soul count by two or three. Easy.

If the class is not going to be reworked, then I'd at least want enemy necromancers to cheat less crudely and less unstoppably. They should have a special enemies-only talent that lets them actively gather souls in some way that the player can actually partly prevent, rather than a special enemies-only regeneration feature that cannot be interfered with by any means. For instance, they could get a Soul Magnetism talent that'd put a big lingering circular cloud on you, using your life force as a beacon to draw free souls from the air or ground (ghosts' souls? I dunno, justify it in lore somehow, it doesn't matter) to you and then to the necromancer--meaning the necromancer would get +1 soul for each turn you spent in the cloud; and also you'd have a chance to be dazed each turn by the cloud, keeping you in it so it could work. You could fight against that by teleporting or using a movement infusion or something, but sometimes you would fail. That would be less overpowered and less frustrating than infinite regeneration is. I'm sure there are many other ways it could be done, too...

[Micbran]

Summon minions might also double dip in talent level inflation (same for summons iirc).