1.5.5 Necro... addressing the remaining issues

[Delmuir]

Almost all of your points, and thanks for the feedback, are excellent, but have been considered numerous times. Sadly, there seems little interest in addressing said issues. I even tried two separate times to do a full re-design of the Necro. You can find my earlier posts on it...

I'm not saying I did a great job but there were some fun and interesting ideas in there and maybe one of you can gather inspiration from it.

Regardless, I do think the class is begging for a re-work.

As an aside, I think one issue is with the Necrotic Aura and exploring... it demands Highborn's Bloom or Hidden Resources to use the class effectively, which is irksome. I think an easy solution is just to expand the range of the Aura by 1 and then let it scale a bit more aggressively, say 1 more with a class talent and another at .2 after that.

That way, you'd be able to get it up 11 or even 12 without too much difficulty.

Regarding some notes about the Shades tree... it's not that it isn't useful, it is. Rather, it's just inexplicable. Why should a Necromancer be able to summon a clone? It makes no sense. My earlier solution was to combine it with Animus Purge so rather than getting an enemy, you'd force a copy of your soul into it, creating a pseudo-clone. It occurs to me now that a good idea would have been to keep the stats of the enemy but grant it your talents. That'd be kind of cool. Otherwise have it act like a Husk.

I think a means to acquire souls sans farming Curse of the Meek would be helpful, but ideally something that doesn't further stretch its talent points, hence my proposal to combine with Shadow Tunnel. You get a means to reacquire your minions and a chance at some souls... with a moderate risk. Given that you'r playing with death, it seems thematic and fun, to me.

Regarding negative life... this makes me crazy. I can't fathom why the Necromancer doesn't have a means to convert some positive life into negative life. It would really enhance the Sacrifice shield but it also makes thematic sense.

Such a feature would REALLY be worth spending scarce talent points on. I'd do something like offer a percent of it with every class point in Blurred Mortality (when active) and then make it a passive instead of a sustain IF you become a lich. Then it'd be worth throwing five talent points into AND it would justify the category point into Necrosis if doing so bumped up the percentage. I'd like to see it around 40-45%, which could be 500 or so with Lich by game's end. Combine that with the 300 or so already in place and you now have 800 negative life 650 or positive life.

Then with Sacrifice, you'd be in business, although that might need a small nerf. I suggest massively increasing its mana cost, from 5 to 80 or so. Necromancer skills are all expensive with long cool-downs, no sense in changing that now.

Additionally, Undeath Link is still the worst skill in the game. This should be simple: take whatever percentage of life from your minions and give it to you, times heal mod. Then, with EoD, grant 50% of that as a shield. What it currently does it awful and pointless.

Finally, I hate, hate, hate the Ice tree and really dislike the Grave tree. That's just a crappy ice-mage. Chill of the Tomb is just a copy of Fireflash. It lacks originality and, again, just makes the gameplay boring... snipe, snipe, snipe.

With my changes, you'd be more durable and thus wouldn't have to snipe. Make the Necro more defensive and less offensive, or at least provide that as an alternative. Currently, the Necro is boring because it doesn't allow for enough diversity of build to make use of its more intriguing skills. There should be numerous ways to play a class, and currently this one is too constrained.

If you change that tree to most damage over time plus area effect damage, it has nice synergy with minions. I had, what I thought, was a really nice category with nice synergy and thematic consistency. It did AoE, DoT, and added relevant status effects like pin and bleed.

You could, in theory, finally get rid of Vampiric Gifts entirely and do what many have asked for: create a proper Vampire race, with life drain as a racial talent.

Anyway, rant done...