ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Here my proposal of a necromancer-like class, i hope something from here could be useful:

Deathmancer talent tree

Resource used: MANA
Most important stats: WILLPOWER, DEXTERITY

Necromancy tree: (class)

-curse of undeath: lasts X turns, deals Y darkness damage to the target. If the target dies during the duration the curse pass on a near enemy and the target is turned to level (1/4 of the target level + skill level) skeleton, which lasts Z turns. Max of K skeletons at the same time.
at level 3 the skeleton raised could be an archer
at level 5 the skeleton raised could be a mage

-Control undeads: try to take the control of the target undead (don't works on elite - unique). Every undead controlled count for the cap of undeads under your orders.

-Bone Golem: fuse all your skeletons into a bone golem, which stats are the addition of all the stats of the undeads used.

Bone storm: the target allied skeleton explodes, spreading all it's bone shards around dealing damage in a radius of X and curse all the enemies hitted with curse of undeath as you were casting it. 50% chance to slow the enemies.

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Soul manipulation tree (class):

-Soul harvest: Passive: Every time you kill an enemy you gain a soul. Every soul collected heals you of X. Cap of 20*skill level souls.Does not work for undead enemies. Elites grants 3 souls and uniques grants 10.

-Consume: Activate to consume enough souls to heal yourself of X per soul stored, till you are full health or there are no more souls.Every time you are hitted you automatically consume a soul if the skill is not on cooldown.

-Souls Stream: Release a spirit every 20 souls stored, consuming the souls in the process. those spirits follow you and fight for X turns. When the time expires the come back to you healing for Y% of the damage they dealt in total.

-Soul weapon: empower your weapon with all the souls you have, gaining a bonus to accuracy and damage(bonus damage is darkness type) equal to the number of souls used. Lasts (skill level) turns

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Bone Weapon (Class, minimum level 10)

-Bone Schyte: converts your currently equipperd staff in a bone schyte using the target allied skeleton as material. The weapon gain a bonus APR of X and have a Y% chance to cast curse of undeath on hit. Permanent effect, but the value of the item becomes zero, let's say nobody wanna buy such unholy item.

-Circular Execution: attack every target around you for X% of the weapon damage (hope this can trigger the on hit effect)

-Backboned Schyte: Extends the backboned grip of the weapon, giving a bonus range to your attaks and skills of X for Y turns

-Reaping Slash: damage all the enemies in a frontal arc, sending a wave of darkness in front of you wich damage and stun everyone in it's path.

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Undead transformation tree (generic)
-undead Traits: your body starts to die, becoming less sensible to poisons and disabling effects like slow stun etc. but also to infusions. Grant increased poison, disease, slow, stun immunity but can no more use infusions.

-Stone bones: you harden your bones, granting bonus armor and defense (not sure about the value to give)

-Dark power: your unholy body can overcome the phisical limits, granting you increased weapon accuracy and spell power.

-Filactery: You try to create a filactery to store your soul and prevent death. Using an Artifact as container you project your soul in it. This dark ritual requires silence and concentration, along with 40 turns to correctly execute it.Every enemy in sight will break the concentration, wich cause you damage based on how long you were doing the ritual and destroy the artifact. As long as you wear it you still resemble alive so no one can spot your nature. When you die the item breaks and your soul return into your body, granting Y% of your total life. Only one philactery can be possessed at a time and the item must be weared or will breaks itself after 3 turns.

//fixed with edge hints

I do love necro themed classes. the idea of combining summons is also very interesting. I belive had a few talents like that in my tainted class wich I need to start working on. Because the undead might want this class too and the undead transformation is then redudant you might want to make a "advanced" undead tree that requires you to be either undead or have X talent points in the undead transformation tree. I also get the feel this is a melee character who is supported by his/her summons. So a thoguht to consider is this a miore melee oreinted character with a few spell like my death knight or the reaver or a spell caster character with a few melee abilties. sence there are no characters that fit the latter I suggest that whoever makes this class consider that.

On a more technical note I do not suggest making the souls a resource (I don't know if your are planning to do that). It turns out each resource is checked by ALL actors so one wants to add them only as needed. As a alternitive I suggest that a system like the brawler's combo point system. This way the data is stored in an effect

oh yeah with coming back to life you may want to have the unlock quest give the one ring that you use it on. This way one just does'nt farm rings and become immortal

First of all, thanks for the feedback, also i'm pleased you like the idea. The base of this class is a caster wich use mana, and since the undead races are not great in WIL and MAG i thought that somebody would prefer a shaloren deathmancer wich actually can become undead during the campaign. Soul are not intended like vim or hate, but just for that talent tree, but it could be reworked, such as gaining more shards instead of only one soul so you can store them quickly. Note also that in the first 3 levels you can't do anything except storing. The melee part start from level 10 so i'd rather classify this char as a spellcaster, wich later use his modified staff to fight but stil has to work on magic and willpower. For the philactery i thick it could help to make the player spend at least 500g to create it, according to me it take a while to earn that number, and people are forced to waste a slot with a ring without bonuses. My goal in this idea was to create a class who cannot just raise an army and watch till the job is done, neither a nuker who make the hell rains on the field in 2 turns. The combination of summoning, fighting and casting could make it more funny to play again in some other ways people didn't last time, and i would be happy to further improve the basic idea with your hints.

You shouldnt base designing a class around your own personal opinions or pre-conceptions. Just because you dont feel undead casters are good or havent found a good way to play one yet dosent mean everyone else is the same. Skeleton Mindslayers may just be the most unstoppable class.

The undead traits talent could be handled with a simple statement in the talent description (like an "or strengthen your undead form if you're already undead.") While some of these bonuses would be redundant with a skeleton or ghoul so would the penalty. So gaining a bit of stun resist on a skeleton or some poison immunity on a ghoul for a few talent points may not be such a bad trade off. Plus if people don't like it they can just invest one point.

For phylactery I would require the character to store his soul in an artifact and keep the breaking effect (and maybe change it to an amulet). Maybe even have the phylactery spell overwrite what ever properties are in the artifact. This ensures that the number of lives gained from the spell are limited (only so many artifact amulets in the game) and gives the free lives a substantial downside (you lose an item slot and access to an artifact).

curse of undeath: lasts X turns, deals Y darkness damage to the target. If the target dies during the duration the curse pass on a near enemy and the target is turned to level (1/4 of the target level + skill level) skeleton, which lasts Z turns.

I think a good method to produce undead from killed enemies would be to give them the higher of your level and the target level. So if you're level 10 and kill a level 5 enemy, your skeleton will be level 5. If you kill a level 15 enemy, it will be level 10. The Talent Level could then mainly determine your X, Y, Z and K.

How about giving curse of undeath its own tree, and each each curse can produce a different type of undead? Or you could make a tree that works like the alchemist infusions, so you could turn on a sustain if you want ghouls instead of skeletons.

Bone storm: the target allied skeleton explodes, spreading all it's bone shards around dealing damage in a radius of X and curse all the enemies hitted with curse of undeath as you were casting it. 50% chance to slow the enemies.

I rather like this one. If you get different types of undead, you could also change the damage types - blight and disease instead of slow for fleshy undead, darkness (or cold?) and confuse or blind or (freeze?) for ghosty stuff.

Soul manipulation tree (class):

I think counting souls is a bit needlessly complicated. Vim is already quite close to what you're doing: you get it for killing on-undead stuff, and it neither decays nor regenerates. Also, I think it ignores fatigue, which would be useful for a class that's expected to go into melee occasionally, since it'd let you wear a bit of armor. My suggestion here would be to let either everything or only the soul manipulation stuff run off vim instead of mana. A class that uses both, but each for different talents, could be interesting.

Reaping Slash

In a similar vein, I'd suggest keeping the target area of Reaping Slash the same as other "arc" style talents (NW-N-NE instead of W-N-E). Otherwise it's a bit strange that it would "skip" targets when you aim straight, while for example Sweep doesn't.

Good feedback, just a precisation: the deathmancer is supposed to use mana, souls stored are just "ammunitions" for the relative talent tree, and about the slash i agree with the current way to attack in an arc, i just didn't think about it before when writing the post

For the first point, i'd rather not create a separate tree to raise undeads and a one to manipulate them, copying the alchemist isn't my goal. Notice also that this caster type have to raise willpower for the manapool, but also dexterity to have a fair accuracy. I'd play him by first spawning some minions and after going melee using my bone schyte to reap enemies...

@edge: the idea of using artifacts instead of rings is good, also i already wrote that a philactery overwrite all the item bonuses, it just becomes a useless item in terms of stat, that why the articaft must be wearable. For the undead form tree, i'm not completely sure about it, any suggestion for more experienced people is welcome.

The death in TOME is connected to Eidolon plane, it would be logical to incorporate that fact somehow. Travel/move to Eidolon plane?

Not really, the Eidolon is an entity with its own goals, which are not know yet.
It saves you on the brink of death, it does not really ressurects you