ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

The idea of necromancy has been bandied about a few times on the forums. Personally I’d like to see a few unique thoughts on how the mancer would play, making it distinct from other Maj’Eyal classes, and also different from necros in other games.

Below are some suggestions for trees that a necromancer could have. There are few attack spells, and they are all short-range, so you can't merrily blast through your enemies like the other caster classes. Enemies are dealt with through minions and becoming extremely strong in melee with Deathform. This is a short duration effect of immense power, so the necromancer will need to protect himself with minions when it wears off. Note that Deathform gives triple fatigue, making spell-casting hard when in this state. The class as I've put it is mana-based, and could have some other spell-casting trees, but it could technically be made into a vim-based class instead. Personally I prefer the idea of necromancy as traditional magic used in nasty ways.


New tree ideas:

Deathform
First talent is activated for (4+t) turns, with 50 cooldown. Higher talents are passive effects for when Deathform is active.
->Deathform (+attack, +combatpower, +armour, +%physresist, +200%fatigue)
->Flesh from Beyond (nature resist, dark resist, +regen, blight damage on hit)
->Ghoulish Appetite (added bite to each attack – bite heals self + can cause disease)
->Wight’s Touch (attacks do added dark damage and can confuse)

Bone Golemancy [lvl 10, locked]
->??? Similar to alchemist’s golem

Dark Magic
->Chilling Touch (melee range, freezes)
->Soul Suck (range 3, drains resources, causes darkness damage, restores mana and health)
->Darkness Falls (darkens area, darkness damage to enemies)
->Extinguish (insta-kill weak creatures, stun + dark damage others)

Death Magic
->Necrosis (melee range, damage enemy, reduce their movement speed and strength)
->Control Undead (attempt to turn enemy undead to your control – single target, in area after level 4; success is will-based)
->Bone Shield (as per enemy spell)
->Self-preservation (various defences/resists, gives 1 resurrection at level 5, but at a cost of 80% Con when raised)

Raising the Dead (Will-related)
Each spell summons one of each tier of undead listed, with each tier unlocked by raw talent levels. Minions decay after a number of turns.
->Raise Lesser Undead (degen skelly/warrior/ghoul/ghast/armoured warrior)
->Raise Ranged Undead (archer/archer/mage/mage/master archer)
->Raise Greater Undead (ghoulking/master archer/forest wight/vampire/banshee)
->Raise Master Undead (grave wight/barrow wight/master vampire/dread/lich)

Minion Control (Will-related)
->Explode Minion (different effects? Skeleton – damage + bleeding; ghoul – disease; wight – thunderstorm; ghost – horror storm; vampire – exhaustion? At level 5 causes chain reaction with other undead. Caster unaffected.)
->Swap Places (swap up to x places away. After swapping both you and minion gain 20% global speed)
->Master’s Gift (heals and reduces cooldowns on minions)
->Eyes of the Dead (sustain – see everything minions see, gaining infravision, see invis and see in the dark with talent levels)


Other trees class could have:
Cunning/Survival [locked]
Spells/Divination [locked]
Staff Combat

Unlock should be something easy like defeating Kor'Pul after unlocking archmages.

Discuss!

I think the unlock should be different is all, other than being lucky and seeing a honey tree in one of them, I dont think any of the newbie areas have an unlock and I like it that way. Maybe have a quest that starts after beating kol'pur and it has you go to another location to finish. That was my idea for a spirit shaman unlock, although that one started in the old forest and you finish up at the Well of Souls which obviously dosent exist yet.

Maybe have the unlock linked to the Unstoppable! (I think) achievement for returning from the dead, because I see this as an advanced class, perhaps Mana/Vim (Vim for summoning, mana for support?)

I don't know at what range this class would fight. Most summoners hang back and support their summons from a medium range, but this class has several melee talents.

Bone golemancy giving you a persistent upgradeable ally seems like it would be a core part of the class (like the golem), so maybe you should start with the bone golem, but only get advanced features (eg direct control, equipment switching) with the tree unlocked?

Raising Dead tree: I would split it differently, because you could get less use out of some of the summons than their lower raw level counterparts. One way to do it, is below. It cuts down on variety to gain consistency within the talent.

Summon Skeleton Warrior: (Degenerated, Degenerated, Warrior, Warrior, Armoured Warrior)
Summon Skeleton Archer: (archer, archer, archer, master, master)
Summon Ghoul: (Ghoul, Ghoul, Ghast, Ghast, Ghoulking)
Summon Vampire: (Lesser, Normal, Lord, Greater, Master)

Master's Gift: Don't know how useful cooldown reduction would be without a better UI for seeing information on your summons.


This looks like a good concept to me, keep it up.

Maybe after collecting all the how to become a necromancer lore

Hmm, read and commented the deathmancer thread before this one, so now I find out that you have a lot of the suggestions I made there. Ninja'd? Self-Ninja'd?

Right, necros should of course have a unique feel For me, the obvious touchstones are Summoners, Alchemists and Corruptors, less so melee-ers. Melee belongs, in my opionion, to a deathknight-like class, but whatever, I'm not that opposed to the idea either. I agree damage dealing spells should be auxiliary, not the classes main shtik.

I'd run them of vim instead of mana, since we already have it and it seems thematically more fitting. Or, as lukep has suggested,

perhaps Mana/Vim (Vim for summoning, mana for support?)

that could be very interesting. Several of the Corruption trees would fit pretty well thematically...

Maybe after collecting all the how to become a necromancer lore

2nded!

So, now some comments on the talent trees in detail:

Deathform
First talent is activated for (4+t) turns, with 50 cooldown. Higher talents are passive effects for when Deathform is active.

Straightforward enough, although 50 cooldown seems a bit overkill. 25 should be enough that, once deathform runs out, you have to do some other stuff before you can cast it again.

Bone Golemancy [lvl 10, locked]
->??? Similar to alchemist’s golem

Hopefully it'd get some decent regen - I've always found golems to get awfully frail beyond level 15 or so, unless one gets Advanced Golemancy with the Runic Golem talent. Possibly the companion could share in any lifestealing the necromancer engages in...

Dark Magic
->Chilling Touch (melee range, freezes)
->Soul Suck (range 3, drains resources, causes darkness damage, restores mana and health)
->Darkness Falls (darkens area, darkness damage to enemies)
->Extinguish (insta-kill weak creatures, stun + dark damage others)

First off, I'd switch Darkness Falls and Extinguish, since Eyes of the Dead, which you'd want up before casting the former, is the forth talent in its tree. Come to think of it, monsters all have darkvision, so maybe it should do darkness damage + blind.

Death Magic
->Necrosis (melee range, damage enemy, reduce their movement speed and strength)
->Control Undead (attempt to turn enemy undead to your control – single target, in area after level 4; success is will-based)
->Bone Shield (as per enemy spell)
->Self-preservation (various defences/resists, gives 1 resurrection at level 5, but at a cost of 80% Con when raised)

Bone Shield is a tier 4 skill in the Corruption/Bone tree - it would be one tier lower here. Maybe something that deflects damage onto your minions instead? Would be nicely ruthless, too. Call it Walking Shields, maybe

Raising Dead tree:

I like lukeps suggestion. For more high-end stuff, there could be unlockable lvl-10-required tree. Also consider making it a timed effect and automatically raising undead whenever your number of minions is under your maximum. Maybe like this:

Greater Raising:(Will-related, needs lvl 10)

• Summon Ghost
• Summon Lich
• Marshalling the Dead: passive, increase max number of minions, summon duration, maybe other stuff
• Open the Gates: timed, auto-summons the last summon spell cast every time an enemy is killed as long as under the max number of minions

Minion Control (Will-related)
->Explode Minion (different effects? Skeleton – damage + bleeding; ghoul – disease; wight – thunderstorm; ghost – horror storm; vampire – exhaustion? At level 5 causes chain reaction with other undead. Caster unaffected.)
->Swap Places (swap up to x places away. After swapping both you and minion gain 20% global speed)
->Master’s Gift (heals and reduces cooldowns on minions)
->Eyes of the Dead (sustain – see everything minions see, gaining infravision, see invis and see in the dark with talent levels)

This looks like great fun, esp. Explode Minion and Swap Places. Not sure if I'd always want a chain reaction though, so I'm not too happy about automatically adding it at level 5. A definite YES on the different effects.
Eyes of the Dead: maybe switch with Master's Gift so that synergy with Darkness Falls is easier to achieve (if you wan't too keep Darkness Falls on tier 3). Because Darkness Falls without this would suck.

jotwebe wrote: Hopefully it'd get some decent regen - I've always found golems to get awfully frail beyond level 15 or so, unless one gets Advanced Golemancy with the Runic Golem talent. Possibly the companion could share in any lifestealing the necromancer engages in...

What about if the tier 1 talent for the bone golem is:
Lifebound Golem: passive
Any healing done to the golem's master also heals the golem for (10 * talent)% as much.

jotwebe wrote: Also consider making it a timed effect and automatically raising undead whenever your number of minions is under your maximum. Maybe like this:

That would make them very different from Summoners, but could work as well. You would constantly have a small army following you, instead of calling them up on demand. An idea for regulating the maximum number/power of summons, what if each summon was persistent (eg. 1000 turn duration), but had a Vim sustain cost attached to it (higher cost for higher tier talents)? This would require an "unsummon" skill, but it could work to build and balance a roving army. It could be interesting balancing the two fundamentally different minions (golem vs. normal summons)

Deathform: I would be tempted to change to longer duration (4 + 2 * talent) instead of a shorter cooldown, but I don't know how long battles will last with this class.

Very interesting.
But I do not think the minions should summoned. it would make the class too close to summoners.
I would rather suggest that the necro have one undead golem and that killed npcs could be temporarily turned to friendly undeads.

Raise the deads
* Fatal call
Deals X-Y damage. if the NPC is killed, it is turned to an undead minion for (6..10) turns (does not work on bosses, does work on elite at lvl 5)
Raised undeads have (50-100)% of the life rating of the npcs and start with (80-100)% of their life.
Raised undeads start with the same set of talents as the killed NPCs.
* Ghost commander (passive)
You can have 2..6 raised undead minions.
* Ghost immortality (passive)
Killed minions have a (10-25)% probability to revive with (80-100)% of their life
* Call of the deads (passive)
NPCS killed by minions have a (10-25)% probability to be raised as undeads with (80-100)% of their life. Life rating and duration is determined by the level in fatal call

Also a free talent would allow to turn a temp raised undead to an undead golem. Kills the previous golem of course.

ghostbuster wrote:Very interesting.
But I do not think the minions should summoned. it would make the class too close to summoners.
I would rather suggest that the necro have one undead golem and that killed npcs could be temporarily turned to friendly undeads.

That would make them very weak between fights (eg. after all of their minions have timed out), and much stronger in the middle/end of long ones. Could make the class interesting to play, balancing the choice between rest and recovery and keeping yourself powerful.

Before a battle they would be relatively weak, yes. But they are seconded by a permanent golem.
One could make the creation of minions slightly easier by allowing the golem and the existing minions to create new minions with the following talents:

Raise the deads
* Doom (range 8, low cooldown, if not too powerful can be a beam)
Dooms the target for 5-10 turns. Doomed targets loose 5-10% of their resistance. If a doomed NPC dies, it is turned to an undead minion for (6..10) turns (does not work on bosses, does work on elite at lvl 5) with 50% life rating of the original NPC.
Raised undeads start with the same stats and set of talents as the killed NPCs.
* Ghost commander (passive)
You can have 2..6 raised undead minions.
* Ghost mastery
Increases the life rating of raised undeads up to 100% of the original npc
* Ghost immortality (passive)
Killed minions have a (10-25)% probability to revive with (80-100)% of their life

Another interesting aspect concerns the golem management. If you can turn any undead minion to a golem, should you choose a new golem with a high life rating, nice stats, interesting talents, etc, or prefer to keep the one that you have trained for hours and that is highly experienced?

I don't like the idea of necros having to rely on killing actual enemies to create servants. It's simply not fun, and can make some situations far more difficult since you're not able to prepare properly - boss fights especially. Enemy necros can summon from thin air, so I see no problem with PC necros doing the same thing.

The more I think about it the idea of Bone Golemancy is possibly a bad idea. I thought it would be a fun optional thing to throw in, but overall I believe the class would work best with more expendable minions. Otherwise they'd be too similar to alchemists. Could maybe do with more minion manipulation talents - throw them around, bloat and cripple them to block corridors, use them as shields (I like jotwebe's Walking Shields idea), more explosion options, etc. This would promote the evil = fun feel of the class, separating them from summoners.

Edit: Oh, and regarding unlocks, I'm not a big fan of difficult unlocks myself. But I guess gathering the Necro lore would be fine. Or beating the Master a third time.

Here is an idea to make the summoning more interesting. Seeded summoning. Since I believe necromancers can make most types of undead from any corpse they should be able to mix and match attributes of the undead. So I could make a skeleton minion have more health but slow movement (like a ghoul). The way I envisioned this was have 4 tiers of seeds each tier would have 2-4 seeds associated with it that would be unlocked as you increased the talent level

T1 Skeleton - +str + dex, weapons,reassemble
T2 Ghoul - +str +Con - move, Diseases (probably on a melee attack) , Ghoulish leap
T3 Dread - +mag move through walls, + def , ???
T4 Spellcasting - evocations ,hexes and curses, defensive spells

so one could mix and match seeds to make a variety of undead. Also one could learn new seeds like the trapping and poison talent. Examples would be a banshee seed (aoe silence) or deathly cold (adds a small map effect to the undead that deals cold damage). All of the seeds would be sustains (that cost no energy to use) that cancel when you summon the base undead. So the more seeds the more it costs. the costs could even go up depending on how many seeds you already have. The problem with this is that it takes 4 key presses to summon a normal minion. So each talent would have a "summon [type]" that would just use the necessary talents to make that type of undead. Also if there was macro support this would no longer be a problem.

I'm not sure I like that level of micromanagement. However it does open up the prospect of more inventive evocations of the undead. For instance:

- Flaming flying skulls, which whizz around the dungeon till they see something they can kamikaze explode into (so you can use it round a corner or outside a room and they'll go find the nearest enemy for you)
- Severed arm - use as a trap to pin enemies or throttle small creatures
- Last Kiss - undead lips arise to kiss the enemy, poisoning and diseasing it
- Dread Intestines - bloody blackened intestines wrap around enemies in an area, disarming and stunning them

Could have a tree called "Leftovers" or "Spare Parts" :)

Or another: Brain Storm - confuses and slimes enemies over an area