ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Necromancer is a fun class, but it has a few problems. Here are some proposed changes:

- Change Curse of the Meek to have a 100% chance of granting a soul upon death by hostiles. Currently, the 50% chance is too unreliable and it encourages farming for souls against weaker foes.

Fix it so that players gain nothing from killing their own bunnies. And increase the summons' duration by a few more turns. Necromancers try to stay as far away from a fight as possible, so the bunnies usually disappear before most enemies can reach them.

- Rigor Mortis is a little too good. Reduce the duration by a few turns.

- Will O' the Wisp is kinda weird. The description says that wisps are basically suicide bombers, but they stick around for a long time, even in battles.

- Change minions so they don't run off and die, while trying to attack an enemy they never seen before in a locked room. It happens constantly in the prides. Minions are not telepathic. :-/

Also, please remove the minion's teleporting awareness. It just makes no sense.

What I mean by this is: When an NPC, targeted by your minions, teleports or phases away, the minions that were targeting it will know where it went, and proceed towards it's teleport exit point, no matter if it on the other side of the map or not.

I just tried playing a necromancer and I never got to level 14 to unlock curse of the meek. I ran into one of those full level vaults in the old forest.
I was stupid enough to play a minion master necromancer.

All I can say is that I will never make that mistake again.

Possible suggestion:
Since curse of the meek is so essential for getting souls, can this talent be moved to the necrotic minions default tree? To me, it seems like it is a central mechanic to the minions, so it should be a part of that block of talents.

necrotic-minions
* Create minions
* Aura mastery
* Curse of the meek (moved from shades)
* Assemble (moved from advanced)

(removed surge of undead and dark empathy, since they are not essential to the minion mechanic in the early game)

advanced-necrotic-minions
* Undead empathy (passive, +combat power, +spellpower, +accuracy, +percentage of your resistance and saves). Merge surge of undead and dark empathy. Makes your minions better.
* Undead explosion
* Sacrifice
* Minion mastery

Shades
* shadow tunnel
* ? new talent needed here
* Forgery of haze
* Frostdusk

marvalis wrote:* Curse of the meek (moved from shades)
* Assemble (moved from advanced)

(removed surge of undead and dark empathy, since they are not essential to the minion mechanic in the early game)

advanced-necrotic-minions
* Undead empathy (passive, +combat power, +spellpower, +accuracy, +percentage of your resistance and saves). Merge surge of undead and dark empathy. Makes your minions better.

I personally would hate this. I love surge of undeath how it is. It let me feel like I was actively taking part in combat instead of just pressing 5 while my minions killed everything.


*edit* Also I used Curse of the Meek a lot and didn't know that I could kill them off to get souls back (and only used the nightfall tree for damage so aside from skeleton mages I wouldn't have killed them). Even at 50% it seemed fine to me. Will O' Wisps stick around until they hit something. If they don't hit they won't ever explode. (Another thing surge of undeath is good for).

Skeleton Mages need to be fixed too... tired of them killing both myself and my own minions. A few in bad positions will end up dealing more damage to my minion horde than the mobs.

edge2054 wrote:I personally would hate this.

Sounds very reasonable, but the point was not to remove these, but to get curse of the weak to the early game.
Do you think it is a good idea to make curse of the meek available earlier? How would you do it?

My idea was more an example, I only played necromancer twice and never got higher than level 13 or something.

How about another option for getting necrotic energy back instead of moving Curse of The Meek?

Dark Empathy could give a percentage chance to refund a soul point when a minion inside your necrotic aura is killed by an enemy actor (maybe half the normal empathy value since 15, 80 can get pretty high with spellpower.) So... self:combatTalentSpellDamage(t, 15, 80) /2 percent chance of getting your soul point back?

martinuzz wrote:Also, please remove the minion's teleporting awareness. It just makes no sense.

What I mean by this is: When an NPC, targeted by your minions, teleports or phases away, the minions that were targeting it will know where it went, and proceed towards it's teleport exit point, no matter if it on the other side of the map or not.

Yes, very annoying.
This also happens when your minions are fighting something.
Then you teleport away and summon the minions around you.
They will try to run back to the enemy that they just fought, no matter how far away and inconvinient this is.

So if the minions are teleported, or their enemy is teleported, the targetting should go *poff* and they could target something new if they like.

OffTopic: If you stand on an unidentified object, I think the orb should identify the object as if it was inside your backpack.

Tom

I think Necromancer NPCs need to work slightly differently. Small, innate Necrotic Aura recovery (perhaps 1% chance per turn), and a lower max level on Create Minions. Necromancers currently put Summoners to shame; I'd rather my strategy not always be "wait for minions to summon, run away so they all die, kill defenseless necromancer."

Tom wrote:OffTopic: If you stand on an unidentified object, I think the orb should identify the object as if it was inside your backpack.

Doesn't this already happen?

The only instances where this may not occur is if you use a talent which moves you on top of the item (i.e, not a 'normal' step onto it), such as Disengage, Phase Door, a Knockback effect, etc - since that will usually *not* trigger things like ID or traps. If you've had other situations where something doesn't id-on-walkover then maybe report that in a new thread.