ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Currently necromancer have only two generic trees(+locked survival) All skills are quite unrelated to necromancy and quite common for other classes, making the class more bland than it should be

My vague idea of a new, cunning based tree without names as I am awful in naming and not sure about talents order

1) Fear immunity and mental save (guys that regularly deal with dead usually have steel nerves)
2) Darkness resistance and blight resistance
3) Activable ability to detect invisible undeads (or invisible monsters in general)
4) +% to damage to undeads and +% hit points (or resist all) for necrotic minions (Thematically: deep knowledge of undead "anatomy. ")

I think it should be based on cunning because it is more knowledge than magic.

Furthermore, I suggest to add a new escort type "Grave robber" or "undead hunter" offering that tree or talents from it as a reward

I like this idea.
Remind me to poach it some time.

How does this sound?

Dark Secrets - Cunning based generic category
Grave Resolve: passive. Bonus to Fear immunity and Mental save.
Dark-Touched: passive. Small resistance bonus against darkness, cold, undead (and demons?)
Dead Whispers: active. Grants telepathy Undead for a short time.
Necroanatomy: passive. You do increased damage to undead, decreased damage to your own undead minions and your undead minions get extra life.

Necromancers start with this unlocked at mastery 1.3
Shadowblades start with this unlocked at mastert 1.1

New escort type: Gravekeeper.
Can grant talent ranks or this category.
Special: If the player is undead, they will notice that the Gravekeeper is really another undead and will have an additional reward option of +0.1 mastery in their racial category.

What about liches?

Dark-Touched: passive. Small resistance bonus against darkness, cold, undead (and demons?)

I think it's a bit weak, I'd prefer some blight resistance here as this is quite nice resist to have, while darkness and cold are more niche. Maybe give blight resist for LVL 5 or even effective lvl 6 to motivate investing in it?

Necroanatomy: passive. You do increased damage to undead, decreased damage to your own undead minions and your undead minions get extra life.

Maybe instead of increased life\resistance that may be to powerful, give some +life regeneration to undead of your party? Including yourself if you are undead, little buff for lichform , undead necromancers and undead characters that will encounter the escort

I agree that Necromancers could use some more (especially generic) talent options.

However:
More darkness resistance is mostly redundant with (and opposes) Frostdusk's darkness affinity.
Blurred mortality (which is getting a small buff in the next version) provides extra life.

I'm not sure why Shadowblades should get (or need) this tree.

Activatable type-specific telepathy seems a bit weird to me What kind of cooldowns would you have, and what would your use-case be?. Possibly have it have a radius depending on skill level, instead?

Alternate idea - an activatable power that, for a short period of time with a longish cooldown, lets you see all nearby undead, and everything in a small radius around them.

Fear seems like it's a bit uncommon to be a major part of a five point generic. Possibly make it fear resist and a crit-booster? Then you could drop the dark resist, and put the mental save there.

I'm also a touch perplexed abou the Shadowblades.

Oh, Dark-touched is supposed to be blight resistance not cold.

Life regen bonus to undead minions and self if undead sounds better than bonus life.

I'm pretty sure affinity is calculated before resistance, so it won't reduce it. (and no guarantee that everyone has it)

Suggested Shadowblades could get it cos they know about darkness and are generally nasty. And they use cunning, so why shouldn't they get it?

I said activate for telepathy because Dreads use stealth. So see invis isn't going to work. Could add the ability to see around your own minions (should they have wandered off).

Anyway I'm not entirely happy with the layout of the talents. Only one activatable and three passives is a bit dull.
So, as DarkGod says...
Moar ideas!

Strongpoint wrote:

Dark-Touched: passive. Small resistance bonus against darkness, cold, undead (and demons?)

I think it's a bit weak, I'd prefer some blight resistance here as this is quite nice resist to have, while darkness and cold are more niche.

I think it'd be bad design to grant blight resistance to a given class just because it's more useful long term than other resists, if there's no thematic rationale to support it. Necros are an arcane class, and isn't blight a form of perverted arcane or elemental magic? (I think I remember reading something about this in the Scintillating Caves or Rhaloren lore.) Usually classes get resistances to the elements they're proficient with, not the opposite.

Well, that tree is not magic, that's knowledge of someone who is dealing with undeads and blight isn't uncommon damage source of undead
And considering that blighted summoning prodigy is widely used by necromancers don't think that Necromancers are opposed to blight


What I agree with is that three passives for one talent tree is a bit too much....

Maybe on touch heal ala nature touch but working only on undead? Or to make it more versatile - if used on undeads it's healing, if used on living as melee attack - damage.
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Crazy idea: move lich form here . People will complain less about the need to spend class points on lich form and any class (but oozemancers) that will be able o became a lich via escort!

Just in case: I am joking here, it would be strange if no necromancer will be able to become a lich

I think that undead should be banned from getting Celestial/Light, and this tree should serve as an alternative for them. All these talents cost souls (and give you an L0 necrotic aura if you don't already have it).

L1: Heals undead/harms other. Gives undead minions a small life regen
L2: Chance to recover souls from dead minions. Automatically teleports minions to you during autoexplore (maybe this should be present in the game anyway)
L3: Removes all detrimental effects at the cost of (%) of a soul per effect. Cannot be used if it would consume more souls than you have
L4: Consumes x% of life from minions but lets you see what they see for a short time

Ooo nice.

Necromancy addon up next.

What about undead Celestials? Right now undead can even be Sun Paladins. The thought of an undead-specific healing/survival tree is intriguing, but I'm still unsure about the thought that undead shouldn't get light-based magic. Also, costing souls means you could run out of juice for healing in the middle of an extended combat with a singular tough enemy and be left with the option to leaving for another area just to find enemies to kill to re-juice up. Plus half of the talents have absolutely no use for non-necromancers--with the Light tree even Bathe in Light can be used to heal escorts and the like, you just have to get out of it. As is I'd actually consider losing access to the Light tree and getting this instead a rather profound nerf on any non-necromancer undead I played.

You raise some good points. How about:

1. Undead start with this tree, locked. (This helps counterbalance the loss of Celestial/Light, since you don't have to rely on chance to get it).
2. Undead whose class is Celestial are healed by Celestial/Light spells. All others are harmed by them (but can still take them, e.g. if you want Providence badly enough to tank the damage, or if you want to heal an escort with Bathe in Light).

I think that that more or less balances the change, especially if you bear in mind that the "must have" status of Celestial/Light on Undead was rather imbalanced. In essence, you swap a shield, a heal, and a way of getting rid of status effects for a damage spell, a heal, and a way of getting rid of status effects. Yes, souls are kind of an annoying resource, but that's a general characteristic of all soul-based spells.

Well, with the projected tree, it's basically worse than Celestial/Light, honestly. (Two minions-users only skills that can only be leveraged replacing Barrier is a trade down, damaging enemies with your heal is a nice extra but generally can't be thought of as making it two skills, to me.)

So this would mostly be an undeads nerf for thematic reasons, which seems unnecessary.

I'm not saying it needs to be all useful to all undead-Bathe in Light is sorta iffy for undead, only useful for healing escorts once in a while-but it's really Necromancer focused as a set of ideas, is all.