Necromancer Rework

[Razakai]

So we've had quite a few threads about this in the past, and I did hesitate to make another, especially as I have a thread in the addon forum. But recently one of ToME's more senior developers mentioned that my rework could be made part of the main game once it's finished and up to the usual high standards of class reworks, so I'd like to open discussion to a wider audience to get more feedback and ideas to improve it. So here's how the rework currently stands, which I've put into a google doc to make slightly more readable:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1h8a ... bhuuM/edit

All comments, positive and negative, are welcome.

[Suslik]

Diablo 2-like Frozen Orb? Yes, please!

[Suslik]

Actually after looking closer I've noticed that basically all the changes are huge buffs. Well for me necromancer(especially higher) looks like one of the stronger classes already and it's not like they need any more buffs. Making talents more interesting? Yeah, sure. Making already awesome talents instant or transferring 5 freaking debuffs? No, sir.

[HousePet]

I've been thinking lately that Lichform might work better as a full category, instead of sitting in slot 4 of a category and granting Star-Fury.

[DAllan7m]

Eternal Darkness in base game? Yes please! Dont have much to say, as i only tested Grave/Reaping combo while trying to get 1 achivment and my save get destroed by last update, but yes Black Ice was overkill a little. I could (and did) just walk near monsters with it and Death Vortex on, till i found something that needed my attention, and that get boring very fast.

[cttw]

Actually after looking closer I've noticed that basically all the changes are huge buffs. Well for me necromancer(especially higher) looks like one of the stronger classes already and it's not like they need any more buffs. Making talents more interesting? Yeah, sure. Making already awesome talents instant or transferring 5 freaking debuffs? No, sir.

This is exactly why I lost interest in the addon. Also imagine a stair guardian with this stuff.

[Razakai]

Actually after looking closer I've noticed that basically all the changes are huge buffs. Well for me necromancer(especially higher) looks like one of the stronger classes already and it's not like they need any more buffs. Making talents more interesting? Yeah, sure. Making already awesome talents instant or transferring 5 freaking debuffs? No, sir.

What parts do you think are huge buffs? Affliction Graft in particular should be a sidegrade to Vile Transplant. Transfers less debuff types at low levels but more at higher levels, has a longer range and doesn't heal, but has twice the cooldown. The numbers in my addon shouldn't be relied on too much, as they'll all be changed till they're balanced. I don't particularly want to overbuff Necromancer with this, just make them more interesting and remove annoying mechanics.

I've been thinking lately that Lichform might work better as a full category, instead of sitting in slot 4 of a category and granting Star-Fury.

I wouldn't mind having Lichform unlock a generic category that could perhaps replace Meta, full of Necromancer specific utilities and stuff. The free Lichform+Finger of Death is more of a stopgap for the purposes of my addon.

Eternal Darkness in base game? Yes please! Dont have much to say, as i only tested Grave/Reaping combo while trying to get 1 achivment and my save get destroed by last update, but yes Black Ice was overkill a little. I could (and did) just walk near monsters with it and Death Vortex on, till i found something that needed my attention, and that get boring very fast.

Yes, that was my experience on a Nightmare difficulty Necromancer too. Grave already has quite a lot of damage so I'd prefer to replace it with something more utility/defence orientated.

[Suslik]

What parts do you think are huge buffs? Affliction Graft in particular should be a sidegrade to Vile Transplant. Transfers less debuff types at low levels but more at higher levels, has a longer range and doesn't heal, but has twice the cooldown. The numbers in my addon shouldn't be relied on too much, as they'll all be changed till they're balanced. I don't particularly want to overbuff Necromancer with this, just make them more interesting and remove annoying mechanics.

Well, almost everything!

- Chill of the Tomb
If you can trade some ability's cooldown for it's damage you will practically always want it to deal high damage because you have other attack abilities anyway. Especially if it can 1-shot a foe - you don't care about cooldown if you 1-shot everything because you can just rest afterwards and that's what I hate about tome, on normal difficulty especially - 90% of fights are 1-shots and you even don't have the opportunity to use any other abilities because you just 1-shot - rest - repeat.
Another threat - if you can spend 2 turns to deal x2 damage in a spike, that's the worst thing you want a foe on higher difficulty to have because they'll simply 1-shot you instead while autoexploring. In other words - if anything in-game can 1-shot you, it will do so because a playthrough is long enough. If you can 1-shot a regular mob with aoe(even with a long cooldown) it's not better because 90% of fights are going to be boring.

- Hungering cold
Same. Huge AoE spike damage makes easy boring fights even more boring.

- Drain life. Necromancers did not have any major healing abilities(Undeath link was the only option and it's meh) before and they are unable to use any healing/regen infusins after lichdom. Still it was pretty doable because of lich's insane max resists, sarcifice and vampiric gift which made them rather tanky actually. But when they got animus with consume soul that was like an insta-super-buff that increased their survivability like tenfold. Now you're going to add a offensive AND healing tree? Is this not a buff?

- Crimson Barrier. Yeah, shield+healing is not a buff at all.

- Exsanguinate. Chance to remove physical effects? Liches always had insane innate resistances and that's how they counter inability to use movement/wild infusions. Now they can just remove them with offensive ability?

Every change to animus is a buff.
Every change to necrotic minions is a buff.
Every change to advanced necrotic minions is a huge buff.

Affliction Graft - the only thing that the necromancer lacks is actively defensive stuff like removing statuses, shielding, etc. And now you add simply the best status-clearing ability in the game and not call it a buff? Cooldown does not matter in such cases because these abilities are supposed to be used in like once every half an hour to save your hide, not for spamming.

I haven't even read any further because that's already ridiculously powerful.

Idk, compare the class to any other. Ideally all classes are of relatively the same strength. Apparently comparing this rework to a rogue does not make any sense because all trees of a rogue combined are worse than one of these trees. Every class(except for wildfire archmages) must have at least some kind of weaknesses: solipsists do not survive burst damage and cannot remove magical/physical effects, corruptor suffer serious vim problems on higher difficulties and their only defense - bone shield is weak against dot's and crowds, arcane blades and shadowblades suffer extreme lack of attribute points, summoners are squishy themselves, paradox mages are glass cannons, you name it. Making a class that has no weaknesses is no fun at all.

[Razakai]

Well, almost everything!

- Chill of the Tomb
If you can trade some ability's cooldown for it's damage you will practically always want it to deal high damage because you have other attack abilities anyway. Especially if it can 1-shot a foe - you don't care about cooldown if you 1-shot everything because you can just rest afterwards and that's what I hate about tome, on normal difficulty especially - 90% of fights are 1-shots and you even don't have the opportunity to use any other abilities because you just 1-shot - rest - repeat.
Another threat - if you can spend 2 turns to deal x2 damage in a spike, that's the worst thing you want a foe on higher difficulty to have because they'll simply 1-shot you while autoexploring. In other words - if anything in-game can 1-shot you, it will do so because a playthrough is long enough. If you can 1-shot a regular mob with aoe(even with a long cooldown) it's not better because 90% of fights are going to be boring.

As it stands, the new Chill is probably a little weaker than the old one. Less radius, longer cooldown, requires 2 turns of setup and relies on having a shard in the correct place, and some of the damage has been shifted to the flames. The orb itself travels relatively slowly, so players would be able to quite easily dodge it. If the spike damage was really a massive problem, Chill could be set to npc_use=false. Which may be needed anyway as I'm not sure the AI would be very good at understanding the usage.

- Hungering cold
Same. Huge AoE spike damage makes easy boring fights even more boring.

The base damage of HC would be lower than a basic nuke like Invoke Darkness, and primarily useful for the debuff. The amplified burst would be good, but only as a finishing move once your Glacial Spike/Chill managed to proc a freeze. Not something you can blow up a whole room with at the start of a fight.

- Drain life. Necromancers did not have any major healing abilities(Undeath link was the only option and it's meh) before and they are unable to use any healing/regen infusins after lichdom. Still it was pretty doable because of lich's insane max resists, sarcifice and vampiric gift which made them rather tanky actually. But when they got animus with consume soul that was like an insta-super-buff that increased their survivability like tenfold. Now you're going to add an offensive AND healing ability similar to the one every corruptor relies upon? Is this not a buff?

Drain Life takes 4 turns to finish it's healing, doesn't work against a number of enemies (cut resistance) unless you go fully into Vampirism, and only heals a decent amount if you 5/5 it due to the scaling. If the problem is the interaction with Lich passive buffs etc then those can be reduced, which I was planning anyway due to it being free. And Vampiric Gift may be removed entirely due to redundancy with this new tree.

- Crimson Barrier. Yeah, shield+healing is not a buff at all.

At max level/gear this would shield you for about... 600-800 with the current numbers. Necromancer doesn't get Aegis so that would last a couple of hits maybe, as well as injuring you to use.

- Exsanguinate. Chance to remove physical effects? Liches always had insane innate resistances and that's how they counter inability to use movement/wild infusions. Now they can just remove them with offensive ability?

Physical buffs against foes. I'm not particularly attached to that effect anyway, it was mostly added as people felt Vampirism wasn't worth taking at the time. Healing debuff+lifeleech is probably enough.

Every change to animus is a buff.
Every change to necrotic minions is a buff.
Every change to advanced necrotic minions is a huge buff.

Animus is a quality of life buff. If the numbers are too high, it can be reduced to a nice bonus.
Surge is a boring skill at the moment, it needed a buff. I already explained the logic behind giving it healing.
ANM currently has 2 almost entirely useless skills, so it's no surprise it's a buff. If advanced minions are too good, they can lose abilities/stats. If the explosion and it's effects are too good, it can lose scaling.

I think you're misunderstanding what I meant when I said 'overbuff'. Necromancer has many boring/pointless skills at the moment, any change to fix those is going to buff them. But as long as it's balanced out to make them not overly strong that's fine.

Affliction Graft - the only thing that the necromancer lacks is actively defensive stuff like removing statuses, shielding, etc. And now you add simply the best status-clearing ability in the game and not call it a buff? Cooldown does not matter in such cases because these abilities are supposed to be used in like once every half an hour to save your hide, not for spamming.

Plenty of mobs are capable of reapplying negative effects quickly. Graft can have the range further reduced to make it a risky proposition to use, cap it at 1-3 debuffs etc. And this is a locked category. Picking this means giving up on other things like the resistance penetration from Reaping, ANM or rune slots.

I haven't even read any further because that's already ridiculously powerful.

Idk, compare the class to any other. Ideally all classes are of relatively the same strength. Apparently comparing this rework to a rogue does not make any sense because all trees of a rogue combined are worse than one of these trees. Every class(except for wildfire archmages) must have at least some kind of weaknesses: solipsists do not survive burst damage and cannot remove magical/physical effects, corruptor suffer serious vim problems on higher difficulties and their only defense - bone shield is weak against dot's and crowds, arcane blades and shadowblades suffer extreme lack of attribute points, summoners are squishy themselves, you name it. Making a class that has no weaknesses is no fun at all.

Sorry, this is kinda false. There's a massive power disparity in classes at the moment, although it's getting better thanks to reworks. Compare a Wyrmic to a Sun Paladin, or a Bulwark to a Berserker, or an Archmage to... well, most stuff. Classes don't need to be perfectly balanced against eachother, as long as it's reasonable, so nothing like pre-nerf Oozemancer or the like. Which is exactly why I made this topic. If skills are too strong, they'll get reduced in power until they're reasonable. Exceptionally problematic abilities will get removed or reworked entirely, which I've already done with things like old River of Souls, Black Ice, the entire Acid tree etc.

[cttw]

Im sorry but the current 1.2.3 necro class is a better starting point for improvements than your addon's necro.

The only change that is needed on necro is to make the advanced minion tree useful.

[0player]

Going to preach to the choir here. I don't play with this addon because Necromancer becomes even more of a stroll with it. (Especially Higher, yes.)

[SageAcrin]

Okiedokie, let's see here.

No friendly fire... I strongly suggest leaving this on Dark Empathy. Making the talent otherwise good encourages people to take it without feeling it's a talent point tax, and optimally there should be builds that build Minions weakly, don't get the same advantages as a heavy build, but still find them useful. I'd rather produce more of a gap between weak minions focus and strong minions focus, not less of one-Create Minions tends to be most of the power of the Minions based play, right now.

Lichform is pretty iconic, but making it free seems pretty weird. No other classes get free bonuses out of the blue like that, unless I'm forgetting something. It's out of place thematically. If you are running low on talent slots(That is, you don't want to make another full tree just for one talent), perhaps you could tie Lichform levels to another talent like Blurred Mortality?

(I'm all for making iconic abilities better than the norm in ways like that, though; See my own tweaks, where I made Swallow pretty damn powerful. Classes need a few powerful talents here and there; Why not ones that everyone finds awesome and wants to use just because of their concepts?)

Similarly, leaving Star Fury on is interesting, mostly because it's one of the few thematically logical ways to gain an unusual Class category.

Darkstaffs are similarly a bit overkill; One class doesn't really need a staff type. Most staves aren't Greater, so it's not a big deal that you can only power up part of their elements.

As to the talents... well, I'm busy right now, or I'd give a better look over of exact value tweak suggestions.

But the idea that Necromancers are overly powerful right now does not seem terribly borne out by figures. The Wyrmic Nightmare/Maj'eyal Winner set is five; Necromancer is five as well, and neither have an Insane clear. That does not imply an incredibly powerful class, I'd say.

[Razakai]

Hmm, I do agree with the strong/weak gap, but it's incredibly frustrating at lower levels if only due to Skeleton Mages. Perhaps a compromise would be to make minions not friendly fire eachother by default, but still injure you. I suppose it wouldn't be that big a deal to remove though.
Well, I was thinking that Vampiric Gift was a little pointless. Now that the trees were trimmed down Lichform slots nicely back into Necrosis, as I have been feeling it's way too big of a bonus to get free.
The problem I see with Star Fury is that I'm not sure who would take it. An extra beam is handy, but what with all the new abilities there isn't many points, especially with Grave/Vampirism having decent short CD nukes. Of course perhaps that isn't a bad thing, if people want another short CD nuke they can pay for it.
Honestly, I'd like to see the whole command staff thing change. Darkstaff was mostly because of how Cold felt like a neglected element seeing as you could easily buff Darkness/Physical via Starstaff. I don't see the harm in keeping it, although it's not a massive deal if it's not there.

[SageAcrin]

Well, remember, Star Fury isn't locked. It starts unlocked.

[HousePet]

Star-Fury doesn't quite work for me as it just adds more of the same, nothing super interesting or thematic.
Moonlight Ray = Invoke Darkness.
Twilight Surge: You don't need the resource regen, and you aren't interested in light damage.
Shadow Blast is similar to Circle of Death, but less interesting.
Starfall: Its at least powerful and functional for a necromancer.

Also, you end up with mana, souls and negative energy.
Its a bit bloaty overall.

So, starting from the 1.2.3 necromancer, first priority to me would be to rearrange talents a bit so that you aren't delving into categories that aren't related to your build. eg. Necrotic Minions for Aura Mastery or Necrosis for Undeath Link.

Shades is also a confused mess that doesn't seem to know if its for summoners or casters.

But before we start nitpicking with talents, we should clarify what builds we are trying to support here.
I'm guessing:
Pure Minions.
Pure Darkness.
Pure Cold.
Hybrid Minion Caster (Dark/Cold?).
Dark/Cold Caster?

If this is the case, then we need some core categories of Minions, Darkness and Cold, Basic and Advanced. Which we basically have already: Minions, Advanced Minions, Nightfall, Shades, Grave and Ice. (Though Shades and Grave are a bit awkward)
Then we have the side/support categories of Necrosis and Animus, which can be added to any of the pure X builds to make up 4 decent categories to use.
The two/three hybrid builds are more difficult.
A hybrid Minion/Darkness character could go with Minions, Nightfall and two of (Shades, Animus or Necrosis), but that assumes Shades remains as hybrid Minion/Darkness category.
A hybrid Minion/Cold character could go with Minions, Grave, Animus and Necrosis. But there isn't much synergy between Cold and Minions.
A hybrid Cold/Darkness character has similar issues, not much synergy, except Frostdusk, which currently involves taking a minion buffing talent, and a soul restoring talent. Neither of which would be useful.

Animus with its soul manipulating abilities makes it synergise well with Minions, so it is the obvious choice for a category to bridge between Minions and casting (however, I would keep some synergy between casting and minions in the basic darkness/cold categories as well). This means that Shades could be made pure darkness without making things worse.
Which leaves open an option for a dark/cold hybrid category, or perhaps a different element that links the two into a multi element caster of DOOM.