ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

My premise here is to that IF you convert into a Lich you gain new bonuses. Here it is:

Necrosis:

1. Blurred Mortality - maintains original feature of a negative life sustain.

As soon as you activate this skill, and quest, all health gained from constitution becomes part of Blurred Mortality's (BM) negative life instead of additional positive life.

If you become a Lich, all of that negative life gained from constitution becomes permanent whether or not BM is active.

Lastly, bonus life rating from Lichform is also gained as permanent negative life IF this skill is at level 5 or above.

2. Impending Doom - maintains original effect

If you become a lich, this skill grants a permanent bonus to your Necrotic Aura (when up, of course), namely that it reduces all living enemy heal mod by 3.5% per active talent level (reduce to 2% after active talent level 5 and 1% after 10) if they're in your Necrotic Aura.

No save possible. No effect on constructs or undead.

This skill can theoretically reduce heal mod to negative IF you also apply a maxed Impending Doom and the enemy only has 100% heal mod.

3. Undeath Link - changes original effect (edited after Housepet critique)

Active skill which sacrifices the life of one minion (you target) in exchange for half of their current life and recovery of their soul.

IF you become a lich it converts the skill from a heal into an insurance policy. It targets one minion such that for 3-8 turns, any attack that would kill or drop you into negative life will instead kill said minion and you will recover 30-100% of any life that would have remained, depending on talent investment. No longer recovers soul.

Increase mana cost to 100 and cool-down to 50 after Lichform conversion.

Essence of the Dead bonus would simply add a 5-turn damage shield equal to half the max life of the minion.

4. Lichform - maintains original effects

You gain +1 to your Necrotic Aura radius at level 2 of Lichform.

Lastly, you gain a 1% chance to summon a lich with Create Minions skill regardless of whether or not you've invested in Minion Mastery (MM). 1% chance stacks with MM. Both bonuses apply only if you become a lich, obviously.

Thoughts?

Additionally, see this concept for two new generics http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=48282 to replace Conveyance. One involves permanent tradeoffs and the other uses souls for mobility, a great sustain, and a one of a kind capstone skill.

There are a few minor issues.

1: Each talent should be good enough without Lichform and so any bonus from Lichform potentially makes a talent too powerful. You want to avoid the talents requiring Lichform to be decent, but you also want to avoid the talents being no brainers with Lichform. Looking at Undeath Link and sort of Impending Doom here.

2: Does Lichform need buffs? The biggest issue with Lichform is losing access to Infusions (which hasn't been a huge issue to me in the past) but you get some decent benefits from doing so already. Also, these are conditional buffs as they depend on investment in these other talents. Perhaps make these effects more of a retuning to being Undead (so some benefits but also losses to the effects)? Could help make Necromancer more interesting for Undead races, as that is unexplored territory at the moment.

3: Essence of the Dead already adds complication to the class. Not sure another source of alternate talent effects is the best idea.

As I said, minor issues, but its something to consider.

Fair points all but it's worth noting that I didn't diminish any of the skills, and only tweaked Undeath Link, which can't get worse. I added a note to clarify that as it may not have been clear.

My thinking is that becoming a Lich is the thematic goal of playing as a Necromancer. As such, it ought to be attractive.

Each skill would require added investment (although maybe not Undeath Link if you don't care about the bonus heal - still, maybe my proposal is too strong) in a class already strapped for talent points. As such, I have a hard time imagining that it'd overpower the class as a trade-off somewhere would have to be made.

What if instead of being tied to Lichform, they're bonuses you get from being classified as undead, either through race or equipment?

Good ideas? I don't know, but I like them, ha ha. Thanks.

Also, I edited Undeath Link to make it less powerful as you were right, it was too good a skill.