ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Undeath Link... man this skill sucks.

It absorbs around half or more of the life of ALL of your minions and then heals you for highest amount of ONE of your minions. At best, it's around a 400-450 life heal, costs a turn, likely kills all of your minions.

Now, if you have Will o' the Wisps then it's slightly less horrible but it's still unreal-terrible. In what situation would you use this? As an emergency heal? That's not a sufficient heal to really help much if you're in that much trouble AND the odds are that if you are in that much trouble, you don't have any minions left alive to absorb from. So, the one situation in which this is helpful is if you have one surviving minion at low life and you're in need of a mid-sized heal AND you only need to buy yourself one turn before something more useful comes off cool-down. That's a massive waste of a skill even if you have the Zemekis hourglass (I think that's the one) which buys you a free turn.

Then, if you have Essence of the Dead active (what are the odds), it'll grant you a shield equal to half of that heal. Great. A 200 point damage shield. Even in an ideal situation, it's not that helpful AND on top of that, it scales horribly.

So let's say you have 8 minions with roughly 800 life per and you have the skill maxed and it drains roughly 70% of that life. The cost is around 4000 life and the gain is around 550. Now it still does that amount even if your minions are damaged but still, that's a steep price for little gain. I can't recall if it's affected by heal mod but for some reason I think it isn't.

Now that Necrotic Aura has the soul recycling ability added (yay!), this skill isn't quite as awful but again, it's still impressively terrible. In six years, I've had call to use this skill maybe once.

I offer a couple of options so any one or some combination therefore or a better idea developed in criticism of mine or whatever. Anyway, here are my thoughts:

1. Have it function as it currently does but now have it grant 1 random ward per minion killed (or more than 1 at higher talent levels).

2. Have it restore mana as well.

3. Have it only absorb from one minion.

4. My personal favorite... Have it drain 75-50% of the life of all of your minions but for 3 turns all damage, status effects and resource drains you receive are transferred to your remaining minions.

#4 would have a sufficiently short duration that it'd be hard to abuse (Shalore of course) but would actually be viable as an emergency tool. Assuming at least one of your minions survives, you could teleport it away from the fight and essentially have two remaining turns of potential (assuming the minion survives) invulnerability or just use those 3 turns to escape or heal.

Thoughts? Counters?

1 is actually impossible unless the Ward code is heavily rewritten.

I'd just like it to give me a damage redirection shield to a random minion. Maybe not 100% though.

What if it granted damage redirection that degraded each turn, i.e., it redirects 100% on the first turn and 80% the second and so on? I still think short-term duration is best because otherwise Shalore would make it really easy to abuse akin to Unstoppable. Necromancer already has the Sacrifice shield which is pretty great at negating huge burst damage but it could use either another damage-negation talent or an actually useful heal.

Personally, I don't mind the lack of healing skills on the Necromancer. I think it's kind of appropriate to the class. Thus, damage negation makes the most sense to me.

Another idea I had was to mimic Bathe In Light a little by causing your minions to lose 20% of their max life per turn for 5 turns and each turn you receive a heal for a quarter and a damage shield for a quarter with the rest being lost. Sure, it'd be a big heal and shield IF you had max minions all at full life but more likely, it'd be considerably weaker.

Whatever it does, it has to be better than its current incarnation.

I think that Healing is very appropriate for a class that can get the dead to keep moving.

Another idea is you just target a single minion to destroy so the cost isn't as high.

No way this is the worst skill in the game though. With 1/5 in the skill, 150% healmod and no minions with more then 300 life, you heal for ~300 life. That's not bad at all for a near-worst case scenario. That's certainly a lot more then biofeedback will ever do for you. Still not very good, especially since necromancer already has a full heal in consume soul.

But Biofeedback is passive... one point and you get small amounts of passive healing. I think it's clearly better but...

Maybe it isn't the worst skill in the game but it's certainly a very bad skill in a very suspect category. The entire Necrosis category is just a little weak. At the very least, it's essentially the "lich" category so I'd like to imagine that the skills might improve upon becoming a lich. Otherwise it's an entire category worth skipping. Impending Doom is solid but hard to land reliably at higher difficulty.

My point is... in a class so strapped for talents, so bloated, and so disorganized and incoherent, Undeath Link stands out as particularly useless. As I noted, in five or six years, I've used that skill maybe once.

Here are some more proposals:

What if Undeath Link did damage to ALL undead in your Necrotic aura and your minions wherever they are?

What if all excess, i.e., unused life drained in the normal Undeath Link wasn't just wasted but distributed as an attack against all non-undead within your Necrotic Aura? Now that'd be something...

Just spitballing here...

Delmuir wrote:But Biofeedback is passive... one point and you get small amounts of passive healing. I think it's clearly better but...

A passive that does nothing 100% of the time is worse then an active that does nothing 100% of the time since at least the active can eat a stun/brainlock. And as mentioned, undeath link is at least useful as a backup heal. Dunno why you think that necrosis is worth skipping because the last two talents are bad since blurred mortality and impending doom are both pretty strong. Even on insane you can beat saves fairly reliably if you build for spellpower and necromancer has good enough statuses that that's definitely worth doing. Madness is a different, much stupider, story.

I suppose our disagreement is that I don't think biofeedback "does nothing." It's a small, constant heal in battle. Not great but worth the one point and you have enough.

Undeath Link is a skill with almost zero utility because if you're in enough trouble to need that heal, you probably have no minions at all but the worst part is that you need to pick up the skill if you want Lichform and it's a class that is already massively strapped for talent points.

It doesn't really matter though. It's a terrible skill on a horribly designed class and I'm just trying to maintain attention on that fact.