Generic tree for necromancers idea + new escort

[Kaja Rainbow]

Yeah. You could easily fold the second and fourth talents into a single talent, and it'd be far from overpowered. A single skill with two different purposes like the damage/heal just can't replace two skills unless they're lousy skills or it's a truly awesome enough skill to make up for having only one set of cooldowns instead of two. Though I don't oppose doing something different than a shield, it has to still be useful to undead in general.

In the end, I think you might actually be better off doing two different talent trees: one for necromancers and one for undead as a replacement for the Light tree.

And as is, a lot of people don't want to use undead because of the loss of inscriptions, not to mention wilder talents. A downgrade from the Light tree would likely make them even more unattractive. I'd rather see a sidegrade.

[HousePet]

How do these sound?

Charnel
Blood Burst: radius 1 blight damage ranged burst, splash heals undead.
Grasping Claws: mass pin/bleed.
Meat Shield: sustain, grants a physical ward on kill.
Vampiric Gift:

Grave
Chill of the Tomb:
Will o' the Wisps:
Frozen Flames: Slowly burns status effects
Ghost Touch: Curse, lowers target's mindsave, cold resist and stun resist.

Advanced Necrotic Minions
Undead Explosion: If used on a Wisp, it will be a radius 1 freeze. If used on a Bone Giant it will provide the Bone Shield and do physical damage.
Soulwind: Increases minion's movement speed and grants a chance to recover a soul when a minion dies.
Assemble: Better level scaling.
Minion Mastery: Add a Greater Mummy that upgrades on Ghoul King.

Dead Secrets - cunning based generic
Grave Resolve: passive. Bonus to Fear immunity and Mental save.
Darktouched: active. Small resistance bonus against darkness, cold, undead. + touch attack Heals undead/harms others.
Dead Whispers: active. Grants telepathy Undead for a short time. Also let's you see what your minions see.
Necroanatomy: passive. You do increased damage to undead. Decreased damage you do to your own minions. Adds healing to Surge of Undeath.

[Parcae2]

Do we really need an across-the-board buff for necros? Not a rhetorical question - do other people feel that necros are weak enough to need help?

[HousePet]

Well advance necrotic minions is a bit weak.
I think think I'm suggesting any buffs to anything that is already awesome.
Anything in particular bothering you?

[SageAcrin]

Necromancers are probably one of the weaker mage types.

It's hard to say exactly what that says, but I think based on unlock/win ratio they probably are pretty close to the bottom for mage success.

The ideas suggested by HousePet don't seem like they'd make them overpowering, and they're a fairly interesting balance of pet/non-pet focused stuff. Considering the popularity of going heavily non-pet for them(and the general effectiveness, for most of the game at least, of going heavily pet), it doesn't sound bad.

[HousePet]

Done. (well mostly)
Haven't got a few things to work yet, but here is something you can play with.

[cttw]

I still think they should just be given the Curses tree. All the abilities match the Necromancer theme and sinergize greatly with current necromancer abilities.

[HousePet]

Released this as a proper addon.
Hopefully it makes necromancers more flavourful.

http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=50&t=38490

[SageAcrin]

Interesting ideas here.

Some thoughts looking it over in addon form...

-Dead Secrets is a pretty cool way to generate a new Generic category for a lot of classes, by strafing around normal theme limitations by setting it to Cunning. There's just one problem with that; DarkGod's mentioned that he doesn't want any resource consumption associated with Cunning skills. (This made making Scoundrel harder.)

So if you're going for game inclusion, that probably would need to change. They also tend towards specific class reference stuff(like boosting Surge of Undeath), which isn't approved of either(though it's not necessarily terrible, just something to avoid, I gather).

I think the simplest answer is to skip on Doomed/Corruptor(Who don't really NEED more Generics, though I approve of more options in general) and make it just a Spell category(and change the Lifedrain ability to Spellpower)...the other option is to retheme it so that none of the talents really need Mana to make sense, which is possible but kinda hard(in particular, the lifedrain active is really hard to retheme, though you could remove that part of it and strengthen the passive end).

You'd still optimally want something so that Shadowblade, which has no minions, gets more out of it, though. As it stands, it's basically a Necromancer, maybe Doomed, tree, which isn't bad but is very hard to get a cohesive theme that works for both for. (Could be cool if you pull it off, though.)

-Charnel...Grasping Claws could stand to do more damage(10, 100 spread out over ten turns may as well not be damage, and a radial pin is boring; I'd triple that damage at least.).

Otherwise the main complaint I have here is names; Blood Burst sounds too much like the various Blood spells and Meat Shield, while a cute name, feels off somehow. How about Ichor Burst and Wall of Flesh?

-I like most of the little tweaks, like moving Sacrifice to merge it with the explosion skill. The only one I'm unsure on is making Assemble a reliable L7 Runed Bone instead of having the chance at L6...seems like a nerf for the talent unless you're catpointing an L10 category(not often), and the talent isn't all that good anyways.

- http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=36408 If you're mucking with the Minion stuff anyways, you may want to look at this topic for some thoughts on tweaking the tables; I think it's a neat idea.

Overall I like what I see; The Generic tree is really hard to get right and you may want to just make it a Spell category for Necromancer instead of making it more general, as it's currently really themed that way. But it could be really interesting if you manage a universalized version like that, so it's a matter of how much work you want to put in.

[HousePet]

Err... How did those mana costs get there?
I'm guessing I changed tack half way through coding these.
Could use some refinements.
I'm guessing by Lifedrain ability you mean the Darktouch?
Its a bit of a mixed bag, but that's okay. This game has many dark evilly classes.
Other than Necroanatomy, its pretty good for Doomed as well.
I buffed the bone giants a bit, so it shouldn't be a downgrade.
And I'm rambling...

[b0rsuk]

I think necromancer escort is very problematic from lore point of view:
- arcane users are hunted (Tannen in Last Hope has the Elder's protection)
- necromancers are hunted in particular. Undead are not allowed anywhere without cloak of deception. Necromancers are not allowed in Angolwen or Sunwall.

If game mechanics have blatant disrespect for lore, I find it hard to respect it as well. Maybe you could add Necromancer escorts to the East ?

[HousePet]

This is why I suggested a Grave Keeper escort, not a necromancer.

[b0rsuk]

So as long as they don't call themselves necromancers, they can roam the world undisturbed ?

[HousePet]

Thematically they didn't need to be necromancers either.
Just knowing about something doesn't make you a practitioner.

[Delmuir]

How about a generic ability similar to the corpse curse? Namely one that has a small chance to bring a recently killed enemy (and I'd say any, not just human) back from the dead for 5-8 turns as an ally.

Maybe a 3% chance per level with a boost at level five that makes the effect possible for elites and unique class enemies as well (albeit at reduced power. Maybe 75% power for regular enemies and 50% for elites and uniques).

Make that their tier 4 generic class skill... sustain or passive?