Not a rebuild. Just some necro suggestions... Update!

[Delmuir]

EDIT: I've thought of some necro quests, the need for a generic, and some its general weaknesses and so I'm going to update this with a formal suggestion on all three.

This is not a Necro re-build but a few tweaks, including a proposed generic category. So here it is:

1. Allow Aura Master to scale with active talent level such that at level 7, 8, and so on, it grants additional range.

Why? Because it'd make playing a summon-oriented Necro at least fun and not torturous.

2. Undeath Link, or as I call it, the worst skill in the game. Make it function a bit like Disruption Shield in that it drains life from your minions at a decreasing rate, scaled to talent investment and magic stat, and heals you.

However, make it such that it heals you for a % of the TOTAL amount drained and not, as is currently done, only the amount drained from one minion in spite of draining all minions. This would make the Essence of the Dead bonus shield actually useful.

Also, allow this skill to crit such that it takes less life and heals/creates shield for more.

3. Make Blurred Mortality be a base amount and then, have it transfer a small amount of your positive life to negative life, scaled to your constitution. Maybe 3.33% for every 10 points of constitution.

This would make skills that limit damage to a percent of life that much more or less effective, see Ghoul's first racial.

4. Make it such that Dark Empathy also reduces the damage that your Forgery of the Haze does to you. This might have been changed but I know it's been a long-standing problem with FoHs killing off their masters with Chill of the Tomb.

5. Animus Hoarder... add the soul recycling ability, which is the ability to recover souls when your minions die, at active talent level 5.

This would make this skill actually usefully, which it isn't right now, considering the cost and horrible scaling.

6. Make it such that your minions, pick up items near them and use them. When your minions die, the equipment is transferred to your Transmogrifier (or whatever it's called), but only if they're in your necrotic aura. If not, the gear just drops on the ground like a normal drop.

This would also significantly improve the efficacy of your minions.

7. Surge of Undeath... have this improve their movement and combat speed as well.


Generic Category called Necromancy:

1. Active skill that attempts to rip a soul out of non-undead, thus making them undead, in range 10, radius 1. This would only effect normal enemies (and may elite, I don't know...) and would prevent them from being able to use infusions if they have them. More so, it'd make the susceptible to skill #3.

If it succeeds, you gain a soul and they become undead. They also suffer from confusion for "x" turns due to the trauma.

If it fails, they still have a chance to suffer from confusion but nothing else.

2. Dark Vision… new sustain skill.

After any enemy or minion is killed within your necrotic aura, you gain a radius "1 + active talent level/2" vision in that spot for "1 turn per active talent level." It doesn't matter who kills them, you or an enemy, i.e. enemies accidentally killing each other words, even if they're far away, so long as they're in your aura.

Radius and duration increase with active talent level.

3. Passive skill that lets you do markedly more damage and crits to the undead enemies, due to your superior knowledge of the mechanics of undeath.

4. Sustain skill that lets you consume life instead of mana at a decreasing ratio if you're currently affected by some status effect that would prevent you, OR you're just out of mana.

In other words, this would make you effectively immune to silence or being manaclashed to zero.

The drawback is that it would consume life at a fairly punitive rate.

This skill should cost LIFE instead of mana and is shut-down when life hits zero, even if you have negative life through gear or Blurred Mortality. I'd say... 100.

This would go a LONG way to making Necro's less vulnerable to having their sustains shut down, which is their achilles heel.


Well, those are my suggestions. Thoughts?

[HousePet]

Necromancy 2: Dark Vision seems fairly useless. There aren't many situations where you would want to see what is going on near your aura and you can't already see it. So the overlap of a critter dying with that is even smaller.

Necromancy 4: Either I'm misunderstanding how this talent would work, or it doesn't actually protect you from being shutdown by Manaclash. Mana sustains are still going to disable when you hit 0 mana, and if I want to cast something I'd just use Consume Soul.

(I'm ambivalent about Necromancy 1 and feel that Necromancy 3 should already exist.)

[Delmuir]

Necromancy 2: Dark Vision seems fairly useless. There aren't many situations where you would want to see what is going on near your aura and you can't already see it. So the overlap of a critter dying with that is even smaller.

Necromancy 4: Either I'm misunderstanding how this talent would work, or it doesn't actually protect you from being shutdown by Manaclash. Mana sustains are still going to disable when you hit 0 mana, and if I want to cast something I'd just use Consume Soul.

(I'm ambivalent about Necromancy 1 and feel that Necromancy 3 should already exist.)

Yeah... I'm not in love with it either. You're probably right about #2. Maybe it should just allow you to see what your minions see, which does have utility.

The theory was that it grants you the equivalent of a bunch of arcane eyes that can prevent you from being snuck up on as you move past something or checking around corners by casting your minions. If they died, you'd know what killed them.

I was thinking about getting rid of the Divination category... The Necro's lack of a generic is just frustrating.

The goal for #4 was exactly that it would prevent your sustains from dropping because the code would read as if you still had mana. It would just consider your life another mana pool but one immune to manaclash.

As for #3, I agree. It should exist but where?

I also know that you tweaked Undeath Link in essentially just this way and I think it vastly improved, although I haven't used the add-on in some time.

As for skill #1, I was thinking it'd be great for mobs (it'd hit a radius one area like sleep but with a huge range). Suddenly, you get a burst of souls, cause confusion, and inflict a condition that grants you extra damage.

Seems like a pretty good skill to me and thematically appropriate to the class. To each their own...

Also, I REALLY like my idea about making it such that Undead Explosion could be used on enemies with a success rate equal to their current life below max, i.e. 10% of life left then a 90% chance of success.

Lastly, something needs to be done about Advanced Minion Mastery but alas, I doubt it ever will... my hope is that it'd grant you a small chance of creating an "elite" minion or further increasing their levels (which would be great). It does have a Lich, which is essentially that, but by nerfing the rest of your minions, it's not worth it.

[HousePet]

#1 seems a bit too like Animus Purge. If it didn't drain souls I would have no issue with it.
#3: There isn't really a sensible place for it. But I think it is good as a generic.

I don't think replacing Divination for necromancer with an undead themed divination category will work, as the original category wasn't themed at all so you would just end up with basically the same thing, but with an undead flavour. There is nothing to indicate that a Necromancer using the Divination category isn't talking to the dead to get that information.

[bpat]

I disagree with making anything only affect low ranks. Instead #1 could divide the duration and effect by rank like Echoes of the Past does.

[Delmuir]

Replacing Divination isn't imperative... it was just a thought.

Rather, I think Necros should have a generic and there are some features that I think fit well, both thematically and practically.

As for taking souls... I'm not sure I understand the objection. It'd help mitigate the need for using Curse of the Meek (and therefore unlocking that category) in some circumstances. Whatever... it's a starting point.

Same with only affecting lower ranks... although I hadn't considered it as a temporary effect. I suppose it could be.

As is usually the case, I'm offering suggestions but I'd like some counter-points. I assume we largely agree on the premise that the Necro is flawed or else why comment?

How about the other issues, the generic aside?

[bpat]

Aside from the generic category, the changes you suggest are good but they don't solve the fundamental problems with undead minions. Here some ideas for buffing minions.
1) Spellpower improves the gear your minions get. At low spellpower they have few egos and Runes while at high spellpower they have rare egos (purple and blue over green), some randarts, and many Runes.
2) Create Minions can crit for each minion, multiplying the minion's highest two stats by your crit mult. This is similar to how Summoner's talents crit.
3) Massively buff the advanced minions you get from Minion Mastery. It's weird that Skeleton Master Archers are so much better than many of the advanced minions
4) Some method to reliably get souls without killing anything should be added. The first Necromancy talent is an alright idea but I think making it not effect high ranked enemies is a mistake.

[Radon26]

about point 6... i put some gear into my bone giants... resurrection means you wont see them again, unless you nuked them in the fortres, at which point it is kinda useless.
i think you should have the ability to pick items from them at will.
also, on picking up new items, i think they should already automatically send the previous one to your transmo, rather than wait for the death.

[HousePet]

I don't think Necro is flawed. It just doesn't do anything well. So its one step above flawed.

I didn't comment on the other suggestions, as most are just standard fixes to known bugs/issues.

#3 I don't like, as it makes Blurred Mortality more nasty when it gets removed.

#6 This could actually reduce the efficacy of your minions if they were then balanced to account for the power boost. As they could then be crap when there isn't sensible loot lying around.
However I will note that skeletons and lichs generate with equipment, which correlates with what tend to be the better minions. So I think I see an obvious way to improve the bad ones...

[HousePet]

And just remembered something I was thinking about before bed last night. (totally useless time to have thoughts...)

bpat, your point 4 above: How about instead of a reliable way of getting souls without killing, having a summon spell that doesn't require souls? I'm thinking something like summoning a small bunch of cold wisps, like my light version in Necromancy+.
That would be way less risky than using Chill of the Tomb to nuke things when you need souls.

[astralInferno]

I like the way 1 and 3 in your category worked together.

[Razakai]

Bit unrelated, but thanks for the negative life necro stuff you keep mentioning Delmuir. I've been inspired to revisit my old necromancer mod and make an all-new version, and was struggling to fill in the final Necrosis talent till I read your thread.

[Delmuir]

Bit unrelated, but thanks for the negative life necro stuff you keep mentioning Delmuir. I've been inspired to revisit my old necromancer mod and make an all-new version, and was struggling to fill in the final Necrosis talent till I read your thread.

Coolio.

That's my only goal.

I've no time to take to coding an add-on myself but I do want to see this game, and the environment for players on here, thrive. I'm not wedded to any of my ideas and I don't consider them sacred.

I just want people to discuss, debate, argue, and be inspired. Make a better game.

My issue, as I consistently lament, is a myopic hostility to discussions at all. People have this weird instinct to just respond to something with a critique of that one, concrete idea, and not address the larger questions it aims to address.

If anything I've written inspires you to code a better or different Necro, even if it bears little or no resemblance to what I imagined, then it is my privilege.

Also, steal some of my talent and category names, if you think them worthwhile. I'm actually quite partial to a few of them.

Lastly, I'm pleased with this as it appears to be an actual discussion. Have fun and I hope you all solve some of these problems. Cheers.

[Razakai]

Yeah, it's a fair bit different to yours but I did try to give them a bit of a negative life focus in the Necrosis tree. If you're curious, this is what it looks like atm: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eOg ... o-Bts/edit

Maybe after I'm done with 1.5 Rogue I'll work on it.

[Delmuir]

I propose that Necromancers gain an added quest.

This quest should appear in the East and only become available if you've killed Celia and picked up "x" number of yet to be created lore that speak of a Lichform Necromancer somewhere in the East.

Find the lore and gain access to this master Necro and he grants you one of a few bonuses OR you can try and kill him. If you kill him, you gain the Book of Death, which offers different bonuses.

Option 1: He grants you a bonus that shifts 30% of your max life into negative life. This would make the Sacrifice shield much more useful.

Option 2: Your Necrotic Aura now passively reduces healing factor by 50% for all non-undead who stand within it, while granting you and your minions 10 life regen per turn, while your aura is active and said minions are standing within it.

Option 3: Gives you an amulet that is a petrified heart. This amulet absorbs up to 1 newly applied status effect per turn. It doesn't affect already existing status effects.

The other option is that you can try and kill him. My opinion is that this ought to be fairly difficult to do...

Kill him and get the Book of Death, which grants the Necromancer a generic category. This generic category:

1. Active skill that attempts to rip a soul out of non-undead, thus making them undead, in range 5, radius 1. This would prevent them from using infusions or anti-magic abilities. It would last for up to 10 turns. More so, it'd make the susceptible to skill #3.

If it succeeds, you gain a soul and they become undead. They also suffer from confusion for "x" turns due to the trauma.

If it fails, they still have a chance to suffer from confusion but nothing else.

2. Dark Vision… new sustain skill that grants 3 benefits.

Allows you to see what your minions see.

Additionally, every time one of your minions is killed, regardless of source, you gain a lingering (up to 5 turns) field of vision, radius This allows you to continue to see in this area, regardless of vision range or magical darkness.

Lastly, the ghostly effect distracts enemies in said radius from each spot. This causes any enemy in that area to up to a 50% chance of being distracted and thus stop targeting you.

3. Passive skill that lets you do markedly more damage and crits to the undead, due to your superior knowledge of the mechanics of undeath.

4. Sustain skill that gradually drains life and resources from everyone. No save. While active, everyone within your Necrotic Aura, except the caster suffers a 2% loss of max life, mana, stamina, and similar resources, per turn. No effect on Paradox, equilibrium, souls, et al.

The caster suffers three times as much.

While this skill is active, you are invigorated by specter of death and all of your cool-downs are reduced by 25% and all status effects durations are reduced by 30% of + 3 turns.