Necromancer Guide + Gameplay

[GlassGo]

Also I have found to play as I want I need some kind of mod - because to become Lich in full power I need amulet with +skill to Necrosis, or category point, with is imposible as Ogre - that's how I want to play.

[Snarvid]

I'm not sure that Insane is guaranteed winnable by any class played with any build. The people who are doing quite well apparently really recommend using Sacrifice, which requires not just minions but a category point spent on Advanced Necrotic Minions. And Ogre is kinda non-synergistic for a Lich Necromancer as well. The strongest tool in the Ogre's box, Ogrewielding, is best for weapon damage based classes, I'm not sure how helpful it's going to be for you when it weakens your spellpower significantly. And Grisly Constitution has very good synergy with Heroism infusion+PES, but Lich squashes the heroism part of that.

Maybe you should try a game on Exploration mode? You won't get insane achievements, if that's your goal, but you'll have more respec options and unlimited lives so you can figure out what's working or not, and then you can come back here and tell us if there's a way to make Tinker Blaster Ogre Necro viable on Insane.

[GlassGo]

And Grisly Constitution has very good synergy with Heroism infusion+PES, but Lich squashes the heroism part of that.

I think it also enchance injectors efficiency, that's my point i playing Ogre, also impact on spellpower not that big if you'll find something powerful for offhand.

Also once I did it to Dark Crypt - when I bought Necrosis amulet in mage city. But I didn't found Healing Salve then. Lol.

[btonassse]

I really do respect that people like to play games in different ways, and that the vets here really are focused on high difficulty builds. The dismissal of any guides for any normal-ish difficulty,
however, really does highlight a problem with this approach.

The obsession with "best builds" just ends up restricting the diversity of things that people do in the game. Undead builds are a lot of fun, for example - but, horror of horrors, they can't use infusions! So we end up with no guides describing a perfectly viable and fun normal game approach. And, if some talents are objectively "too strong"....explore builds that don't use them, at lower difficulty levels. There is more than one way to add challenge. What's really striking about reading guides at high difficulty levels is how monotonous and narrow the options are. Same inscriptions. Same races. Same talents, in many cases, even for different classes. Cookie-cutter. It's perfectly OK to note that some options in the game are generically stronger than others. It's quite different to write guides that omit large fractions of the class talents in a misguided optimization exercise.

I'll also flat out say that this game *needs* classes with a variety of difficulties. There should be simple classes for beginners - not every class should be the complexity of a Mindslayer or Temporal Warden. And, of course, complex classes for advanced players. There should be some classes that are easier to win with - most players don't win this game at any difficulty level! "Balancing" classes is therefore not the same as a MMO to me. (It is true that you don't want a single ability that is so much better than anything else that you just need to repeatedly mash a single button, especially if this is true at normal. I want interesting options, not one true path.)

And, if a feature is "too powerful" if used in some complex and unanticipated way, you shouldn't change the game in ways that harm the large majority of the player base that don't do those things.

Sorry to necro this (no pun intended), but I just wanted to say I love you. Thank you for putting it so well.

It's amazing how some people here can look at facts straight in the face and deny them. The majority of Necro winners are liches. That is much more eloquent than any metagame theorycrafting.

Also, just because some hardcore players can win lower difficulties just using bump attacks, this does not make the build irrelevant. This is just false logic. In my first Insane/RL wins I completely ignored armor, not knowing at the time how it mitigates damage before all modifiers are applied. Does that mean that armor is irrelevant in Insane? Besides, to win using only bump attacks you have to be a pretty darn experienced player which is not the case for everyone. Very few people win the game even on normal.

A guide is not necessarily a 100% efficient roadmap to win. A guide can just be an explanation of the possibilities of a certain class and how each talent could be best put to use. So yes, I agree that this attitude detracts a bit from the potential variety of the game. And this not even considering how negative this dogma attitude can be even for Insane play. If we treat everything as set in stone, maybe some perfectly great combos that people haven't yet found out about will never be discovered.

[Snarvid]

"In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it." - Herbert Simon.

If we stipulate that the point of a guide is to point the greatest number of individuals towards the choices that will improve their chances of winning (as distinct from a character report, which can simply be "here's what I did"), then higher difficulty modes are the equivalent of more rigorous lab conditions for testing what's good or not. If we were designing a robot that needed to safely navigate an environment and we only tested in relatively simple environments, we may not be able to tell more resilient programs from more fragile ones. If we add more dangerous elements to the robot's testing environment, these distinctions will be easier to see. This is the value-add of testing a build on higher difficulty modes, and adding more guides that don't meet this standard consumes the same amount of attention (or more, if in a 2 hour video format) while distributing less rigorously tested information. It isn't saying that less rigorously tested information is necessarily wrong, it just hasn't proved its rightness to the same degree of scrutiny, and when I'm practicing good attention hygiene I prefer the higher standard.

Sheila already addressed your "metagame vs. presence of actual liches in vault" argument - the guide was written before lich was buffed, what was good or bad advice under a previous patch is not necessarily so under the current patch.

I do agree that guides can include explaining where fun but suboptimal pieces can fit into a build. Someone (bpat?) came up with the "core/luxury" distinction of points spread, and I like the trend in guides that is pushing them towards "here is the minimum stuff you need to get in order to get the quality stuff from this class" (see Cathbald's Shadowblade guide) rather than telling you where you have to spend every single point (although I think Adventurer builds are often an exception to this). I just think these things should be labelled clearly, and a more rigorous lab again lets the guide author have a better sense of what was critical and what only optional, even if fun.

I also agree the game needs, and has, classes that have different viability on different difficulty modes at different player complexity rates. But this information seems like the kind of information that is critical to know, and place in a guide, rather than handwave away - if e.g. you can't win on Insane with Bulwark, better to find that out, post it, see if anyone else has better advice, and convey that to readers of your guide, than not test it and disseminate advice that didn't lead you to a win.