Necromancer Balance Ideas

Necromancer
1

I have played summon, poison, and bone necro. All of these have felt like the initial damage of choice is to make your first corpse for CE chaining. Here’s some ideas to change the playstyle and meta of Necro a little bit. I’m looking forward to necro lovers feedback here.

Summoning Changes

Summons overall need to be fixed so they don’t completely disappear when they get too far away or stuck. They need to teleport to player automatically like mercs do. This is especially frustrating with iron golem given its cost.

Skeleton Mastery magi needs a major damage buff. Change magi damage from 200% to 300% at 20 points which should help skeletal mages.

Skeletal Mages need to have their skills changed to more powerful elemental versions. Lightning should cast chain lightning, Fire should cast Fireball, Cold should cast Glacial Spike, and Poison should cast Poison Nova or should be changed to a Bone Spirit mage instead.

Revives should last until they die instead of being on a 3 minute timer.

Fire Golem needs to change Clay Golem synergy to 5% increased fire damage per point instead of AR.

Iron Golem needs its Thorns aura to apply to all minions. In its current implementation only the IG can utilize thorns when hit but it’s most likely not the minion being hit. Make it a much lower level thorns compared to A2 merc so it doesn’t become a mandatory minion.

Blood Golem needs a 50% damage buff. This will make it more reliable in Hell and increase its life steal for the player.

Golem Mastery to allow 2 Golems at 10 hard points and 3 Golems at 20 hard points. This allows multiple golems to be summoned so golem synergies are more useful.

Poison and Bone Changes

Corpse Explosion needs to nerf its range to 8 yards maximum because currently it does screen wide damage and is too op. 8 yards is about half a screen still so it’ll still be very viable.

Poison Explosion needs a buff to range to expand as large as corpse explosion and reduce the poison duration by 30% so poison from the explosion deals damage faster. This would make this a viable skill to use over corpse explosion for the poison necro. Allow Poison Explosion to stack with Poison Nova so one doesn’t overwrite the other.

Poison Nova needs a reduction in mana cost by half to be more in line with other necro skills.

Poison Dagger needs to change to be used with any 1H melee weapon and not limited to daggers. Rename it if needed. Grief may break this skill but Grief should be nerfed anyway.

Bone Spear & Bone Spirit need to eliminate a synergy each so more points are available in this build and then increase the remaining 3 synergies to 11% each.

Curses Changes

All Necro curses should not be overwritten by non-necro sources. Curses from other sources should stack with Necro sourced curses. Only Necro sourced curses should overwrite Necro curses. This will be tricky to program but it needs to happen to avoid having mercs and allies overwriting your curses.

Attract replace with a new curse that focuses your minions to attack the cursed enemy. This will help with bad minion AI and replaces an unused curse. This is a better version of Attract.

Confuse needs to be a combination of its current curse and the older version of Attract so enemies wander around and attack each other.

Lower Resist needs to scale the same as Paladin’s Conviction aura.

Weaken needs a 25% buff at all levels because it’s a worse version of Decrepify currently.

Iron Maiden needs to scale higher at more points invested so it actually works in Hell. Re-work this curse so it scales like Thorns. It should be x% of damage + flat phys damage. (i.e. thorns level 20 is 1010% damage + 144 flat damage returned to enemy).

2 Likes
2

Should add a new skill called ‘Skelepoline’

Put it as a side skill to skeleton mages with at least 1 point in mages required to use it.

  • Have it ‘teleport ‘ all the mages under you like a teleport does
  • Have the game play multipul 3-8 overlapping sounds of skeletons being summoned and moving
  • Have a 1 second delay then have it do a barbs ‘leap’ to the targeted location
  • Each time it is used it deletes a skeleton
  • Hard points increase the range as per leap
  • Children laugh
3

Re spawning a golem if needed in small areas to prevent your army being trapped behind him. This can cost a lot of mana and the Iron Golem can’t be recast. They should create a skill that allows for repositioning without re casting the golem. Have it be less mama but it doesn’t heal the Golem. It just teleports the golem or lets the Golem Leap. Moving the Iron Golem without recasting him.

The Iron Golem is an awesome Idea. But It is under powered. One way to improve him is to just add a semi inexpensive Item that adds resistance along with some way to prevent healing. Poison, crushing blow, Open wound. This would make Iron Golem more tanky and allow for damaging Ubers. A Rune word like Malice or steel but with resistance in the Weapon. It doesn’t have to be as nice as Obedience. Something in-between Malice and Obedience. Druid would also benefit from it.

4

Great list, here is my thoughts :
-I agree with lower resist, confuse, attract, but not multiple curses. Necro is also how applying the good curse at the good time on the good ennemies. I would prefer buffing the curses.

  • Poison dagger should always hit or have a really high AR modifier and work with throwing dagger.
  • I would prefer if poison explosion had no synergy like CE. So, you can chose which one. I would add more diversity on any playthrough.
  • 2 or 3 golems, I’m not sure, the army is already super big. I like this idea of choosing (if we want real choice of course), but I like your idea of fire golem (maybe, even 10%, fire golem is pretty weak).
  • Revives : your idea or every point invested, you get a 30 seconds extra, maybe adding damage on elemental with points, because the passive buff on skeleton mastery is also for melees.
  • Adventurer’s idea of moving your golem is great. Not all your army, but just the golem.
5

Just an FYI

Attract is the best crowd control curse. At plus 10 points it forces mobs to cluster around the target and you can amp/lower resist the rest.

The ‘unused’ curses are:

  • Weakness
  • Confuse
  • Terror

Everything else has a purpose and use. Terror is conceptually useful but functionally, dim and attract are better.

6

Absolutely no. Revives with CB will be too op. You can already have an army of 40 summons. Why would you want 60 -almost permanent - summons at the same time?

Skelenton mages were buffed back on 2.4. Buffing them again is a mistake imo; they have a role as dps supporters.

Agree with the golems changes. With the introduction of the warlock , golems seems so clunky, and their old mechanics stand out a too much. I would like to see the same change they are planning for demonic mastery be applied to golem mastery (soft or hard points to unlock more summons).

CE radius is not the problem, its the chaining. Your proposal nerfs it by just making players click more, so your balance is essentially using tedium as a nerf mechanism. I can’t find any arguments to support a change like that.

Poison Explosion is just an unusable skill. Even buffing the range or incresing its dmg 30% won’t change that. Allowing PE and PS to stack aims to solve issues with poison damage in general, not just for the necro.

Bone necros are fine; its just a heavy skill investment build. It’s ok to have variety -not all builds needs to have 20-40 spare points.

And just a big NO to curses changes. Necros don’t have problems at clearing anything on the game. Curses stacking seems just unnecesary power creep to me. However, the Attract rework seems really good, and it solves the problem with the warlock summon skill that teleports minions.

7

I hope blizz makes some changes to necro because I think you need to embrace change in the world :slight_smile:

8

You know skellies could be ‘buffed’ just by adding %crushing blow to lightning and stacking -defence to fire.

They would have a purpose as ‘boss’ killers. Causing overall kill timers increasing especially for the lower to middle geared folks.

9

For poison dagger just take the function and animation of the warlock’s miasma bolt but turn it green and the projectile look like a dagger (req a dagger). So the necro throws a dagger that has a strong ST poison dot but also leaves a poison pool on the ground. Poison dagger should do phys/poison damage

Then make a 2os rw for necro heads that has ctc poison nova from poison pool (can call it fetid ground to be fancy) when poison pool damages an enemy so novas can be cast ontop of enemies instead of from yourself. You can have fetid ground be a spot that applies a poison res debuff when enemies stand in it.

Poison explosion should heavily increase its range and add a physical component that applies its dot so its more or less corpse explosion that is poison/phys instead of fire/phys (think blood boil). Better yet rename poison explosion to detonate dead and have it be where you can corpse explode your own minions for phys/poison damage like blood boil. Essentially a mobile corpse explosion that you can carry to boss fights.

10

Or let the necro use poison dagger on throwing dagger at least.

11

I have my doubts that their skeleton crew would go this far with it though. DD being a poe skill would probably not go over so well in a blizz game. I’d venture to guess they’ll just tweak raw numbers (if we get anything at all). We can dream though

12

Unfortunately the creation of the warlock has made the need to update the old classes even more apparent.

Afaik d2r is over for me until they revamp the game to fit the new standard warlock has set.

13

I would like to suggest that they make it so that summons do not de-spawn when leaving the game.

They should rework Poison Dagger into a single-target ‘Poison Bolt’. It would deal instant damage instead of damage over time, with about 70%-80% less base damage(because its instant). At 20 hard points, it should grant -20% Enemy Poison Resistance to break immunities. This would finally give the Poison build a dedicated way to deal boss damage.