Is it possible to have necromancer’s revive skill duration removed or change duration to be based on skill level (e.g., 30 seconds for each skill level) giving us an incentive to max revives?
Reasons: reduce significant amount of time spent reviving (quality-of-life), not ideal when your revives expire while fighting a boss or an uber(s), retain specific revives to allow players to uniquely customize army composition as desired for many possibilities thus enhancing player experience
As a community what are your thoughts / feedback on this matter?
Reasons to keep or change current revive duration?
Revives are actually some of the most powerful summons in the game if you pick the correct dead enemies. The 3 minute time limit is hard set to keep you from gathering a dozen over power mobs and then just mopping the floor with them for a longer farm. It keeps the skill realtively in check versus some other options. So, in a word it’s fine as it is.
First you need to pick the correct slain monsters which are not always readily available. It doesn’t make sense to have your first revive be 1 to 2 min closer to expiring by the time you revive your 40th monster.
Increasing revive duration is miniscule in the grand scheme of things. For example, 9k damage blizz sorceress with -160 cold mastery without items like enigma and infinity that can solo baal in 8 player room in under 30 seconds while a necro with beast and enigma would need at least a minute with a decent likelihood of having revives expire before serving their purpose. What I am suggesting is not game breaking but rather allowing summoners to spend less time on reviving slain corpses, and have more fun with revives.
Keep in mind there are other characters that should have their skills be kept relatively in check, and there is a good chance we both would agree on some of those skills.
The revives are extremely powerful. Even with a few points invested in tree, they are basically the monters you just slew with added health, damage and resists. The skills is meant to be a mana sink for the necromancer forcing you to juggle several resourses. This includes your mana supply and the supply of corpses you are reviving. Realisitically, if you have more than a few hard points in the skill you are being wasteful. Even a summoner specialized necromancer usually has enough +skills to have 10 to 15 of them with a single point. They are meant to be supplimental to your skeletons and any more than that and you are just wasting your time.
I like revive but I won’t invest more that the 2 base points on my summoner (initialy wanted to invest a bit more).
The problems are:
the timer doesn’t stop when you go in town.
dead bodies doesn’t last long enough before disapearing.
That being said, I think that even if the two problems aboe were to be solved, minions duration should be increased a bit. I don’t care they don’t last forever but they should last at least 1-2 minutes more (much more if problems above are not solved).
Revives were never meant to be a permanent boost. They are meant to be a utility skill to be used on the fly to boost your performance. I think permanent revives would be way too op. Think of it like this. What if you had Bone Spirit passively attacking enemies automatically. Revives are spell tool thats why they cost so much mana to use.
Agree with most of the comments above. It would be too overpowered. If we want revives to stay permanent then some aspect of the skill requires a corresponding nerf. As an example, I like the idea of reducing the amounts of revives. Something similar to skeles (3 points = +1 skele). Maybe 4 points to revive could increase the amount of them by 1.
I think suggestions made by Hanz (Collision among minions should be removed, Revives should last forever with 20 hard points, Revives should carry over games, The amount of revives should be drastically reduced from 40 to 10 with 40sp) are great, practical, and seem reasonably balanced all the while creating a fun experience as a summoner!
My only request is to be less stringent with reducing revives such that for every 3 skill points invested would generate 1 revive (for example, 39 points into revives = 13 actual revives) instead of 1 to 4 ratio as previously suggested.