Necromancer skill rework concept

General Discussion
1

Hey, I was recently posting my changes to barbarian and druid skills for my offline D2R mod and i would like to continue with necromancer. Changes i am making are in concept stage so its not final and I will greatly appreatiate feedback. So please share opinions what you think about changes or what more to change or tweak.

Ok, necromancer… Do we have some issue on him? I think yes. He has 3 categories of skills:

Curses: Here we have most skills being one point wonder skill, I dont say its bad, but I think some skill should be changing more than just radius. I will also use few curses as synergy to other skills and improve some less used ones.

Summoning: Everyone knows that summoning tree has issues, biggest one being the very weak skeleton mages. Then there are quite weak golems, iron golem and clay golem have good utility, but they are not exactly great at fighting. And who use Blood golem or fire golem exactly? Probably nobody.

Poison and Bone: I think this skill tree struggle with skills not being used a lot. 2 out of 3 poison skills are completely useless and Magic dmg skills are weaker and cost way too many points to max, taking away any option for hybrid builds. Bonemancer also do not have any way how to kill high magic resistant enemies and it can be struggle at bosses. And there is Corpse explosion, way too overpowered skill with one invested point often being stronger than your whole summoned army. I dont want to make that skill useless but I think it should be powerfull with skill investment, not just as one point wonder skill.

Poison and Bone skills

Teeth

  • Damage increased
  • Synergy from Bone Wall and Bone Prison removed, instead both Bone Spear and Bone Spirit adds 30% Magic damage as synergy

Bone Spear

  • Synergy from Bone Wall and Bone Prison removed
  • Synergy from Bone Spirit and Teeth increased from 8% to 16%

Bone Spirit

  • Synergy from bone wall and Bone Prison removed
  • Synergy from Bone Spear and Teeth increased from 8% to 16%
  • Projectile speed increased
  • Damage increased

Poison dagger

  • Skill replaced by “Poison Bolt” with pierce (its skill Andariel is using)

Poison Explosion

  • Here I am not sure what to do so any ideas are welcomed. My current best idea is to replace it with skill named “Necrosis”. After casting on body it release flesh eating bacteria in certain radius and when monsters who were hit by it are damaged, their life starts degrading. Its basicly negative hp regeneration. Damage and radius would be increasing with skill level.

Poison Nova

  • Mana cost on lower levels decreased

Corpse Explosion

  • % damage decreased to 20% at level 1 and increasing by 5% every skill level
  • Radius slightly incresed to compensate for lower initial damage
  • Higher Mana cost increasing with skill level

Bone Armor

  • No change

Bone Wall

  • No change

Bone Prison

  • No Change

Summoning Skills

Raise Skeleton

  • Skeleton Warriors gains bonus from increased attack speed bonus on character equip

Skeleton Mastery

    • damage to mages is by %

Skeleton Mage

  • Damage of spells incresed
  • Fire Mage now use Fire Bolt with pierce
  • Cold Mage now use Ice Blast
  • Lightning Mage now use Lightning
  • Poison Mage now use Poison bolt with pierce
  • Mages gains bonus from +% fire/cold/ltng/poison damage on character equip

Revive

  • Revive has now +% enhanced damage bonus starting at 20% and +5% every skill level

Clay Golem

  • Clay Golem is Immune to magic damage
  • Significant Damage buff
  • Slow effected significantly nerfed

Blood Golem

  • Blood golem has chance to deal Open Wounds
  • When dies, Life tap curse is casted
  • Increased damage

Iron Golem

  • Increased damage
  • When dies, high level of Iron Maiden is casted
  • Thors aura is improved version from paladin skill rework.

Fire Golem

  • Gains bonus from +% Fire damage on character equip
  • Fire Golem is using improved version of Holy Fire from reworked paladin which lowers enemy fire resistance.

Golem Mastery

  • Also is increasing +% enhanced damage on golems
  • Also is increasing % physical resistance of golem

Summon Resist

  • Every 10 level of skill adds +5 magic and physical damage reduction to Skeleton warriors and Mages

Curses

Amplify Damage

  • Starts at -30% and increases by -6% every skill level

Dim Vision

  • No change.

Weaken

  • Weaken also lowers enemy magic resistance by -10% at level 1 with increase -5% per skill level

Iron Maiden

  • Iron Maden is now synergy to Summon Resist skill adding flat bonus to reflected damage to all summons (if that will be possible to mod :slight_smile:

Terror

  • No change

Confuse

  • Confuse now significantly boost damage of affected monsters

Life Tap

  • Life tap is now also synergy to Summon Resist skill, providing 1% passive life leech to all summons per invested skill point

Attract

  • I am not sure what to do with skill and most importantly what will be possible as it can be heavily hardcoded function like Taunt skill. Any idea is welcomed.

Decrepify

  • No change

Lower Resist

  • Diminishing returns removed so skill increase by same % every level, starting at -20% and increasing by -4% every level
  • Lower resist is now synergy to fire golem, incresing his fire damage by 15% every invested point

So thats necromancer, Sorceress will follow next. Feel free to comment, i want feedback :slight_smile:

6 Likes
2

Added AoE explosion.

Increased AoE per level, additional physical dmg on explosion.

3 Likes
3

This is a PvP skill. This would buff necro even more in PvP and he is already S tier. But it does nothing for PvM.

Also the removal of the synergy effects of Bone Wall and Bone Armor could be an issue in PvP and would require testing.

Doesn’t help with higher player count. I think it’s already fine with the current values, but it should scale better with player count.

I don’t like that you nerf 1 point wonders like amp early to scale them with extra points. Especially early on those 1 point wonders are great for necro and without + skills I’d be hesitant to invest in curses when damage skills scale better.

4

Not an issue,its offline mod :slight_smile:

But for balancing damage at pvm is pvp irrelevant as you can always penalize skill in pvp by certain %.

Thats my reason for nerf. Its simply too good.

It does a lot for pvm. Its basicly saving 40 skill points and also if you saw weaken, it now lowers enemymagic res.

But i might also add splash dmg on spirit, not decided yet. Someone in topic had that idea.

1 Like
5

Splash will help more on BS than the flat increase.

Not sure about 40 free points since you still want to use bonearmor in PvM, but for offline it doesn’t matter.

1 Like
6

For Poison Dagger and Poison Explosion I would do the following:

Poison Dagger:

  • If a monster dies while still under the effect of poison dagger, its corpse automatically triggers poison explosion.
  • Poison Nova’s synergy bonus is rolled into the skill itself

Poison Explosion:

  • Poison Explosion radius increases with levels like Corpse Explosion
  • Poison Nova’s synergy is rolled into the skill itself.

This will significantly increase poison dagger’s clear speed and make Poison Explosion more on par with Corpse Explosion. (which gives CE a little much needed competition as well!)

Also by removing the poison Nova synergy, you have essentially created two poison-necro builds. Poison Dagger+Explosion build and the old Poison Nova build. Poison Nova would still probably be a bit better and easier, but that’s offset by requiring 20 more synergy points.

1 Like
7

Make projectiles shotgun a single target, and the dmg increas is unneccesary.

1 Like
8

Here’s my thoughts on the builds, to try to keep things succinct.

Bonemancer: This is a high single target damager, or if the targets are in a row. It lacks a good AoE damage aside from CE. As the skill point investment is also very high you don’t have the extra points to make a decent CE radius or to gives yourself meat shields like Revives. Thus Bone Wall and Prison become your ‘meat shields’ and are synergies.

Solutions: As Indian said, let teeth shotgun. This gives the bonemancer an AoE/high damage boss killing skill like charged bolt. You don’t need to add any damage to Spear or Spirit, keeping the PvP balance going. Second give the necy the ability to unsummon bone wall/prison. This way we can wall off enemies and lines of being flanked, kill them all off and clear the screen of the bone wall mess without waiting for the timers. It also keeps the justification for the synergies in Wall/Prison.

Poisonmancer: Nova is a great skill, dagger and explosion just stink. Dagger is niche, while explosion is useless.

Solution: Dagger needs a cap on poison duration at about 10 seconds. If you know poison mechanics you can get the total duration back up to 20 seconds but it needs to tick by at about 5-10K per second rather than 2k Per second at the high end. Dagger should also either auto hit or come with a better AR bonus so it’s has a better chance of hitting. Running in and trying to stab something as a necy is dangerous enough without the missing problem…

Explosion needs to have the radius get bigger, ideally with skill pt investment, and the duration capped as well.

There also seems to be a bug with poison not damaging in the frame that other sources of damage are applied. This needs to be fixed.

Summoner: Really has very little issues. Mages damage doesn’t get increased the same way skellies do. Golems each have a function; clay slows, iron can hold auras, blood heals and fire agros. Revives can be very powerful but are short lives. there is balance here.

Ideas:
Mages - give them masteries/damage boosts that start at lvl 20. As their base damage is about the same as warriors and the issue is the ‘additional’ damage sources, the lvl 1-20 mages are fine. The ‘end game’ mages just stink and can use some more love. Giving a lvl 21 mage a mastery will benefit investment in mages and let them deal more damage as lvl 30-40 mages.

Golems. Increase all the synergies bonuses such that a necy that wants to invest 100 pts into golems can have one beefy boy that can hit things as do real damage.

Revives. Hard points add 10 seconds to duration. I also like the idea of adding damage to the actual skill in addition to skelly masteries 10% per level.

1 Like
9

I simply do not think that poison dagger should be even in necros kit at all. Thats why i replaced it with poison bolt. Necro has basicly no skill to survive melee fight well. Its a caster. Yes he has bone armor and curses can deal with some stuff but he will still greatly suffer at melee range so its flawed skill design.

Issue i have with poison explosion is that poison nova will be always better as its faster, you dont need bodies also. Thats thy my idea a presented remove poison out of it and introduce new different source of damage. You cant honestly do a lot with poison because how it was designed in d2 to work. I am open to have completely different skill instead of it. I just didnt come up with anything better than in first post. I have one other crazy idea tho.

Very powerfull necromantic single target spell called Finger of Death. It would be one shot type ability which practicaly nobody survives but cooldown on it would be 30 minutes.

You mean it would be hitting monsters multiple times for every projectile? Do i understand it correctly? Thats cool idea actualy, i will try to do it.

Cool tip, i will try to do that.

Check my previous answer above to someone else about explosion so i dont epeat myself :slight_smile:

I am pretty sure thats impossible to fix for me.

Well did you read the skills i gave them? :slight_smile:

That would require to let nec use all golems at once tho. Idk i had idea to let him summon two different golems but i feel like he has already way too big sy on screen.

10

Bone spear should get 1 projectile every 10 skills from bone spear or teeth synergy. Teeth should get 2-5% pierce chance from bone spirit / spear synergy.
Make bone build less reliant on corpse explosion.

1 Like
11

Yupp. Allow multiple projectiles to hit a monster. Even all of them if you are close enough.

1 Like
12

I don’t see a problem giving primarily caster classes melee abilities. Besides, you’re taking away the Dagger’s one and only niche if you removed Poison Dagger. If the necro is not the best in melee, that’s okay because the skill isn’t designed to for you to stay in melee. You poke and retreat.

It’s okay if poison nova is “better” than poison explosion because

  1. It’s a level 30 skill
  2. In my changes it requires 20 more synergy points than explosion/dagger.

If it were worse than I would have just created the opposite problem where no one ever picks Nova.

Believe me, changing radius for poison explosion would make a huge difference. It’s currently stuck at 2 yards! That’s less than a level 1 corpse explosion.

Poison in general is quite good if you understand the mechanics completely. Heck, even Poison dagger’s damage isn’t terrible for what it does. Its clear speed is just too painfully slow. By adding automatic Poison Explosion, you greatly speed up clear speed without messing with its primary single-target nature.

While I’m quite comfortable seeing big changes, I think completely removing and replacing skills is out of scope for D2R.

13

Not necessarily, as long as a single golem is capable of dealing with strong ennemies on its own. The build wouldn’t be a fast one for vanquishing lots of monsters, but it would be very strong against bosses.
I am really not a fan of triggering curses (or other effects) on their deaths, as normal use doesn’t cause them to die very often, and unsummoning them would make them the curses to easy to apply without spending points on curses.

Curses in their current state are interesting specifically because they are 1 point wonders. If you want to move them away from that status, you need to make sure investing in them is valuable.
For example, Amplify could give -10% per level without a starting -30%, making it -100% at level 10, and -300% at level 30, justifying the extra points investment.
For weaken, you could make it reduce monster damage by 5% multiplicative (monster damage = .95[1]), making it approximately 21% at level 30, thus justifying spending points in it.

Alternatively, instead of moving them away from their 1-point wonder status, you could make curses synergize with each other. For example, each point spent in Amplify Damage could add -5% physical resistance to the effects of some/most/all other curses. Each point in Decrepify could give a -3% movement/attack speed synergy bonus.
And so on, making a strong curse investment valuable, either for a merc/curse specialist, or for a dual spec character.

  1. skill level ↩︎

14

I know, but at high mana cost so it it really worth it? It doesnt need to be there tho. It was just something intereding i came up with when i was putting it all together :slight_smile:

15

I think you could look into giving them immunities to certain status effects instead, such as rendering the Clay and Iron Golems immune to stun/knockback, the Blood Golem immune to curses, and the Fire Golem immune to the Holy Freeze slow effect and to cold slow/freeze effects.
This would make switching from one Golem type to another interesting.

Also, for Summon Resist, I think giving them physical damage reduction is missing the point of the skill. Plus, it should also apply to Golems.
You could either make the skill give Magic Resistance the same way it gives elemental resistances, or have it give a flat magic damage reduction per level (not more than 2, though).

16

yeah! more easy mode!!

17

Strange, i didnt talk about monster changes and difficulty yet, so far I am mostly working on skills.

18

I miss 1.09 Bone Spear/Corpse explosion Necro when I had so much fun on cows like no other class/spec in a game.

19

Hi Zak

Please save the assassin.

1 Like
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I am saving her as last because she will be hardest for me as i didnt play her much over the years.

Would be great if you can tell what issues she has. What should i fix?

I will be posting sorceress and paladin today, amazon in next days and assassin as last.