Necro Magi as Mrllama said, can be replaced by archers.
BUT
Here’s my extension to this idea.
Why only archers?
Make em use crossbows, throwing axes, knives and spears.
And this adds
Bows - 30 - IAS (Or whatever is needed to shoot faster by 1 frame more than others)
throwing knives -Deadly strike 25 %
Axes - Make monster bleed
Spears - slows enemies down by 20%
Crossbows - slower, piercing chance 50% (1 frame slower than rest)
And to not completely remove ele dmg, let crossbows/bows have a random chance of getting fire arrow/bolt tip and knives, spears, axes with poison damage.
In addition to standard physical damage.
Of if we dont want to remove it completely, lets add it alongside magi with buffing their damage.
But to stop Necros power creep, limit the summon count to what is possible today.
It was not MrLlamas idea originaly. Someone in this forum came up whit it, wrote it in MrLlamas poll too, and he presented the idea to the bigger audience.
That said I like your idea. And adding the elemental dmg of the mages on top. Just to make them feel different a bit from the skele warriors, and not looseing their identity, I just love it.
A. yes. We need to add more damage output to a necromancer. One that synergizes nicely with amplify damage. Sure, great idea.
What for? Does anyone would care if that was the case, when amplify damage doubles/triples damage output anyways and you want to get a corpse to drop and then boom-boom your way out of it? Slow is added by decrepify. bleed is just worse version of poison which in mages is useless.
Amplify damage removes ~95% of physical immunes in this game. Elemental damage is totally superfluous.
So to add your idea, you want to cripple the summoner necro by making the summon cap to be shared between mages/archers and warriors? Then please, scrap this idea. I’d prefer my skeletons to deal damage and mages to be the lightshow.
The feature of a summoner necromancer is that it takes 41 points for the base build ( 20 skele, 20 skele master, 1 amplify damage ) and from there you customize it to your liking.
With ‘archers’ extending that by 20 points you make the summoner pretty OP. With ‘archers’ sharing creature limit with skeletons, you cripple the build.
Mages work fine if they are meant to customize current build. They dont work fine as their own build, without skeletons around. So think of a method of that being the case.
well, someone on this board made the suggestion to make the mages the skelly warrior equivalent for poisenmancers. Llama also suggested that in his vid (he probably read that person’s post) i think that is a good way to go. problem i see is that mastery is shared between warrior and mages. that makes it too cheap to max skelly warrior too (just 20 points). but to be honest, im to lazy to make a proper suggestion here.
problem with mage damage is they don’t scale dmg as well as skelly warriors. i went through the math here:
secondly, the necro is supposed to have bad damage output, but extremely good tanking capacity. thats his stick. safety for killspeed. you can negate that later on, the better your gear is and hence the more auras you get. skelly mages are supposed to be an inbetween build, incase you don’t have very good gear to give an additional dmg boost, at the cost of points for golem (clay or iron). i mean one can have a debate if they should double the dmg output or triple (because at the moment they double dmg if you don’t take auras into consideration, they have the same damage as melee skeletons). but i just don’t see the skelly mages have the same damage output as a warrior army with auras. that would just be insane.
The issue is that poison does not work well with multiple sources. See: poison skeletal mage. Get a team of 10 of these and bask in them being totally useless.
think it was rondel that mentioned this, there is a utility for them, negating monster heal rate. but besides that their killspeed seems to be low (since the status can’t stack.)
well, single point in revive can be better meatshield than skelly warriors as well. hard to find a purpose for mages then, even if you went down the poisen mancer meatshield route.
synergize LR with mages/golem to get more -fire res to break fire immunity
This way this makes a full fire-themed build - fire golem gets damage from mages, mages get damage from fire golem - 40 points.
Mages get damage from Mastery - 20 points
LR gets “-fire res” from mages and golem to break immunities without boosting mage damage into OP status and unsynergized LR does not bleed this for other classes
so:
60 skill point build scaffolding - check
Not OP - check
New character build - check
Fire themed, because Trang’Oul is a dragon - check
Fire golem provides aggro - check
Underused skills get usage - check
Sorceresses love your company - check
One of the MAIN weaknesses of the Necro Summoner is lack of ELEMENTAL damage vs. PI/FI monsters. Mages solve this problem, but their damage is to LOW. Just make their damage higher and make CE a bit weaker. Another option is buffing Bone Spear a bit so that it can be used as a magic damage support spammed skill on left click.
If neither LR nor Amp does work - Terror, 360, Moonwalk away. Elemental skill strong enough to make these monsters not being a time sink to kill would make the necro OP.
Well, for starters i dont think that the game should always think the “practical” way.
I just want to have a diversity of options. It just looks more like an army to have different kind of weapons on summons. It would just look cool as summoners are supposed to be
And to adress power creep, i dont think it would be a great idea to make skele ‘rangers’ uncapped.
Setting the cap at max what is possible now on necro with all skillers isnt that small.
Look at poor druid. He needs to be repaired in this manner.
You can have plenty skellys atm Thus i dont believe adding more would be a great idea.
First off I don’t think mages need to be a stand on their own skill. I think they make a good auxiliary to the warriors. IMO the mages are at a good spot when you who drop 20 pts into bone spear or golems think it’s worth it to drops those 20 pts into mages instead. I do not think we need to move to archers although I see the appeal. the elemental damage is a good thing, it makes the build more ‘well rounded’.
Most good builds have 4 skills maxed, for a summoner we only need to do 2 of them, Warriors and Mastery. Most will still do 20 into CE and then the fourth is up in the air, spear and golem being the main spot to put those pts.
So after reading through the idea’s here’s how I took your ideas and messed around with them: I have two ideas on how to improve them. First I think mages need to have a big ramp up in their damage after lvl 21. It seems that every 2 pts in Mages gives 9 pts of damage. At lvl 21 it should jump to 20 pts of damage, 25pt of damage at 25 etc. This will ‘spike’ their damage at high levels and is only achievable with + to skills.
Second, and geared to those who want the lord of mages - Lower resists should give a synergy to mages of 10% damage per lvl. At 20 pts into lower resists you get +200% to mages damage. This change does two things: If you want to use 20 of your pts into making mages really strong you need to take them from either CE or skelly warriors. You can go no meat shields or ‘smaller’ radius on CE. Then you can run mages that are about as effective as the warriors currently are. It also gives a us a place to put extra pts after lvl 88 when all skills are maxed.
The synergy may be too much as a well equipped summoner can get away with only a few pts in CE as a lvl 15 CE (1 pt +14) is still pretty decent. Thus the mages damage would need to be ‘balanced’.
why not just let the player chose which mage they want to summon? they should just get 4 abilities when they acquire skeleton magi skill
It lasts 2 seconds though.
You could try poison dagger… if you could land a hit. But a single poison mage is quite convenient.
Amplify damage also solves this, if you really want to kill someone… And necro is also the easiest hero to just ignore a monster. Just cast confuse and move on to a better target
this, so much! This is one of the reasons why D2 is so great, because a lot of it is built not with a metagame in mind.
No, it won’t
many skill trees already have 10 active abilities (e.g. bow & crossbow, auras…), and with 1 ability per mage type you will have exactly that - 10 abilities on the summon row
you kinda have to cast nova non stop to keep the poison on the enemy, that’s my point. It can work, just not as convenient as a poison mage.
Archers would just add free DPS to a standard summon necro, which is already strong enough… This would be unbalanced and unfair on other classes (power creep).
Necros should be encouraged by the game’s mechanics to EITHER summon skele warriors and synergise them with amp damage OR summon skele mages and synergise them with lower resist…
Summoning skele warriors (16 at level 43) and skele mages (16 at level 43) should not be encouraged, or incetivised by the game… It’s complete overkill and adds nothing new or dynamic to the game…
Other than the “Kylo Ren Necromancers” that just want “MOAR!!!” skeletons…
