Suggested Necromancer Changes (All Builds)

I’m always up for the discussion on the Necy, especially from people who actually play it and aren’t just asking for non-issues to be fixed! First off many of your ideas would just push the necy really far in the power spectrum but hey ask for you want and see what sticks. It also seems that some of these things are idea’s that may seem better for D4. They better put a necy in D4 and there are some great ideas for the necy in that game. If they don’t add a necy to D4 I probably won’t buy it….

Summoner!
Re-positioning, I would love to see something like this, but it needs to be a ground based re-positioning that is not a telly. Telly should be ‘hard earned’ or come at a cost. Enigma is ‘expensive’ while telly staffs are common, but the staff comes at a cost of losing a few skellys if you use it. I’m fine with that.

Merc issue – A change like this would re-do the necy as a whole, again great for D4 as I just don’t see them doing anything that much to D2. Long ago I just considered the merc as part of my damage and accepted it.

Revives - would love to see them last longer maybe 5-10 min, I don’t think they should be permanent. I think increasing the + damage % would be appropriate. The current levels were a carryover from 1.09 and before when the monster life was not as large as it is now. When a monster does 100 damage and you give it a +300% damage, it still means it does nothing to something with 5K life. Giving them +800-1000% would be more worthwhile. I’d be fine with this instead of CB. This would equate to adding a lot of + damage % to skeleton mastery for the revives.

Mages – I’ve been pitching a solution for a while which involves giving additional bonuses for skills after lvl 20. This can apply to many different skills from Sorcs to necys, but here’s the thought on Mages for it. Starting at lvl 21 mages get a greater + to damage than they were getting below lvl 20. Specifically, mages gain damage every 2 levels at this point. Starting at lvl 21 mages gain damage every level, ideally 10+ damage per level vs the 9 damage per 2 levels they are currently at. By starting this additional damage at lvl 21 you generally need to put pts into the skill to be able to access these extra ‘bonuses.’ Sure we can get lvl 25 mages with 1 pt + skills but relatively they will still be weak compared to the other skellies we are using.

Golems totally agree, Blood and Fire need some Help. I’d be fine with Blood getting its old ability to leech from IM or Thorns. It was OP ‘back in the day’ but IMO if it was given now even items like bloodmoon would be an interesting option when combined with thorns. Fire golem just needs more damage, if the damage got high enough, I wouldn’t need any -fire resists.

Poison
I don’t feel that you need Deaths Web etc to just play a Poison necy, you need those to clear the immunities. Without them we are just as gimped as a fire sorc, but with them we can break with immunity with LR and still have a good kill speed.

Boss Killing – yes this just sucks, you basically need to go get the right revives is you want to kill a boss in a decent amount of time. I would like this solution to be increasing the revive damage over an inherent – resists.

Bone necy

The solution I’ve thought was good for Bone necy is to make Teeth shotgun. This makes teeth very strong at close range while still being relatively trash at a long range. If you are willing to get up close and risk dying you have the potential of doing a significant amount of damage but if you keep your distance Spear is still your best option.

Add in a cap on mana for all bone skills and you are done. I don’t mind the Bone skills taking a lot of pts, this means you don’t get to really have strong Bone skills and minions or strong curses. The Bone necy doesn’t get to be much of a ‘jack of all trades’ but is more specialized. I’m ok with that.

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Glad to see that we share similarities. This also proves that most of the requested changes are intersecting with each other. I have read your post before writing this, and you identified similar problems and offered nice suggestions.

Your target focus curse should become the new attract. This could work. Alternatively a warp can be added to Attract which essentially forces all minions to focus a target. The warp can help managing the merc especially in tight areas such as arcane sanctuary or maggot lair. The warp ability essentially fixes the “trafficking of minions” in tight areas. If you do not include warp but only do a “focus” curse, you will not provide much benefit to summon necro especially in maggot lair. Therefore, I defend my view on adding a “warp” ability.

Very interesting. This could work.

I agree with this portion.

Read your suggestions, they are indeed very similar. I am glad you liked the skeletal archers idea. At this point I honestly think skeletal archers is a guaranteed fix and provides better overall damage with Amplify Damage.

I read your post before writing my reply. The names are cool, I like Vile Alchemy better than Rotting Marrow. In any way, replacing this ability would be better for pnova necromancers imho. I suggested introducing poison mastery, so we can break resistance and do more damage, which will help TREMENDOUSLY with boss damage.
Stacking pnova damage can also work.

Modifying Amplify Damage with physical + magic resistance might be a bit too much, but I’ll take it. Lower Resist lowering magic resistance makes more sense for me essentially.

Great suggestions overall! Enjoyed your post!

This is a great idea. Diablo 4 necromancer (we know he/she will be coming) can use this for sure :slight_smile: Not sure if D2R can make a dramatic change at this stage. Great suggestion though.

Rondel you have Blizzard Sorcs, Hammerdins, Charged Strike Amazons who can 1 shot Player 8 Hell difficulty monsters and bosses. In the meantime, you have a poison necro who cannot solo p8 bosses, a summon necro who has to wait so the merc gets a kill so he/she can build an army, and a bone necro who suffers on P8 as well. Let’s be realistic, necro needs MUCH MORE damage to actually be viable on Players 8 Hell difficulty. Necromancer needs insane damage, which should not make it overpowered in pvp. How do we achieve that? These suggestions are centered around actually improving the necro damage in pve and making it harmless for pvp. These suggestions are no way perfect, they are my ideas after all. However, I can bet my money that they are BETTER than simply flat buffing bone spear damage and its synergies.

Sounds good but what will you do in maggot lair and arcane sanctuary? You need warp/tele, plain and simple. Otherwise you will continue to encounter same problems and nothing will be fixed.

Time for a change then. Let minions do most of the damage and use merc as a secondary source.

Great, extending the duration definitely works. Although I want to see desecrate style corpse generation carrying after games for QoL improvement.

Skeletal mages need insane amount of flat damage buff. Only after that buff we can talk about percentages. New abilities are cool, I also suggested them. Honestly I think skeletal archers replacing mages looks like the best solution to me. Skeletal archers can do additional fire, cold, poison or lightning damage, but the main source should be physical. Problem fixed.

Flat damage increase also works. My suggestion works on making Fire Golem a synergy for corpse explosion at least, since CE deals half physical and half fire damage. I’d like to see fire golem lowering fire resistance and do more fire damage at the same time ofc.

I don’t know if you are playing on P8 ladder, but you need all the most expensive gear and you still don’t do good damage as poison necro compared to other classes that can one shot P8 mobs. You will never be meta if you don’t get damage increase. Utility is one thing, but hey people can just buy wands and benefit from your utilities without having a necro in the grp :slight_smile: you need damage damage and damage.

I saw this suggestion in various posts. This sounds good but idk if they can change the codes without breaking the game. Hence I suggested freeing up points in bone so bonemancers can focus on other things instead.

This is the reason why I suggested the aura change. So it does not affect PvP that much but introduces a more risk&reward PvE damage system.

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Attract curse in its current form is actually useful, and I’d like to keep it rather unchanged - it can help ex. in “need of 1st corpse to get going” scenario. If anything, Confuse could be replaced, although “Warp” doesn’t fit there. Well, any king of warping sounds weird for a necromancer…yet I agree that such ability is really needed to efficiently use your army :confused: Hmmm…
How about something called “Unburrow Ambush” in Summoning tree? Mechanically it’d do exactly you’re opting for Skulm, and visually it’d suck all your minions (without mercenary perhaps?) underground, then burst them at the cursor placement after a short delay(which could lower with levels of the skill); imagine ground exploding, pieces of soil, and bones erupting from the destination point - this will be something more necromancer-like than teleport-like Warp.
The skill might even give a temporary damage boost, or something.

After reading that I though “well, skeletal archers idea do sounds really nice, however I’ll advise Skulm something to have the best of both archers and mages - skelly archers dealing physical + elemental damage. This will be even better, as mages are unaffected by Might/Concentrate/Fanatism while archers will be, and also implementing different spells for higher level will be complicated”, but as I see:

such advise is not needed :slight_smile:
Actually, when I think about that I like the phys+elemental archers idea so much I’d like to edit my suggestion with them, if you allow.

Well, I suggested to improve Lower Resist scaling; assuming it could get max -200% all resists(and usual 1/5 efficiency at breaking immunities) Poison Mastery should no longer be needed. Meanwhile Vile Alchemy will work not only with Poison Nova, but also bone spells strengthening them in a more interesting way that just plain damage increase, with additional bonus of stopping health regeneration. And stacking of Poison Nova 2-3-4-5 times should be a gamechanger against bosses.

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Interesting ideas and I do agree with some of them. The Skill tree could use a re-work in terms of prerequisites and synergies. Namely the first thing for me is that Bone Skills require 100 points to maximize. Virtually every other skill in the game requires 40-60, at most 80 but 100? That’s where the Bone Wall/Prison skills need to be liberated and attached solely to Bone Armor. To compensate, buff the Teeth/Bone Spear/Bone Spirit synergy to 16% so as to keep the combined 640% damage buff when maxed(unless you want to nerf them… hah).

I’m torn on whether to make Revives permanent since while it’s a level 30 skill, Skeleton Mastery buffs their HP and Damage a crap ton and makes them arguably stronger than the permanent Skeletons you can summon while retaining the attacks/abilities of the slain monster(Council/Pit Vipers/Urdars are notable ones). Speaking of Urdars, they use Smite(hence always hits) and they do 25% Crushing Blow on Hell(making them godly Revives and why they’re often Revive picks). Tomb Vipers were also godly picks until they patched them in 2.4 since their bugged cloud attack did gobs of Physical Damage.

Anyways, I think a compromise buff would be to extend the duration of Revive 20 seconds for every hard point. Meaning level 1 = 180 seconds, level 2 = 200 and so on. Level 20 = 560 seconds or 9 minutes and 20 seconds. If that isn’t enough time to use your Revive, you’re not playing efficiently. I also think that Revive shouldn’t require skill investment into Golems and Summon Resistance should be its own skill(like Salvation or Mastery skills for Sorceress) or moved as a prerequisite for Revive. Summon Resist scaling could be buffed a bit too as it pretty much loses effectiveness by level 10 or so.

Blood Golem providing a Life Leech aura is intriguing I must admit but then that kind of makes Lifetap rather moot if you think about it. Perhaps +Replenish Life in an aura like Prayer with hard points increasing the radius and rate of regeneration? As for it granting +Max Life, that is already done by another class skill(Oak Sage). As for Fire Golem not doing enough Fire Damage, Lower Resist curse helps a great deal here and helps Skeleton Mages in their Elemental Damage.

Lower Resist Curse needs to scale better than what it is now. It reaches -62% at level 20 but the cap is -70. Anyone know what level that is achieved? I’ll tell you: LEVEL 60. Who in their right freaking mind would code a skill to take 40 levels to get 8 resistance points? Conviction tops out at level 25 on the Resistance side(level 31 for %Defense) so ffs how about the same for Lower Resistance? I mean I don’t need LR to break every Poison Immunity in the game(Conviction certainly doesn’t for Fire/Cold/Lightning) so the Lilith issue is no surprise to me but I shouldn’t need to invest an insane amount of points to get its maximum benefit.

Poison Cone is basically Bone Spear but as Poison? Hmm I can’t argue against that, provided the skill pierces. Poison Mastery though… that I disagree with. Yes Poison Explosion is a terrible skill but what you have to replace it is not a good idea whatsoever. It’d effectively make Poison Nova deal double the damage on anything it breaks with Lower Resist(wouldn’t need to cast LR on non-immunes) and Nova’s current damage is pretty good with solid gear and synergies maxed. Yes the gear is not easy to get(Death Web in particular) but that’s the challenge of picking an elemental/poison build. Yet unlike the Sorceress, you have the means of amplifying your Poison Damage with Lower Resist curse and breaking Immunities(Sorceress only has that via Cold Mastery and has nothing to break an immunity natively).

As for LR affecting Magic Resistance… Magic Immunity is one of the rarest immunities in the game. So rare that even PI is more common and although monsters do have Magic Resistance, anything you do to “buff” Bone Necromancers with respect to Magic Resistance inherently buffs Paladins(and they are already S+… want to make them S+++++++++?)

Glad to see you agree with my suggestion. This suggestion is included.

If not permanent then the 3 min duration has to be extended by more point investments. 3 minute duration feels bad atm.

Wonderful

About Blood Golem, the life leech could simply be a weaker version of life tap, so life tap can also be used in situations where it is really needed. Right now Blood Golem has to offer something decent to shift the meta. I think a weaker version of BO for max life increase across the party can be better than Oak Sage since Oak Sage is super squishy. Druids can now summon a zoo, we should at least steal something similar to oak sage.

This is where I disagree with you. I have done (also the other content creators have done) MULTIPLE tests with max skeletal mages, max mastery, max fire golem and max lower resist. Lower Resist DOES NOT HELP AT ALL. Your fire golem and skeletal mages still do NEAR TO NOTHING damage with everything maxed, including lower resist. I don’t know why you said lower resist helps them do great damage tbh. This statement is simply false.

Great input

It will be a cone which will deal AoE damage.

We are talking about making Poison Nova Necromancer meta level. Poison Nova Necro does low damage in P8 while charged strike amazons and hammerdins delete p8 bosses and mobs in miliseconds. If you want to make Necro meta level, you need the damage. Poison Necromancer needs to do MASSIVE damage before getting gg gear and getting the gg gear on top should carry it to S+ Ladder meta. Poison Mastery is needed for that insane damage. That’s the only way poison nova can really pump up the damage.

Paladins are already S++++++++++++. This change would at least allow Necromancers to enter the meta.

Naay, not a hard point, +10s duration per soft level is good enough.

Hah, that’s exactly what I proposed in mine suggestion xD

On the one hand that’s true, however Bone Prison and Bone Wall investment not only buffs offensive bone spells, but also significantly strengthens Bone Armor. As a Wind Druid I don’t afraid any elemental damage, even from Diablo or Ball, but painfully feel every encounter with physical archers, even normal ones, left alone champions/minibosses; Bone Armor is a blessing in such situation. Besides, Bone Wall and Prison give excellent tactical options, and used wisely they are an immense help for Bonemancer. The simple rework for them should be they emerge instantly, and more complex one you can check in my suggestion. So removing these synergies might not give the expected result, as you’d have to reinvest these points in Bone Armor branch anyway.
Anyway, I’m fine with 100 point investment in bone tree if Teeth can shotgun, Bone Spirit will move twice as fast and lock on targets behind corners, Bone Prison can be cast on ground not on unit, Bone Wall/Prison emerges instantly. Well, comparing to Cyclone Armor, Bone Armor might get 50% increase bufff I suppose.

@Skulm
I’ve added Raise Skeletal Archer in my suggestion, please check if I haven’t messed up anything.

Hard points into Revive to increase its duration make way more sense than having it as a 1-point wonder with +Skills massively increasing its duration. Revives are much stronger than any Summons a Necromancer can get, hence why Revive has been capped at 3 minutes for as long as I can remember(balance reasons).

Therefore, increasing its duration should require the Necromancer invest points into it. +Skills not only increase the amount of Revived Monsters you can control but also their Damage and Life via Skeleton Mastery. In other words, they get that much stronger so it only seems fair that if you want to control them longer that you have to plop finite resources or Skill points to get it.

And what’s wrong with being one point wonder? Not to mention revives alone, not supported by auras, curses, Corpse Explosion, teleport etc. are not that great - see summoner druid. At least they inherit base monster abilities and AI(speaking of AI, skeleton warriors have imo better AI than vast majority of revives), but still, just alone, on their own, are just okayish only. Therefore, imo soft level is good enough.

Quoting this for below

Okay, both arguments have solid foundation. Let us now analyze the two outcomes:

1-Dark Helmet suggests Revive Duration should only be extended through hard skill point investment, hence providing extra benefits to summon specialized necromancers. Dark Helmet also adds that soft point increase should only count towards extra damage and life of revives.

2-MasterBLB on the other hand, suggests soft point increase should also benefit revive duration along the damage, life etc.

Revive by itself is a 1 point wonder. I can definitely confirm this because I am currently playing my own hybrid bonemancer/summoner build for farming P8 Diablo Ladder.

Investing more points into revive should be attractive and it should reward dedicated summon necromancers. With the current system, I can invest 1 hard point into revive and summon nearly 15-16 revives just because of the +skills gear (without any summon skillers btw).

MasterBLB’s suggestion would 100% improve the overall power of the Necromancer and make it compete vs the meta classes for sure. Soft points improving revive duration alongside the damage and life would definitely be preferable.

Dark Helmet’s suggestion on the other hand rewards dedicated summoner necromancers much more. With Dark Helmet’s suggestion, you can invest more points into revive. Would that help though? 20 seconds per hard skill point might be too low, however it is a very promising suggestion. Perhaps we can make it 30 seconds per hard skill point investment and prevent any rounding up issues. A dedicated summon necromancer can invest more points into revive and not only improve the size of the army, but also it can focus on reviving quality monsters and retain them for a longer period of time.

Both suggestions are great, obviously MasterBLB’s suggestion improves the necromancer’s power much more. Dark Helmet’s suggestion is more technical and it can definitely make skill choices more interesting.

I am personally happy with both outcomes.

I’ve an excellent idea for reasoning hard point investment in Revive:

  • With enough hard points in Revive you can resurrect normally unressurectable monsters like Oblivion Knights/Minions of Destruction, with more hard points invested champions and minions of a boss, and with even more bosses, with even more(lv20 I suppose) Super Unique bosses like Shenk, Pindleskin etc.
  • Each hard point in Revive should give bonus to skills of the revived monster. So let’s say Vampirelords normally cast lv10 Meteor, with 10 hard points investment in Revive their Meteor becomes lv20.
  • Each hard point in Revive should increase by X% stats like deadly strike, crushing blow, open wounds etc. of revived monsters.

Now THAT IS A SOLID REASON to put points directly into Revive! Meanwhile I still stand after I was writhing before, soft levels should also increase duration of revives. This way there might arise a new summoner type build focusing only on revives, while classic summoner still be viable, and will benefit from increased duration of resurrected minions.

2 Likes

I can see this working, except for being able to revive super uniques. While the idea itself is definitely entertaining, we should focus on making revive a meta level choice. Therefore, I mostly agree with your idea.

The revive quality of life should also be provided, and that is the corpse production as I highlighted in my suggestion post. Necromancers should be able to save a type of corpse and carry it over to new games in order to quickly start reviving. More hard points invested into Revive allows this new “Corpse Generator” ability to provide more corpses while Revive itself would allow for the extension of revive duration and grant more power to those monsters.

Don’t you think nightmare is already too easy with necro? i don’t usually build with a full max of anything like “poison necro” or “bone” or “summon” i mix things up, and I think nightmare is a bit too easy. But well again I say that but the HC boards have plenty of dead necros at these levels I think so it’s probably not too easy, i just worry about that. I was using the newly improved blood golem last time and it gave so much instant heal and also barely died itself with a few points. However I definitely agree that something like poison dagger seems kinda useless and that’s a shame. Or is it… it is +20% AR per level and just applying poison neutralizes the natural HP regeneration of monsters. So if you’re using some good dagger… i haven’t really tried using it much yet. Mmmh it does have +20% synergies and then even without maxing all of that…

Nightmare is easy for most good builds.

I recently published a video about poison abilities encountering a bug therefore not reaching their max potential.

I wish they would remove pet collision, i think one of the main reason PET AI sux big time is due to pet trying to avoid colliding with each other.

Any ways great post. Love the improvement ideas

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Forum staff when they see this thread:

Thank you for the feedback.

:slight_smile:

They should simply add Skeleton Archers. They shouldn’t remove Mages.

As for mages themselves, they should change them all to a shoot a magic bolt, basically a singular Tooth as seen from the Teeth spell. The Fire Golem should also be changed to a Magic Golem, and the two should synergize with each other for a Magic based minion build.

Physical builds could use Warriors, the new Archers and a golem of their choice (probably blood, clay or iron).

Magic based summoners can use fire/magic golem and mages for damage and skeleton warriors for tanks.

I think they should also condense golem mastery and skeleton mastery into one skill, summon mastery, and take all of the inter-golem synergies and put them into the summon mastery. If for some reason you want golem mastery to remain, then the golems themselves need to be way more powerful, and they should not synergize with each other (and all those synergy buffs should be pushed into golem mastery).

Now, the real controversy - Nerf the crap out of corpse explosion. Make it do a smaller percent of enemy health as a baseline with flat scaling damage. Make it better than it is now if you invest points into it, and add synergies to it through amplify damage for the physical damage and lower resist for the fire bit.

For summoners, they could stop being forced to take corpse explosion if the upgraded minions did enough damage to be efficient on their own, or players could still roll half summoner/half CE if they like the playstyle.

Frankly, Corpse Explosion is super OP on P1, and very lackluster on P8 because it doesn’t scale off of the monster health on higher player settings. It is also so powerful that the rest of the necro, especially the summon necro, is gimped out because they are expected to use CE as a crutch until they reach the most extreme levels of gear. It is a cool skill, and it should be a good complement to other builds if players like it. However, it is currently a center piece of the necro but as designed is too powerful to scale with higher player settings, meaning the necro is not very strong on high player settings. In a way, every necro is a Corpse Explosion necro that just needs to figure out how to get its first kill with the rest of its points.

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Nice input. I agree with most of your suggestions.

First the parts I somewhat kindly disagree with:

-Just remove skeletal mage, adding archer on top is a good idea but that would overcomplicate the build. Replacing skeletal mage with skeletal archer is better in my opinion, since archers will deal base physical damage, but they can deal added elemental damage on top.

-In its current stage, Fire Golem is not doing noticeable damage. I would REALLY love to see a Fire Golem Necro that can benefit from Fire Sunder charm, Flickering Flame and Phoenix that combines everything with Infinity and Lower Resist. Buffing Fire Golem may open up a whole new build tbh. Magic golem idea is cool but it would move away from the original game too much imho.

Now the parts I agree with:
-Very interesting idea about condensing golem mastery and skeleton mastery. I would say keep them apart still, but move all golem synergies into the golem mastery, with the new added increased flat and % golem damage increase from golem mastery. Nice one!

-Corpse Explosion does not scale and it takes P1 monster HP so in P8 games it starts to lose its power. I think the main problem for a Necromancer is getting the first corpse, as you mentioned. Different specs achieve this in different ways, but as I stated in my original post, removing some of the Bone synergies opens up a whole new dimension. Bone Prison and Bone Wall no longer synergize with Bone Spear and Bone Spirit, but now the remainder of the Bone Spear synergies provide more damage, so you retain your damage but have free points. This would allow Bone Necro to properly invest in summons or curses.

-Fixing the poison nova damage canceling would GREATLY buff poison nova necro, since it can now benefit from army damage and poison nova damage at the same time.
-Skeletal Archers or buffed Fire Golem would GREATLY benefit the Summon Necro.

Great input overall, I personally prefer to stay true to the original game, so applying much needed fixes with some minor rework could work wonders for the Necromancer.

Hate to be the one to re awaken a semi old post, but would like to add some input. I love the necromancer and agree he could use some buffs, probably more specifically to the summon tree in comparison to others.

IMO i like the idea of summon resist not needing any pre reqs and is similar to how salvation, or any of the resist auras, works in the paladin tree.

As for skeletal mages, i like the idea of them maybe becoming archers that do elemental damage. However, id certainly miss them being mages. Id personally prefer them to stay as mages, but their damage just needs to be increased signifcantly and perhaps include either faster cast rate or piercing to their bolts in skeleton mastery (or their skill itself). Perhaps include both of these for them.

However, i think the easiest thing to do would keep them as is, but just improve their damage. Like crank that knob up man lol. I dont think that’s too much to ask for.

Id definitely advocate to separate revives from needing golem pre reqs.

Then i also like the idea of revives gaining additional duration per point invested, perhaps even soft points as well. IMO the idea of 10 seconds per hard/soft point isnt half too bad. For someone just getting them as a “one point wonder” might have them around level 15 with gg gear. So thats basically an additional 150 seconds… Then of course if one invests points into them then they’re potentially adding another additional 200+ seconds.

I also like the idea of golem mastery providing the necromancer to be able to summom multiple (different) golems. So perhaps, and I believe this was already suggested, every 10 hard points gets you another golem. At level 20 you can have 3 golems out. It’d also be nice to see all the golem synergies to become a part of golem mastery as suggested by others.

As others have mentioned, all golems need a fairly signicant increase in the flat/base damage they do via. their skill.

I like how the golems kind of have their own identity and IMO should maintain that. However, i do have some suggestions to further improve them allwhile maintaining their identities;

I’d personally like to see the clay golem maintain his slow effect, but also receive 1% crushing blow per skill point. That way if its a “one point wonder” then can potentially have between 15% to 25% with gg gear. Then by one actually investing into the skill will just have almost double that. IMO this can help any necro build with killing bosses at higher difficulties.

As for the blood golem, he should maintain his current tooltip mechanic wherein the life he steals is also applied to the necro, just ensure all of the necro summons are also included. THEN one addition to the blood golem should be open wounds per skill point, similar to the crushing blow proposed for clay golem. So 1% open wounds per skill point. So if the blood golem is a “one point wonder” well then one could still get like 15% to 25% open wounds from blood golem. Then of course investing points in the skill just improves that. This will give an opportunity for the necro to prevent high life replenish from bosses via. things like ubers.

IMO the iron golem is fine as is considering you can make him out of runewords that provide auras, etc. All he needs is increased damage via. initial paragraph stating all golems need a (signifcant) increase to their damage done.

Then IMO for fire golem he should explode on death, similar to how the sorceress meteor functions. So if the necromancer either recasts fire golem, or the fire golem just dies, then he’d explode dealing x amount of fire damage and leave behind a patch of burning flame for 4 seconds that deals x amount of fire damage per second. To help prevent a necromancer from spamming this the fire golem would keep a high mana cost. Then of course the fire golem maintains his holy fire aura

For the poison and bone spells i feel like there is a lot of good ideas here. IMO poison dagger should instead be able to apply to any weapon of choice, as another has mentioned. This would help create a kind of melee necro/necro that actually uses a weapon or bow/crossbow if wanted. My only addition to this is perhaps have this new poison strike instead act as an enchantment, similar to the sorceress enchant? So basically the necro can provide a poison enchantment to his allies AND summons. This would help create a little bit of a synergy for a poison/summon hybrid.

I agree that poison explosion needs a re work… there is some good ideas in here for it. Ive also seen some other good ideas as well. Overall, it needs a rework, because no one is going to use poison explosion over corpse explode for sure lol. I personally like how it creates the poison cloud, but i just dont like that it is a corpse ability, albeit it makes sense. Perhaps just remove it being a corpse ability and allow its poison damage to operate separately from other poisons, similar to how rabies works? Overall, i do like the poisonous cloud effects it does. Perhaps make the poisonius cloud apply a debuff of sorts, ie. additional -enemy poison resists?

IMO poison nova is fine as is, but the whole bug issue where the poison damage gets canceled by your minions or any physical damage needs to be fixed. If this bug gets fixed then i think poison nova would be fine, especially if some of these other poison buffs are applied, via. poison enchant/strike, and a re work to poison explosion.

Overall, for a kind of buff to poison damage perhaps each kind of poison operates separately? So you have poison damage from weapons/attacks (this includes the idea of poison dagger becoming an enchant/strike), poison damage from druid poison creeper, poison from rabies, poison from the new poison explosion if it continues to do any kind of poison damage, poison damage from poison nova, poison from venom, etc. IMO all of these could act separately.

I like the idea of separating the bone wall/cage from bone spear/spirit/teeth as a synergy and just let those synergize with bone armor… BUT by removing the bone wall/cage synergies DO NOT reduce bone spear/spirit/teeth damage. The damage should remain as is, but just reduce the synergies needed to get there.

This would provide options for a bone necro to hybridize for more damage OR if he wanted to have more survivability then he can still invest into the bone wall/cage/armor. IMO separating these synergies just provides potential for more options/decisions/choices. But yes, please dont improve bone spell damage… IMO just reduce synergies to then give him options for more damage from other sources, ie. getting raise skeleton and skeleton mastery maxed, or perhaps he goes the golem mastery route with multiple golems, assuming that became a thing, etc.

Lastly the curses, yes please remove lower resists insane diminishing returns lol as it is atm its not worth putting more than 1 point into when you have gg/high +skill equipment.

Then as others have mentioned perhaps include some kind of “warp” or something for the necromancers minions. I like the idea to add this to attract. So the attract curse still works as it does, but add some kind of delayed “warp” to necro summons. The more points invested into attract would just reduce the delay to a point that its non existent.

I just wanted to mention to add curse synergies to other necro skills. For example amplified damage could synergize with raise skeleton, increasing their damage by 5% per level, for example. Perhaps lower resist synergizes with skeletal magi to improve damage. Perhaps allow decrepify synergize with clay golem to improve his damage and perhaps make his slow effect last longer? Maybe allow iron maiden to synergize with iron golem, improving the attacker takes damage done. If they make the fire golem explode then perhaps corpse explode synergizes with it.

Idk IMO necro could have more synergies to help promote improving his damage as well, probably more so for summoning skills.

Do i expect any of this to happen? No, unfortunately not, but it is fun theorizing, to include i guess hoping they do another “balance” patch like 2.4, wherein perhaps some of these things are included.

Anyway, nice ideas in here everyone and was nice to read through them!

I like the warp suggestion for relocating your army, but I think fixing it with a skill and ai would be better.
Also I wonder if they removed the revive skill altogether. Would you guys miss out.
My suggestion would be something like this
Replace revive with Lich strike
Lich strike
A powerful attack that commands your skeletons to focus the target.
Damage %
Attack rating %
Focus duration 3 seconds
I imagine the focus would make your skeleton to switch targets to a focused target. However pathing issue due to monsters and other skeleton being in the way they might just be attacking a target near your focus.

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