So as a preface, and for a little bit of extra context for me personally, i played on the necromancer beta for D3, but never played a D2 necromancer, and have made a necromancer in most seasons to play around with new build ideas and whatnot as necessary, so i may be referencing information related to these facts, okay, let’s begin…
To Start, the current version of the necromancer, in my eyes, is about a 6/10 in terms of design. the sets (which i will break down individually in a moment) all have fairly glaring issues, compounded by the necromancers overzealous, over-reliance on long cooldown abilities, and copy paste items for every single build (i’m looking at you krisbins), furthermore, there seems to have been a civil war amongst the developers about what the fantasy of a necromancer is, such that, rather than having a character centered around blood, bone, and the cold embrace of undeath, we have a character that it blood, bone, OR the cold embrace of undeath (and that last one is questionable now).
With that said, lets jump into the set discussion, since this game tends to revolve around sets in an almost unhealthy sort of way.
Trag’Ouls: I wanted to start with this set because, of all the sets on the beta, this one got done the dirtiest in terms of design. while i was a firm advocate against having a stacking mechanic for damage and damage reduction on sets (as that causes a grey area where you’re either really squishy or unable to contribute to the progression of a rift while you get set up) Trag’Ouls was originally meant to do both, and unfortunately now it technically still does this for it’s “damage reduction” (if you want to call it that), but mechanical beefs aside, the primary issue with this set comes from the 6 set bonus, being that it increases the damage of health spending abilities by 3,800%… wat? i understand that the necromancer came out before the addition of legacy of dreams and the overall rework to the setless buff, but the lack of speed with which the devs have to update this set modifier means that there are practically no reasons to use it, ever. especially since the necromancer has a massive slew of support items that take up the traditional six set slots, running LoD will, in every conceivable situation, just be better than trag’ouls.
but wait, it’s issue don’t even stop there. as mentioned, the 6 set bonus buffs “health cost skills”, and to their benefit, most damaging abilities have at least one health cost rune, which should make this set incredibly versatile, right? right? wrong! the problem with linking a set to health cost runes for many abilities, means that you’re making that set compete with every other set which would buff that ability, but wouldn’t be tied to the one rune. in this case, why would you ever bother using the health cost rune of corpse explosion, corpse lance, bone storm (i know that’s not what it’s called, but that’s what it is with the rune), bone lance, or death nova when the other sets grant bigger and more versatile buffs? this also leaves us with basically 2 options: skeletal mages (which have been so thoroughly tuned around singularity that they may as well not exist anymore in any other context) and bone spirit, which likewise has practically no support as a spell comparatively. simply put, unless this set gives us a reason to value health cost skills over the other sets which would buff them, then there is simply no reason to use this set, however, if this set does give us a reason to value the health cost skills over the other sets, then it would do a 180 and give us no reason to play any other set. it’s a cache 22 and the design was simply made to fall apart.
Pestilence: the OG bone spear set that the devs simply could not make popular on the beta, and thus had to include bonuses to corpse lance and eventually corpse explosion to get people to even put it on. it’s problems are mostly in the form of it’s reliance on a finite resource, that being corpses, which force it into using land of the dead, which has a very long cooldown and is not otherwise supported by the set. in other words, the issue this set has is downtime when you’re waiting on a cooldown, and a chunking slow paced sustain reliant on killing enemies, and an incredibly niche series of support items which typically can’t be fit into the set as they take up primary set slots.
Inarius: my beefs with this set are short, as it’s basically diet LoD, and thus fullfills no notable roll outside of being able to use the weapon set, which itself only supports like, 2 niche builds with no otherwise purpose. in practically every scenario you’d prefer to use LoD for any build that is supported by this, as it’s basically the same damage bonus without the range restriction.
Bone spear set (i don’t know what it’s called): This is the one set i never bothered to play, because as with the Beta, bone spear just wasn’t an interesting skill to me. however i do know that, similar to my last statement on Trag’ouls, they went out of their way to make this set so overwhelmingly powerful next to every other option that it practically became the only choice to get on the leaderboards, and that just isn’t healthy.
Rathma’s: i went out of my way to save this for last because, as you all surely know, this set got reworked fairly recently (then nerfed for some reason?) and it is now the hottest, most unsatisfying garbage in the necromancers arsenal. i said in my opening statement that i questioned whether or not the cold embrace of undeath should even be included in the necromancers fantasy, and this set rework is why. like, who thought it was a good idea to make it so that no sets revolved around pets? must we use LoD for everything now? WHO OKAY’D THIS??? i get it, singularity is a problem, so get rid of it and actually make skeletal mages worth something please, bone ringer was a problem, SO GET RID OF IT AND MAKE MY SKELETONS GOOD PLEASE!!! golem was never a problem, nor has it ever been good, this could also change. why did you take the one pet central set and make it “lol, bone army go BRRRR.”
good lord blizz, what have you done??