D4 suggestions for the Necromancer and the book of the dead

General Discussion
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I kind of feel like the necromancer’s specialty in the book of the dead lackluster, you just have around a couple of options for the small selections of minions that you would summon and that’s it, there is no other use for it.

I have a couple of suggestions that would enhance the flavor of a necromancer class and their book of the dead special mechanic.

There is an interesting indie game that’s called Necrosmith, in that game you play as a necromancer as well and you summon minions, however, what is different and interesting about it, is that the minions you summon, you forge them from parts of your fallen enemies, its like, you killed a skeleton, you got a skeleton arm, you killed a siren you got a siren head, you killed a goat man, you got a goat man torso for example, and in your forge you can put all of these different parts together to create a monster, or you can try and collect all normal skeleton pieces and summon a normal skeleton, same goes for the undead siren or goat man.

My suggestions would be:

  1. Let us as necromancers collect body parts (these items only drop for necromancers) from our enemies, these body parts are unique per monster family, these parts can be collected and consumed per summon (however you can introduce a quest later that would give you the ability to do a ritual to make a body part last and not get consumed per summon), to be able to summon an undead companion you would have to put in all 5 different body parts (head, torso, legs, right arm and left arm), there would be a beastiary in the book of the dead with recipes on what kind of body parts you can put together to get which undead companion to join you in battle, and maybe through questing you can expand on that beastiary (there can also be some hidden recipes)

examples,
you would open the beastiary section of the book of the dead, you would find:
Skeleton > requires you to get all 5 skeleton pieces
Zombie > requires you to get all 5 zombie pieces
Rotting one > requires you to get 3 zombie pieces with 2 skeleton pieces (these ones would look like decaying zombies)

the next one is unlocked through a quest:
Abomination > requires you to get 5 gargantuan zombie pieces for example (these guys would be the equivalent of the bone golem I guess)

the next one is a hidden recipe, it requires the player to experiment:
Wailing Amalgam > requires you to get 1 piece of each monster family and mix them together in a ritual, and once you have done it the first time, this recipe would be unlocked in the beastiary section of the book of the dead

  1. Another suggestion, is to give necromancers the ability to control their armies AI, in regards of battle formation and behavior, its like if you got skeletons with shields, why not let them do a box formation around you? or maybe you want to do a spear head formation with battle oriented skeletons to try and break the enemy’s lines, or maybe if you get stunned, any of your minions with a CC ability would try to CC any enemy that is trying to attack you, or if you want the skeleton mages to prioritize elite enemies, or ranged enemies, without controlling your army’s behavior you don’t feel like a general.

examples on how a necromancer would feel like a general of the dead:

  • Give him the ability to control his army’s formation around him.
  • Give him the ability to put each unit of his army into a team and the ability to assign that team a priority regarding their behavior (like focus attacking an elite enemy, or attack anything that is in close proximity to the necromancer)
  1. Lastly, I would love to see a death knight kind of build, a melee necromancer that charges with their army into battle is always badass.

These are my 2 cents regarding the book of the dead, I don’t mean to be critical of the current design, but honestly it kind of feels lackluster in comparison to the rouge for example, and I would always love my necromancer to be more unique and have a flavor to it.

Edit: I wanted to include the next suggestion in the OP so that any new readers would find it easier, rather than scrolling and reading everything.

  1. Give Necromancers Ghost Flame magic, (this is inspired from the ghost flames in Elden Ring), their damage type would be Shadow/Cold (or cold, I thought it would be cool to have a class of abilities with 2 damage types) and these flames would look like the flames the necromancer emits when you pick him in D2, they would have a wispy teal tint to them.
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bruh, you really think blizzard cares or even could do something that “complicated”. You’re asking a lot of a company ran by marketing majors who tell interns what to program.

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bruh… I would rather give constructive criticism regardless of who runs the company rather than acting like a keyboard warrior going on a mission against the evil big bad corporation.

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that’s why i bumped your post, but it’s falling on deaf ears.

blizzard is beyond lazy and if you understand how they design pets in every game they control these days, pets are literally just an aura. yes you see the illusion of pets, but it’s literally just an aura spell with aura AI. There is no pet AI. Pet AI in Diablo 2 is magnitudes more complicated than Anything they have done in the last 15 years.

if they even bothered with a half as version of pet ai in this day and age, you could literally toggle them to do things and they would act completely different from one persons choices to the next. Think of it like the current botting programs out there today but with 50 more AI choices. If some dunce who programs a bot for D3 can make the character do what we see them do, imagine what levels of pet AI a few developers on the literal team could create. They dont care, it’s not even on their scope, and it’s a joke to just make a spell aura disguised as a pet, and for some reason some people eat it up and enjoy it. Though not many, as most blizzard games barely have an active playerbase compared to when they actually cared about their games.

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While I like the overall concept of the Book of the Dead I have to agree it seems a bit lackluster.

While it sounds great, it also might be a bit too involved for a single class mechanism, but yeah, allowing the necromancer to change some parts of their minions, with the body parts of slain enemies, could be interesting.
Maybe a simplified version could just be changing their two hands/arms, which then determined something about their attacks or defenses (weapon types, spells used etc.).

This could be really interesting. Like Final Fantasy 12, or Dragon Age 1, combat automation systems, setting triggers and effects for the minions.
In Dragon Age you could set stuff like
“If [Elite Enemy] uses [Stun Effect] on [Player] Then try to Use [Skill X] on [Same Enemy]”
Again, should probably be simplified a great deal, both how many commands you could make, what they could do, and likewise there should probably be some kind of cost to them for balancing (maybe each time a counter triggers the minions take dmg, or one minion is sacrificed etc.)

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The classes have been finalized in committees and subcommittees a number of years ago . . .

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You know Necroforger is all about your minions and how you build them, and pretty big feature and mechanic. While Diablo Necromancers minions are just a skill, you either use them or not. They are just one of their many tools, it’s unnecesary to make a huge feature out of it, even more so because than you have to make something similar, for the rest of the classes.

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Thank you for your feedback, now that is way more helpful, I hope they read this and respond to it properly, as I like you have seen the necromancer in D3 to just behave like a different variant of sorcerer rather than an actual necromancer, that is why I left my feedback here hoping that one day they read it and if not at launch then maybe later they can add this, or it might inspire them to do something better.

Yeah, I don’t mind making a simpler mechanic out of it, I just thought to my self, It might get very boring if a level 1 necromancer still summons the same minion at level 100 as well (both visually and mechanically), like yeah you can dress good, and customize your necromancer’s gear, but your summons are all the same, which is kind of lame and a missed opportunity on blizzard’s behalf

Yes! what actually inspired me to suggest this was Dragon Age, that system was very good, and it would make you feel like a general/commander of the dead, because currently I don’t really feel like any general or commander.

Sure thing, this is my suggestion/feedback, they can take it, leave it, get inspired by it, do it later on in development in an update, do whatever they want.

The rest of the classes already have more interesting mechanics, like the Rogues, they have 3 different systems to use with different schools to learn these skills from, the Druids, Barberian and Sorceress have also their own Unique mechanics, while the Necromancer’s unique mechanic seem kinda passive/shallow or empty.

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I just wish Blizzard would give some Necro info to Maxroll and public so we can start feeling our way towards what we’re going to do early June 2023!

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The Rouge for shure. The Druid imo is the least interesting, then Barb is pretty much on paar with Necro, and Sorc is the second most interesting. But you know this is just going to be the base, everyone can and should give feedback everywhere, specialy in open beta. They shurely going to expand a lot of stuff in the future.

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YOU WILL ATTAIN THE NECRONOMICON!!! Sorry, couldn’t resist.

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Maybe barbarian is not that interesting, but I want to point out that atleast the class feels like a barbarian, it’s strong, destructive and physical, when you play it you feel like an actual barbarian, same goes for the druid, they can transform into werewolves and they control nature oriented magic, as for the necromancer, what you get for the book of the dead is 1 simple page UI listing very simple almost passive choices for you, or a passive buff if you want to unsummon one of your minions, which is very meh, you’ve got no control over how your minions behave, you don’t feel like an actual necromancer, currently he kind of seems like a witch doctor with different pixels for his minions.

I just wanted to note that my feedback is based on what I have read from the quarterly update blog post regarding the necromancer, and any associated videos.

Haha, this is the spirit that I was looking for! you even inspired me with some new ideas, like they could add a page with the minions you can summon with hand drawn images and flavor text, stuff like this that makes you feel like you’ve ATTAINED THE NECRONOMICON!!!

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The last good necro was in D2 (considering how old it is). And atleast in D4, your summons can hit harder than a wet noodle, so they are realiable source of passive dmg, un like in D3 where you can’t do anything with them, aside from skely mages.

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That would be a nice addition to D4, but unfortunately that’s too much detail. That’s more along the lines of D&D where you need that much detail to get vested in the game.

After watching the 3 Evil Dead movies, I really wanted to make a Necromancer in D&D. I played the heck out of it in D2 and D2:LoD, even used mods for solo offline play that would change the Necro a bit, invisible skeleton mages, etc.

I even told a DM that I either start with my own ‘spell book’ or that’s the first thing I will do when I start playing. Um, yeah, I will allow you to start with it. Okay, that works. It was fun, but didn’t last long as most D&D sessions don’t. Good thing there is Diablo.

I created my own world, as most D&D players end up doing, and I incorporated the Necronomicon (Calling it the Necro Nomicon) and added a ‘Necro Lexicon.’ In D&D Necromantic (divine) and Necromancy (arcane) are two different things. So, basically a book for each. One was bad and the other good. I was going to mess the players and give them the wrong book for completing the adventure, thus starting the ‘real’ adventure. But, it never happened. Too bad, it would have been a lot of fun. I was going for a mix of Ravenloft and Call of Cthulhu.

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one more thing that was very nice about D2 skeletons, is that they changed their armor depending on the level of the necro’s skeleton mastery skin, ( I think the last visual change is at level 8 skeleton mastery) its a small thing, but it was nice to see them evolve with you as a necromancer, however in D3, the skeletons were the same throughout the whole game, which gave no sense of progress at all, this also goes for the rest of the summons, and that is something that I kind of fear about D4.

While true, but I wanna say that D2 was heavily inspired by D&D, and I believe they can make a more casual version of what we’ve mentioned here.

This looks very interesting, what stopped it? I already can’t imagine the outcomes!

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Of course, a MAJOR influence. Matter of fact, there were Diablo books made especially for AD&D 2nd edition. I thought that was nice. All of the monsters in D2 were converted into AD&D monsters, including all of the bosses as well. You could actually run a D2 game in person with paper, pencil, dice, miniatures, maps, etc. Good times.

Many of the players were active military or had kids, so getting a schedule going when it was my turn to DM was too difficult, so the group disbanded. Plus, many didn’t like the horror aspect of it, they wanted high fantasy. The idea is still bouncing around in my head if I ever get the chance to DM again, even if it’s Pathfinder, I wouldn’t mind.

I never got the chance to play in a Ravenloft or horror inspired game of D&D, but I did play a few games of Call of Cthulhu, so that was nice.

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Yeah that progression was nice, but it was an actuall skill where you put points and it gets stronger i liked that way better. In D4 it’s more like gimmick, that is just there, and in that sense you are right, it misses this evolution progression stuff. Now that i think of it, it do needs another layer atleast. Llike leveling them?

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OP, you got a great starting point for a D4 WD dlc :grinning:

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I think I am amongst the few that like the dark and gritty fantasy/world like that of diablo’s or castlevania, I had hoped that we were many.

Yupp! that is exactly what I kind of hope for, like the more you level them it is reflected visually on them and maybe is also reflected on their behavior or abilities, like their AI becomes smarter or can do more functions rather than be a passive source of damage in the background.

I don’t mean to be a party pooper, but I honestly hope we don’t get the Witch Doctor in D4 :joy:

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Skirmishers could start with a dagger, and then as you level them up they mire and more resamble as rouges, wearing lather armour, maybe even you could have options for equpemnt, like dual wielding daggers, dagger and sword, and poisoned wepons, they would be fast but fragile. Defenders could eventualy wear heavy armour with huge shields and blunt weapons, taunting enemies and knocking them down with their shields and stuff. Reapers could have magical robes looking like the Grim Reaper, spining with their huge scythe for 2 secons dmging everything around them with shadow, and an aura if weakness or leach life. Mages could have a chance to cast huge AoE spells from time to time. But maybe necro than would be to OP. Or… well yeah it’s only a matter of dmg output.

If done right, why not?