As you guys know, I’ve pretty much been exclusively playing/streaming necro since it’s release in Season 11. Over the course of that time, the 3 biggest feedback/complaints I’ve heard about the necro are the following:
Thorns is over-performing/necro push builds are lame
Not only is thorns too strong because it takes advantage of game mechanics but it feels very dull for a few reasons.
- Passively doing damage solely based on getting hit is a fairly boring playstyle.
- You’re fishing for elite affixes that proc your thorns the best [desecrator, frozen, lightning storm, particular melee hit speed etc…], which is incredibly fishy, even for diablo’s standards. Most classes have to skip juggernauts, that’s a given. But thorns necro has to skip elites that don’t have good affixes, don’t chase, don’t attack fast enough etc etc… the list goes on.
- There’s no means of forcing mobs to attack your pets, which is essentially how you’re SUPPOSED to do your damage as a thorns necro.
If I’m being honest, to me, thorns is solely in the game to invoke nostalgia from Diablo 2. It’s an out-dated, passive playstyle that doesn’t really keep with the times and there are infinitely more clever pet playstyles we can push towards going forward with the necro.
Land of the Dead is in every build
While this is 95% true, a big reason this happens is because of necro’s dependency on Krysbin’s Sentence and poor means of generating corpses outside LOTD. That being said, I don’t think the play is to overhaul LOTD or remove the skill from the game, that would break necro. But pushing the sets towards a different playstyle could solve this, hence some of my decisions going forward.
Necro is so squishy
No surprise here. Although necro does have a decent supply of mitigation items unique to it’s class (IE: wisdom of kalan, golemskin, lornelle’s sunstone[which is worthless unless you’re a support class]), they either share the ever-important jewelry slot that we just can’t sacrifice or they just don’t provide enough mitigation
Now lets get to the MEAT
As a developer myself, I wanted to start with the “quick wins” in my list. These are changes that would be super easy to make that would massively impact the class. Then we’ll get into more hefty, work required ideas.
Nerf thorns
Again, I don’t really see any way around this nor is it necessarily utilizing legitimate mechanics. Although I’m not usually a fan of nerfing builds, NOT nerfing thorns prevents us from buffing other items on this list… so THE GREATER GOOD
Buff Trag'oul 6p
Drastically change or remove the "blood lance" rune
The reason I paired these together is because if you strictly buff 6p trag, you essentially shift necro back to playing the bloodlancer from season 11. And although this is a better playstyle than LON ColdLancer, it doesn’t hold a candle to Pestilence coldlancer, which we’ll get to in a second. Assuming thorns is nerfed and blood lance isn’t a thing, we can safely buff trag’oul 6p and bring builds like blood mages and blood nova more in line with other necromancer builds.
Buff Pestilence slightly to beat out LON ColdLancer and DRASTICALLY buff bone spear damage
It wouldn’t take much, but a small buff to Pestilence is needed to bring it up to LON ColdLancer GR levels. Pestilence cold lancer is 1000% a more polished, better handling and all around better feeling build than the LON version and should be one of the go to options for pushing on the necro with pestilence. Furthermore, a massive increase in bone spear damage is needed to make the skill anything but a means of proc’ing obsidian ring of the zodiac.
New Bracer: Increases the damage of Corpse Explosion by X% if there are Y or fewer targets
This has more implications with suggestions to come but even by itself, would drastically improve farming with Corpse Explosion, which is arguably the most satisfying skill the necro has.
Buff Inarius 6p
Kind of enough said, just needs another small boost to make it more competitive
Jesseth Set: While your skeletons are commanded to attack a target, all of your damage is increased by 400%
Command Skeletons: Enforcer or Mending - change to poison
There’s really no reason to lock this to minions, especially consider that the trade off is that you have to run skeletons on your bar. Giving this a flat 400% will make it more viable across necro builds. Also give necro’s a spammable poison rune for command skeletons for some synergy with Nayrs.
Final Service: When you take lethal damage, you are sustained preventing all damage for 4 seconds. In addition, you heal for 10% of your Life per minion. This effect cannot occur more than once every 60 seconds
Really straight forward change, consuming your minions makes pet builds dead in the water when they proc. Simply removing 3 words from this passive makes it 10000% better.
Golemskin Breaches: The cooldown on Command Golem is reduced by [20 - 25] seconds and you take 80% less damage while your golem is alive.
This potentially solves a great deal of mitigation issues on the necromancer and has some greater implications with suggested changes coming later. While we’re at it, we could easily add the damage modifier for golem back onto this item. It didn’t make or break anything and was kind of pointless to remove.
NOW FOR THE MEATY MEAT
I’ll admit, a lot of my decisions here were based on how cool some of these un-utilized skills look. I’m also keeping all ideas in the wheelhouse of diablo. Therefore nothing that would be outside the bounds of what I feel possible with the current game engine or beyond any engineer to develop.
New Bracer: Skeletel Mage Contamination now lasts forever but you may only have 1 mage at a time. Increases the damage of Skeletel Mage by "X%" for every enemy killed within "Y" range up to a maximum of 20.
Fates Vow: Grants the Death Valley rune & removes the cooldown on Army of the Dead but it now costs 90% of your maximum essence pool to cast.
Command Golem: Decay Golem - significantly increase the damage per corpse consumed
Some of you may see where I’m going with this. Poison Scythe could be a really fun means of pushing the necromancer with Inarius. The problem is, in it’s current form, the damage isn’t there and the synergy is clunky. So the goal with these items is to make a proper, Necro feeling built based around poison scythe. We massively increase our damage with grimscythe via leger’s disdain. Scythe hits a relatively small area in front of you and the only means of currently dumping your essence is with singularity mage. The general premise here is you drop a contaminated skeletal mage (weak at first and stationary), use your army of the dead(with the new fate’s vow) to suck in mobs around the mage. You then swipe them to death with grim scythe, continually dumping your essence with more army of the dead casts. Killing mobs around your mage causes the mage to become stronger, eventually helping you to deal massive single target damage to whatever is left(the trade off being that the mage is stationary). This will also generate a significant amount of corpses(and we can’t waste those 
), therefore we’ll be using the active ability on decay golem to create a super powerful golem to also aid in the single target damage. We can stack poison skills here and make use of Nayr’s black death in the cube. This would effectively be the first melee pet build in diablo 3 and an incredibly unique playstyle that utilizes some extremely cool looking spells in the game.
Bone Prison Passive Rework: Blood Spells have a 15% to stun targets hit for 1.5 seconds & traps the target in bone prison for 3 seconds
Trag'oul's Avatar:
Now has a necklace
6p: All Life-spending abilities deal 3800% increased damage. Healing from skills is increased by 100%. Increases the damage of corpse explosion for every corpse in "X" radius up to a maximum of 15
Iron Rose: Attacking with Siphon Blood has a 100% chance to cast a free Blood Nova while also granting the healing effect of the tendril nova rune
Trag’oul’s Avatar now becomes an entirely new way of pushing on the necro. The idea is we use death nova procs from iron rose to deal heavy aoe damage. The problem, of course, with death nova is that it has zero single target damage. How do we solve this? Since these iron rose death nova’s are free to cast, we don’t have to run devour, thus there will be a plethora of corpses on the ground after our blood novas have wiped out all the trash. The new corpse explosion bracers allow us to use the insanely cool looking final embrace rune (a blood skill) in conjuction with our increased 6p trag damage to deal massive single target damage to the big single targets left behind from our AOE nova’ing. The bone prison passive gives us a way of proc’ing krysbin without running dislocation or land of the dead nor would LOTD help this build as it requires actual corpses on the ground to get the damage buff and LOTD just gives you corpse skills for free. We could also run high CDR to reduce the flesh golem timer and perhaps even use moribund gauntlets to generate a pile of corpses should we run out.
Bones of Rathma Rework
2p: consuming a corpse with Revive triggers devour:cannibilize
4p: 2% increased mitigation for each active minion
6p: Increases the damage of revive by "X%" for each active minion. The cooldown of BoneSpirit is reduced by 10 seconds and travels 1000% faster
Originally, I was going to leave Rathma alone but there’s no scenario where Rathma becomes a better playstyle than LON Mage. In blizzard’s blog about the future of Diablo 3 they mentioned adding a new set, immediately my brain went to a revive set for the new set but again… I don’t see rathma ever getting used again in it’s current form because of how good the LON version is. So I figured why not make Rathma the pet set. The idea is pretty straight forward, summon literally everything the necromancer has to offer to have an army of undead minions at your disposal. Leaving you to maintain your mages, cast curses and cast Bone Spirit: Posession to get even more minions under your control(synergy with 4p&6p) . I also increased the speed of bone spirit because it’s ridiculously slow and you would be standing at range in this build which could be unbelievably frustrating. 2p is basically just to keep up essence costs of maintaining curses and skeletel mages.
This leaves the new set to focus on an entirely different section of the necro that is not utilized, my suggestion? Bone spear
