Which basically means it gives you perma-invulnerability.
There are a number of other skills in the game that would give you perma-invulnerability with enough cooldown, like Smoke Screen, Serenity, Seven Sided Strike, Spirit Walk and Falling Sword (and maybe one or two others).
But all of these skills have the feature “This ability does not start its cooldown until after its effects expire” which prevents you from having them up 100% of the time, even when you have very high cooldown reduction.
The issue with Army of the Dead is that its long cooldown make it useless as an area nuke, and its synergy with Rathma’s is almost non-existent. To address this, I’m thinking that it needs a big cooldown reduction either from the set or from a change to skill itself. If we can cast AotD more reliably, then it can serve to proc a big defensive and pet damage buff. It would function like slow Time on the DMO set.
Here’s how I would change Rathma:
AotD gains the effects of the Death Valley and Unconventional Warfare runes, and its cooldown is reduced by 1 second for every enemy your minions and AotD hit.
You and your pets take xx% less damage for xx seconds after casting AotD.
Enemies hit by AotD take xxxx% more damage from you minions and AotD for xx Seconds…
I’d also add a 20-30% cdr for AotD to the Commander of the Risen Dead passive.
Now AotD can be used reliably, hits harder, has some crowd control and defensive functions, and boosts all your pets. You aren’t wedded to using mages, and your defense doesn’t need to ramp up from pets.
I don’t know what the number could be, but I would be fine with a 30-40 second base cooldown and then further reduction from the set.
I think I suggested basically the exact same (or a very similar) idea many month ago on the old forums, but for the 6piece set it was simply ‘You and your minions deal xxxx% increased damage for xx seconds after you casted AotD’.
I have the feeling that the Rathma set does not really feel like a pet set, since its focus on Skeletal Mages. Instead I would leave it more open ended for the Necro to choose which minions he uses, which is what your suggestion would do as well.
Also, I would include Revive and minions from item procs (like the Fallen Champion from Maximus) into the set, which gives even more choices with the set.
I may rail against thorns but it is deeply satisfying to beat (that may be the masochist inside of me). Now with the stone gauntlets/ice climber combo I can replace aquilla for toughness and since I’m not using moribund gauntlets, hexing pants or devour, I use siphon blood (power shift rune) to make up for the life/essence, damage generation loss.
After that it’s just a matter of getting on my bike and finding those elite’s that die within a minute of being commanded.
No, it doesn’t. This holds true when you are able to kill the enemies around you pretty much within the first 10 s, i.e. your first cycle of LotD. At some point shortly after that monsters are not frozen any more and start to attack you again. Since you cannot keep on playing sitting duck with the Necro, you will eventually have to reposition or get one-shot.
In addition, there are several mob types (hell witches, tongue lasher, goat impaler, winged assassin, lacunis, corrupted angels, tbc) that will attack you although they are in the radius of your LotD and potentially one-shot you even though LotD is already up.
I see. But it still leaves the question if certain measures should be taken to prevent you from being perma-invulnerable it, even if you just become perma-invulnerable under certain conditions in some circumstances.
Meh, I’m unimpressed by your proposed changes. First off, “meaty meat” stuff is just asking for too much. This game has been on life support for years, asking for new items and complete set revamps are pipe dreams. Maybe it’ll happen, but I wouldn’t wager a dime on that bet.
Definitely gotta stick to what you referred to as “quick wins” – short, easy changes like adjusting percentages or changing an element. No new items, no text changes, that’s just too much for these hypersensitive developers to handle.
Except there’s one glaring issue, and I want to emphasize this very much…every single class has a ton of “quick wins”. This game has so many “quick wins”. It’s so damn painful to watch this game, season after season, suck so hard when it could be so much better if the designers/developers just knocked off a bunch of “quick wins”.
I mean, give me an excel sheet of every skill and every percentage and some red bulls and by the end of the day I’ll have made at least 20 builds viable just by adjusting damage percentages. No new text, no new items. Literally just changing a damn number in a database somewhere will completely restore many builds to glory. It’s so sad.
Why is it that, with all the legendaries, sets, bells, and whistles this game has, each class has like…two end game builds at most? No need to nerf them, just literally dial up everything else. It’d take a math major less than a week to bring this game to such an insanely better place. So many builds could be viable with just a number change…
The balance is, in my opinion, between kill rate (dps) and toughness. Poison Scythe is a build that Fluffy put out there but without the area damage rolls you’re essentially invulnerable but kill extremely slowly. It is relaxing - put on some deep house (I like Nora en Pure) - and walk through grifts scything away, never really worrying about dying.
But one thing that Fluff says sometimes which I really support is that the Thorns necro playstyle just sucks. Incredibly fishy, and an odd mechanic. I have read Barbs talking about the wall charge era being a gimmick and I see the Thorns playstyle as equivalent.
I am thinking about ways to improve Necros too but am not ready to really share ideas. I’ll probably write something in this thread towards the end of this season. I think that Necros do very well but are pigeonholed into very few builds - the question is, how do we address this say, to make the fun lance builds the best ones to choose and essentially make our play time that much more fun.
Rather than make a new topic I figured I’d post here.
I’ve never really liked most Necromancer builds but I recently became aware of a LoD Blood Nova (Siphon Blood using the Iron Rose offhand) push build that I do like a lot. It is the “Push Build GR109 LoN (LoD) Blood Nova v2” on diablofans. It has a few issues that could be fixed to make it even more enjoyable.
The biggest issue that everyone immediately notices is the build has next to no single target damage. My suggestion is to add an effect similar to the Monk’s Kyoshiro’s Blade (increase the damage of Death Nova by xx%. When the initial impact of your Death Nova hits 5 or fewer enemies, the damage is increased by xx%) to either Iron Rose or a new bracer. It would have to be one of those two because the build already uses Scythe of the Cycle and Bloodtide Blade.
Siphon Blood behaves like a channeling skill, but it doesn’t benefit from Mantle of Channeling or the legendary gem Taeguk. I think it’s time to change them so Siphon Blood works with those items. The added defense would help with having to stand still in huge piles of enemies.
There is a delay after casting Siphon Blood before Blood Nova is proc’ed from Iron Rose. A slightly clunky feeling mechanic. I don’t know if this can be changed, but it should certainly be looked at.
I hope something can be done to make this a more viable push build.
LotD doenst give in fact unlimited corpses coes u can t proc them. u got some barriers on how many corpse lance u can shoot/1s , so in those 10s the unlimited its very limited, even more its sprayed over a crowd and not on the desired target.
the clunky feeling its due to an another nerf asked by the crowds of noobs. vox populi … vox Blizzard. As it is the existence of this class, so hated by Blizzard dev.
Id like to see Final Service changed. It always feels bad, especially at higher GR’s when you have no corpses or orbs to consume.
Once it procs, it should give 4 seconds of immunity, blood rush you in a random direction and (10) corpses explode from the area that it procced. No heal.
They also need another item slot that offers more damage mitigation, 50% from dayntee’s isn’t enough. Most of the offhands are useless, they should look at a bonus for one of them. Something to do with the consumption of corpses, so it’s accessible in most builds.
“Each Corpse consumed reduces damage by 3-8% stacking up to 10 times for 3 seconds.”
This would shift Corpse Lance / Blood Lance back to Trag’Oul’s since you can combine 2Pest with 6Trag and we probably dont want to see that again.
Bones of Rathma Rework
4p: 2% increased mitigation for each active minion
Revive / Personal Army : Damage taken is reduced by 1% for each revived minion active.
They could rework Mask of Scarlet Death
Revive gets the Personal Army Rune damage taken is reduced by an additional 4% per revived minion.
I would love to see some more interaction on Ratha’s
we have Golden Gorget of Leoric and Corrupted Ashbringer both summon a bunch of Skeletons we could technically use.
Btw we already have more damage reduction problem is its bugged right now. Devour / Voracious resource cost reduction doesn’t work with crimson set while crusaders wrath reduction works just fine. 2% resource cost 25 stacks.
I made a new post about trag’ouls it could have been one of the more unique sets.
I think necromancer has a lot of cool interactions no one thought about. Broken promises meleemancer 100% crit after 5non crits, bonestorm 6P attacks pretty fast pop bone armor crit apply pain enhancer to everything. Use Grim Sythe (physical), Bone Armor (poison) and Bone Spear (cold) they would perfectly sync with CoE. Just one of many ideas I’m messing around with.
edit : kinda liked the idea of Necromancer reviving dead Items but that’s a dead end it seems. Andariel’s VIsage and Pox Faulds both use a poison Skill witch doesn’t work with Nayr’s Black Death. Even the Necromancer in “Heroes of the Storm” has a lvl 20 Talent called Andariel’s Visage like what the hell. Starting to wonder when the Devs gave up on polishing Necromancer and just released a Pile of Blood and Bones…
what about the Pestilence Set 2P each CORPSE you consume fires a Corpse Lance at a nearby enemy.Blood Lance costs 2% Life. Devour / Cannibalize : Each corpse consumed also restores 3% of maximum Life. Since you are draining and regaining your Life pretty fast it could work pretty well with our passive Blood is Power. 2P doens’t say its a free Corpse Lance!
edit: just did some quick testing Devour eats 10 corpses per cast while in Land so
1 Devour with 2P eats 20% Life and heals you for 30% Life thats + 10% Life we could use for Corpse Explosion 5 additional corpses.
Corpse Explosion and Devour animation can overlap so you could use both skills at the same time. time to play the Piano?
edit2 : if you pref Cold Lance. Devouring Aura + Corpse Explosion / Bloody Mess sounds good with CoE. Cold -> Physical -> Poison.
The main issue with the necro is actually the insane Cooldown that is needed for a boring and very specific playstyle for those looking for speed runs.
Personally I think it would be fair if they release a ring that reduces land of the dead Cooldown but also necro damage while wearing it.
Since it’s a ring it will already be a nerf, also the ring dropping our damage would give necros the option for stacking damage or defense. And it would be fun not elite starve doing speedruns.
And thorns are always boring. You’re right.
Indeed.
LotD also is kinda needed for the Pestilence set (at least the way I play it) , to kickstart your damage reduction buff, etc…
An alternative that I was thinking about would be to remove LotD and replace it with something like “Rain of Corpses”, where ~30 corpses fall down from the sky that you can utilize and it has like a ~30 second cooldown.
Or something like “Sacrifice” where you summon ~30 citizens that then immediately die and leave a corpse, also with a ~30 second cooldown.
That would get rid of the LotD problem completely.
In addition to that, you could give the Necro an innate 20% chance that enemies spawn a Corpse Fragment when you hit them with a damage dealing skill, which also would generate more corpses without having to kill enemies.
These Corpse Fragments would work exactly like corpses, but you did not had to kill enemies forst to use them.
I think that - with a few other changes - could make up for the removal of LotD.