With the upcoming Necromancer changes in mind, I’ve gone back over my ideas for Necromancer item changes to try and flesh out many different builds while simultaneously making all skills useful. This time, I’ve also attempted to tune the damage modifiers for balance. Here is my list of suggested changes/additions:
Golemancy
new Chest
- Command Golem summons all five runed golems. Activating Command Golem only activates the golem with the selected rune.
Rationale:
Golemancers should never be stuck with just 1 golem at a time.
new Phylactery
- Your Ice Golem is commanded to attack when you use Decrepify. Your Bone Golem is commanded to attack when you use Frailty. Your Blood Golem is commanded to attack when you use Leech. Your Decay Golem consumes all corpses you Devour.
Rationale:
You can’t slot Command Golem in five different slots, so this is the only way to give control over all 5 golems in one skill bar. Added bonus is it brings in all three curse skills in one skill bar as well.
new Wrist
- All cursed enemies take damage equal to 1000% of your golem’s thorns each time your golem attacks.
Rationale:
This brings the damage of your golems up to relevant levels and provides a way to deal AoE damage that you can somewhat control.
Bones of Rathma
change Bones of Rathma
- 2p: Your minions have a chance to reduce the cooldown of Army of the Dead by 1 second each time they deal damage.
- 4p: You gain 6% damage reduction each time one of your minions deal damage. Max 10 stacks.
- 6p: Each active Skeletal Mage increases the damage of your minions and Army of the Dead by 2500% up to a max of 10000%.
Rationale:
This set just needed a bump in DR and damage to be relevant again. I adjusted the ramp up on the 4p bonus to make it faster to reach full DR.
new Wrist
- Army of the Dead deals an additional 200-300% damage. During Army of the Dead and for 10 seconds afterward, your minions generate 5 essence per hit.
Rationale:
Rathma builds needed an incentive to use Army of the Dead. Army of the Dead needed a damage boost to be relevant.
change Fate’s Vow
- Army of the Dead deals an additional 200-250% damage and gains the effect of the Unconventional Warfare rune. You are granted 50 stacks of Unnatural Resilience upon using Army of the Dead. Taking damage consumes 1 stack of Unnatural Resilience which reduces the damage taken by 65%.
Rationale:
Rathma builds can focus on Army of the Dead, Command Skeletons, or Skeletal Mage. Each of these builds has a specific legendary item that boosts it, but the change to add DR to Razeth’s Volition would prevent the use of Fate’s Vow and Bloodsong Mail solely because of the DR. To prevent this, I added different DR mechanics to each of them. While they can be stacked in a LoD build, it would require the use of skills that they generally don’t have room to include.
change Bloodsong Mail
- While in Land of the Dead, Command Skeletons deal 100-125% more damage. Command Skeletons gains the effects of the Enforcer, Frenzy, Dark Mending, and Freezing Grasp runes. You gain 5-9% damage reduction per active skeletal minion.
Rationale:
Inside Land of the Dead, your skeletons still get a boost, but now this item is useful outside Land of the Dead as well.
change The Johnstone
- When Land of the Dead expires, you are granted 50 stacks of Macabre Knowledge. Macabre Knowledge increases the damage of Corpse Lance and Corpse Explosion by 150-200%. The damage bonus of your Command Skeletons is increased by 15-20% per stack.
Rationale:
Command Skeletons needed a damage boost and didn’t really make use of any of the Necromancer specific amulets. With the thematic link between Land of the Dead and Command Skeletons this seemed to make sense. Note that the stacks are not consumed by Command Skeletons or minion attacks.
new Wrist
- Your skeletal minions deal extra damage equal to 8-10% of their thorns value with every hit while commanded.
Rationale:
With the other recommended damage modifiers, any more than this and the damage gets ridiculous. This does let you build around Thorns instead of raw damage however.
Masquerade of Burning Carnival
change Masquerade of Burning Carnival
- 2p: Your Simulacrums no longer take damage, gains all runes, and its cooldown is refreshed when you die.
- 4p: While you have a Simulacrum, damage is reduced by 50%. Damage you take is split with your Simulacrums as well.
- 6p: Your Bone Spear, Bone Spirit, and Death Nova deals 10000% increased damage. Simulacrums gain triple this bonus.
Rationale:
This opens up the new set a bit to allow for greater build diversity.
change Haunted Visions
- Simulacrum now drains 1% of your maximum life every second and lasts forever. They can now duplicate your Primary skills instead of Skeletal Mage.
Rationale:
This is mostly just to increase the potential builds available, but it doesn’t make much sense to me that only Grim Scythe can be duplicated.
new Wrist
- Enemies trapped inside a Bone Prison generate corpses when hit. When a Bone Prison expires it leaves behind 2-4 additional corpses.
Rationale:
Necromancers need corpse generation tools outside Land of the Dead and Command Golem. This turns Bone Prison into that tool.
change Bryner’s Journey
- Attacking with Bone Spikes has a 100% chance to cast a Bone Nova at the same location.
Rationale:
This is just bringing this item into parity with Iron Rose.
change Defiler’s Cuisses
- Your Bone Spirit’s Damage is increased by 400-500% every second that it is active. When you trap an enemy within a Bone Prison, you and your Simulacrums release a Bone Spirit targeting it.
Rationale:
Bone Prison is a cool passive with a lot of identity, but very little substance. This change would turn it into an effective tool for both control and damage depending on the build.
new Wrist
- Devour gains the effect of the Ruthless rune. Whenever you consume a minion using Devour it releases a Bone Spirit targeting a nearby enemy.
Rationale:
Bone Spirit is a great skill that just doesn’t see a lot of use because it has very little support, is almost entirely single target, and can’t be spammed. This item would give a new mechanical way to use Bone Spirit as a main skill, albeit indirectly.
new Waist
- Your minions apply a random curse to enemies when they deal damage.
Rationale:
Some builds no longer have a need for the DR from Dayntee’s Binding or the damage boost from Trag’Oul’s Corroded Fang. As a result, those builds often don’t even slot a curse skill. This would give a QoL option for builds that otherwise just choose between The Witching Hour and Vigilante Belt.
Trag’Oul’s Avatar
change Trag’Oul’s Avatar
- 2p: Blood Rush gains the effect of every rune. Enemies take 150% more damage from all sources while having their blood drained by Siphon Blood and for 3 seconds afterward.
- 4p: You always gain the full benefit of items and effects based on missing life. While at full life, your healing from skills is added to your maximum Life for 45 seconds, up to 100% more.
- 6p: Siphon Blood and your Life-spending abilities deal 3800% increased damage and your healing from skills is increased by 100%.
Rationale:
The current version of this set has several issues: not enough damage, not enough survivability, limited skills that can even be used. What it does have is a unique identity. I wanted to keep the identity of this set while giving it some much needed boosts. I also didn’t want to invalidate the set dungeon tied to this set so I couldn’t just redesign it entirely.Giving the 2p bonus a party wide damage booster serves two functions: First it incentivizes a zdps necro to use this set a bit and promotes active targeting of priority targets. (since Siphon Blood is single target) Second, it bumps the damage up of the set into relevant levels, albeit against a limited number of targets at a time.
Adding DR to this set is something that had to be done. I took a bit of inspiration from the design of both the Grace of Inarius and the new Masquerade of Burning Carnival sets and promoted an existing Legendary piece of Jewelry into an unofficial ‘7th set piece’. Lornelle’s Sunstone is an interesting item that does not see much use currently. With the new ability added to the 4p bonus, this item provides up to 95% DR at all times. Given that using the Trag’Oul’s Avatar set with pretty much any of the skills it can support prevents you from making effective use of the other DR items available, this actually provides comparable DR to what other builds achieve in practice. It also allows some interesting build variations in that Shi Mizu’s Haori becomes a possible damage boost.
With those changes in mind, the only thing missing was a build that focused entirely on Siphon Blood. In order to support that, I added it to the list of skills that benefit from the 6p bonus.
change Funerary Pick
- Siphon Blood deals 600-800% more damage and drains blood from 2 additional targets.
Rationale:
Funerary Pick is never used currently. Because Trag’Oul’s Corroded Fang provides a sizable damage boost to all damage, any other weapon must provide at least as sizable a boost to be competitive. As a Primary skill, Siphon Blood needs even more of a boost to bring it up to relevant damage levels.
new Wrist
- Siphon Blood gains the effects of the Power Shift rune and attacks 200% faster against targets cursed with Leech.
Rationale:
Leech is an underused curse. It is also highly thematic with Trag’Oul’s Avatar. This incentives it when building around Siphon Blood.
change Bloodtide Blade
- Death Nova deals 300-400% increased damage for every enemy within 25 yards. If fewer than 5 enemies are within 25 yards, Death Nova deals 1600% increased damage instead.
Rationale:
Death Nova performs very well against large groups of enemies, but horribly against stragglers and bosses. This puts a floor on the damage boost that this item provides, greatly increasing performance against single targets.
change Mask of Scarlet Death
- Revive gains the effect of the Purgatory rune and now consumes all corpses to raise a minion that deals 125-150% more damage per corpse.
Rationale:
With the recommended changes to Trag’Oul’s Avatar, Revive must use the Oblation rune to benefit. The Purgatory rune is a QoL rune that also benefits LoD setups as well.
I welcome any feedback you have on these. I also tried to improve the formatting from my last attempt. Hopefully this is easier to read.