With the introduction of the new Masquerade set, we have AT LAST a high-performing necromancer set which is dominating the leaderboards and sought after in meta spots. I am not saying Necros have been ignored in the meta heretofore, but only that their sets have been janky and much wanting. With the recent attempt at a Rathma set rework, we see the potential for Blizzard developers to rework underperforming sets, even with a COMPLETE overhaul to the set itself. Rathma’s remains a minion build, as its flavor suggests, and though it has lots of issues in terms of GR performance compared to other sets and classes, I think we can expect more tweaks and even full reworks going forward.
With that in mind, I have some thoughts about flavor or theme of each set that I’d like to see in future set tweaks. Necromancer sets are not only some of the worst performing, but also some of the most awkward and confused designs among any classes. Examples: Pestilence has bone spear and corpse explosion bonuses, both of which are handled by other sets (Masquerade, Inarius) or LOD. Also, Inarius AND Tragouls offer generic bonuses using certain skill types (bone armor, blood skills) but their damage is so low and their themes so weak that they dont offer much incentive to play. To summarize the current issues with necro sets, I would say the following:
- Skill overlap among sets - as noted, corpse explosion and bone spear on Pestilence are unused over against inarius and LOD
- weak and underperforming set bonuses - specifically DR has been a problem (historically) across all necro sets, and trag/inarius especially lack any enticing numbers for most builds over LOD
- thematic confusion - this goes with the skill overlap item, but the whole theme of pestilence is eradicated when you use its signature skills with another set, like using bone spear with LOD for example. Why have a set if it does not have its own flavor?
- janky playstyle - most necro builds have relied on two long cooldowns for damage, namely LOTD and simulacrum. These days, sim is pigeonholed to BS and LOD mages builds, but LOTD is still much used. In extreme cases, some builds require you to set up pulls for 1 minute before doing ANY damage - and this in spite of the fact that necro has the fastest COE timer in the game with only three elements.
Necromancer has many things going for it in terms of supporting items. The weapon choices especially stand out as the strongest, with the exception of funerary pick offering next to nothing at this point. With the addition of necro bracers (in addition to our class-specific glove choices) it looks like we can expect further item support for SETS as opposed to LOD variants. With this in mind, here are my thoughts for THEMATIC reworks according to the “flavor” of the set - hopefully it is clear what i mean by these terms.
Trag’oul’s - blood, life, high-cost and high-reward
The flavor of this set is actually quite clear and distinctive: pay life in order to get power and also synergize with increased life gain. The interplay and transfer of life to power essentially creates an inversion: spend lots of life and gain lots of life to increase power and cast more skills, etc. What I want to see is for this sort of inversion to pay off in different ways, i.e. where you might STACK life, leech, and regen in order to build up DR and damage. I’d like to see something where the more life you LOSE, you gain more damage. In theory, some sort of synergy opening up the life items in the game, and even Shi Mizu, would be amazing. Gaining some sort of shield as a result of your regen might be interesting too. The point is: everything you gain in life turns into some power or defense advantage. In theory we could see a blood nova build and a corpse lance build, or even a skele mages life support version. In an ideal world, this would be my top-tier high-investment and high-risk build with a high skill cap to master.
Inarius: bone, dmg increase to all skills, ez mode
Inarius was the first set i played back in season 17, and what I loved about it was its ease of use. Just get bone armor and kill stuff. The issue with this build in the long term is that 1) it is too weak in general over against LOD variants (with exceptions), and 2) it is a bit boring and doesnt SPECIFICALLY benefit any one skill, which means by default whatever multiplier is highest is the best build.
This build has a clear flavor as a bone build, but it is a bit boring in my opinion. Beyond having a bone storm, there is nothing this build adds, and besides the Wisdom of Kalan amulet, no way to scale bonestorm damage or DR. I’d like to see some way to increase the damage of bone storm range, stacks, or damage (perhaps based on how many in range) - scaling damage and/or DR is something this build desperately needs. An item which is bone-based with no usage is Bryner’s journey, perhaps this could be reworked so that bone spikes procs bone nova and increases by how many stacks of bone armor you have?
Pestilence - plague/poison, aoe, stacking damage + DOT, big explosions
this is the most broken in my opinion, which I say mostly because Rathma’s is currently under the spotlight and I suspect it will be changed more before they are done reworking it. Pestilence uses corpse skills to proc corpse lance (2 pc) and buffs corpse explosion and bone spear, but hardly buffs corpse lance at all. Overall, this set simply has no identity and would have no use other than for Znec.
I want to maintain this set’s usage for the current Rat/BS meta as a zdps spec, so i would retain the 2-pc with a slight alteration that it fire a corpse skill on your bar (znec equips CL with brittle touch rune as it is). This would allow for it to cast corpse explosion on random enemies even without a corpse, or perhaps dependent on your rune it would emanate closer to your player. The point is, you would stand into the middle of a pack of enemies and blast them down from within. This set would naturally pair well with Nayr’s, and there are so many options to get that 5-stack going that naturally benefit the necromancer. I would also buff this set’s performance with death nova (instead of bonespear), maybe give it increased damage per corpse skill fired (similar to empowered bone spear in the current set). The end result would be a natural synergy: essence gained through corpse consumption, which casts corpse explosion, which buffs death nova, which spends essence. Rinse and repeat.
Rathma: minions, summoner necro, undead armies
Honestly, i am waiting to see what they do with this but I am not a fan of how they have done it so far. Bone spirit and army of the dead sound interesting in theory, and in the original PTR version it looked amazing, but too OP. The current form is meh, but I would like them to do more with the undead army theme, maybe change some of the supporting items that go with it. The command skeletons and golem are underused skills except for utility, so ideally id like to see these buffed. My biggest question is, what are the minions doing otehr than buffing your damage for other skills?