Tested Rathma changes

PTR Feedback
1

Okay, so…
Are you guys intending for Rathma’s Shield to up 100% of the time? I remember when Crusaders had a build revolving around a similar invulnerability mechanic. Ever since Necromancer was first introduced I always kept an eye on RS. What’s the design plan here? If you nerf it, the build might fall apart due to requiring more abilities/gear for toughness making army of the dead uptime suffer, but if you leave it as is… the build is just too good. Besides that, having zero fear of incoming damage just feels weird, and wrong.

Secondly… Revives lasting forever, but not mages? Um… Okay, feels like a missed opportunity there.

The 6-piece bonus is built around number of minions, which heavily incentivizes having mages in your build, which also requires some way of generating essence. So, that’s two of six skill slots used up, just to ensure maximum value of the 6-piece bonus. Since the damage of the build revolves around army of the dead and bone spirit, there just isn’t enough real estate to include both skills. The ideal build for this set doesn’t include Bone Spirit at all. The META is already being figured out.

If you want bone spirit/army to be the primary source of damage for Rathma, than the 6-piece bonus needs to change. Instead of “per minion” make it a flat damage increase. Army damage increased by 30,000% and bone spirit by 10,000% or something. This will open up the possibility to include both in the build.

As for Rathma’s Shield… there’s really only a few ways you can go about nerfing this. I’d extend the 4 second duration to more of a 10 second duration, but change the effect. Instead of removing all incoming damage, make it damage reduction. Proposed wording; For 10 seconds after using Land of the Dead, Army of the Dead, or Simulacrum, the necromancer takes 50-80% reduced damage.

2 Likes
2

I could not possibly disagree more with you! 1. We FINALLY HAVE A MINION BUILD! and you want the devs to minimize the importance of minions. The whole point of the necro is that he’s a summoner. If this build is not OP as hell and isn’t reliant on minions, I might quit the entire dam Diablo franchise. I have been waiting for a legitimate minion, necro build, since this freaking game was released. With all due respect, please never post anything, ever again.

3 Likes
3

you would need to use all defensive rings. if you do remove shield . Remember rathmas is one shot by a poison wasp. even with the 75% damage red it gives. damage would not be so good . prob not worth playing it again.

4

Minion build? Far frome… a minion build would have your minions do damage and not run around as meatshield and catalysts. The fantasy of a lord commander of the undead has been thrown out of the window by make it another caster set for bs an aotd…

5 Likes
5

I wish it was a minion build though :frowning:

6

This is NOT a minion set/bulid. In a real minion set/build your minions are the main damage dealers. Now they are just tools for buffing up other skills to do the damage. So you’re free to quit because this is nowhere near a minion set/build in reality.

2 Likes
7

Did you read what I wrote?
I’ll summarize again for you.

  1. Rathma’s Shield 100% uptime is an issue. The Crusader with Law of Justice (I believe) had the potential to have 100% uptime on damage immunity… it was nerfed. This will be too. I’ve already suggested the perfect way - make it raw damage reduction.

  2. The set doesn’t boost the damage of minions. At all. Period. If you put the Jesseth set on, you’ll boost your minion damage a small amount, but it will be completely eclipsed by Army of the Dead damage.

I’m not asking for nerfs, I’m asking for buffs. Did this explanation help?

3 Likes
8

would have to be a lot of damage reduce. I just tested without rath shield. First ya lose squirts lots of lost damage there,then ya lose coe for unity 200 loss there. And i still got 1 shot and dropped down from 140 to 120 gr and seemed like i had no damage .

9

Your observations are valid. I think this set should focus on Army, as that skill is very cool visually and conceptually, a zombie armageddon.

I agree with others that this is not a summoning set per se. But we have had Mages as a damage source for a long time now. I sorta wish this set was the Revive set, and maybe Pestilence or Inarius became the Army of the Dead set.

1 Like
10

I like that it uses minions and Army. It looks like I have a massive army…

However, I do agree that mages should last longer. And Rathma’s shield is OP.

I’m not sure how I’d nerf it, though. But definitely needs tweaks.

2 Likes
11

I’m not so sure why they thought bone spirit was a good addition to the rathma set. It’s a cool looking skill, but rathma should revolve around AoTD, command skeletons, mages, revive and golem.

Given that bone spirit gets cooldown for corpse consumption, pestilence would be more ideal for bone spirit since the set’s emphasis is on corpse.

Unless we get a 4th slot in the cube, it’s also tough to optimize damage to both AoTD and bone spirit.

2 Likes
12

Rathma definitely should swap Spirit for Golem. Completely agree.

Move Bone spirit to Pestilence or Inarius.

Or, at the very least give Golem to Pestilence or Inarius. It’s sad that no set uses it and it’s such an iconic and cool looking spell.

Golem Breaches should also be buffed to 50% dmg reduction to maybe compete with the Dayntee’s belt. Not only it’s NOT a belt (hence, harder to add to most builds), it’s only 30% reduction.

1 Like
13

Yes we have summon mages bulid a LoD bulid not a set and thats just the mages. If it’s army of the dead set than you want an army of dead minions hacking up your foes(atleast the trash mobs if not everything). Mages are more powerful than other summons, but whit this set even they don’t do that much damage. It would be cool to see all the summons killing everithyng (almost) and cast AotD if things get difficult for them.

1 Like
14

Yeah i think that theres too much split between the bone spirit + all the other summon skills, I sort of have to choose either armoy of the dead or bone spirit in order to have good damage, and rathma shield is definetly a problem, as fun as it is to stand in the middle of things and take 0 damage, it would be way to op

15

I disagree with those changes. The whole point of the Rathma’s Set was to always been minion based. If they made that kind of change then it wouldn’t be a minion set and would defeat the basis of what the necromancer class is.

They either need to make mages last forever to assist with the mechanics of the current set changes, or they need to change the set so that the minions are the main damage of the set along side AOTD and change BS to fuel the damage. ie) like WD using Zunimassa set and having mana spenders increase damage of pets.

However I do agree that if Mages last forever they should change how RS works. Since the main thing with AOTD is its cooldown is reduced for each minion that is hitting an enemy. If you had mages last forever you’d have 100% up time on AOTD and therefor 100% up time on RS. There would be no need for CDR at that point which one benefit is Defiler Cuisses would actually have room in the set as you wouldn’t need Captains anymore, however you’d be immune forever which yes I agree is too powerful.

So I do agree changing how RS works would be smart if they were to make changes like this and frankly if it meant being able to use an item like Defiler Cuisses because we have actual room for it, then honestly I’d welcome that change.

1 Like
16

Rathma’s Shield already has 100% uptime with the current changes. Mages lasting forever or not.

The concept behind having mages expire, is to force the player to press buttons and spend their resource. I can see the set being fun with perm mages or expired mages. The confusing parts of the set are still the two points:

  1. Permanent damage immunity.
  2. Bone spirit not having any room in your bar. Also its underwhelming in damage.
1 Like
17

The issue with rathma it’s:
if you focus too much in damage you will sacrifice mobility or damage. Yeah appears to be the case:
Command skel, Revive, Skel Mage, Golem, Army of the dead, leaves you with one slot for some kind of resource generation. Also makes your command skel with freezing rune to trigger krysbin but would lose some benefit from naiyr and also the uptime from army of the dead

If you swap golem to bone armor, you can get both values from nair and krysbin but will need the slot for generator.

Krysbin affects you needing to have freezing rune on skels or bone armor, either way both effects aren’t that great. One because less aspd on skels means less overall uptime on army of the dead, while also army of the dead dimish the benefits from bone armor on longer fights because Knockback counts as CC but not to trigger triple bonus, making the target “immune” more often. So your krysbin will often have 100% bonus damage not 300%. If you choose to keep the mages often you will get tricky to manage krysbin and the value from krysbin will drop against other jewelry(royal, coe, haunted and squirt).

If you choose to avoid naiyr, you could manage better things with reileena. Because:
1- simulacrum will provide 325% more damage instead of keep 3-6 spammy stacks on naiyr that often will be 2-4.
2- you could use captain crimson, solving some cooldowns and resource cost problems, keeping a better uptime on things, you could use other stuff like avoid royal and use the ring to improve the casts of mages. (2 mages means 2k% damage would easily beat the benefit from krysbin) or make the helm being equipped and enable Reaper’s wraps on kanai.
3- mages could be more manageable because your essence pool would be bigger
4- the pay-off price will be way less impactful. Because crimson could almost generate the same damage as krysbin while also improving the uptime 400% damage buff from command skeletons and more uptime of 10 mages.
5- Solve the issue of not having too much good passives to the build, so you could use the passive to increase your essence pool and increasing your overall damage while doing so.

Sim, command skel, revive, mage, army of the dead, curse/bloodrush work. If you improve your resource cost, your essence pool and essence generation. Often you will avoid bone spirit to put some generator to have less problems with mages.
About passives:
Overwhelming essence, dark reaping/life from death, rathma’s shield, commander of risen the dead/extended servitude.

Reileena it’s way more effortless but also a bit less “high output damage”. You can do great stuff if you just ignore krysbin also, because the benefits wouldn’t be great in the first place. If the build holds okay at 2.1k gons at gr130 without the mages and krysbin, so the issue it’s not about damage it’s about management. Also I only had 2 ancients(weapon and chest, both without augment)

18

Not sure about everyone else but i found revives to be unreliable at consistently damaging enemies to reset aotd cooldown. I think its only use is as a damage reduction buff from the one rune, however its kinda useless atm with rathmas shield being up 100%. not to mention they dont do any damage while reseting the cooldown.

1 Like
19

they serve to trigger some benefits, like: Increase the damage up 10k%, consume corspe that could trigger life from death(paired with reaper wraps) and also reduce the damage you receive (which can happen sometimes if you don’t manage properly your timmings to have 100% uptime on rathama’s shield), you can create a cycle of mages and revives almost self sustainable. Your damage come from army of the dead and bone spirit not from the summons. The summons only add damage for those 2 skills.

About the cooldown, you can keep it up when you keep using the command skeleton frenzy rune

20

Some revived monster has the tendency to just stand and not attack as well. If I play with revive, I usually revive corpse from golem.