I did some testing of the Johnstone amulet on the PTR with the changes to the necro that upped the damage of the skill. I decided to use this amulet because I’ve never tried it nor seen any serious build use it, and it seemed to be a natural CE item that could be good.
Looking at it in the field, I cannot say that I was greatly impressed. There are several flaws - and likely these are what kept lancers from using this amulet in the first place:
- not enough stacks - I run out of stacks quite easily using golem for corpses and the moribund gauntlets outside LotD. More stacks will help, say 100 or so.
- damage is good, but the chokepoint is still corpses outside LOTD. Macabre knowledge is the name of the buff, and it suggests knowledge of death. I’d like to see freecasting of corpse skills for 100 stacks outside LotD - so the buff of LotD without the runed effect, like frozen lands.
- Strange wording on the buff itself, which reads that you gain damage “outside land of the dead.” On some occasions I had about 30 stacks of the buff when I popped LotD again, and the buff supposedly was still active inside LotD, which is not what the wording of the buff suggests. I’d clarify that you just have the extra damage, dont say anything about LotD in the buff description (not the amulet affix text, keep that the same).
- This item could potentially work like Fazula’s improbable chain and the Swami for Archon wizards, where you retain the buff of archon form outside LotD off cooldown. It does not currently give that same sense of scaled wreckage, but it could feasibly be altered to do this.
I think that a LotD centered amulet buffing corpse skills needs to be revisited, it would be hugely ironic if no corpse builds used this amulet. Since CE builds are currently all LOD based, the main choices for amulets are bound to be flavor of time, squirts, and hellfire amulet, all of which currently offer better potentials than this amulet.
Seeing as how most necro dps cycles are inside of LotD this amulet needs something to make itself more appealing. Its like a booty call who only wants to hit you up when you’re out of town, tantalizing but unsatisfying.