I have to say I agree with most of what OP is saying. The Necromancer fantasy is one of the best, yet the execution by Blizzard has really been lacking.
I really think there needs to be a true endgame viable summon Necro (with or without active playstyle), and scaling your army up with skill points. Yes, D4 sort of has that, but not really in the linear fashion that feels like every level matters to your army. D2 may be the best Blizz has done with the Necro, but it still wasnt good enough. If Summon Necro was done right it would be my main. As it stands now its not even my alt.
Sadly D4 devs really don’t like summoner classes. You can’t even put skill points to Skeletons, Skeleton Mages or Golem, i mean there is no skill for them on the skill tree (but there are passives, and paragon boards for them, so that is something at least), and no revives, no new pets, but it is D4 already 20 years past D2’s necro and were going backwards.
Not to mention they’re forcing puting points into random active skills so i could put points pet passives and again the upside one basic skill’s passive grants bonus dmg to pets if attacked by that monster, so there is really no choice there, not much play your way.
I don’t even dare to compared it to Last Epoch, for a multi billion dollar company this skilltree is very weak and thin.
I swear everyone is just missing the point about being a summon necro that is defending weak skellies.
During server slam, skellies were so fragile that you spent more time pressing raise skeleton than anything else. Ya, we get it, you have to actually summon your minions. That is a bit overboard.
So now that they buffed them a bit, we don’t know if a summoner build will even be viable. Sure play what you like. If my skellies can live but I suck I’ll still have fun and make it work. It when everything that you summon just flops as soon as a regular mob hits it, it makes the build not fun.
No one is asking for immortal god tier skellies, but atleast let them take a few hits from a boss before they die to actually get some rotations going.
InB4 they were just trying to see how many people were playing minionmancers to see if they got to be careful when nerfing them to oblivion, to not have a hell to deal with.
All RPGs including ARPGs have a softening power curve the more time you put into the game. I dislike the idea of summoning a minion which outright just slaughters everything.
The scaling power of the minions in D2 is as important as scaling the damage of your frenzy barbarian or bowazon. You have to get creative with runewords, merc auras, curses, etc.
The high end skeleton can do something like 500 damage. Solo that’s a nothingburger. Surround the boss with 12 of those skeletons and now they’re doing 6k damage. Throw frenzy and might on top of that and you begin to see how skelemancers can drop ubers solo.
D2 is always going to be an ARPG where you need to spend many, many hours of your life to see the power ceiling of a build. PoE is probably the closest to D2 in terms of time investment. D3/D4 are a joke by comparison.
Their own paragon board, and dedicated glyphs, +to skills effecting passives too, inheriting 30% of stats from the necromancer. Devs might increase their base health in higher difficulties, like in D2 that we don’t know of yet.
Army necro is going to be heavy investment build and will probably shine later, but you will still have to help out your minions in fights. Darkness skills are a great synergy for the army necro, and everyones seems to be sleeping on the Shadowblight key passive, when it comes to the minion necro build. Army of Darkness build is the way to go imo, i can be wrong ofc, we shall see.
You clearly have no idea how the math and dmg on skeletons in D2 works and you’ve clearly never played a summonmancer in D2.
Otherwise you would know that skeletons in D2 are not playable for D2 end content and on their own, need a long time to kill a boss, since hit Chance exists and also because they die easily.
My skeletons are spawned with with a skill lvl of 54 and still, they can’t do sh*t and need forever to kill some trash packs.
Uber Tristram? Absolute impossible. One or two waves of Baal and they’re all dead.
Pls inform yourself about stuff you’re talking. You sound like a sorc who’s pissed about Necromancer summons, while you’ve never played it yourself, while you think “it’s super op”, while they aren’t in any way, other than your super op sorc.
