Hello everyone
This can be a little big long, but lets talk about thorns necromancer…
I’ve been playing as a thorn’s necromancer since S1, always improving and adapting my build as new updates, seasons, and hotfixes come for the game.
Being my favorite archetype (as well as that of many other players), for me it was extremely fun to see some of the hardest bosses in the game dying relatively quickly to the thorns of my minions and golem, even though the build was always considered Tier C, or at best of all cases on B, while the other archetypes (bones, shadow, blood, Mendeln Minion, Critical Damage Minions) managed to do their millions and billions of damage with an abysmal cadence.
With the launch of Vessel of Hatred and the promised changes, thorn-based necromancer builds have all but died out. Because unlike other classes, such as barbs and SB, the necromancer’s thorns rely on stacking %armor and %thorns on as much gear as possible. And both have been heavily modified.
The fact is that, since the necromancer cannot stack his thorns like before, in addition to greatly reduced armor stack in the current state of the game, this archetype are even weaker than before, not even being able to face Torment IV with adequate efficiency. In short, this is the only thorn’s archetype of the game that loses damage as the difficulties increase, as it does not have decent items or multipliers to scale its thorns. The bone golem, which is the main weapon of the thorns necromancer, uses the armor overcap to deal damage during his taunts, but the other minions purely use the thorns for this, forcing the necro to divide himself between both, which as I already mentioned, were severely weakened.
Let’s take into account that, since thorns do not does critical damage, thorns necromancers give up of any critical chance and critical damage to only strengthen their defenses and their thorns.
We also don’t have any class items or aspects that really benefit this build in Season 6:
The Razorplate, despite usually being the key piece of the build, ends up losing space to legendary armors that can provide + ranks to golem, more armor, more life, more everything.
The Needleflare aspect is simply not effective. It doesn’t work good with minions. It requires the player to take direct damage for the thorns spam to happen, being totally inefficient in any situation because the player’s thorns causes a low damage. I tested it in dungeons, on bosses, in tides, hordes, etc. It’s terrible.
Sticker-Thought conflicts with Juggernaut’s aspect, which despite having been severely nerfed, is still more effective than sticker-thought.
%Golem inherit thorns was removed from game (?). What the point?
We currently have exclusive items and aspects for shadow minions, physical damage minions (mendeln), blood minions, but the thorn’s aspects has very far from a good to compete with any other thing. By the way, if I can, I would like to suggest the idea of a new unique item for necromancers, based on the mechanic of thorns, but which would allow alternative builds to use it as well.
Item type: Amulet
Suggested Name: Chain of Razored Bones
+20~30% Intelligence
+4~6 level Spiked Armor
+1~2 Level Hellbent Commander
+Minion Inherit 30~50% of your thorns
Unique power: Your minions cant crit or Overpower, but get 20-50% of her thorns how extra damage on hit. Additionally, if you choose to sacrifice your skeleton mages, each sacrificed skeleton mage increases the maximum number of skeleton warriors by 1, up to a maximum of 3 additional warriors [You cant have more than 8 summons (golem included) and your sacrifice bonus are 25% weak].
Please look with love at the thorns builds. They are extremely fun, but the nerfs and the neglect are killing it.
Sorry for my poor english. Is not my native language.