Overpower Blood Necro is Underpowered and needs improvements

Necromancer
1

Summary / TL;DR: Blood Necros that are focusing on Overpower and trying to have build flexibility by not using the Corpse Tendrils Aspect that increases crit damage are very weak against higher level monsters. Something needs to change.

I just reached level 100, and my Blood Surges are doing 500k damage, which is really good against monsters my level. But when I go into higher tier Nightmare Dungeons, I have a few problems that I think need to be addressed somehow:

  • Paranormal Blood Surge only getting a stack to Overpower if you’re Healthy (above 80% life) is a very big problem in higher tier NM dungeons, as any hit from the weakest mob will take you lower than that. I think this condition should be removed/replaced/reworked to make the skill feel good
  • Paranormal Blood Surge and Supernatural Blood Lance (ops, someone swapped the names, Blizz) needing stacks to Overpower means Attack Speed and Essence Generation/Refund are a must to increase DPS, but Overpower damage is still so weak compared to Crit/Vulnerable
  • Even if above skills Overpowered on every use, they would still be weaker than Bone Spears. Even if above skills didn’t have an Essence cost, they would still be weaker than Bone Spears.
  • Overpower damage formula either needs to be changed so that Overpower portion gets multiplied by all other damage modifiers, or some huge buffs are needed to take it to the right level of balance

I would very much prefer that the formula got adjusted, its ridiculous that its not clear in game that some damage modifiers apply to Overpower damage, while others do not:

  • Int = No
  • Willpower = Yes
  • % Life = Yes
  • +% Damage = No
  • +% Critical Damage = No
  • +% Vulnerable Damage = No
  • +% Overpower Damage = Yes
  • +% Core Skill Damage = No
  • +% Damage after Picking Up Blood Orb = No
  • +% Damage while Fortified = No
  • +% Damage while Healthy = No
  • +% Damage to Injured Enemies = No
  • +% Damage to Healthy Enemies = No
  • +% Damage to Close Enemies = No
  • +% Damage to Distant Enemies = No
  • +% Damage to Stunned Enemies = No
  • +% Damage to Crowd Controlled Enemies = Don’t know, Control glyph apparently works
  • +% Blood Skill Damage = Don’t know, apparently works
  • Imperfectly Balanced passive skill = Yes
  • Skill Rank = No
  • Fueled by Death passive skill = No
  • Death’s Embrace passive skill = No
  • Death’s Reach passive skill = Yes
  • Amplify Damage passive skill = Yes
  • Tides of Blood passive skill = Yes
  • Coalesced Blood passive skill = Yes
  • Blood Begets Blood legendary node = No
  • Bone Graft legendary node = No
  • Bloodbath legendary node = Yes with skill stacks, No with Rathma’s Vigor key passive
  • Scent of Death legendary node = Yes
  • Flesh-eater legendary node = No
  • Sacrificial glyph additional bonus = Yes
  • Blighted aspect = No
  • Inner Calm aspect = No
  • Nightmare Dungeon affix “Monsters take 60% less damage from Overpowered attacks” = No (maybe it just takes your full Overpower Damage, which is around 2k at level 100, and reduces 60, so almost no reduction in DPS)

Above is based on my own tests and some info I’ve seen in other posts or videos. If anyone disagrees, please test and provide some evidence, so that others can try and reproduce test to confirm.

If you have info on other stuff that does/doesn’t work, please share as well - would be nice to compile a list somewhere.

10 Likes
2

I might be wrong, but design wise the ability heals as well as Fortifies, which means it would need to be about x% lower in dmg than its counter parts that do not heal and fort?

3

The stat overpower is anything but overpower tbh.

2 Likes
4

your life its just a roallercoaster, blood paragons force to play whit fortify, but you are constant lose fortify whit all things.

and yes blood whit op hit very ,very , very very less vs normal critical builds, when people easy take 35% critical change 1 of 3 hit crtical and do milons of damage.

1 Like
5

I would not even dare try to play blood yet with how fast fortify goes away and it’s decay speed.
I think once fortify 100% life is reached, it should remain for at least 1 minute and any npc speech or interactions should pause it.
The decay speed should be reduced so it takes 1 minute up to 3 min for a full decay from 100% down to 0% Fortify.

I know it goes up quite fast with playing blood skills but without them, it can take a whole dungeon to get it to 100% and then just go back around after killing last foes and the path to walk down to the boss, its back down to 0% I find that to be quite upsetting.

2 Likes
6

Is that total damage from Blood Surge or just the Siphon?

The first hit of the effect is screen-wide and does the smallest portion of your total Overpower vs the Nova which is close range and does more.

You note in your list that Overpower doesn’t work with skill ranks, but it does from my own testing.

When you look at Blood Surge, you will see X number modified by Y value. The Overpower’s end calculation replaces X with itself and then is modified by Y. The final total is modified again by enemy resistance.

In my own testing, I am finding Overpower seems to do everything it says in the tool tip.

Now, I am NOT saying there isn’t a disparity in how the current values of Overpower lack in the exponential multipliers of critical damage.

Bone skills, like Bone Spear, are compound multiplying large modifiers. Most compounding modifiers across other builds* (at least for the Necromancer) see somewhere between 10-15% at a baseline. If these are skill ranks, then you can get +3~ or so additional ranks on the necklace (so upto 30%).

*Edit note: Shadow can also take advantage of some pretty ridiculous compound multiplication. However, Shadowblight starts at 22% of your damage and it doesn’t have skill ranks like Bone Spear. It also has significant ramp up time, but it is worth mentioning that SB ticks when stacking all [%x] is magnifying that one specific damage source to high numbers.

Bone skills are getting benefits from their specific passives which are magnifying critical damage. Then legendary aspects can magnify that again, and then finally Corpse Tendrils can essentially double that total. In addition to that, the Bone line has very easy access to Vulnerable and players of that build are highly encouraged to use it to amplify things further (this includes Paragon nodes).

While I do not play a Bone Spear build at the moment, this is pretty easy to see in videos where folks are showcasing their one-shot builds. You can see the order of operations in how they are using skills, and when you understand how the aspects work off each other this seems to be the resulting behavior.

There is nothing related to how Overpower works that functions the same way. That is a problem, and furthermore there is a general problem in exponential critical damage multipliers. I can’t say for certain if Blizzard back themselves into a corner of game design here or not, but it looks like it.

1 Like
7

All blood abilities should heal.

There should be a viable leech build.

4 Likes
8

Blood Skill rank only matters for the base calculation that Overpower then gets added to.

There is no point in investing 5 points to increase your damage by maybe a couple thousand damage when the end result is in the hundreds of thousands

1 Like
10

Just recorded a Tier 48 nightmare dungeon run, mobs level 102, to collect following info.

First room, first skill activation, which Overpowered due to Rathma’s Vigor key passive and no Fortify:

  • Blood Surge Syphon: 157k

  • Blood Surge Nova: 186k

  • Blood Surge Nova echo: 181k

Second room, after 5 stacks, barely any Fortify:

  • Blood Surge Syphon: 304k

  • Blood Surge Nova: 343k

  • Blood Surge Nova echo: all dead before it

Fourth room, after 5 stacks, 50% Fortify:

  • Blood Surge Syphon: 430k

  • Blood Surge Nova: all dead before it

  • Blood Surge Nova echo: all dead before it

Fifth room, 3% chance, 60% Fortify:

  • Blood Surge Syphon: 250k

  • Blood Surge Nova: all dead before it

  • Blood Surge Nova echo: all dead before it

Sixth room, after 5 stacks, 60% Fortify:

  • Blood Surge Syphon: 380k

  • Blood Surge Nova: 433k

  • Blood Surge Nova echo: 426k

Sixth room, Rathma’s Vigor, 60% Fortify:

  • Blood Surge Syphon: 311k

  • Blood Surge Nova: 470k

  • Blood Surge Nova echo: all dead before it

Seventh room, Rathma’s Vigor, 80% Fortify:

  • Blood Surge Syphon: 290k

  • Blood Surge Nova: all dead before it

  • Blood Surge Nova echo: all dead before it

Seventh room, after 5 stacks, 80% Fortify:

  • Blood Surge Syphon: 440k

  • Blood Surge Nova: all dead before it

  • Blood Surge Nova echo: all dead before it

Eighth room, after 5 stacks, 100% Fortify:

  • Blood Surge Syphon: 476k

  • Blood Surge Nova: 554k

  • Blood Surge Nova echo: 523k

After that, just more of the same/similar numbers - you can watch it here if you’d like:

Summary of relevant stats: 24.6k Life and 1873% OP Damage

@4:30 in the video, you can see I get a pylon that makes skill casts not cost any resources, so that I can just hold down the skill button and it casts super fast due to my attack speed and aspects, and it still doesn’t help the build much, just proof of what I said in my initial post:

Even if above skills didn’t have an Essence cost, they would still be weaker than Bone Spears.

I’ll record a tier 60 later, for comparison.

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First off, thank you for sharing this!

I watched through a bit of this, and watched the first OP instance in frame-by-frame.

I cannot say for certain that the numbers you are cataloging as “nova” (the 180k hits) are actually the nova.

You register hits to other enemies just barely off screen for similar damage (after one of the 190k instances finally closes out on screen, another 180k number appears towards the bottom of the screen out of nova range).

I am not saying it is or isn’t nova damage. I am saying… I can’t tell because the hit registers are coming out so fast it looks like the screen report is not keeping up.

High-end Blood Lance is really bad at this too when attack speed numbers start getting incredibly high. You can hit so frequently, and if you spread lances which proc more hits, the damage registers just become this mass of yellow that is not readable.

12

Just a quick tip regarding fortify - you can stay capped at 100% fort using the aspect that drops 30% orbs from corpses and the blood drinker glyph which fortifies on orb pickup. If you have good attack speed (which every blood build should have) then you can quickly pop all the corpses to fill up your essence during a fight, use both orb aspects (drop from corpse and essence on pickup), glyph for fortify on pickup, and keep your surges for when tendrils procs. I find it works far better for essence and fortify management than iron maiden or hemo. CE from gear, decrep > reap > tendrils > surge surge surge (stunned and vuln) > CE x 5-10 (with good attack speed (inspiring leader x 3) this takes less than 1-1.5 seconds) quickly scoop up all the orbs and repeat.

13

How did you manage to acquire 24k life? Thats insane. Just rolling 1k life on each piece? Paragon board?

1 Like
14

Levels add a lot of life. If you’re not 100 yet, get there. Other than that, have Life on every equip piece and paragon boards. There’s not much else that scales it, unfortunately.

16

I’m 99 and I have over 25k life without having max rolled life on a lot of pieces. My gear is far from optimal. The paragon boards offer a fair bit and I was getting better results with them there over damage nodes. I have 2,050.4% overpower damage. I get orbs for fortify/essence from tendrils & hemorrhage.

I recently ran across a blood lance necromancer doing a NM92 from another post. I found it very interesting tbh.
Diablo 4 Blood Lance Necromancer vs Tier 92 - YouTube

Thanks for testing all of this!

1 Like
17

Ah, that’s you, amazing job by the way, beautiful build and runs. We need more people experimenting, I wish we would have loadouts and cheaper respect cost at lv 100

18

I may have misunderstood your reply but I don’t want to take credit for that content creator on youtube. I ran some of their blood surge build from a previous video for inspiration to get the numbers I have but they are far more talented than I. I only putz around NM60ish for now. :slightly_smiling_face:

I’m not going to give up on blood though. I really feel like the playstyle started really coming together later in the game. I understand why buffs might need to be approached conservatively. (Not disagreeing they don’t need to happen)

1 Like
19

Oh sorry, I misunderstood then, I thought you are that YT guy

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My only suggestion right now is to change the way the “Fortify Generation” stat works. Make the stat also increase max fortify. Then give every “Damage Bonus while Fortified” node on the Overpower paragon board the “Fortify Generation” stat.

The fact that its better for Overpower builds to skip most damage nodes on the Overpower paragon board is bad game design.

2 Likes
21

Thanks for writing this up! I’d say most of these are fairly accurate.

I play a Blood Surge Overpower with Minions build and have been 100 for a while, but only started to attempt Echo of Lilith yesterday (still at it). At full fortify (27k HP), my raw Surge does around 450k - 500k (with Tendrils, it goes up to 700k++) each. With 7 minions + 3 Surge hits, each Surge cast that overpowers deals on average 5m in total. Seems decent, but that’s with timing and setup. Meanwhile bone spear does 5m with one button. Another problem is, our damage is only on the every 6th cast. When you have to run around and dodge Lilith’s attacks, taking damage, watching blood blisters and not having the attack speed to proc overpower when you need… because you hit just for thousands without overpower… Then you die.

Damage is decent for doing same level content and up to a good few levels above you (last I did was NM7x). It falls off hard after that, and of course, it doesn’t scale like Bone and it’s miserable in comparison.

Apart from overpower damage and the list of overpower damage modifiers here that need to be addressed, there are a lot more which needs reworking. For example:

Blood orbs is a clunky mechanic. There needs to be some auto pickup, be it a skill, aspect, or even including it in Rathma’s Vigor. When doing higher NM and more challenging content, it doesn’t make sense to run around trying to pick orbs during combat. Movement and positioning becomes more critical at those levels.

Rathma’s Vigor is also hardly build defining or significant enough as a key passive (Kalan’s Edict too) even after the latest patch.

Fortify. It needs to be able to persist longer reliably. During the Lilith fight, my HP is often kept full but “Fortified” keeps appearing and disappearing. E.g. when you take a small hit, it goes away, you take an orb to heal and fortify (Blood Drinker) to full, you don’t get “Fortified”.

I don’t want to go on and on so I’ll just stop here. Glad to see fellow blood players around and speaking up! I love the archetype and really hope to see improvements. Blizzard please.

Meanwhile, I’m contemplating a minion build (Mendeln) to push NM100. Unfortunately, I don’t think a Blood Surge build can do that without sufficient damage. At NM100, we also don’t have enough defense and healing speed to tank as blood.

2 Likes
23

I have nothing of import to add to this thread since I’m a Necro noob. First one I’ve played since launch, but I just wanted to say I appreciate this “data-rich” thread that y’all are contributing too. Helping me learn a lot here and where I should be aiming to get my build once I get out of WT3.

1 Like