Overpower Blood Necro is Underpowered and needs improvements

Necromancer
24

With Corpse Tendrils auto-casting every… 6? seconds in season 1, i’ve been leveling up another Blood Surge Necro to see what a mix of Overpower, Crit Damage, and Vulnerability can do.

I know Overpower doesn’t interact with Crits/Vulnerable, and relying on Corpse Tendrils can be annoying (not annoying in Season 1!), but if the game hands you lemons, then make lemonade.

I also decided to exclude the Blooddrinker glyph due to the buff to Drain Vitality (honestly, Blooddrinker was overrated anyways even before the Drain Vitality buff). This frees up a glyph slot for more non-Overpower damage.

This is what my current leveling experience looks like:

Area clear is nice as usual, but single target clear is still sluggish. Once I get the next Paragon board up and slot the Exploit glyph, single target damage should improve.

25

So a couple of things with overpower because I’ve been working on an overpower build since pre season 1 and now playing Overpower necro in s1.

  • I have seen lots of people say that skill ranks do not boost overpower damage but from what i’ve noticed they in fact do. I really need to do some more testing this week on it but I think skills with very little % increase in ranks only “seem” to make no change because of the calculation.

  • the only things overpower ever cares about are Health, Fortify, OP% and a few extra modifiers that seem to work on it.

  • Aspect of grasping vines actually works and makes crit multiplicative but it is safe to assume this is unintended and not something to build around.

  • Aspect of untimely Death is absolutely S-Tier on an amulet IF you have enough healing to maintain stacks between overpowers which you should if you are playing Overpower. It doesn’t just add 60% to your OP% stat. Instead it adds an additional 60% on top of whatever overpower damage you did. This can be taken to 90% on an amulet. If you hit for 1,000,000 normally with full stacks this becomes 1,900,000.

  • You NEED Healing. Your main source of damage is overpowers and unless you’re full life you aren’t hittong hard. That means plenty of ways to keep yourself Healed, Shielded, enemies CC’d

  • Blood Lance is just far superior than Blood Surge imo. Especially with the new aspect. Every time it consumes an orb to fire an additional lance (which can overpower itself) you get all the benefits of Blood orb as if walking over it yourself. the Healing, Essence, cd reduction, fortify, Blood artisans procs. This means with enough enemies on screen you have infinite health, essence, cd reduction on ultimate.

  • Blood Wave is amazingly underrated. First off it doesnt protect you as well as Bone storm but you’re healing and CC’ing so much and with 20k+ of fortified life and in endgame around 30% of your life total healed every single blood orb you consume who needs shields? You’re healing 6k per cast more if you consume multiple orbs.

  • Blood wave with Tidal aspect and blood orbs reducing Ultimate Cooldown automatically gives it a -13.5s cooldown reduction. Then three waves of knockbacks on enemies, 9 blood orbs that will become Lances on casts which spawn even more blood orbs.

26

This is already made up for by the fact that bone spear can be cast from range and blood surge requires you to stand in melee range most of the time.

27

Problem is blood lance uses 3 aspects and you want to have grasping veins for the huge critical multiplier and CC. That only leaves space for 1 ring and you want to use it for essence generation. So if you want to use blood wave triple wave or Ultimely Death you neee to drop one of those.

28

Grasping Veins is almost certainly a bug anyway but I’m not sold on it to begin with for overpower.

You can’t invest enough to gaurantee crits and pump critdmg% high without seriously impacting your max HP and overpower multiplier.

Even with corpse tendrils they are dealing an extra x40% crit damage? With no other stats to do with crit alomgside the fact it is bugged you are talking an extra 40% of whatever you dealt in an Overpower Crit added on. Or 60% if you had this on an amulet.

So that is either a 400k for 40% or 600k for 60% IF you crit and overpower on a 1,000,000 hit.

Whereas since you heal so frequently and overheal you could instead get Aspect of Untimely Death and easily cap 60 or 90% between overpower consider blood orbs heal you for 15% of you max HP (not base) at a base level.

That’s 600k or 900k on every overpower and not relying on crit or a bug at all.

I use Corpse tendrils but don’t use Grasping veins because untimely just works better due to the ammount of Blood Orbs being consumed.

The only required Aspects for Blood Lance are gore Quills and Hungry Blood in an Overpower build. You don’t want Blood Seekers because you don’t care about the damage multiplier (does not interact with Overpower).

There is an argument to be made for taking Rathmas Chosen, but that applies to more than just Lance.

My current build is aiming for 20k~hp/fort and around a 1600-1800 OP%.

Blood Orbs will heal for around 5k each, every 5 throw out a bone spirit that generates 30 essence, overheals generate 20 essence, lowers blood wave cd by 1.5s every blood orb, fortify with every orb and any overheals adds another 90% Overpower damage on top.

Then with bloodbath adding another 50% on gauranteed overpowers again.

Edit: The only reason to take some CritChance in season 1 is to Proc The Barber Malignant Heart.

Other than that all you want is:

  • high HP and Fortify
  • A way to gain as much health and fortify per second as possible (thanks blood orbs)
  • OP%
  • 2 Aspects for Lance to make more lances and in turn blood orbs
  • Resource generator (again blood orbs overhealing and/or blood Artisans Cuirass with bone spirit upgrade and/or Iron Maiden for large packs)
  • CC (Tendrils with chance to make orbs and Blood wave triple knock back with 9 orbs)
  • CC Breaker (Blood Mist which lowers cd whenever we overpower)
  • Finally the 2 overpwer multipliers that are not bugs. (Untimely Death that will just flat add an extra 90% onto all of your overpowers if you have enough healing almost doubling your damage and the Bloodbath Legendary node that will add another 50% on gauranteed Overpowers)
  • Attack Speed
  • Defensives (enough to ensure you can survive taking into account your massive healing ability)

Edit if you’re still not sold on untimely over grasping veins when you spec nothing else into Crit% here is an example of numbers on a 1000dmg hit, base Crit Multiplier of 1.5, 10k of fortified health, 80% Blood Lance dmg and 1500% OP:

((Dmg * Crit) + ((HP+Fort) * ((1 * Skill%) * OP%))) + 40% from Grasping
((1500 + (20,000 * (0.8 * 15))) + 40% from grasping
241,500 + 40% = 338,100

(Dmg + ((HP+Fort) * ((1 * Skill%) * OP%))) + 60% from Untimely
(1000 + (20,000 * 12)) +60% = 385,600

As you can see untimely not only just does more by about 50k but also will happen more frequently because the build hasnt got 100% crit rate (if we factor that in for the crit example it goes even lower). Whereas with overpower you always want to be at or as close to 100% HP as possible and overhealing permanently you will almost always have max stacks of Untimely on every overpower provided you dont luckily get two overpowers in a row, which if you do just means more blood orbs to power up the next one.

Even IF you somehow managed to not forego any of the other stats regarding OP in this example and somehow managed to get your Critdmg% all the way up to 500% you would still only do 406,000 dmg. Getting 500% Crit dmg without forfeiting OP stuff is impossble but even if it were you woudl be much more benefitted in using those points to increase stats that matetr to overpower.

And before anyone says Grasping is x40% shoudl try it in action or watch the video above where you can see an overpower AND a crit overpower in the same cast after a vines. Overpower hits for 100k~ the crit overpower for 140k~ all it is doing is adding another 40% on if you both crit AND overpower AND they’ve been hit by vines in the last 6 seconds.

TLDR: Stop using Aspect of grasping vines in overpower builds. Use Aspect of untimely Death and focus on Blood orb healing for Lance builds and Healing recieved for Nova builds.

1 Like
29

There are only 3 total aspects in the game for Blood skills with Zero synergy and you are complaining exclusively about damage multipliers???

Zero Aspect Synergy?
Zero spec choices?
Zero Uniques?
Zero corpse consumption?
Zero class synergy?

Zero information on damage synergies is a good point - but this spec has zero viability a playable class.

I’m lvl 46. I’ve only got 4 places to put skill points. Aka- I have left overs.

Essentially there is only hemmorage and surge. That’s it. No real essence, armor, skill, item or damage synergies.

30

I played a blood surge prior S1 clearing 20+ levels above my own. I was not aware of the blood seeker since I just played lance for a little bit.

I played around blood orbs to keep me fortify with barrier up with temerity, so it was 100% barrier+fortify uptime. The bone spirit armor was not worth it for me since I was lossing too much defense for a little bit of damage because my Novas were hitting harder and the spirit will usually hit a wall or somethig.

Now the description of Ultimely Death is +% additive and not x% so I didn’t bother trying it. I just went with Grasping Vein since the top 2 Necro youtubers from maxroll already said it’s adding the x40%.

I should go back to my ethernal blood necro and try to push NM100 since they got nerf and I was already pushing NM60’s as a lv92 and they said the old NM70 is the new NM100. I can also give Ultimely Death a try but right now having too much fun with a darkness S1 necro

31

Aspect of untimely Death is absolutely S-Tier on an amulet IF you have enough healing to maintain stacks between overpowers which you should if you are playing Overpower. It doesn’t just add 60% to your OP% stat. Instead it adds an additional 60% on top of whatever overpower damage you did. This can be taken to 90% on an amulet. If you hit for 1,000,000 normally with full stacks this becomes 1,900,000.

Are you absolutely sure about this? Because I tested it pre-season and it was additive. Are you saying it was stealth changed?

About the Grasping Veins aspect, its not a bug. Grasping Veins aspect does not allow overpower to interact with your crit damage STAT. The Grasping Veins aspect is a separate damage bucket that just so happens to require a crit to trigger. Its similar to other separate damage multiplier aspects like Imperfectly Balanced.

32

I got crit OP proc bigger than regular OP without Grasping Veins. It may not be scaling a lot in the calculations, but it does work.

33

Blue numbers represent Overpower damage PLUS normal damage.

Orange numbers represent Overpower damage PLUS normal damage multiplied by crit damage.

Crit damage does NOT multiply Overpower damage.

1 Like
34

It does with Grasping Veins

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35

If it did then my current 150k Overpower crits would deal over 700k Overpower crits after using Corpse Tendril. It does no such thing.

As I already explained 3 posts above yours, Grasping Veins does not allow overpower to interact with your crit damage STAT. The aspect is a separate damage bucket that just so happens to require a critical hit to trigger.

Grasping Veins is similar to other separate universal damage multipliers that works with Overpower, like the aspect that multiplies all damage against enemies in the Unstoppable state, or the glyph that multiplies all damage when you have no minions, or another glyph that multiplies all damage when the enemy is chilled/slowed/stunned/frozen. Separate damage multipliers also include Necromancer passive skills.

36

The way I saw it explain was that it only applies the Crit% from the aspect and not any other critical damage from gear/paragon. I’m happy with it since nothing else seems to work

37

I am pretty sure and noticed it last night when doing t4 capstone dungeon.

You can see here that an overpower with 0 stacks is roughly 30k.

Then an overpower with 144 stacks (74%) is roughly 52k.

Its looking at what your overpower damage is then just adding an extra x% onto it.

1 Like
38

It doesnt it just adds another 40% of the damage you did if you crit AND Overpower AND tendrils an enemy.

You can watch the vid someone posetd above using tendrils there is even a part where he tendrils two seperate enemies. Overpowers them both and one crits the other doesnt.

The non crit hits for 100k, the crit hits for 140k. it just adds another 40% of the damage done on top if all conditions are met whereas Untimely Death can go up to 60% standard with less requirements.

39

If its x% and not +% then it sounds likes a good replacement for grasping veins. I will most likely try a blood lance when closer to lv80 so will give it a try

Last season I was using the deadspeaker amulet and added the ring of mendeln because I didn’t had to change anything so in that case grasping vein was a better option.

40

Aspect of inner calm is all damage 30%, not just core

41

At relatively low damage, you will notice Grasping Veins is impactful.

Once you start popping off 500k+ OP’s regularly off of Rathmas and not off of Paranormal Blood Surge, Grasping Veins becomes irrelevant.
It isnt CHD modifying your Overpower, its CHD modifying all of your base damage and everything that scales into that, and adding onto your overpower. Which again is relevant if youre still kinda weak and doing less than 200k damage, but beyond that youre better off taking a different aspect. Still using Tenedrils, just not with the Aspect.

42

Grasping Veins is multiplying overpower damage. Some players were putting that on their amulet and getting over 1m Overpower Blood Surges with it during the pre-season.

If you’re not playing Blood Lance, then you should have plenty of aspect space. You can solve any essence issues entirely from items.

43

Overpower as a mechanic is not in a good place, it’s not the Necro specifically. Blizzard has already commented that they will have design changes in it for the future.