For this moment in the game there are three different types of skeletal mages (shadow, cold and bone). Shadow and bone are match to necro itself (skills, gear and paragon) especially with PTR updates, but I can’t say the same about cold mages. The main restriction in this case is type of damage they have - cold. As an alternative for new season I would like to suggest to rework cold mages to blood mages. In this case we will have three types of skeletal mages which match to Necromancer’s skills and paragon.
The issue is that blood skill deal physical damage. Thus, there is no “blood damage” type (just blood skills being categorized as blood for the purposes of affixes and enchants).
However, it would have been interesting if blood was a hit + bleed effect and we had mages to match. Still would be physical, but it would be something other than just plain old hit damage alone.
Or rather than focusing on their damage type, they would work like how blood spec does, being based around overpower mechanics. Blood mages could be designed to have overpower mechanic built in as well as book of the dead options for other blood mechanics such as chance to drop blood orbs on hit and such, or buffs when a blood orb is picked up.
What would that achive? Not like you could increase thire elemntal damage with stats on gear. Maybe if they would have the coresponding skill tags, which they don’t. Also mages rarely had matching damage types in previous games. In D2 necro had bone, poison and summoning skills, while haveing blood golem, but no other blood skills, fire golem but no other fire skills and fire, cold, lightning and poison mages while gaving again no other fire, cold or lightning skills. In D3 mages shoot an unknown type of element, probably phisical, though with skill runes you could change it to cold and only there increased damage to cold skills effected their damage, in other iterations their damage are fully separate. So fitting their damage type to the necro’s was never an issue, nor a concept.
As I see . The main idea is to make minions build more flexible. In the beginning and up to now preferable skills to learn is Darkness (most of them receive bonuses from having active minions). I also sure that most of necro players choose “shadowblight” key passive instead of “Kalan’s Edict”. Hence, having blood mages would make blood skill-based summoner competitive to darkness one. For example, next step could be changes in blood skills (core and passive) that would have new interactions with minions.
As for the type of damage apparently would be physical one (the same as all blood skills).
You mentioned Necro playstyle from D2 and D3, but in my opinion it’s incorrect to compare them. Especially D2, due to different game mechanics (immune to different types of damage and physical as well). In D2 mages have elemental dmg on purpose. In combination with curses (lower resist) mages do decent damage.
Unfortunately, in D4 we have “disciple” necromancer who learned only two curses…
But even shadow mages are only good for ramping up your Shadowblight stacks, and other passives that have some effect against enemies affected by shadow dmg overtime. They don’t interact in any other special kind of way with any other shadow skill. Mages provide a variety of utility, and allready good damage with minion scaleing and +to mage mastery. Cold is a great deffensive option with the hard CC and porvide resource and a source of makeing monsters vulnerable. about a curses how ever, I would love mages that can cast curses.
I don’t see the issue. Mage types don’t necessarily correspond to the core skills of Necro across the board. Even though there may be some synergies in play there.
Cold Mages primarily serve as pure utility. Providing a steady stream of CC, essence or vulnerable. If anything they fill this role well and there isn’t much need to change it. I could definitely buy into the addition of some type of Blood Mages though. Outright replacing Cold Mages, not so much.
Mages by definition deal elemental damage. Cold mages are my favourite and advantage here is chill effect that basically cannot be done with physical damage. I like my enemies be frozen (even if they don’t spawn a corpse after death), explode from block of ice and btw frozen enemies are considered chilled - it might work well with slow effect to provide extra defence.
Bloodless Scream, Coldbringer’s Aspect, Azurewrath (now available for Necro), Aspect of Elements etc. - there are some options to play with.
Bloodless Scream, Coldbringer Aspect and Azurewrath don’t really have any synergy. You could use something else and kill enemies in less time than it takes to freeze them.
On the ptr, you could get shadow mages up to 50-100 mil per hit, with perfect gear.
Agree, but Frozen effect is mostly for me as a nice cosmetic I enjoy. I have Blood Mist exploding blood drops from Blood Boiling, Blood Lance using Embalmer with Gore Quills and Blood Surge consuming corpses with Cadaverous Aspect - this will eradicate all enemies very fast with no extra damage required.
Yes monsters under an effect that makes them recive more damage applyes to any source of damage, in damned case shadow damage.
Yes I know that, but currently it adds too little with the 30% inherit, and in S4 where it could matter we have quite limited sources, since that stat doesn’t roll on gear anymore, and only have a few nodes on the Wither board and Darkness glyph. I wonder if that also applyes to warriors while under the effect of Aphotic aspect?
They get cobbled together with items to form a cohesive side strategy. Like for me, I have Howl from Below + Bloodless Scream and Cold Mages. Everything ends up chilled, frozen and vulnerable and it stacks up the stagger on bosses pretty fast.
Probably not the best build for high tier NMD but it’s more than serviceable.
Don’t get me started on Bloodless Scream. You’re giving up a 2x aspect slot for a 1.50 multiplier that’s not even active until you freeze something. (at which point it would likely be dead already, otherwise)
Works with Cold Mages but yeah losing that aspect slot hurts. On PTR I’m pretty sure Azurewrath was Necromancer and that works pretty well with lucky hit-based procs.
Personally I’ve moved on to abusing Army of the Dead + Mendelin +4 sec CDR every 5th cast of a core ability for an active cooldown.
I mean yeah I realy like that item too, but what aspect would you sacrifice for it? Ofc it also depends on the build, but think about it realisticly, if you want to push the build to it’s maximum potential. Even more so in S4.