State of Necromancer VoH

PC General Discussion
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To start, I loved most of the stuff announced in the campfire chat. I was extremely excited and ready to pre-purchase VOH, until the Necromancer announcements. I really feel like whoever is in charge of Necromancer class design does not play Necromancer at all.

We do not have a minion generator or core skill. We only have a few utility skills. So few in fact, that every build uses the same ones. Shadow builds already have two options for ultimates. How did we end up with an ultimate that is basically the same as Shadow Bone Storm?

Other than the blood key passive, our key passives are boring or useless and they give us a new key passive that is just a better version of Shadowblight. Why tie curses to shadow damage and shadow damage over time? Also, a missed opportunity to add a new curse. That ultimate could have made for a cool siphoning curse.

Necromancers have terrible survivability all around and I see the effort in adding barrier, but it’s tied behind lucky hit and minions have no lucky hit, so this won’t help minion builds.

The only new minion thing is an aspect that does AOE damage. The only golem worth using for damage, being the only golem with a multiplicative damage increase, already has an AOE for it’s active ability. It would have been nice to have an aspect that allowed us to do thorns damage around the golem on active ability use instead.

Outside of the announcements, there are still glaring issues with the necromancer. The book of the dead is an awful class system. It objectively makes sacrificing minions better for all builds other than pure minion builds. Minions need to be made into skills in the skill tree with tags that can be buffed alongside other skills. This will allow minions to be used in hybrid builds and in non-minion focused builds as utility without making those builds suffer.

There is very little synergy within the Necromancer class and builds are forced to basically be color coded. There needs to be some room to make passives work with multiple types of skills and damage types. There is no synergy with cold damage, yet we have more unique items for that than we do for minions. With the new key passive, maybe you should rework Shadowblight to synergize with chill and cold damage.

Here are some ideas I just want to throw out:
-Iron golem rework to synergize with thorns, like an active that deals thorns damage around it.
-Rework iron maiden to synergize with thorns.
-Add shadow golem and rework all shadow minions and skills to synergize with dot damage, like making shademist aspect the golem’s aura and have an active to erupt dot damage.
-Rework bone golem to synergize with bone skills, like an active to bone spike enemies, pull them in, and get max essence for every enemy spiked.
-Add blood mages and make blood minions synergize with overpower.
-Rework passives to work with types of damage or effects instead of specific skill types.
-Give more options to add different tags to skills.
-Make the passives and aspect for Army of the Dead baseline and give it some survivability love like the other ultimates.
-Scrap Ring of Mendeln and make it’s unique effect the base of a minion key passive that scales damage with minion damage
-Give us some cool minion uniques!

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It frees up an Aspect or two, and seems vastly superior than Bone Storm for Shadow play. The only reason to go Bone Storm now is for Lidless Wall.

The Aspect of Ultimate Shadow always seemed like a stop gap for not having a true Shadow Ultimate. Now we have one… but it remains to be seen what supporting Aspects it will get.

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Agreed, it does look better than bone storm, but they really just need to bake a lot of our aspects into skills baseline, or make them choices in the skill tree. We have way too much aspect bloat as necromancers and not enough skill choices.

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Bone Storm players that are Shadow need 3 Aspects to really make it work. There’s a 4th optional one to increase Bone damage (it’s still a Bone Skill).

  • Aspect of Ultimate Shadow - converts Bone Storm to Shadow
  • Aspect of Shielding Storm - grants Barrier when Bone Storm hits
  • Osseus Gale - Adds duration to Bone Storm

Putting Osseus Gale on a 2h or Amulet gives infinite uptime on Bone Storm. Lidless can do similar, but then you sacrifice a 2h weapon anyways.

Now -

  • Soulrift does more damage inherently
  • Soulrift gives a barrier inherently
  • Soulrift gives an (x) damage scalar inherently
  • Soulrift gives Essence, which may be used for further damage scaling

Overall, a far better change. But like I said, it all depends on what the Aspects and Tempers that support it become.

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Ultimate Shadow is the only one you need to make it viable for a shadow build. You can get infinite uptime without osseous gale. Shielding Storm is a defensive aspect, which we don’t have many good ones in general, and this one is by far the best choice.

The new ultimate is cool and looks good, but was absolutely not needed as much as other skills. Like I said previously, we still have no minion core ability or generator. We have such a small amount of utility skills that every necromancer build uses the same ones.

That ultimate could have been made a curse and could have been used in more builds and gave more options. No doubt it’s cool and I will most definitely try it out, but we could have used other things a lot more. Truly, I believe it’s better than all of our other ultimates without any aspects attached.

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Not to derail your thread because Necro is one of my favorite classes, but I kind of feel the same thing about Sorc new skill. A familiar. Its ok but its just yet another thing that to maximize its use you have to use all 3 elements. I like pure casting, not forcing me to use all elements. Like I guess there are aspects or something that can help that but still… can we get away from using the same two enchants?

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On that note, some people think the familiar might add more variety for fire builds since it can cause burning. Food for thought. I’m not a sorc player though, as I only play Necromancer.

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Possibly. Im not a big theory crafter like that. Too old for this stuff anymore haha. I can make my own builds but I am not going to spend countless hours on the stuff anymore.

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I really enjoy making my own builds. That’s why I decided to take the time to write something up. I love Necromancer and I feel like it’s not getting the love it needs.

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I also love necro. I love the minion build of season 4. I also loved the bonespear build of season 1. I really loved when they added the heart that did auto corpse explode and stuff so was super happy when they made it something else instead of deleting it. Im not really into the blood builds though.

I feel they definitely screwed necro this season. It was in such a good place in s4 and they should have just left it alone. It was not really all that OP. I thought it was in a good spot. Then they buffed the best build from s4. Like what?

As for making my own builds… I enjoy that too. My builds arent good enough for super end game so I usually make my own build, play it, then if I want to push something I’ll grab the op build from someone later.

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Yea. S4 was my favorite season for minions and it was what brought me back to the game.

What happened is the devs proved how reliant most builds are on aspects. They nerfed the Blighted Aspect and killed just about every necromancer build. The only things that survived were overpower builds because of how much aspect and unique support there is for overpower builds.

We are reaching a point where we have no more room for new aspects to carry our damage and without changes in our skill tree, Necromancer won’t be able to keep up with other classes. That is, unless they give bandaid aspects that are just more powerful than what we already use. Then, we will just have a lot more unused aspects than we already do.

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