Casual player here, be patient with me.
So I heard they were reworking the undead race with Reforged on the way, and I’m pretty happy about this since undead were my favorite race back in the day even though it always felt like they were missing something.
The reason undead were my favorite is because I’m fan of necromancy in games. I love spawning units using magic overall, but necromancy has always been my most preferred way of creating army of minions. And as much as I was happy about W3 having necromancers to raise those corpses, it always bugged me that the skeletons had a timed lifespan, which is understandable from balance standpoint as to not allow the undead player to swarm the enemy with spawnable skeletons, making the undead race too op. I have been thinking of way to remove time limit on skeletons while preventing the undead to become too powerful to handle:
1. Mindless undead
This idea of mine is based on the mindless/feral undead you encounter when you create an undead character in WoW. According to the game, those undead were left by the Lich King in Lordaeron after Arthas went off to defend Northrend and they were, well, mindless and uncontrollable, attacking everything in sight. My idea of this transferred to the W3 is that those undead would slowly wander around the map at random, attacking other players while remaining neutral to the player who raised them. I understand that this would require some balancing, like tweaking the skeleton stats and preventing them from providing vision to the player who raised them, but it doesn’t seem impossible. Interaction between those mindless undead and neutral creeps could also pose a problem, but any suggestion how to tackle this would be welcome.
2. Skeleton limit
Another idea I had would be to set a limit on how many skeletons can one player have at any given time, which would basically make them like Crypt Lord’s beetles without the need to recruit the hero (who is, as I’ve heard, not very popular anyway). Here we encounter another problem, which is that this would basically remove the need to build more than a few necromancers as well.
3. Skeleton pets
Third idea, sort of derived from the second one, is that every necromancer could keep a certain amount of skeletons, like ‘pets’ in WoW. Those pets may perma-follow their specific necromancer or could be entirely independent, and may or may not die when their specific necromancer does, whatever the devs and general public prefer.
I was also thinking of adding a ‘food’ cost to the skeletons, however, given how the upkeep mechanic works in this game, one’s gotta watch their supply unlike in SC2, which means that this would make raising the dead feel a bit like juggling lit torches and dynamite at the same time. In any case, I think by making some changes in this direction it would make the corpses an even more valuable resource for the undead and make the undead race more fun to play overall. I think it would make the undead players feel more like they are actually playing the undead.
I do, however, understand that those changes would require some amount of balancing, so it’s not an easy task. Any feedback (whether good or bad) and constructive criticism on these ideas, as well as another suggestions regarding skeleton lifespan removal, would be appreciated.