Hey all!

I've been around for awhile but recently rolled a new character to play in a group with my family friends here in PG. Our main shtick is that we're all Necromancers, so our abilities hit each other's summons a bunch and we're having a blast!

I've noticed some things as we've been playing as a group that I wanted to share observations and suggestions on, so here we are! We're all about level 30ish in Necromancy right now, so keep that in mind. The first part of this will be a little review of how our experience has been so far, followed by some requests/suggestions on how to improve the skill!



Firstly, Zombies. As the more forgiving of the two types of summoning we do as Necromancers, we have great fun with them. Because they despawn when moving zones there's a little rush in our group to smack down mobs in the beginning of an area to summon a new one. I love that they have the "expendable" vibe to them and can be simply re-summoned when they die from another body.

Skeletons by contrast can be very punishing to lose. This isn't a bad dichotomy to have, and I appreciate it being distinct. We run Skeletal Battle Mages almost exclusively in our group for a few reasons. Despite being the most fragile of the skeletal summons, they deal far and away the most damage of the three (Mages, Archers, or Swordsmen). A major part of this is because of their AoE ability letting them do good work in the multi-mob fights we find ourselves in frequently. Also, due to the number of Zombies and players we have, mages seldom are the targets of hostile attack. Even if they do take a hit or two, 6 Necromancers pumping out heals is enough to keep them all alive in most situations. Swordsmen and Archers simply don't provide any meaningful trade-offs when compared to mages to make them worth running. We may swap to Archers however if there are significant resistances to Fire (or Electricity) down the road.

Moving on to active spells, Provoke Undead and Heal Undead are incredible in our group. Provoke Undead increases the damage of ALL nearby summoned undead for 10 seconds. This effect stacks when multiple Necromancers cast it around the same time. This means that bosses get mowed down by the focused fire our battle-mages and zombies are laying down when we all activate it at once. We're clearing areas in the 40-50 range at our skill level because of this alone. Granted, I feel like this would be possible for any group of 5/6 players to accomplish, but we have a fantastic time with the synergy that this provides.

Heal Undead works in a similar way as far as stacking effects, though it requires some mods to accomplish. There was some debate between Heal Undead and Rebuild Undead in the group for a time before we realized something: Heal Undead has three total (one that occurs once and one that shows up twice) modifiers that provide (or have a chance to provide) our summons with damage mitigation. The tool-tip says "mitigation", though to be clear this mitigation is only for direct damage. Like Provoke Undead, this mitigation effect stacks when multiple Necromancers use it. In the endgame, if we were to have all those effects off at the same time (and get lucky with the effects triggering) our pets would all have up to a whopping 498 direct damage mitigation (with 78 as the absolute minimum). We don't plan on our pets taking that much damage in the first place, but if they ever happen to start taking damage we know we can keep them alive.

Here's an interesting interaction between those two skills though, and why it makes for such a good pair: Provoke Undead has mods that deal damage directly to our summons in exchange for an extra flat damage increase. This damage to our summons can be minimized or completely eliminated by Heal Undead's mitigation effect! There is also a mod for Provoke Undead that deals damage over time for increased damage on summons, but it is currently bugged and has a good chance of straight up killing everyone's pets at higher levels because of that.

In addition to all of that, I am personally the Battle Chemist of the group. This means that I get Extra Skin, my group gets Extra Skin, and the pets all get Extra Skin (eventually...)! The real gem of Extra Skin for us is the indirect damage mitigation it provides, eliminating the slow bleed-over-time effect that zombies have inherently. If the Provoke Undead DoT mod was working properly it would be fantastic for that too, but alas it currently deals twice as much damage as it should and still wrecks our pets.

As for actual direct damage combat skills, Spark of Death is the king of the crew. It's got a mod that increases the damage a target takes from electrical attacks by 10%(occurring twice) for 30 seconds. Spark's damage is pretty decent (it's a core attack on an 8s cd), but the damage slowly gets more intense the longer a fight goes (which isn't super long admittedly right now), making us really start to hit hard as a group after a few casts.






SO! With all that said, what are my suggestions and thoughts about Necromancy? (AKA TLDR

  • Fix the Provoke Undead DoT mod so that it deals the listed damage. (It currently deals twice as much as it should)

This mod, if you were to have both occurrences of it on a single character at level 80 would deal 540 damage to all your summons over 10 seconds. That's pretty garbage, considering it will kill or nearly kill every single pet you've got when it's all said and done. If anything so much as sneezes at your pets during that time (and they're more capable of pulling aggro while it's active), they're super easy to kill. Say even 4 people have just 1 of those (1,080 damage to pets) in a group of 6 necromancers like we're running? We'd wipe out all 18 pets and have no real way of getting 12 of them back short of wiping and restarting the area we're in.

Honestly it sounds pretty badass to literally set your pets on fire in a blaze of glory at the last boss, but less so when that's every 20 seconds.

  • Limit total skeleton summons to one. Two Zombies total.


The idea of this is to let the Necromancer get their zombie pain train rolling with the first more thicc Skeleton summon. The skeleton is then more like a long-term personal aide to you while the Zombies are disposable and replaceable pawns. Zombie raising is a much more consistently interactive activity than skeleton summoning, so I'd like to do more of that.

With that, I would hope that skeleton summoning requirements would become a little more complex as you level up. There's a fine balance here that needs to be struck, but I don't think it would be uncalled for. In addition to that, I'd really want to push for more interesting mods for specific skeleton types. Currently it seems like skeleton mods are weaker because they have the potential to affect 2 units, and thus need to be underwhelming to compensate. I wonder sometimes if the intention was to make it so that skeletons of different types would be combined for different situations, but I don't think I've ever seen anyone using two different types at once.


  • Raise Zombie becomes a sidebar skill.


Currently, it is functionally possible to summon a zombie through the use of the skill on the main bar, then replace it with a more combat-oriented skill while fighting and swap it back if you happen to want to summon a replacement/use the buff after combat. This is a hassle, but it lets you use another combat skill during... combat. Using Provoke Undead, Heal/Rebuild Undead, and Raise Zombie consumes half of your possible Necromancy skill spots. At least in the case of Provoke and Heal you're using them actively during a fight. Raise Zombie can be used in combat, but I'd really just rather have another skill to use when the primary condition of using it is for something to be dead already.






That's all I've got! Thanks for sticking with me till the end (or jumping to the TL;DR, I'm not judging). I could keep going on and on about Necromancy since it's my favorite skill (specifically with suggestions and thoughts about it's mods), but I'll end it here since I've done enough rambling for the day :P