Shattered Kingdoms

15 years ago, most definitely: Back in the day when NPCs did obscene amounts of damage, haste gave you double attacks, when summon had no lag, animates had no limit, bash made you take 50% more damage, energy drain actually drained xp, and you could be maledicted to heck and back while under the sleep spell. That was a loooong time ago, though.

Before those changes I cited, however, necros were nowhere near that level of stupidity. At that time the only person who was complaining that warlocks were underpowered was Kin, and everyone generally just told him to shut up. You can still find those gameplay threads.

I cant agree that detect poison is on par with paralysis, but I can vouch for it being a less effective version of a certain religion spell. There were plenty of instances where various npcs would get their attack routines in without any will mods, so I can imagine in the pvp realm, it would be better to forgo paralysis and go with skeletons. One has to ask why the other undead aren't being utilized as well. Curse bite is not really needed since you can simply hard cast it. Poison, granted that enough rounds go by for it to stack is not really a game changer and zombies are simply semi-decent tanks that would require you to compensate with spell damage. I think animates need looking into. Perhaps energy drain or vamp touch bites and better weapon skills for the less utilized undead. Maybe we could throw more ideas out there.

Eh? Reference Trag….?

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Are we throwing out obvious back-handed insults? I remember players commenting on the necromancer that you played. If I remember correctly, your methodology consisted of building a huge army, walking in, and O ALL BASH <target>. That was a great tactic at the time, and you scored a lot of wins (and losses). But it’s reasonable to suggest that necros should require more skill/tactic than that.

Again, I was not commenting whether necros are “good” or “need work”, but specifying the FACT that there are, indeed, different uses for different animate types- even if they don't meet your specific needs/wants (or even the specific needs of the playerbase at large). You say:


If the be-all, end-all of your necromancer character is ONLY to engage in PK, and is ONLY to use the skills/spells that are most useful ONLY in PK, then your analysis suggests that a necromancer is probably not a good choice for you to play. But I dismiss the notion that the ONLY useful skills/spells in the game are the ones that help you win/dominate PK.


That’s a pretty wild presumption. Frankly, it’s the kind of polarizing assumption that is counter-productive at best, insulting at worst, and self-aggrandizing at its base. Don't pretend to speak the "painfully obvious" intentions of others unless you actually know them.

To be clear, I’m not disputing your overall position that necromancers are under-powered and need some work to be rebalanced. But some of the accompanying rhetoric is less useful to your argument.

Trag posted that necros are fine, but he got beat by a solo fist Swash repeatedly within the last year, and on more than one of those occasions had the numbers advantage on the solo swash. I'm going to choose to pay attention to the logs rather than his word on that.

I'm not throwing out back-handed insults, I'm throwing out facts and denouncing arguments that anyone who's played a necromancer would recognize as faulty. It just so happens that no one besides Trag has played any active necromancers since Surrit, which comes as no surprise given how weak they are, and so misinformation like what I countered in Thuban's post thrives without anyone saying otherwise.

As an example, you just said that my methodology on Surrit always consisted of o all bash, yet that's incorrect. While o all bash was definitely the best option for securing kills, there were many situations, including the one time I went 1v7, where it was much better to start with o all dirt or o all hit in order to deal as much damage as possible before my undead got dropped in two holy words, or simply to focus on staying alive from ranged damage through quaffing heals and stone skin vials while my enemies focused on me instead of my animate army. I also had great success using spells like fear to my advantage on multiple occasions. If you had played alongside me when I was playing Surrit instead of basing your opinion completely off of other people's comments, you would have known that. Trust me, I tried going routes other than animate, and I didn't roll Surrit to be a PK powerhouse or to be an animate necro, but after I explored the alternatives of going the maledict route (my preference) or the control route, I decided to primarily utilize animates because they were the most effective even though I hadn't rolled with them in mind. Despite being built to specialize in maledicts, I learned that controls and maledictions were comparably poor choices pitted against the strengths and weaknesses of other classes like sorcerer, warlock, hellion and shaman, and that's still the case now.

Back on topic, the fact that some animates get chill touch or paralyzing touch is, yes, an actual option you can take. It's just a terrible option that provides extremely little to no benefit at all even when compared to the damage output of a single skeleton. To counter your point, It's not just a less effective version of the religious spell, it -is- the religious spell. It's the same code. When you get hit with paralyzing touch your affects list says "interdiction," and as I already mentioned, it's completely unnoticeable against anyone with a reasonable will save even if it manages to land the paralyze status. As for your allusion that it's useful in PvE therefore it's actually worthwhile, please note that any NPC that takes a skeleton army more than a couple of rounds to kill has its will save jacked through the roof due to recent code updates, so interdiction isn't going to reduce their damage output at all. Even if it did, it's still totally besides the point because as I already mentioned, you can't take undead armies anywhere legitimately difficult in PvE because all end-game areas (Frozen Wastes, Dreamscape, Iron Citadel) either have null-magic rooms on the way or otherwise prevent pets from following.

I don't think it's a wild presumption to state that since necros have received nothing but nerfs in the past 5 years, yet warlocks have received nothing but buffs, and big ones at that, that the person in charge of balance clearly wanted those things. Why do you think that's a wild presumption?

My Elf/Fist swashbuckler did beat up Trag's delf necromancer a few times, he made huge, obvious errors each time, overall his performance against me was not remotely indicative of actual necromancer (or swashbuckler) balance. You don't get to cherry pick logs where one player is at the top of their game and another sucks to argue over balance.

I actually watched Edoras often. I liked him. He was well-RP'd, he was ballsy, and I saw him take some pretty good lumps without crying. I don't mean to malign him.

I'm not calling out your technical assessment, but the way you chose to frame intent.

Your suggestions are reasonable, except that I disagree the best boost to necros are to make them more dependent on control undead. Animate + necromantic spells (shroud, vamp touch, e-drain, finger of death) are where I prefer to see their bread & butter. Animate is a tricky thing to tweak so it's done sparingly. Any change anywhere has the ability to be magnified nine-fold in no time. They're glaringly weak in the situations you describe. But a necromancer spends a lot of time NOT standing toe-to-toe with an aggressive warlock/paladin, and those meat shields, those speedy skeletons, and even those poisons/ curses/ paralyze are still useful in different ways. Especially when properly equipped and buffed and x8.

They have challenges. Many of the things you complain about are only true in the context of PvP. While that is a major part of it, the class as a whole has to be judged in PvE terms too. And some of those things are very useful in PvE, which allows your character a number of other tactical benefits that can help you in the character's overall competitiveness.

I'd like to see them get something. But not a control buff. Nor reversing the previous debuff balancing.

PS - one of the beautiful things about animate dead is that you can make more when you get there!

I feel that the necromancer offers very little in advanced pve scenarios. Null magic rooms and saves boosts to outer area creatures limits what you can do. For same room easy PvE, the necromancer shines a bit with high damage and maledictions vs non-elite races/creatures. In advanced pvp, they could simply be avoided by having ones wimpy set to 100, so to some extent, you have to rely on controls for bash/trip.

Its difficult to find a solution imo because any change can tip the scales of class balance, but I think animates will be the best place to start.

Then I'm not sure why you chose to say that my tactics only ever consisted of o all bash, when I had plenty of fights where I used fireball wands, o all dirt,o all disarm,double heals, double FoD scrolls, liberal use of the info command to scout my enemies and fear. You said "Necros should have more tactics than o all bash" to me, the person who used a whole lot more tactics than o all bash on Surrit.

I'm honestly confused. I've never suggested to make necros more control-dependent. I've only recently offered one suggestion for a necro buff, and in multiple threads, which was to give them a skill that lets them order animates without order lag, and on a failed check lags the necro and doesn't issue an order. This wouldn't come anywhere near close to making up for the fact that animate damage got completely destroyed with the animate nerf, but it would certainly make the class abundantly less frustrating to play in PvE and PvP and actually make animates and maledictions work together. As things are, animate-based necros are forced to spend the majority of any combat, especially PvE, in order lag. In PvE this is boring and dull, but it's still infinitely better than using maledictions, which is your only other option. In PvP getting stuck in order lag because you tried to o all hit someone who was sanc'ed, invis, or behind a pet is enough to let the person start and finish casting holy word or move multiple rooms away and/or start hitting you with ranged combat. It's very depressing to level up a GM necro to realize that the only thing your animates really do for you is force you to spam "o all hit" constantly for the benefit of being able to clear some 2-3 mannable areas in a few less combat rounds than it would normally take.

And yes, while it's possible to animate corpses once you arrive at a location... then you've kind of already proven that you didn't really need the animates in the first place, haven't you? That's not even bothering to mention that you'd have to bring high-level weapons for the animates to use, which is legitimately impossible with the 6 item hoarding limit, and that 2 of the 3 primary end-game areas have multiple null-magic rooms spread throughout them, or script dispel magic on all NPCs in the room, or gas blast which will instantly kill all undead due to their low HP pool and inability to be mass healed, or have corpses that are too high level to animate without a bard, or any of the other handful of reasons that prevent animates from being anything more than a nuisance in end-game PvE.

If you want a maledictor in PvE, you're infinitely better off having a shaman, because they have every worthwhile PvE malediction in addition to innate tankiness and heal. Even sorcerers are far and above more desirable for PvE too if only on account of the fact that they can enchant.

Either way, I already addressed the fact, as jreid has, that saves on supernatural creatures means that interdiction is totally useless, as are all the other maledictions that undead have the option of landing. They simply don't matter, and I'd be hard-pressed to believe that someone who legitimately played a necro since, even if only in PvE, could honestly believe that the touch attacks that undead provide are useful for anything other than flavor-text or getting a lucky paralyze on a PC with a will save in the dumpster.

And that's what necros are now: They're a flavor class which isn't to be feared. Their teeth were completely removed with the constant repeated nerfs, and it's blatantly obvious that whoever's in charge of balance is not a fan of necros and is a fan of warlocks. I don't see how that's even subjective, because anyone can look at the recent patchnotes and see the repeated buffs to warlocks and the repeated nerfs to necros. It sends a clear message: Necros have been relegated to an RP class, not a powerful one. Even then, it's a pretty terrible RP class, because the whole necromancer concept is that by dedicating yourself to the forbidden dark arts you'd be able to tap into power that is otherwise unobtainable, when it turns out you would have been more powerful if you'd decided to be a warlock, shaman or sorcerer instead.

Trag wasn't being completely inept either. Your Elf Fist was 2 rounding animates while dodging the overwhelming majority of their attacks, you didn't even need sanctuary in any of the fights and only used spirit aura once. The ceiling for animate damage against a prepped PC now is obscenely low.

For the one time you had sanc...

That's the raw power of animates now. O all hit is just as likely to engage half your undead and get them killed before you can do anything about it rather than actually get them dealing the minimal damage they can still output.