Shattered Kingdoms

Inspired by this, I bring forth the new and improved Animate Dead spell, as well as a few tweaks to the existing system to make necromancers more balanced, less fragile and in my humble opinion more enjoyable.

Before anything, I'd like to state that I'm fairly certainly these ideas won't be well accepted, but I'm bored so I figure.. why not stir up a little healthy discussion.

First of all I'd like to express my dislike of the current animate dead system, not only with the fact that only the level of the corpse determines the type of undead, but the fact that you need huge numbers of undead to be effective. I don't really feel encouraged to play a necromancer and spend so much time trying to gather up undead. On the other hand, giving them the ability to have so many undead actually makes them the most powerful class, which leads us to the fact that a quick fix was implemented to make necromancers extremely fragile (to off-set their incredibly power). That quick fix is called Bolt of Glory, yes the no-flee nimbus creating, one-shoting undead, mother of a spell. Now wouldn't it be nice if necromancers weren't so powerful, if they didn't need to spend so much time preparing themselves and if their power didn't need to be off-set by such fragility from a ridiculous spell?

I think so.

I suggest the following changes to animate dead:
- An animated corpse isn't in the control of the caster, they in fact need to cast control undead to have such.
- An animated corpse lasts indefinitely, or unless it is killed or there's a reboot.
- An animated corpse retains the abilities, be it spells, skills, class, scripts (to some extent) and such of the undead. Certainly things like the necro's hp, me, pe pool would influence their power, but essentially you wouldn't see a generic wraith, you'd see a wraith of a venerable green dragon for example. The animated creature wouldn't have the racial resistances or weaknesses of its previous race, but would in fact adopt the ones that undead have.


Now given those changes, I'd also like to propose a few more that would actually make this system work well:
- Lower the ridiculous damage BoG does to some races, remove the nimbus affect and make it affect everyone except lighties.
- Remove the ability of BoG one-shoting undead, while still having it do enough damage to be a viable option against undead.
Edit: Crap, I totally forgot to add that animated corpses shouldn't be prone to dispel magic anymore.

What I propose would abolish the mass army of undead and instead give the necromancers a few select, powerful creatures for them to control. It would be similar to the way charm person works now, while still retaining the uniqueness of necromancy. And if necromancers aren't so incredibly powerful, there would be no need to make them so frail either.

Thank you for reading.

Disclaimer: I may have forgotten to add some of my thoughts so if I remember something I'll add it.

That's actually an interesting idea, but sounds a bit hard to implement code wise. If this was done, Control undead would have to be balanced. As of now it has a huge mana drain and a Delf necro with max int can only hold 3 controls, and if you do you can kiss mana regen goodbye. The concentration would have to be lowered and the mana drain more forgiving for that to work.

A cool idea that I could get behind. Necros need to be balanced, after all, if you are one of those crazy people who thinks game balance is a good thing.

It sounds like a lot of work, though.

Yes, that's one of the things I forgot to add. The concentration would have to be lowered.

I must be missing something but wouldn't this be the same thing as removing animate dead entirely? There's already a control undead spell and there's a decent variety of creatures to control. Why would you ever animate anything, except for convenience of proximity?

I don't like the change. It would wimp necromancers too far, IMO.

For balance, I'd rather see a limit on the number of undead that can be animated (e.g., only as many as can fit in your group).

It's not the same as removing animate dead, because this would allow you too choose which NPC corpse you could animate. Ranging from a feeble priest to a mighty dragon. It would definitely give more diversity to the class.

I think you would need to add more undead characters in that case.

Terrible. Its fine the way it is. This is coming from a guy who gets owned by necros all the time.

Then you think it's acceptable for one class to be a great deal more powerful than other classes?

Edit: or to rephrase.. do you think it's acceptable that there is a class that can solo inner guardians while others can't even come close to accomplishing such?

Due to recent changes, necros can't solo inner guardians anymore, nor do I even think they can solo outer guardians with the crazy spam dispel. The inner guardian's gas blasts are like being hit by a semi.