Shattered Kingdoms

Put up or shut up! Roll a necro!

Baldric, regarding your issue about dropping 10 mana trains on a necro and such..Necros are fairly hard to build already and dropping 10 mana trains on a necro will nerf the crap out of it. As it stands they need art, lots of it, for their maledictions. Int, wis, cha and con (if i recall undead HP is like elementals and based on your con) so if you want your undead to survive a holy word you can't slack off on that. There really isn't enough room for 10 mana trains and slacking on art will get you killed by anyone with good enchants.

Regarding what you said about how quickly an army can be raised..Yes, a nephrite and 10 mana trains can make it substantially quicker. Gathering 20 obsidian and spamming energizer can make it substantially quicker, but the prep time is still there. It can take upwards of an hour to create a small platoon of undead.

Now getting back on topic. I want to say that I don't think this underpowers necros. They're still very powerful and their damage output is still top notch and the maledictions and group control are still present. Fear and such are nothing to be sneezed at. The problem I do have with it though is, as I said, the walk in HW bombs.

This is completely ridiculous. When you're fighting bounty NPCs or raiding an area, you can't move at a quick pace. Once you initiate a fight with a NPC, you are LOCKED there else you screw up your formation AND lose members. This affects necromancers greatly because as stated, places like Exile or Sith, which Necros typically raid, are nightmares. It's bad enough that the NPCs in the rooms can cast HW on their own, the fact that a rogue can go grab say, Baltus, and order him to cast a holy word then walk in, the Necromancer has -absolutely- 0 chance of avoiding this. You can flee from undead spam. Yes there's always that chance you'll get spam bashed and not make it. But the HW bomb has no escape. It is instantaneous upon room entry when done correctly, and furthermore people tend to do it as described above when you're locked in combat. The Necros greatest power also becomes its greatest weakness. Group management.

While yes it is tactics and such, Necro damage is single target fire. The necro walks in, o all bash. It focuses one target. You don't see a necro instantly going o 1.wrai bash xx o 2.wrath bash xx etc furiously. The defending party only o xx c 'holy word" wait for command lag, walk in and voila, they win. The necro's group is crazy hurt. Add in the fact that multiple pc's can do this and necros have no chance whatsoever. This absolutely is not fair in the slightest. 20 minutes to an hour prep goes down the drain in a span of literally 10 seconds.

I am aware of the challenges associated with building a necro. I understand that INT, WIS, CHA, CON are essential, and that HP, DEX, art are extremly useful. I would definitely max mana, though. The benefits of training mana are just too great to ignore.

The walk-in holy words and stuff all existed before this nerf, and if people's claims about 1 holy word dropping wraiths consistently are true, then it was equally effective then as it is now. Necros were beasts before the nerf, and are still beasts now.

I want to thank Dulrik again for making some very good changes. I'm honestly shocked at the way some people have been complaining about necros being underpowered now.

Comments about how to avoid walk-in holy words aside, I think necros are close to sorcs now as far as game balance. I just think that they -should- be overpowered.

It's not really so much the fact that they'll be underpowered, Baldric, so much as just throwing them a bone. Holy word, if I recall, has a chance to outright dispel undead on contact and 1 shot them. Even if it doesn't, it still destroys their HP pool, little that they have. (Wraiths are by no means really that sturdy..) The thing is, 8 wraiths is far less than 16-21 that people carried. The chances of all of them being 1 shot by a HW is low and even if they are significantly damaged there was enough to hold. As it stands now, it's far easy to chew through 8 animates with just a single holy word or two.Yes they still have beast damage, I'm not denying that, but the holy words become that much stronger simply because there are fewer undead to actually contend with. This is a buff to HW, albeit indirectly.

1 Holy word is bad. 2 is absolutely game over. If you had 16-21 or so, there was a chance you might live 2, but the chance of 8 undead living 2 holy words is very slim. Places like Exile and Sith are already nigh impenetrable except to the best players that have a necro and have uber gear. Anyone, no matter casual or elite pker, can o NPC c holy word and then walk in. That's the problem. Risk vs reward. It's too easy to entirely shut a necro down with just 8 undead. I'm not saying they need more undead, but throw em a bone. Playing one isn't as easy as you think. Bards, priests and paladins will completely annihilate them at this point with hw bombs.

My last line of defense is this. Casting small spells and stuff while moving is fine, but holy word is the epitome of concentration as you're invoking the wrath of your respective god. The concentration and PE drained from this indicates just how stressful it is to the caster's body. Being able to move while casting such a powerful spell shouldn't be possible in the slightest, even for the greatest of clergy.

It would take 2-3 holy words to drop my wraiths. Four if I berserked them after they had taken damage.

A competent necromancer can kill a sorcerer with no problems. It's not even a question. Against a competent necromancer it takes groups of people to repel their efforts. I never, ever felt threatened playing my deep-elf necromancer, and there were times that I tried my luck against groups of upwards to 7 people. Most of the time I had to run away, but sometimes I would smash entire groups of 5+ people and send those that I couldn't gank running for the hills, and that was with just my necromancer.

And to be honest, I actually feel more confident that a necromancer can do far more damage due to some changes to the code nowadays.

And honestly, if I could do that with just a group of six wraiths, and some spellcasting, what is stopping other people from repeating those sorts of rapes and pillages? Mind you, I laid down the rape in only 10 weeks of playing the character before I just got really bored of the class. If I played the character to age death I probably could have netted something like a 1500:1 ratio, which is just plain absurd.

Who did you kill anyway? I always heard about Vaistri, but never saw her in action. I wasn't playing much at the time, but honestly, if you were taking out groups of 5+ people with just 6 wraiths, then those people probably sucked.

So pretty much everyone is going to roll a necromancer to prove their either too wimped or perfectly even....well paladins have their work cut out for them

I was killing everybody, MC, Hammer, Druids, Harlequins, Guardians, Peacekeepers. Anybody that wanted to venture out and crossed paths with me I would attack.

It's not that they sucked, but it's hard to deal with 24 attacks in one round, no matter who you are. Top that with someone in the back rank dismantling your group with some of the best debuff spells in the game, and using stuff like cone of cold wands, it's pretty much impossible to stop their onslaught unless you have a large group of your own. It's just [REDACTED]. If I had to pit any of my characters against my own necromancer, I just wouldn't do it.