Necromancers.

[Davairus]

Its already possible to sacrifice the flesh golem to regain health immediately.

[Xenyar]

Shouldn't have fucked up vamp touch, then you wouldn't be fixing what you broke, again. That change hurt vamps too.
I'd rather have cure light than hack-job vamp touch and sacrificing my army for hp.

So consider that at the very least, trade all that stupid shit for cure light.

[Dogran]

I haven't tested the new vamp touch, my vampire inactivitied around the time the change happened. However, based on previous posts and complaints my takeaway is this.

Vamp touch is no longer effective against low level mobs, Xenyar cited 1000 mana for 300 hp, but I haven't seen those numbers (Willing to test if need be), and he stated that it is only effective gains on a level 45 or so creature, which then deals more damage to the necromancer than the vamp touch gains.

Proposed solution.

Give zombies the ability to hold aggro, maybe only if you have the right kind of zombie. IE a zombie of a grizzily bear would hold mob aggro, but a zombie of a tiger wouldn't. This is just random thought off the top of my head. If you could get a tanky zombie to quaf a purple and tank the level 45 mob it would keep this going, and still slow the OP of super fast regen via vamp touch.

[Dogran]

Since I can't edit my post, haha a second idea would be more golem options. Maybe get rid of flesh golem and stone golem, and have just a make golem spell and have multiple options. To stop it from being OP only able to have one golem type at a time or something. What do you guys think?

[Davairus]

so.. the scaling with level overtaxes mana for reduced benefit? then we can scale the mana cost as well? i dont see why we would restore cheese touching fathers just because its pricey now. its a risk-reward analysis. i'd be fine with a cure light crappy vamp touch costing the mana of a cure light instead of 60. thats probably more reasonable. but making it overpowered again isn't the right thing to do, and this certainly wasnt a nerf done out of spite or to try to ruin a whole class
(side note - "nerf a spell ruin a whole class" might be a sign a class is over-dependent on one thing)

I dont have a firm opinion on the concept of gradually gathering a large army of powerful zombies but we should ALL be able to recognize in principle (ozaru does, resatimm does) that this just sets up a turkey shoot with the social behavior around surges. strength damned was appropriate in 98 with 80 players online and at least sixteen players at level 50 would be around chasing the necro from the moment they logged in trying to stop that full zombies terror build. thats necessary because eventually that becomes being chased around by a full zombies necro. and thats good because it perfectly matches the horror theme of the game. Back then there was not free zombie prep, and now there is. not everybody at level 50 is playing an elf paladin that can just spam reckoning on that army to neutralize it after hours of free prep. It *is* mostly a turkey shoot and it is cheesy not scary, you are not a badass if you just woke up earlier and farmed the army with no competition at all, its kind of cheaty


Resatimm's solution to strength damned was in the spirit of addressing these free prep turkey shoots. You don't like it, cool, we can have difference of opinion, but just whining with no offer of solutions won't get anything done about it. It puts me in the wrong frame of mind to be thinking of solutions on my own, too. its kinda a self-fulfilling prophecy, I reply in kind to assholes. if you think I am an asshole look in a mirror. Ideas are WELCOMED. This patch threads exists entirely because they are . And posts should have included them. we could have suggested even as little as a "book of the dead" grimoire to obtain somehow and recite on your strength damned zombie to perm it, maybe something that requires knocking off a wight with the brand new shatter spell that necro just got, a ritual to do in your sepulcher once you gather the right unholy materials.

generating ideas requires effort. it means having to think of something instead of this ridiculous approach of trying to get each others contrinbutions to the game deleted. We dont need to delete shit, and its wrong, and if you ever say someones an idiot because you didnt like their idea, then youre the idiot, because youre the one who is not thinking before you start yapping. I dont think this thread will go far btw if the approach here is going to be landing it in the wasteland as bladefury also pointed out.

[Kalist19]

Unpopular opinion: I think the necro changes are fine.

I played a lvl 50 necro at the exact time these changes took place - Linisan the necro justice.

You can still strength damned your three zombies and go to town but now you have a finite time of that OPness. I completely agree that logging on hours before surge to set up a turkey shoot is lame and bad for the game. In general I'm not a fan of anything that a person can do that will make other people simply not want to play (see my thread on radical thief idea).

Yes the vamp touch change really hurt in terms of PK. For PvE it is fine though because you're using it to get zombies your level (or higher if you know where to get them I guess).

It stopped me from using my plan of 'ensnare the opponent in seringale then vamp beggars any time I want'. Vamp touch isn't insane during pk anymore? Boo hoo - go get some healing scrolls or potions like everybody else.

It was legit easy to get 1k hp with a necro and I felt completely invincible. Even fighting Szrevan was like 'lol ok' because it simply felt like there was no chance of ever dying.

You either land the full sleep/spellup and ruin your opponent, or you fail and run away. Or you can just brute force them with rend life and zombies bashing. If a zombie lands a bash you order all rescue or flee out and come back in and rend down. Or you trick the enemy into a room with a door and flee out and keep it closed (with pass door up).

If you can't succeed with a necro it's on you, not the class.

[Ashlyn]

Necromancers getting level 50 cure critical healing shouldn't be a thing. Ever.

[Xenyar]

You guys can't see the forest through the trees.... You call in a turkey shoot? I call lack of preparation by the opponent. When you see logs of them wearing 80 mals against a necro, it's their own fault. They will get rolled with a full army of old school leet zombies, or sliths. If you log on and see a necro, WEAR LOTS OF SAVES PEOPLE AND YOU WILL HAVE LESS PROBLEMS WITH NECROMANCERS. There is a target number of mal saves you need.

I'll roll another necro sometime and it will be the same ole routine when they die, I'm sure. People not wearing enough saves.

Ashlyn, I can agree with your statement. I suggested a hard cap on vamp touch HP gains so you're not getting 50+ hp back. The current setup of using 35 mana for 16 hp gains from using it on nymphs...not worth it... and those nymph will still hit your necro occasionally, even at lvl 50.

Kalist, yes, right now farming scrolls is probably the way to go. Do those energy scrolls still decay?

[Xenyar]

Revert popping zombies and just put a lvl cap on what zombies you can raise, like lvl 52 or something. That way you don't see altar guardians rolling around whacking people. That's what brought on most of these changes... Illyiza rolling with lvl 60 zombies. That would have been a good start. Level cap on zombies and HP cap on vamp touch. But instead, we run it through the meat grinder...and then have to go back and re-fix what was "fixed" by the fixer.

[Davairus]

Literally the pendulum of balance of chasing around a necro to stop full zombies was disclosed to you and you just fucking blacked out

[Ashlyn]

Draining someones life shouldn't be cost efficient, it isnt healing, its stealing. My idea for vamp touch would be 30 mana for 30 hp and it temporarily reduces your max hp for 10% of the amount healed for a day. Take out the level component. Would balance it out pretty well and make it something you have to consider carefully.

[Xenyar]

And what prompted your "turkey shoot, we must change necro zombies" mentality? Illyiza.
Do you see the correlation there? Do you not think before you type, or do you just blackout? I might know a good therapist for that...

[Davairus]

Xenyar, what point are you trying to make here exactly? We could have a much bigger playerbase today if you did not turkey shoot so many surges with that character, and I am pretty sure the chief reason you deleted is because after you collapsed the sunday surge playerbase by forcing players to logout every week for months, you just ran out of turkey. Eventually its a self-correcting problem.

With vamp touch, I actually had wanted to buff vamp touch for Alhoons. I'm annoyed that you spoiled my plans for this. Instead what I addressed was that stupid vamp touch exploit after Resatimm caught you red-handed abusing it, but that wasn't Ilyza, that was some other stupid necro. It isn't surprising that just blends together for you.

This is the log that ended vamp touch:
* https://abandonedrealms.com/logs/view_log.php?id=1800

Notice at no point did I ask for any input from you on vamp touch.. it'd be like asking you how to fix word of recall, your response is going to be like "what do you mean? recall potions are like 50 lbs each and waste tons of gold, its so hard already, nothing wrong with word of recall, everybody else just sucks, and I can't help it that I am so great". Heaven forbid it could be a balance issue, meanwhile you and you alone can see that everybody else is too stupid to see everything is fine.

Any change we do to necro is going to need to factor in the class being evil and that coming with a propensity to deliberately massacre everybody and ultimately what the long-term effects on our game's playerbase size WILL BE of a character that is extremely effective at this.

[Bladefury]

I agree with xenyar still. Reduce vamp touch to what Ashlyn said minus the HP take away. That's stupid. Then restore zombie time to normal no more explosions and make the cap at 52 I literally only know a couple zombies at 52. I'd prefer 54 because I like scheartzer and the elder dragons but that's fine.

[Davairus]

Messing with zombies and vamp touch again is going backward. I am starting to zone out on this thread, and this is why. There is no real sense of goodwill here that you guys have any interest in playing necromancer to actually play a necro. From what I have seen from this class, over the years, similarly with shaman, its been doing nothing but glorifying ganking. That has its place, but with different classes completely. Its a horror kinda game, and an important part of horror is being pursued by a monster, which could be a dk, a pissed-off necro, a ranger, a vampire, a fire giant warrior, etc. Or conversely, while playing the monster, getting chased around by a Knight - they're your respective monster. The games cat and mouse fun comes from the chase not getting instant gibbed. and it should be perfectly possible to have a fun and intriguing necro class without it being gankers two rounding instant gibbing all the other level 50 with innkeepers and then posting self-satisfying logs about it. and the problem with this class it is played ONLY by gankers all relying on the exact same crutches. Necromancers should ideally be a highly intelligent player capable of forming a cult of other players to do his bidding just like the mobs he commands, i.e. leader of Legion, or maybe Justice cabal. those kinda necro is what I'm looking for. thats why you gotta do better than this ganks crap

[Kalist19]

That's what I was aiming to do with Linisan but deleted to do something else. I specifically went justice so it wouldn't just be 'another OP necro that stops people from logging on'. No matter how strong he got eventually you would always be safe in town.

[Arunore]

"and the problem with this class it is played ONLY by gankers all relying on the exact same crutches."

I'm not quite sure I would 100% agree with this statement. I can say that when I played Ravinah I was completely unaware that rend life was broken, but I do think 10 hit 10 dam is too much, and while that spell aided me in gaining zombies and to defeat the tougher opponents along the way, it was not the sole factor in my Necromancer arsenal. The character had joined Legion but left due to who was in charge of the Cabal at the time, and the seemingly OOC (which is why I created the character in the first place, to eradicate these OOC rings) ring I was then surrounded by. That was a different time, though, and it can be said that the success of that character was shadowed by a albeit broken class. Is that the players fault? Not necessarily, unless a bug is being abused. But sometimes it is hard to differentiate whether a skill/spell/song is working as intended, because the helpfiles are so vague. I think if the numbers and all details of the ability you are using are displayed in the helpfile it will help crunch level-playing fields down. You will have more people sending in bug reports, more voices, and less of, "Nycticora says ' Did you know this was broken?" Ravinah says "Hell no I didn't. Did you? Why am I the one figuring this out?" Not to sound incredulous but we are investing time and effort into our characters and it kills it for us to be guinea pigs. Just ask us, we are mostly (bladefury) willing to help. And we are all grateful for the free work that you pour into this. Do not forget that for a second. I'm looking at Kalist for some donations coming up, come on guys. We all been playing this for years, let's give some love to the people who make this possible.

No more ambiguity, help us help y'all correlate these changes until they are too late and driving away players.

With that being said, I agree with the concept of with great power comes great responsibility, but any of these race/class combinations could drive away players if a skilled enough player sits behind that keyboard. I will never play another Necromancer though, not since you killed off Shosethszar with your lvl 37 Avian Warrior on a lvl gap against a lvl 32 Necro. I'm not salty, I'm glad you did, because I went against my own word of ever making one again, and it near-sealed my disapproval of it, but what really sealed my disapproval with a stamp on it was the changes to them, much to Xenyar's point. I feel that we can compromise and come up with a solution.

Vargan thank you for showing me through logs the joy of having a taste of ale here and there. I will say that I think souls should be utilized as a buffer and management of some spells, so that they aren't just a daunting collection of "feed me more" mentality to gain as much as you can, unless that is the Shroud of Souls sold by Legion specifically for a Legion Necromancer at Vinnie. Perhaps body parts can be used with the new preserve corpse spell they got, limiting the amount of spellpower you can manage in a single bodypart to instill within a zombie. 3 comes to mind, since that is how many zombies at lvl 50 you can get, and have a random modifier of which bodyparts fall off the zombie.

I also want to say I really love your idea Dav of using the sepulcher and having Necromancers actually being Necromancers, that is golden. I think expanding on that will unlock some awesome features. I love you all, I hope everyone is doing well, let's get this thread on the right track.

[Dogran]

Get with the times, Vinnie was fired.

[Davairus]

Well there is nothing particularly complicated about the vamp touch spell. you could already do the 10 min of effort to check in game.l what I did years ago is set vamp touch's heal to restore 50% of the damage dealt. That way it scales properly, and has a nice feel and is distinct from the priest spells, and we can have vampiric touch do quite impressive damage when properly applied, but which is impacted by the opponents save, sanc, protection spell etc. I won't be changing vamp touch to convert mana to hp because that's unnecessary homogeneity and throws away all the potential counterplay.

Anyway the "issue" with vamp touch is simple in my mind. It was being abused to run around dealing massive damage to level 1 mobs for cake heals. Dumb. There are other ways to skin this cat, like I could make the touch spread out over 4 -6 rounds, so then that spell abominates the druid "wilderness healing" which also works over time, and then vamp touching a level 1 mob just wastes your startup mana cost, because it'll be dead before the heal finishes rolling. That also slows down how fast the necro heals without nerfing the effectiveness of a singular vamp touch, and maybe the presence of the touch could open up racial legacies to have an improved vamp touch that lasts a bit longer and/or gets better if you keep it rolling uninterrupted.

I still doubt this thread is really in good faith though, pretty sure these guys just want to go back to vamp touching level 1 mobs and heal 600 hp per tick like they did before i nerfed it, while having forever zombies that hit demolishes through sanc. Of course these are opinions of what would be best for the game, and I strongly disagree with them. I'm not in the least interested in reverting this, and wont do that. But I remain very open to tweaking these things in ways that do not defeat the purpose of the original changes, and as reminder specifically those are, anti-turkey shoot and spamming in heals on summoned vuln mobs after recalling to timaran. I dont see how there can be compromise on those. It is simply going backward to do anything that undoes the things that alleviated them. Changing the spells without going backward is another matter though.

[Arunore]

Doagie that was hypothetical I guess about Vinnie, but you're absolutely right about me getting with the times lol

Sounds like you have some solid solutions how to adjust vamp touch. I dont remember vamp touchin lvl 1's for any gains though, it was usually common fathers or farmers, or summon dryads and numphs order all sleep blind dryad/nymph and vamp touch it to death with the best malbreak you could find

I just know zombies going away after any duration sucks, but honestly I guess so foes logging on with a necro who prepped for 8 hours, its a time sink and not everyone plays bards, healers, or paladins to thwart said zombies.

I dont have any good ideas other than whats already been said for vamp touch, the channel could be cool and work it in the rounds so it hits every round but for like grazes and hits, giving you back minimal life so its not a reliable source of healing. Um, you could make it an opener only lol