Shattered Kingdoms

Its all about how you play it, I believe. My necro a few years back only had true enemies in other necros, and even helped lighties fight em. Of course I didn't carry undead with me at those occasions, but still. This guy was probably the exception, of course.

To address the issue, Here's what I think:


Etherealform:
Easy enough to obtain through other means but, that aside, i think that death shroud and the ability to walk into some areas of the game as if they were your cabal headquarters and lure pursuers there is awesome.

Final strike:
Okay, not much to say there. Personally I do not open discussions concerning finalstrike as I believe it is the single silliest thing in SK.

Yeah, It's been used for great things once or twice, but in my mind, its one of the major reasons big rp events are not organized by players without an imm hand. Someone will almost always come by and FS the place.

Petrification:
Imo, FoD > Petrification.

Petrification will not get you the lewt, nor will it deal any damage if the target saves.

I think the problem is not in the class itself, it is perfectly balanced as I see it, and it still packs a punch hard enough to defeat almost any other class of the game 1v1, even when the necro is under-equipped.

I think the problem is that people still think of what necros once were, in malias's own IC words: Yeah. Necros no longer need 3 people against them in order to have a chance to defeat them, nor can they solo guardians with their undead. This is a good thing IMO.

You never needed three people to defeat a necromancer. A paladin or priest with holy word can and always has been able to cripple a necromancer's classic defense. I'm sure there's other strategies which work, but that's not the way the class was described or played for the longest part of SK. I do not think that it ever took 3 players to defeat a single necromancer, unless they didn't use holy word. Then they probably died.

I laughed pretty hard when I read this... cause it's so true.

If you didn't have a paladin or a priest, you needed 3 people, and even then it was pretty ambiguous whether the single necro would die or not.

The chances you would be facing a necromancer when there wasn't a bloodthirsty paladin or lightie priest looking to take them down, or have a member of a tribunal with HW capable NPCs are likely slim to nil. Sorry that you chose to go into what would appear to be a suicidal situation. That's just not being very tactical if you know you're going to be faced with an army of undead.

I don't know if I still have the log of Ardith destroying solo an army of 25 undead. One second longer and I would have died. That's prior to the concentration changes. After hours of preparation. One character can destroy it. A weakness such as that should be enough to offset the strength of the necromancer class.

If we're going to remove the traditional methods from a class, I think it should only come with new features to replace the change in utility. There weren't any new features added to help necromancers stay afloat when they were hit so hard with a nerf bat. Control undead was slightly buffed. I don't think its enough, unless you increase the number, access, and variety of undead available and useful for controlling dramatically.

After double checking, I found some glaring errors on scrolls I have recently added. I tweaked them to be much more useful, which was how they were intended to work originally.

Lets look at the Necromancer help file



Now lets say your are new to the game, would you think that a) Hey there should be a limit to the number of undead I play or b) Armies? Seriously? I am going to make an army and invade cities!

This is something close to what I would think necromancers are like now.

I agree. This change wasn't needed. With Bog out there necros have enough to worry about. I will state this for the 10000th time. With Roriand, myself and Jorlian killed every necro that lived in his day, most of them over and over again.

I have to be very careful about this because I don't want to come off as a braggart that will make my post invalid, just some vain ranting. But I kid you not there's no necromancer I couldn't kill.

Granted they were mostly deep-elves but still. I don't think Necros needed a wimping. They aren't that tough. You get a keeper with a law NPC and one char who can holy word and any necro no matter how many undead is proably gonna get beat.

Holy word casts fast, real fast, you can wipeout like 20-25 undead with 2 holy words like they are nothing. Bog can wipe out a necro in 2-3 bolts. I mean Necros really aren't over powered and weren't over powered before the change. The only thing overpowered about necros, and I will grant you that this is true, is that a necromancer could do anything alone.

There is no NPC a necro can't handle by himself. Even the archmage with all his fancy scripts can be dealt with. In that regard they are very strong, but at the same time no matter what they collect a good priest in a tribunal, or a good paladin should be able to get off them.

Okay well so far I guess I've just been complaining and not adding anything really constructive. These are my thoughts on what should happen to necromancers to lighten the nerfing a bit. Some of these can only be done by Dulrik, others not.

1. If you're not going to get rid of the stupid concentration on animate dead, get rid of the timer.
2. Add more GM level undead to control with various nifty abilities that AREN'T eliminated when the undead is controlled. GM necro barb please? Dracolich was one but someone made him uncontrollable...
3. Any GM undead merc in the middle of nowhere (read necropolis) should start with at least a crappy version of the weapons it is specced in as it is ridiculous not knowing what to have it use to make it the most efficient. Sessie does, and Varloch starts with one of his, but Banespirit and such don't start with jack.
4. Lower concentration requirement on Finger of Death or lower concentration further on Control Undead.
5. Give Energy Drain a partial resist to get rid of xp drain but still deal damage.
6. More strong/powerful scrolls of . I think Achernar said he added some but I haven't seen them yet, but we'll see.
7. Lower mana drain on Control Undead, having to return to an inn every few minutes as anything but a gnome is ridiculous.
8. 'Bolster' spell as suggested before. MINIMAL concentration, and minimal if any mana drain. If you're not going to give necromancers enchant armor, give them another way to buff both THEIR own and their UNDEADs resistances, damage, stats, etc. Have it increase all resists by a certain amount, as well as give a 'rallying cry'-like buff to undead for damage purposes. Maybe some other minor buffs as well.
9. For some reason I'm also thinking of some sort of 'spirit link' spell where either you like yourself with your undead and any damage you take is partially split with them...or link undead together so you can't 'focus fire' or at least make them last a little longer. This is a lot more tentative then the first 8 though.
10. Bring back a darkie cabal...

I'm sure there are more things, I just can't think of them right now.

Make a group version of death shroud.