Necro DOT Revamp!

FYI I suggested to start with 2-3 lines, balance them, then move on to 2-3 more, balance them and move one to more, ending with total consolidation and balance for the class in general. Trying to take on every line all at once will never get it done.

The problem is, and TLP players have a hard time getting it through their heads, the dot revamps are not aimed at the TLP's. They have almost nothing to do with the TLP's, and only incidentally impact the us. The devs didn't set out to balance changes on the TLP's. It was purely aimed at live. Looking at the history of how it actually played out on the TLP's makes that abundantly clear--they broke things badly initially because they hadn't even considered the TLP impact when making the changes. Then broke things again trying to rectify the first mess.

It makes zero sense to keep bringing this up on the TLP forums at all, as if it were a TLP issue when it isn't.

Also, consolidating all the lines down to roughly 12 lines that stack with each other is a great goal, this leave one spell slot for taps/chaos power nukes. Sure it may simplify the class a bit more than it already is, but isn't that one of the main complaints from live necros is that they have to battle mem 3 spell sets just to come close to the DPS of other classes that don't battle mem anything. Considering the other clickies we maintain and AA abilities to manage, I would think that a 12 dot rotation with clicks in between and nukes to round of the rotation would be a perfect balance of difficulty and enjoyment. Now once you factor in resists, and specific lines that may not land, that would allow a necro to possibly utilize other parts of their kit to do other things during the raid. Mindwrack, make/use orbs/shards, heal buff pet, refresh aura and again AA clickies.

I do believe the resists of certain lines would need to be looked at slightly because a resist on a DoT = full resist, where a nuke can partial resist. I believe that our snare line would not need to be adjusted. Our Tap-over-time dot line would need to be balanced so the damage would scale up due to lack of stacking but the healing would stay the same, then the cost of the dot would need to be re-balanced to accommodate for the fact that dmg went up but healing didn't.

Again, taking this all on at one time seems to be a bit too much to grasp. I suggest the consolidation and balancing of 2-3 lines at a time and continuing on with the process from there. This would require patience from the necro community, but to be honest I would be a lot more patient knowing that this revamp is being looked at and worked on by seeing incremental changes being made.

I don't see any reasonable suggestions coming from those that would shout me down. And in my opinion any negativity at this point would just serve to lengthen the process by adding stress to an already untenable situation.

Thank you Ngreth and Prathun for your attention to this thread and I hope you know that we still have faith in you guys and your ability to make this a challenging yet enjoyable game all these years later.

Understand Machen that this IS a TLP issue as we are approaching on the TLPs the EXACT time that we start having to battle-mem spells to maintain DPS. This is the PERFECT time to address this. You unfortunately have yet to suggest any reasonable solution to the problem. Because of this, I am inclined to file your posts into the round file cabinet of my mind because they simply are negative with no offers for solutions. I have read each of the threads where this has been discussed and only see a bunch of suggestions that require massive difficulty and are full of generalities.

We need to help our devs by suggesting a game plan that simplifies this insanely difficult process and partitions it into manageable tasks, instead of being negative about the entire thing. It is two and a half years later, let's start setting obtainable goals.

Please understand that they may not get it perfect the first time around and that is ok, because it can always be adjusted and tuned later. It happened with shaman and other classes and is bound to happen with necros. If we know this ahead of time it should lessen the angst felt later one when we need the final balancing to be done. I am trying to approach this situation at this point from a position of positivity and constructive criticism and I encourage the rest of you necros to do the same. We all know that supreme negativity has gotten us no-where at this point.

Thank you again.
Hades / Pazuzu

We, the TLP community, CANNOT do this because we don't understand the complexities of the class and how changes we might think are workable would impact live.

This is the whole point I have been getting at. It is a fool's errand to try to address these issues based on the limited perspectives of a TLP player. I don't understand them fully. No one posting to this thread does, except for maybe players who play a necromancer at a high level on both live and TLP's. (I am not convinced that there is anyone who has posted in this thread who does.)

The dev staff absolutely does not need our help to suggest a game plan, because I guarantee they have thought about this issue a lot longer and harder than any TLP player has.

You clearly arent understanding whats being said here. The devs dont care that a necro will have to have multiple spell sets to have all their dots on a mob, thats a part of playing the class that comes with min/maxing to be doing the best you can for your class. Its also not just becoming an issue of having to swap spellsets now, realistically you should have been doing this since kunark VP dragons, if you havent been you havent been maxing your dps.

The issue for dot line consolidation is specifically because the buffcap limit, which isnt getting remotely close to being hit on TLP's, limits the number of spells that you can have people casting. The consolidation wasnt to make getting all your dots on faster or to make dotters lives easier, it was meant to make it so guilds didnt have to limit the number of necros on a raid as after a certain number of them they werent able to dot because the mobs didnt have room for more.

While I agree this needs to be done and should have been done long ago, however it's not going to happen in the middle of Beta for a new expansion. I'm not sure why everyone seems to think that Beta is the best time to bring up stuff that takes massive amounts of work to do. They can barely get the expansion out on time, what makes you think they have anywhere near the time for this >< So for now, this is all you get >

That's an easy one. Beta, what's that? This is the TLP forum and beta doesn't matter!!!

I will reiterate my previous statement that negative responses at this point serve no purpose as we have had quite enough of that already. Your trollish feeble attempt to derail this thread is not needed nor does it provide any new information at this point. If you don't want to see the necros to discuss this, then don't open the thread and read it. Let's try the non-shout down method for a change.

Actually, you clearly haven't been reading the threads or you would have noticed that the issue is both the debuff limit AND the fact that having to battle-mem 3 spell sets in order to achieve similar DPS that other classes get by hitting auto-attack or by casting 3-5 spells in repetition has become ridiculous and needed to be addressed. This revamp/consolidation would fix both of these situations. If you had played a high level necro on live, you would know this.

I have a high level necro on live and play him from time to time, so I understand the frustrations with the current situation. Because you don't play a high level necro on live and don't even main a necro on TLP, I must ask you why you are posting on a thread about a necromancer revamp at all. This really has nothing to do with you. It seems that due to the sheer amount of posts you have made on almost every thread covering every subject on these forums, that you seem to think that every issue is affecting you. This one isn't. Your input, especially because again you have yet to bring anything substantive to this conversation, really is superfluous at best.

Please Ngreth and Prathun, we understand that there is an expansion coming up and there is most likely a push towards getting that content refined and ready for release. This does not mean that this issue, which has been affecting the necro community quite some time now, needs to be discredited completely as others would have you believe. We only want to let you know that we still are here and still are eagerly awaiting that which has been promised us. Thank you again.

If live necro had fire-magic-disease-poison-corruption consolidated dots (my live necro hasn't got high enough to see new flavors) does that solve the debuff issue or just allow 1-2 necros to come along?

Battle-memming 2-3 spell sets of dots constantly sounds silly. Duration is out of hand if that tactic appealing and/or necessary. Balancing the class DPS allowing more than 10 dots to be cast at a time from spell gems was probably a mistake (shared cooldowns across resist types would have worked... so you can cast your top 10 level dots, or you top 10 disease dots, etc. to give you target flexibility). 10 is an example number here.

It doesn't matter @ 65 on progression from the stacking standpoint as there isn't enough dots worth casting to do 2-3 sets. The debuff situation obviously does matter on early progression to live.

I currently on my Phinny necro have 2 entire spell sets of dots that I attempt {with the massive lag} to maintain on a raid target. Soon enough, this will become 3 spell sets. Also, we are approaching the point where we will be encountering the debuff limit. Necros have already been abandoning the class in favor of other viable options since POP. As soon as a raid can only support 1-2 necros, you will see revenue loss. Most necros that have stuck it out this far, will most likely just stop playing at that point and hand their money to someone else. How about we work towards a solution to the issue before this occurs on the most popular TLP server to date.

This clip sums up the feeling of necros who are all waiting for the dot revamp.

Poor poor necros still no DoT revamp yet they apparently had time to somehow make a FACTION window boy i hope its just for the newer expansions factions... Because didn't a dev like Prathun say a year or two ago that a faction standing window would be a damn near impossible task because the game got something stupid like 3000 different factions... So they can do apparently the damn near impossible but can't give the necros some love

Or if Necro is supposed to be the king of DoTs...

Why not just make all DoTs chromatic, limit them to 4 lines and scale them accordingly?

Completely replacing necro dots with new ones to suit the new reality possibly makes the most sense. Then they can just leave all the old spells in place for the NPCs that cast them without that balance altering too.

Right, completely replacing every spell in their lineup would certainly have no unforseen consequences over 25 expansions.

Which new reality are you speaking of? The new reality in the classic-->pop game? The new reality in TSS-->SoD? The new reality on live? Those are all very different realities.

Sure, never mind raid encounters that require certain spell lines/resist types be used in various scenarios. Just make them all chromatic, and necros can just not be brought to those fights. Or heck, just redesign all those fights, what could go wrong.

Keep in mind I said "possibly"... I refer to Debuff counter reality, which is a global change so it has to work everywhere.

Leave all the old spells in game for the NPC, remove all current necro dots (including those shared with other classes) and overlapping (if redundant) debuffs from the necro spellbook.

You would tune the lines for the first level cap expac to keep it simple, though maybe you stagger the lines a bit through the long eras in certain levels (i.e., each level 70 expac gives you one more line's level 70 dot).

Then give necro 5-7 dot lines:

1. magic, dot damage, snare component + resist debuff component (scent of dusk line) that shares cooldown with a snare/debuff that does no damage* (could even do a third version as per insidious retrogression which is DD + snare but holds a dot debuff slot)

2. disease, dot damage + lowers disease resist, strength and AC debuff component (see Asystole)*, could share a cooldown with group recourse version (see succussion of shadows)

3. poison,dot damage + lowers poison resist, strength and sta debuff component (see Degeneration)*

4. curse (see Dark Soul LDoN), dot damage and hp drain recourse to caster (see Vexing Mordinia) that shares cooldown with a group recourse version of the spell. Not on same cooldown as shadowbond line (as this allows necros to heal pet via mob HP through themselves).

5. fire, -resist count typical of necro fire dots, dot damage + attack debuff (see crippling claudication)*

6. magic 2, splurt line which is low aggro, low damage ramps up to decent damage dot, with -magic resist check.

7. magic 3, mind wrack line, large resist check, mana drain that feeds group... possibly convert this line to a DD mana drain that puts a recourse song onto the group... aka no debuff slot used?


*you make a no damage (no dot) version of the debuff component. At times the debuff amount won't change (i.e., you might do a level 50, 60, 65 poison dot that all have the same value of degeneration debuff).

This maintains the current self utility, and direct damage utility. It doesn't address undead dots/debuffs so maybe that is one other dot line (Undead dot + undead slow etc.). As long as the damage and mana/cost is tuned to the 50, 60, 65 etc. eras it probably doesn't break the solo or group game.

Biggest issue soloing with superdots is resists burning way more mana than losing one cast of a current dot. Maybe necros gets more -resist bonus added into the non fire lines to adjust for that... or lich line gets lower level when you get each version or something?

I'm thinking it wouldn't need to share the cooldown. Situationaly, being able to cast the debuff of any spell line and then later overwrite it with the dot would make sense and provide more tactical utility.

Not sure if you would make dot version only overwrite the no-dot, or if you'd have that go both ways (would allow necros to undot a target... hmm...)