Nec/Sk Dot Revamps

You can't revamp every ones dots but necromancers. When the stated goals were using less debuffs, less casts and improved damage with the degree of improvement varying by class. Necros don't need much if any improvement dps wise in raids just shifts in dynamic slightly. Group they do need more.

I don't care to speak for everyone but in my opinion necros would be happy with, and things still semi balanced:

• 8-10 dots in raids with relative performance staying as it is(meown had a great breakdown on how). So tuned in a manner that provides a bit more upfront damage but not zerker, wizard burst levels but with a reduction in overall stack base damage to offset this upfront gain so that sustained wasn't drastically impacted. If handled properly this keeps necro sustained relatively the same, improves burst some and most importantly reduces 8-10 debuff slots and required casts per necro. Or said another way if their current base dot stack with 18 dots is 90,000 damage spread pretty evenly between 2-5k base dots. You shift that to say 65,000 base damage for total stack spread out between 8 dots with two dots of like 14k base, 2 dots of like 10k base and 4 dots of 4-5k base.
• Swift dots for grouping, remove the recast timers and boost them by 50-100% and see how it works out. Reduce or increase as needed but pairing better swifts with the bigger regular dots should close giant group gap.
• For era's prior to skeletal swarm pets and swift dots you adjust the base regular dots damage up or down as needed even more depending on intended era levels and number of dot lines available.

Pretty sure you play an enchanter fransisco, so its quite funny you quote something your class could do with its eyes close as a reason for necros to not get their dots revamped. Your bad info and hate shine through in every post you seem to make.

The idea of a 30 second burst for wizards didn't even start till twincast and spires were added during SoD. By the time HoT came around we had ITC, reduced re-use timers, and havoc to proc twincast. By your definition I probably had a pretty good burstained mode even then. So, I figure there's 2 expansions of EQ where you thought things were good?

No the stupid that is today started around VoA. Prior to that and burst classes bursted and sustained classes sustained and people actually ran out of resources for results.

Resources are still a serious issue today. I had to use staunch to get the parse I listed above. I do that every week on ST3 and I still finish with under 30% mana. And I'm only speaking for my class but we gained the ability to do good sustained DPS during TSS. Our class was completely changed at that point.

As a burst class your resources should offer you 60 seconds of giant burst and then almost out of mana allowing you putter on for another 60s and then after that you're spent with your work done early carrying you forward dropping down down down if a fights to long. Or for longer durations you don't use the burn intensive tools and instead swap to more efficient spells, not that yours are currently tuned well to make them that. There is zero choice anymore as full out burn in any setting is the best and your spells like everyone elses related to burst are tuned such that using anything but your best non stop is wrong. Instead of it being worthwhile to burn like this if a fights 300 seconds or less but if its longer you do this instead using entirely different spells or skipping your massive sustained penalty burst tools. But it doesn't work like this anymore for any class really its just constant best you have in succession.

You having the resources to burn for 800k and then still continue on for 900 seconds at 350k + isnt managing anything.

We are getting away from the topic at hand and like I said there is no going back at this point. But speaking for wizards and in general adps if I was designing you never would have gotten mana harvests aa and spell, never had counters or duration added to your burn tools just boosted burst power in a short duration window. Given your massive burn spikes your burn tools would be longer reuse so you could only use them like every other event and classes without that massive potential would get to reuse their stuff faster so their 2 lower reuses would put them in ballpark of your one massive long reuse stuff.

Stuff like auspice of the hunter, black wolf, IoG would all be 50% less power then they currently are and 50% less duration just to start, all the mana crap like paragons, focused paragons, rally calls, etc would also be cut by 50% or more both in impact and duration. Burn tools would have reuse times that didn't allow for them to be up every event for some. Others that perform lower at max potential might have faster reuse for overall increased sustained on the night despite never having the wow capabilities. So people had to actually manage their play by making choices both in strategy and with class selection, not do the same thing for 900 seconds straight without changing anything really except for the mods slowly dropping off.

Most of the spells people now spam cast as they pop as the only way to perform as a class were designed originally to only be used with gift of mana procs.

But the necro community is dead? 10 pages later.

Where does this arbitrary 60 seconds come from? How is there zero choice? Today's spells just have different names and we have more options. Alliance and Dicho are the new big nukes and you cut AA nukes and cloudburst if you're low on mana. Plenty of people still bring in the wildmagic line to save mana. We've had blindness/damage added to our beams for years now so there's more than just a mana/agro trade-off. I regularly load 10 even 11 nukes at once in current EQ which is far more than I had to manage before. And they're not based on resists in RoS. I just need that many.

And for some reason you think 800k and 350k is bad or too much? Compared to who and compared to what? DPS is relative between the classes and between what's needed to beat content. We're 7 expansions from VoA of course our DPS has gone up. And why bring up spells like Harvest? You're seriously going back and complaining about changes since Kunark? You're just making stuff up and complaining about things you personally don't like over the years. It's kinda silly and completely divorced from reality.

Your opinion or my opinion wont change the game. So its silly to go back and forth.

However the game was way better off when dps classes varied and no one type was always the best regardless of the setting. There was no burstained where you had your cake and ate it too. Some classes bursted insanely high and had long reuse tools like once an hour and went out of resources extremely fast when they burned, they had poor sustained as a trade off. Some classes bursted ok but for less than the above and sustained higher than those burst classes but a little bit, they burned resources slower but had less burn power. Some classes bursted for crap but had the highest sustained compared to everyone else and rarely ran out of resources, but couldn't dump those resources into burst so it didn't matter.

Reuse of aa, disc, etc actually evened the field so that no one class was the best in slot no matter what.

This hasn't been the case in the past few years. Just because some accept it as the norm and reality doesn't mean it was a good choice.

Thought I'd go ahead and come in and derail this whole thread...

1. You guys actually think the devs read this stuff? Youre living in a dream Land.

2. Necros won't be getting any dot revamps at least for the next 2-3 years they have to much catering to do on the TLPs.

3. IF they do the revamp noone will like it cause chances are they will 100% screw it up making necros *op* so SHM DRU I will cry and moan cause necros dots are out dpsing theirs.

4. Refer to number 1.

So your basically saying "grumble grumble this game isn't like I 'member' it being" now?
What does that have to do with your objections that necros don't burst enough or don't compete for #1 spot in all parses?
Because wizards!

And I have no idea why you think that wizards should beat necros on 16 min long parse.

I'd suggest you actually read and digest what I posted. Its sort of the opposite of what you say. Not some white knight be any means but I would say I am in the minority about keeping actual balance instead of justifying why I should dps as good as everyone else always. However I am not stupid so if wizards, enchanters, mages, berserkers and druids get to burst high and sustain high and to a degree a few other hybrids to a lessor extent then tack me in for necros doing it as well.

I said I think it's good that we're competitive. But no I don't think there should be many scenarios where a wizard has zero chance of being at the top. This particular event has lots of short lived adds to beam so I think wizards should do pretty well on it. Just because an event is long doesn't mean necros should be #1 all the time.

Ladies, ladies, ladies ... you are both agreeing on the same thing.

The parse below is the same event as kizant's, but for me. I am only doing this because I am trying to be more transparent.

/GU Combined: Venril Sathir in 971s, 389196k @400408sdps --- #1 Shennron 389196k@400408sdps (400820dps in 971s) [100%]



As mentioned by Spellfire, this parse heavily favors the necromancer. Longer duration = more DoTs that lasts their full duration. And you have 2 targets, meaning less spell swaps and more usage of the higher valued DoTs.

For this fight in particular, you can see that I burned at 5 minute mark on Rile (who is not poison immune), and then burned as refreshes occurred (5 min on Anguish BP, 7.5 min on Third Spire, 8.5 min on Hand of Death).

A more standardized RoI fight will look like the graph below.



This is something that has not been mentioned yet in this thread. One of the most critical things in maximizing a necro burn is to wait until all your DoTs have been applied (ramp time). You don't follow raid main assist at all. In fact, just ignore it like I do with Aldryn all the time.

This is also unlike any other class where you can adjust damage output at any point in the event, depending on what benefits the raid the most. Non DoT classes will be able to swap targets and roughly lose minimal DPS. The theoretical total damage that a necro puts out on events may look good, but their raid contribution is limited only to high HP targets. Also, necros don't swap targets even during an HP lock. The parser is still running, but you may as well count all that damage as a big fat ZERO.

A potential DoT revamp will help to semi alleviate the ramp time, giving more flexibility on when to burn during an event. However, I am also concerned about the first introduction of these revamped DoTs. They will most likely be out of balance. I will have a follow-up post that will try to estimate the base damage that necromancers will need to be roughly equal DPS as they are currently on raids.

Going forward, I think that the discussion should be redirected to ideas about how to improve group play as a necromancer. Should their current group spell options be altered? Should they gain new spells/abilities to assist their current setup? Should the necro aura become parseable?

95% of the posts in here from the necro community has been about the group game. We can argue all you want about the raid game but I think there is not a person in this thread that hasn't acknowledged short of the debuff issue, there is overall little problem or no apparent problem. The same is not said about the group game. And the thing that makes necros so strong in the raid, RAMP of many spells, makes them so weak in the group game because there is no ramp. It's all burst.

I would actually say that I am far more concerned about the raid game for necromancers then in am about group game. Necromancer class is in collapse in the raiding game. Necromancers have already collapsed in group game. I'm far concerned about stopping the collapse in raiding then I am about fixing the group game.

Not that I oppose fixing the group game for necromancers. But this triage type situation where you have to treat what is most critical problem first.

Actually, the argument used for groups also applies to raids to the extent that raids don't last long enough for a necro to stack 15 damage over time spells on the target, or don't have enough spell slots for that to happen. It's the same argument either way because the game design principle and mechanic doesn't change, only the length of the encounter, so you could just treat it as a balance issue necros have with any short encounter.

There's also the game play issue of having to cast 15 different spells in the first place in order to finish a rotation, which is just ridiculous from the perspective of quality of life. Which other class has to combat memorize in order to do its standard DPS rotation?

The reason the class is broken is because of this death by a thousand spells design, which isn't in line with how the rest of the game is played. The damage over time changes happened because ALL damage over time spells had this sort of balance - a consequence of tradition - and consequently ALL of them were out of balance and out of use, except for those who had no choice, like necros.

You could read a strategy guide from two years ago for beast or druid, and it would say: don't ever waste a spell slot on damage over time spells, because they're useless. That's how bad it got, and that's what caused the changes.

But those classes had options. Their entire class wasn't about damage over time spells, like necros are. Necros actually need this change more than any class in the game, yet now a year later, no change has been announced. That's what makes it depressing.

I think that's an opinion that should be left up to people who actually main the class (which I'm not). It's a distinct style of play with some nuances. It does give people an alternative to the multi-bind mash style of play. I'd give the opinion much more weight if the real necros were screaming about it.

With game design further and further making most classes of an archetype essentially the same (look at enchanters being morphed to dps while their runes and cc are being devalued), I do think it's refreshing to have an outlier that's unique in style. People that think it's ridiculous have plenty of other choices of what class to play.

It's amazing watching this thread and seeing how many non-necros have opinions of how necros should be played. Even to the point of arguing with the few responses from actual necros.

I haven't raided since TDS, so I can't speak to it. What I do know is necros have been dead for some time in the group game as you said. Apparently to many necros in this thread that's ok because we can solo. Which is odd because my mage can do the same and amazingly enough isn't useless in a group...

Necromancers have been broken for so long in the group game. That it seems be just the way it is. I can understand that group necromancers are frustrated. But collapse in raiding is the most extreme risk for the class at the moment.