Necro swarm pets since the patch

I agree Mackal, a good and easy fix for the Swarm Pet spells would be to now increase the damage of the 1 swarm we get.

Necros are still far behind in group DPS. This is partially attributed to the DoT nerf in RoF Beta. All DoTs received a 23% increase from VoA instead of a 33% increase. Aristo wanted to lower necro damage and didn't exactly understand why raid necros were doing more damage then what he wanted. The reason DoTs were doing more was because we were given DoT extension AAs and we could then stack more DoTs on raid targets.

Well, Swift DoTs also received only a 23% increase instead of a 33% increase like every other spell in game received. For the past 4 years, Necros swift DoTs have been stagnated and it shows. If you played during HoT, when Swift DoTs were introduced, remember how awesome they used to be? Not the case anymore.

Another problem is that group content is dying much faster than before. Like what another poster has said, I can barely cast my 3 swift DoTs on a target in time before it dies. Meaning I get about 2 ticks worth of damage on my first cast and maybe 1 on my last cast. Our DDs are pathetic and do less damage a lot of the time then 1 tick of a swift DoT.

Another fix is to have the 0s and 5s on separate timers.

What I mean is the 95, 105 swarm pets on one timer and the 90, 100 pets on another timer. This would limit the necro to only 2 swarms at once instead of the 3,4, or 5 some people did (even though that was an actual detriment to their dps).

Also increasing the damage of them would be a good idea.

Every swift dot needs damage that closely resembles Dichotomic. They should be a base of around 12-14k damage rather than their 7-9.5k that they are now. Maybe then necros will be competitive in the group game. They surely won't be the best but at least they would be somewhat tolerable to have in a group.

Other options are making necro nukes better. Right now they are so god awful that an 85 wizard could out dps necro nukes. Also, decrease the cast time of swift dots. With spell haste they are hovering around a 2.2 second cast time (?) if I'm remembering correctly off the top of my head. That means the first tick of the mob we'll only have 1 swift dot on and maybe 2. The next time we'll have all three if the mob isn't already dead. Even if we manage all three by the 2nd tick, wizards are still getting off 4-6 nukes in that time.

F it! just replace second swarm with AE damage aura when grouping and let the hilarity commence.

Right now sustained goes to wizzies. Gratz to them I'm def not hating. But please stop saying that I, as a necro, am advocating to be anything near tops at burst. Your misunderstanding of why peeps play a necro is showing. Perhaps instead of typing your opinions you might send me a /t (venau on tunare) and learn the real reasons many of us are disappointed with recent nerfages!

The problem is peeps(perhaps devs) noticed necro dps was very high. Instead of folks clearly understanding how much MB made necro dps rank off the charts on the leetness scale......the devs decided to 1) Remove MB's impact on necro DoTs...this solution alone would greatly decrease necro dps. 2) Remove the ability of FTP to proc GoDR. This is overkill and plain sillyness. I've seen many peeps say "whats the big deal...so u twin cast about half as many DoTs as before...on a raid mob the dps will be negligible." What these peeps fail to realize is that not only are we losing twincasts....but our DoT rotation is being destroyed at the same time. Example: Old way i'd have FTP running....would just keep casting DoT after DoT...most would twin...a few wouldn't ......no biggie......keep casting....GoDR expires...........keep casting rotation.......rinse and repeat to infinity or mobby dies. New way: Cast Orb, cast a DoT (already down one DoT in the rotation).......Cast Orb cast a DoT(now down 2 DoTs in the rotation)...Cast Orb cast a DoT (now down 3 DoTs in the rotation). All of these missed DoTs messes up our rotation and results in even more lost dps.

Do you care about lost DPS? Well I do and here is why. I know of several mid tier raid guilds that were barely squeaking by before the nerf bat hit us. After the nerf they are now struggling with events. This is causing peeps to become frustrated. Frustration equals lack of fun. Lack of fun equals quitting EQ. Peeps quit EQ and you, Faana, start making posts about how nobody will buy your stuffs on your server cuz population is too low.

I can go on and am more than willing to detail the real impacts of these nerfs if you have any interest in learning about them. If not.....no biggie.....carry on.........but know that many of us will merely glance past any of your future writings.

Maybe you missed what was just done to enchanters gift of hazy thoughts procs. At least YOU didn't have to get to level 105 and spend a pile of AA just to have your major ADPS nerfed.

And yeah. I already quit over nerfs back in 2013. I log in to hang with guildies. People are shocked when they see me outside of baz.

(Although it is true, I was half-heartedly working on a necro since it hadn't been nerfed so recently.)

Instead of swarm pets, you will be able to summon food items that stave off your enemies hunger for vengeance with new shawarma pets!

Summon puppies.

READ THIS! Way too many people out there are clueless as to how necros dps these days. Getting rid of mana burn would have been MORE THAN ENOUGH to cut necros dps by 50% on fights <100sec and 30% on fights over >200. Please fix this complete nonsense.

Wait wait, they really nerfed swarm pets?

And I was thinking of returning too, sad really.

Not much nerf. They just made it so that all the levels share a timer.

I was baffled by this remark about wizard nuke cast times and wondered what wizard spells (other than harvest and some port spells) take 10 seconds to cast. Then I read one of your subsequent posts:

If your wizards are casting Ethereal Fuse and then standing around for 33+ seconds to cast it again (or even chaining Ethereal Skyblaze with a recast of 5.5 seconds), that might be why your guild's necros are still topping parses post nerf.

I'm not seeing a necro, no matter how skilled, beating an equally skilled wizard, zerker, rogue, or beastlord after the Black February patch. In fact, I'm not seeing them on the parse (in our guild) at all. They haven't all quit or main changed yet, but that's only a matter of time.

Our necros still doing fine on certain events last week, from what I could tell. Their ramp up time is worse, and cast order is more of a pain. But on the necro friendly events, they're still good. The non-necro events that manaburn was skewing got even worse.

I don't think anyone was saying these nerfs killed necro DPS, but they were a quality of life downgrade on a class that already has the worst quality of life in raids due to having to deal with EQ's spell(set) swaping UI so much during raids.

Even on necro friendly events... We're not winning them either.. =(

Are or can zerkers, wizards and rogues win parses of durations over 3 minutes? 4 minutes? 5 minutes? 8 minutes? 10 minutes? Verse a equally geared and skilled necro who has no chance of keeping up with them in the group game, on trash or in a burst fight. From what I have seen the answer is now yes and that is flat out broken. Or there is no longer a point to playing a necromancer.

It should be obvious by now that this brouhaha is class envy.

^This mostly. Necros still parse fine but for guilds not in the top end (which I've already talked about before) it's going to be a much bigger hit. An example I could think of - If you were barely winning WnD within the timer pre-nerf MB and had Necros in raid, well, at least you can still win if they are enraged now post-nerf?

I can't comment on the other changes or how they affect group play for Necros. I abandoned using mine outside of Solteris farming a while ago and replaced with another class in my usual box group setup because it was already terrible. That's a poor metric though.

All that aside- nerfs completely out of left field for ANY class with absolutely no rationale or warning are stupid. Even if they are legitimate in some aspect. They still need tuning and a week on Test means that it's already set in stone so basically we have blind decisions going Live every month which are just re-patched and then re-re-patched months later. Waste of resources.

Can we please make necros more friendly to play?

One obvious thing includes procing Hand of Death. We have to be below 80% health to do this. Currently, Lifeburn is the best option but the long reuse on it makes it not viable in a lot of situations. We also have a Self-Sacrifice AA, but there is no difference between rank 1 and rank 2 of this AA. It alone is not enough to drop my health below 80%. I have to pair it with a mod rod and be lucky that I don't get a heal on me before then.

Another obvious one that has been complained about in this thread is Gift of Deathly Resolve. It takes the same amount of time to get 1 DoT twincasted as it does to just cast 2 DoTs. Think about that for a moment. Also, this AA messes up tight rotations if you want to be competitive. Obviously, Flesh to Poison remedied this issue back in CotF, but no longer is that the case.

Issue number 3 is the changes to our undead slow. Necros have had a 70% slow to undead since level 38. We were then given an AA slow back in VoA that was 70%. Later, it was upgraded to 75%. And then in RoF, got nerfed to 40%, but we received a new spell from Aristo that was a 45% slow. Maybe he doesn't know that we still have a level 38 70% slow to undead? Oh, and we were given an AA upgrade to our slow in TDS that bumped it from 40% to 45%. Yay. Lolol. I will still use my level 38 spell thank you.

Corruption spells are another issue. We get 1 line of corruption spells and they are only useful if the target is a plant. forget about using DoTs in groups cause bad, this leaves soloing and the raid game. Not very many options for plant killing solo. The raid game it is then. Oh but, Anashti Sul, Decay and the Final event of Anashti Sul get healed from these spells and disease spells. How anti necro can you get? Yes, druids can turn NPCs into plants, but if they are already flagged as undead, construct, fish, god, dragon, etc. then you are out of luck.

Speaking of Skin to Seedlings, why is it that after I use my combust bones DD (turns NPCs undead for 12 seconds) that the target can no longer be flagged as a plant, forever. All these clerics and paladins that ask me to turn the raid mob undead yet to the detriment of every necro in the raid for the rest of the duration of the encounter.

Let's talk about our favorite AA mistake, Death Blossom. This AA has been a disaster ever since Death Bloom was created. You have to wait for out of combat regen to use it, but because of server lag it actually puts the necro out of combat for close to 45 seconds half of the time. Necros suck at group DPS and they bleed mana quickly in groups. Just revert the change to Death Bloom already so necros can get their meesly 16k or so mana every 3 minutes. Make it 5 if that is what it takes.

Feel free to add to the list. I am sure there are more.

Would love to see instant cast DoTs for grouping or an activated twincast AA that doesn't require a nuke->DoT.

Give necros a new pet that is something like a familiar. You can call it a voodoo doll. How it works is, they dot the familiar, and the familiar relays say 80-90 or 100% of that damage to the main assist's target every tick.

The loss of a regular pet I think should be enough of a sacrifice that they should be allowed to do good dps in fast killing groups. Maybe not full on wizard levels of burst since they have the option of having a pet later if they want one, but it should still be quite strong. It could lead to some interesting and beneficial social dynamics.

In order to get my subs back they would need to do most of the following:

• Undo the nerf to necro fade, restore it back to 100% chance to drop aggro on all mobs level 110 or under currently. Like all the other pulling classes who had 100% chance to fade prior to changes.
• Undo the nerf to Gift of Deathly Resolve so that Flesh to Poison procs once again trigger it. If anything the Flesh to Poison proc rate needed to be increased to make this more reliable.
• Remove the timer from the dot Scourge of Fates. It never should have had a timer to begin with being it had the mob type condition to limit it nevermind it now sharing a timer with a 60s reuse spell that remove it from being used now.
• Undo the nerf to swarm pets so that the top 2 versions can be used.
• Change Gift of Deathly Resolve, Hand of Death, the proc Chaotic Power and Funeral Pyre to all work on 12 second duration swift dots for grouping. To address group burn dps.
• Possibly unlink all 5 swift dots for grouping and double the base damage of necro nukes. To address group or fast kill dps.
• Undo the nerf to Deathbloom or reduce it to 5 minute reuse.
• Fix the AA Self-Sacrifice to once again work as was intended regardless of hp pool and rune buffs. Or remove the sub 80% requirement for Hand of Death seeing as most of the other conditional AA lines have been addressed recently.
• Add the mage pet AA lines that add 10% hps and 10% chance to avoid melee to both necros and beastlords.
• Fix our AA undead slow. As was mentioned above this AA was supposed to be a copy of our level 38 spell and it was for years. Then like 2 years after the AA came out and 12 years after the original spell Aristo (despite lots of logic and protest) decided to then add a new undead slow spell at like level 100 that was 40% weaker than the original. Which was fine until someone else then used the new pointless spell as their basis for tuning when they went in and retuned all slow effects from spells and AA.

Short of that and I'll continue to linger the forums once in a great while and wait for someone to see the light or get it right again in another game. Said as much in my cancellation survey's, not that anyone reads them or cares.