Necromancer 2022

Tossing out some prior ideas. Class is extremely strong dps wise thanks to most dot spells being revamped and some ranks to AA for dots that shouldn't have happened. So list is mostly comprised of quality of life changes/additions from prior years.

~~AA~~
- Hand of Death: Reduce recast time to 7:30 (currently 8:30) and reduce cast time to instant.
- Pestilent Paralysis: increase root duration to 4 minutes. Cast range increased to 250. Reduce reuse down to 30s.
- Pestilent Spray: activated ability that causes up to 8 targets in front of you to succumb to a sudden, violent attack, pushing them back and rooting them in place for 4 minutes. .01 or instant cast, 60s reuse.
- Quick Dots: something to get us to 50% dot haste when we have a raid haste item (like Quick Damage for nukes).
- Out for Blood: passive ability that increases the chance that our spell line "Proclamation for Blood" will trigger "Chaotic Power". Mage AA version is Flames of Power
- Gift of the Grave: absorb dot damage aspect added being the dot specialists. Something like Gift of the Grave VI:
1: Absorb DoT Damage: 20%, Max Per Hit: 20000
3: Absorb Spell Damage: 15%, Max Per Hit: 20000
- Speed of the Wraith: increased base run speed by 135%, increase speed cap by 5, duration 2 minutes. 5 minute recast.
- Embrace the Decay: counters cured increased especially curse. We have had cure curse for our pet since level 7 and can cure our pet of 79 curse counters every 4ish seconds yet our 3 minute reuse self cure is unable to handle current curse counter requirements. Reuse reduced to 90s.
- Encroaching Darkness: increase snare duration to 4 minutes, increase effect to 75% snare. Cast range increased to 250.
- Mark Grave/Return to Grave: self only secondary bind affinity/recall.
- Mercurial Torment: reuse dropped to 15 minutes and add a .5 second reduction in dot casting time that bypasses haste cap of 50%. This would put dots at a 1 second cast time for its duration.
- Scent of Thule: Can we just have this restored to what it was, its silly that we now either don't use it at all due to debuff cap issues or end up using 2 debuff slots for what should be 1.
- Bloodmagic: reuse dropped to 15 minutes, down from 18, additional 6 second duration added to all phases.
- Gift of Venom: this passive AA adds an additional 24 counters to our proc nuke buffs. Flesh to Venom, Flesh to Poison and Bestow Rot.
- Shadows Boon: this passive AA allows your life tap dots and life tap dot recourse healing effects to exceptionally heal their target at X% per rank. An exceptional heal doubles the healing value for that 6 second interval.
- Death's Defiance: this passive AA allows you 1% chance to resist stun, snare, charm, blind and mezz effects per rank.
- Deadskin: this activated ability cast's your most current rune spell, latest being Carrion Skin. 60 second reuse mana cost as deemed appropriate.
- Bertoxxulous Eye: summons a magical eye that allows you to see creatures with enhanced invisibility for 120 seconds. Upgraded necro version of eye of zomm clicky that allows you to see invisible and see invisible 2.
- Convergeance: Hastened cast time by 50%.
- Mortifier's Unity: Hastened cast time by 50%. Add Shield of Order, Sigil of the Arcron, Infuse Ally, and Phantasmal Ward(98) to the list of buffs.
- Lingering Fear: passive ability the reduces the chance that a necros root spells are broken when a direct damage spell strikes the target.
- Focused Swarms: reduce the recast time of our swarm pet spells by 2 seconds. Most current version being "Call Skeleton Mass".
- Focus Imbue Ally: increases buff duration by 300% for the spells Imbue Ally and Infuse Ally.
- Focus Plexipharia's Grasp: 3 seconds cast time removed from this spell line (currently the only dot thats not 3 second base cast time). Frozen Leech dot line added to this AA, currently does not receive the 25% boost from focus AA lines like all other dots.
- Reaper's Harvest: killshot AA, whenever the necro or his pets get a kill shot on a non trival mob he has a 30% chance to proc Death's Fury.

Death's Fury
Target: Self
Duration: 42s (7 ticks)
2: Increase Critical DoT Damage by 100% of Base Dot Damage.
3: Increase Current Mana by 400 per tick
4: Cast: Wraith's Fury

Wraith's Fury
Target: Pet
Duration: 42s (7 ticks)
2: Increase Pet Hit Damage by 85%
3: Increase Pet Chance to Flurry 75%[/quote]

It might help to separate out of the quality of life suggestions from the rest. That is a pretty big list.

I appreciate the thought you put into these annually, but as mentioned, Necros are in a spot where, in a vacuum at least, DPS boosts should be small and carefully curated, unless every other class gets some massive improvements (Lookin at you Clerics) this next expansion, some of these asks in particular would only serve to further the gulf.

HoD reuse to mirror Spire sounds nice and all, but is still an obligatory DPS boost. This is probably on the lower end of the spectrum, but still would give a compounding benefit to Necros as fight durations increase. I do think universally all burns should refresh in a consistently intuitive manner across all classes, but I think this would necessitate some retuning elsewhere and we're probably not the class to start with.

Quick DoTs even at a tiny increment would result in a measurable boost, more cast more boom. Nevermind asking for an additional .5s cast time reduction from mercurial, that's pretty egregious imo. We already start topping parses in the 40-60s range, that would make us WAY more burst capable than we already are. Mercurial lasts 5m, that's entire events in some recent instances. The problem with balancing DoT cast times vs DD cast times is each material cast of a DoT provides far more realized damage than a single nuke, especially during Burns, allowing for more successful (and earlier) applications of Pyre to multiple targets (and adds are always going to be a feature in the raiding game) impacts DoTing classes more explicitly than nukers.

The Chaotic Power proc rate increase I'm kind of on the fence about, I don't think the nuke requires much further incentivization given the additional benefit of synergy already being baked in now. If anything maybe 1% more chance per rank for like 5 ranks, but Chaotic Power should continue to have a relatively low proc rate.

Reaper's Harvest is basically just half strength Spire sans crit rate, and Frenzy of the dead, at 30% proc chance as a class that frequently gets the killshots already, that seems pretty big tbh. I could probably agree with this if it can't proc off raid mobs and is only 30-42s un-focusable duration.

The addition of a Grasp focus line is probably the one I agree with most since it's not really and won't be a top of the order spell regardless and shouldn't have much of an impact on any events, and it just doesn't make sense to exclude a single DoT line.


Sorry to be such a negative nancy there, just doesn't feel like the time or place to be adding more to the Necromancer toolkit in terms of damage potential on raids in particular.

The Swarm Focus and Gift of Venom (and perhaps a separate shorter cast time AA to refresh it rather than Unity, which I'd prefer personally didn't have it due to it eating Twincasts) I could see as being pretty decent boons to grouping Necros who struggle without really adding much benefit to the raiding side.

I definitely think LoTs need to be exceptional-able at this stage of the game

I mostly agree with everything else, though I'm not sure why we'd be given a secondary bind tbh, unless literally every caster is to get one. Same with the see SoS eye.

I wish EQ had "Form" Buffs/AAs, like your example of speed of the wraith, change it to "Wraith Form", add some increased dodge chance/Melee/spell mitigation and lower reuse of Whisperwind while active, while also incurring a reasonable penalty to DoT damage to compensate for the increased survivability. A sister "Lich Form" where all lifetaps/heals are significantly boosted at the expense of overall damage and a perma snare, and then a "Warlock Form" where you basically just become a glass canon with reduced spell/melee shielding and an agressive increase to negative HP regen while also blocking shield of order line of runes from landing, for a (still relatively small if considering current EQ) boost to damage

That's my 2c anyway, thanks for starting the thread Forcallen

It would be more impressive if it wasn't just a copy and paste of his Necromancer AA 2020 post:
Necromancer AA 2020 | EverQuest Forums (daybreakgames.com)

The unchanged comment on Scent of Thule is a dead giveaway that not much thought was put into this list in the last two years.

Quality of life suggestions from list:

A lot of QoL improvements for all classes would be to align timers more succinctly. For example, 15 minute and 7.5 minute timers would be ideal for int casters who already have twincast (15 min) and Spire (7.5 min) on those timers.

Many class AAs have a set range of 200, which does not match our spells with a range focus equipped. Adding in the extra 50 range usually solves these discrepancies.

I have been parsing out the potential benefits from "Proclamation for Blood" under various scenarios. This DD line is meant as a tool to increase the power of our DoTs. Even without calculating the 1% chaotic weakness chance, the additive effect of Chaotic Power (25% chance, 24 DoT ticks), Defiler's Synergy (12-17 second buff for all spells), and the DD portion are less effective than just casting any other DoT in raids. This is partially due to how OP the 'Enhanced Decay' line has become for DoTs. An increased chance to proc Chaotic Power may hopefully tip the scales for the Blood DD line to be used again during raids.

Convergeance, aka necro rez, is often beat out from cast time by other rezzes while in-combat. The reuse on it is already long enough that necros don't get a lot of use out of it over other classes that can rez in-combat. It would be nice to have the option to help a team recover from multiple death's a bit better.

Many classes would love more buffs added to their Unity spells, especially pet classes.

Imbue Ally, a pet proc buff, has its duration maxed out at 7 minutes. This AA option may not be necessary if it is included with Mortifier's Unity.

Our Leech lines 'Grasp' and 'Leech' are uniquely disadvantaged with either double the cast time of other DoTs or missing focus AA that our other DoTs receive.

Is this still a necessary addition with the increased debuff cap this past Summer?

Additionally, I believe Defiler's Synergy needs a change. The spell that procs Defiler's Synergy, Proclamation for Blood, has a cast time of 1.5 (unfocused 3) seconds and a recast time of 5.25 seconds. However, the Defiler's Synergy lasts from 12 to 17 seconds, or 2 DoT ticks. The Blood DD can be recast way before the duration of Defiler's Synergy wears off. If the spell were to be recast immediately, which a lot of necros fall into this trap, you lose half the benefit from the previous cast of the buff. I propose a 50% reduction in duration, 1 DoT tick reduction equivalent, for a 100% increase in focus at each respective rank of the AA.

Convergence is fine. It's great, and has been great for a long time. No improvements to it are needed.

Your curation of the list picks out only asks that add power to the necromancer class. "Please increase my class' power" is a thing that can be asked, but it's not what folks mean when they speak of Quality of Life suggestions. When folks speak of QoL improvements, they mean those exclusive of Power improvements.

Everyone is entitled to their opinions but its all just that. Many of these ideas are from years ago and from lots of different folks. None stand out as an egregious ask to me but again its a matter of opinion (Quick damage was supposed to be an AA version of tribute essentially with a slight boost, yeah it shouldn't be 32% haste on top of group pants for a full 50%).

Hand of Death recast timer specifically while dps is a qualify of life change. When this AA (and its first iteration Funeral Pyre) were made Eli was in his "everything needs to have trade-offs" to be added phase. In a convo I had with him he said he intentionally made the timer 8:30 to throw it out of whack with spire for flavor and it also used to require being sub 80% health to work. Same with heretics Twincast (GoDR) being added only since it had silly tradeoffs at first. That was all remedied as it was later considered to be poor design and in my opinion so should this (in the past another AA dev said this was on his radar to address time permitting). One should not simply kick the can down the road for even longer just because necros are solid at dps presently. And I've lobbied for lots of changes like this for lots of classes with AA, spells and discs during beta.

Its the same with Mark Grave/Return to Grave. Many might not like it but it was something that was slated to be added for necros (and they said a mage version as well) if there was time.

My experience with these things is if its reasonable you ask. Often times 0, 1 or 2 things stick or serve as a jump off point to something close but different being added. Other times it sits for years if ever. Still gotta ask.

I would say that they are a mix of QoL and power. These 2 facets can overlap like a Venn diagram. I would be more interested in seeing class development. However, class development is most likely not in the cards. So, Improvements to current AA, which is what that list consists mostly of, is where we can also seek for QoL improvements (e.g., timers, range, cast times). The odd timers make any class feel a little bit clunky.

Necro community when someone proposes necro changes

Necromancer here. The only thing out of this list I can agree with is including more effects into unity spell, and a way to dramatically increase the duration of pet Ally spell line. Everything else is not needed at all. In my opinion these would represent actual quality of life improvements and not a major boost to a class that is already doing well for itself. (Yes, increasing the duration is Ally line is a marginal DPS increase, though i think it's not going to break things.)

Substantial buffs that I would like to see are to include dot mitigation into Gift of the Grave and reducing the cool down on Blood Magic by a couple of minutes.

Otherwise, please leave us alone. We are doing just fine.

Good list. I appreciate your efforts to improve our class.

Realistically I'd like to see flesh to venom, or its upgrade made to not eat twincast counters, a 2nd unity that casts pet buffs, and gift of grave have absorb dot dmg added. Dream scenario i'd like to have the remaining dot lines ( corruption/undead/ignite) consolidated , and focus AA lines for the swifts replaced with undead DoT and HoTs.

Well i been playing a necro for 17 yrs. every time people bring this stuff up , The dev.,s look at this class and nerf it . This class is more then fine like it is..

I'll concur with several folks on here that the following would be nice for QoL, and add one more:
- Lifetap DoT cast times match other DoTs (encouraging this spell cast will increase mana usage, as this line is expensive mana-wise)
- Hand of Death recast to 7:30 to match Spire. Do this instead of adding ranks to up the mix/max buff potency next expansion (like was done in ToL) to offset some of the DPS increase. Agree with Scorn that this kind of thing should be examined across classes.
- Focus for Leech line. If not added, this line will degrade quickly as new focus ranks continue to be added for other DoTs. Can remove swift foci if AA limits are still an issue.
- Faster recast on Blood Magic (most helpful early in expansions for multiple raid deaths)
- Flesh to Venom line - make the nuke not twincastable so it doesn't eat counters
- Scent and Snare AAs: Increase range to 250
- Death's Effigy: Remove min mana requirement (already has a longer timer than regular FD, this just allows its use right after a rez)