How are Necromancers in Velious? Discuss!

Im not really sure how Necromancer will be in Velious. I played with mine a bit and it seems the pets personal dps has gone up a bit, along with survivability. Id be intrested to hear from you all your thoughts on how we are now. I still personally wish we had something that made people want to invite us to raids and groups, its a bit hard to get into one these days.

I saw a rather nice DPS increase in DoV. And I guess AD in now passive and not life leaching us so thats a nice perk.
Too many classes in this game - they should have these classes in EQ1 where raids have a lot more slots for players - instead we have EQ2 - too many classes - not enough raid slots.....go figure!

The pet does significantly more damage than before. I think the overall increase for both of us is around 20-35% or so (I mean me + pet before DoV and me + pet now). A bit early to say yet, since I've only played for about an hour so far. The pet criticalling all the time and not only me is nice ofc. Definitely like the change on how pet crit bonus/crit chance etc is determined. Signifcant dps boost for me at least.
Not to mention the fact that from now on I should see desirable loot mor often since I don't need to be on the lookout for pet boosting qualities.

My necro saw a huge increase in dps... Probably around 40-50%.

Troy wrote:

i actually hate how they took the life draining from it. it was supposed to be "an eye for an eye" type of deal. you want more DoT power? then you get your life DoTed". i also knew a few other Necromancers who refused to use it, and i always upped them in damage. just goes to show who was better at playing the class.
i also hate how its "passive". how do i know its actually working?

With the pet changes is it worth using the Scout or Ooze Crawler now?

Rebus wrote:

Not sure about the ooze, but in some situations the scout might be better. For example, if you're in a group where the tank is having difficulty holding aggro against some other group members, the dehate could help. But it still does like half the dps of the mage pet, even against a single target.

I'm finding that in general the changes to Shared Stats are working to our benefit, increasing damage dramatically. The increase is on a bell curve where the Raiders won't see as dractic a change and the quest-geared players will see quite a large improvement.
The Mage pet puts out a lot more damage, but now you can actually steal aggro from him where you would have been hard pressed to do so before. This pet runs out of power FAST now. Partly becasue the fights are dragging out longer and partly becasue of the ability cast speel bonus he has from the shard stats. I'd guess his popwer pool is larger now then before, but he tends to burn through it now.
The Tank pet is putting out maybe 5 or 10 times the dps he use to and is using more of his available spells while fighting. His aggro is much better then it was before but still needs to be watched closely. You still can't go all out on a mob without stripping the aggro from him. His mitigation took a real bath and dropped quite a bit, but he is much easier to heal back up with tainted heals. I'm running around with 17k health and power (w/o much crit bonus) and I have seen a crit tainted heal land more then once for 13,070 and non-crit for around 9800. This puts the Tank pet in my current gear @ around 55k health.

The issue I am finding the Mitigation on the pets using the shared stats is very low. The inbound damage is high and you'll end up yo-yo'ing the pet a lot more then before. With that said over all this is a huge increase in the Necro class. Even though the pet needs more micro managing he (tank) can actually do something without standing around looking stupid. In the past expansions I hardly ever summoned the Tank pet and never summoned the Bard pet. Not becasue the Mage pet is paper thin and like to burn his power pool up I am actually running with the Tank out and even though the fights take a little longer with the Tank then the Mage I can move to the next fight much faster with him.
I can't wait to see how much stronger he gets when I gear up more and am closer to 25k H/P or even 35K H/P.

From my grouping experience my pet is keeping up with mana just fine, it will depend on specs I guess and gear. Mitigation sucks on pets, however with the lack of AD draining health we are able to get away with other specs to prevent aoe to pet. Been forever since I have used it, blood pact I think. Your pet will stay up 100% unless it gets aggro pretty much.

IBuneary wrote:

It was a terrible AA that did not provide a big enough dps boost for the cost of health...at all.
They need to uncap DoT's and remove the cap on splurt to make it more worthwhile in letting the DoT's tick.
DoV was definitely a step in the right direction, but we aren't where we should be yet.

Sciomar@Unrest wrote:

Well said, were in the right direction however not there yet.
Positives:
Pet sharing: Necros will see boosts in DPS because alot geared for themselves rather than the pet prior to DoV. Even though necros cannot buff thier pet, it has become closer in line with the counterpart's pet due to shared stats.
Higher heatlh: Lifeburns will see improvements due to health rising. It ain't Elemental Blast numbers, but necros should see some decent numbers as long as they obtain greater health/potency items.

Concerns:
DoT mechanics as it pertains to SDA and DD overall balance, as well as being dispellable. AD and the DoT cap as it pertains to the UT buff. Dumbfire abilities and thier lack of usability in certain situations such as raiding.

ran Haunt with a t4 conji with soulburn and he outparsed me on the ZW by 19k, Yeah my gear isnt as good (t1-3 mix) and I dont have soulburn but imagine what he'd parse if we had an illy and a troub in the group!
Zonewide
him 46k
me 27k
coercer 14k
zerker 11k
dirge 7k (what?)

So yeah this was not a mage group by any means and our first time in the zone but I think you can see where we may fall short.
Hoping lifeburn gets some love but I doubt it ever will.
Get used to second place.

So far, necros are pretty decent. Shared stats brought a huge increase in dps to the necromancer class.
A few things that need to be changed/improved:
1. The dot cap - i cant see removing it having any OP effect on any class, honestly im not sure why they even bothered putting it in. Removing it would increase our dps a bit, without going to far
2. Dumbfire pets - At the moment the only dumbfires i bother casting is undead horde, the others get no use because they just dont do enough damage (even if they did last the whole duration without dying). They were useful for a time in beta when they shared stats, but that was removed because a few were to powerful. Honestly, id rather they just turn blighted horde/awaken grave (and all other dumbfires for that matter) into DOT's.
3. Lifeburn - Needs to at least be brought up to the damage of elemental blast. Lifeburn has a 5 min recast, drains your hp, and mobs get lifeburn immunity. Elemental blast has a 3 min recast, and does a lot more damage than lifeburn. Id suggest either letting lifeburn get additional ticks and have a higher hp:damage ratio, or reducing the recast and possibly eliminating the lifeburn immunity. With the large amounts of hp players can gain though, lifeburn might start to equal out with EB.
Overall, Necros are still a bit behind our Conjuror counterparts, and need a bit of work, but Velious definately treated us well.

In t2-t3 raid gear in haunt I was pulling zw ave of 50-60k. Ranger was behind me at 40k. Can't compare to a conj but thats ok. I am happy where we are.

Actually, we are suppose to compare to a conjuror, they are our counterpart. If a few more things asked for get adjusted down the line it should bring us better balance.

I think the developers figured that conjurors wouldn't choose soulburn because using that and elemental blast would mean death for the pet. From what I'm seeing on flames, if they just cast stoneskin on their pet they don't really have any issues keeping their pet alive.
I'm going to have to see how everything pans out when I get soulburn, but I see Lifeburn taking our HP and then Soulburn taking our pets HP.

My Necro is an alt (has 251 aa's) and therefore it's probably not a fair assessment, but mage pet and necro seem to be doing fairly well. There are times when Necro spends the whole time just healing his pet instead of doing dps, but like I said, he's an alt and he doesn't have raid gear like my main.

Has anyone else tested the tank pet? I have both my AA -setups geared towards the mage pet usage, but am considering on resetting the solo -setup and do it again for using the tank. Worth it?

Why two setups for the mage pet? I have been killing everything using just a raid dps spec, to include ^^ and ^^^ heroics.

We arent all cool kids like you scio