Necro efficiency/utility/damage/lvl50 concerns revisited

did they fix the summon on the rezz yet or is it still broken?

Still broken. Wouldn't be suprised if it goes live broken.

Bad news, they took away (for all intense purposes) the int modifier on all damaging spells. Which means that lich hits for less, heals for less and all our spells do considerably less damage. I am level 50 with master siphon at around 265 int and it does 500-750 or so and ad III lich hits for 242 per spell and heals for 78. This is also a big problem when considering growth to level 60. Since spells do not really scale with level or int anymore, at level 60 these numbers will be the same but mobs will be much much tougher with more hp rendering us much less comparative dps growth.

If they leave it that way, it'll effect all mages (and the strength hits hurt all scouts) but due to the nature of summoners, the hit won't be as painful as it would be if we only did personal int modified damage.
I'm not that concerned, if it is designed this way, we'll be least effected, therefore it could be seen as a buff, not nerf since our damage reletive to the other mages will go up.
It's way too early in this being pushed to test to get worked up about it.

wow hopefully that was just some stupid dev mistake because if they take away damage bonus for int what incentive do we have to get over 200 int? this is a very stupid change and hope it goes back to how it was with int effecting damage. also hope they fix the freaking summon on our rezz i am really looking forward to that and would suck if it didn't go live because they just couldn't get around to it.

They seemed to have re adjusted the int scaling thing. Less then it was origionally, but more then it was yesterday.

Well, the root duration has been halfed which drops that utility compared to other mages though this change is giving me a warm feeling:
Stun, Mesmerize, Stifle, and Charm improvements: - Stun and Mesmerize spells and arts now have shorter recast timers.
- Mesmerize spells and arts should now have considerably better durations.
- Charms now affect up to triple-up conned opponents (Heroic), have a chance of periodically being resisted by the target (roughly every 30s), and last between 8 minutes to 15 minutes depending on the charm spell (Troubador charm spells do not last as long). - Stifles now have shorter reuse times.
The question is, does this apply to our undead charm as it does for coercers and troubadors?

Yes, it does el. -- Duration is up to 12 minutes.

However, this news may destroy your warm feeling and replace it with a cold bitter hatred..... Our stun is now a 3 second cast time with a 6 seconds duration!!! and it still gets resisted nearly 50% of the time at master!!!

[edit] ps there are no undead in maj dul, so I am going to head out and search for some to test out this now-usefull charm.
Message Edited by Named88 on 09-06-2005 07:50 AM

Meh, I've grown so used to not having a stun that I'm pretty numb to the stun nerfing.
12 minutes where I can relive the glory days of pets consuming power though, that makes me feel pretty good... especially if those pet concentration buffs bleed over to the controlled mob .
Edit: Just imagine, doing zalak and grabbing one of his pats as a pet... that would be dreamy!
Message Edited by El Chupacabras on 09-06-2005 11:06 AM

Charm is broken atm... If the mob doesn't resist, it just eats up power and does nothing.

Darn, I shoulda known...

that sucks it is broken, it is gonna suck if this and rezz go live broken which i am starting to think will happen. this spell just started to look useful with a 12 minute duration even though it will probably not be used much since it can be resisted every 30 seconds and if a triple up breaks charm then we are gonna be dead pretty fast but i don't know, will have to wiat and see how often they actually resist.

i would like to know though how long is the recast on our stun now?

3.0 cast time, 6.0 duration, 30 second recast

Are we ever gonna get fixed? We've lost around 2,500 pts of noxious debuffing, lost our power tap, lost our health buff, lost alot of our noxious buffs, our root duration got halved, the cast of our stun is up by 50% and duration is down 30% (from my original post), charm undead doesn't work, summon corpse doesn't work properly and we have no epic effecting abilities other than damage.

The problem is the combat revamp started with claims of fixing the summoners back in live update #3 (the sorcerer live update)... it hit live update #7 and they hadn't fixed us so they said "well, we're gonna fix priests, summoners and enchanters"... then it became "well, we have to fix the whole system" and here we are coming full circle without being fixed in any meaningful way whereas there are some huge changes to most other classes.

The p'shawing of the patch message of making swarm pets immune to AoE isn't as big a deal as it seems since so many classes now having dumbfire pets (something that was originally our thing). The fact that protoflames "taunt" has been reduced is troubling as that implies a pet that isn't a dumbfire but a limited pet... I haven't seen my rats taunt recently. Not only do more classes get swarm pets but more classes now have controllable pets.

What's the story here? Archheal and combat rez doesn't justify us losing all utility other than pets. We're six days out from revamp release and there have been no necro improvements on beta yet which leads me to believe we aren't getting any period. The only benefits I'm seeing is that the "Coil" line has had its cast time reduced by three seconds and it's damage increased by 30%. What was our main DoT is now a dumbfire. The bugged pets have been fixed finally but we've also lost what was our saving grace, namely the noxious debuffs (warlocks, the lowest utility mage, can now out debuff us).
We've been trying to get the devs attention for the last 10 months or so and here we are with very limited functional fixes to the class. I guess that charm has the potential to be pretty cool but where is the rest of the stuff? The filler group augmentation "oooh-aaaah" kinda stuff? I don't feel like the master of the undead with these changes, I feel like a sorcerer should feel... no utility but raw damage.

Where are our targetable concentration buffs? Every other mage gets them, why don't we?

Why does our pet take four concentration to buff? Conjurors get to choose who they use their seed line on, we have our pet berserk buff instead which is vastly inferior (not besmirching the conjurors). How about that brand line that buffs every resist with additional buffs to all the groups pet vs. our 40ish buff to sta/int? Where is the bloody parity in utility between the classes? How about between the mages in general?

As it is now, we get archheal, combat rez, FD, the sta/wis tap and terror... the rest of the utility is done better by other mages, many of our other utilities are done better by the other off-class types (pally gets a better rez, bruisers get a better fear, monks and bruisers get a better FD).

We were s'posed to be a large part of the reason for combat change and here we are with our pets fixed but the rest of our utility nerfed into the toilet.

Edit: Our efficiency has also been fixed, should been in paragraph #4.
Message Edited by El Chupacabras on 09-07-2005 12:53 AM

lets just hope they are have been working on some necro fixes and will finally release them sometime very soon to beta. it is rediculous how we still lack our third level 50 spell, snare line of spells, charm undead is broken, and that corpse summon isn't working either. we are supposed to, when we have tank pet up, be in same tier of DPS and utility as enchanters and right now i really don't see it that way. i like the changes they have made alot but they need to change a few more things to make it even out a bit. i think we lack a single target conc buff that alot of other mages get and would like to see one added, maybe that will be the other 50 spell whatever happens though it better happen fast so it can be tested because obviously they have a hard time releasing necro spells that work right away.

I put this in another thread regarding the new undead charm, figure I'll keep all my griping consolidated in one thread:
Just running the numbers:

• 735 power cost for the first minute
• 539 power cost every minute thereafter
• Chance of break every 30 seconds

How are necro's gonna pay for this spell?

• Power tap recovers about 629 power per minute (max)
• Power tap drains pet of 1,023 health per minute (max)

Well, I guess we can keep up with those power costs... though there are other problems:

• Power tapping to keep up takes 7.5 seconds per minute (approx. 12.5% total cast time per minute spent tapping)
• Gotta keep our pet healed since we're tapping him like crazy, that's 5 seconds per minute to heal 936 damage (approx. 8% total cast time per minute spent healing)

The problem here is:

• Losing 20% of our cast time per minute equates to an approximate loss of 3,762 personal damage and the associated personal lifetapping (not counting dumbfires, etc... just plain personal DoT's and DD's).
• To equal that, the charmed pet would have to do around 63 DPS
• Using the charm and trying to keep up, we effectively lose all our power regeneration ability. Necromancers are still pretty innefficient though not as bad as on live.
• Fully buffed tank pets are doing around 45 DPS in test, I don't expect a charmed mob to beat that.

Therefore, assuming a charmed mob would do offensively buffed rotting thrall damage, we're talking a loss of 20% personal cast time, charm break risk every 30 seconds, the plain old inconvenience of managing the silly thing,all your associated health/power shifting and still doing less damage.

I shoulda asked this earlier... did you try charming without having a pet up?

Nice post as always Chup....
I was a little pleased with some earlier changes in the neco spell platter, but as it stands now I'm sure I'll survive...... do I want to starve though?

Hmmm... I guess we'll see.

Don't be shy in keeping this thread going.... it's a very goog one

Yes. I tried with and without a pet in multiple zones ( including a t1 zone ).

Still broken btw.

Darn.
Well, never let it be said I can't keep my own threads going... so here we go!
Spells and spell lines added to "round out" the class:

1. Necromantic rune
2. Transfer life
3. Lifetap
4. Clinging darkness
5. Fear
6. Rotten blast (just an addition out of the 14 level upgrade order)

Numbers 3, 5 and 6 are early inclusions into what are later spell line starts with the rest being brand new spell lines. Why does this bug me? Because it's six more spell lines to keep upgraded that for the most part did not round out our class nor improve us vastly.

• #2 and 3? Sure, those are good lines to add though we should have had those from the start.
• #1 was already included in our regular spell lines, now we have a specific spell line to keep upgraded (our only debuff so it has to be upgraded quite high quite early).
• #4 was just added to give us our snares from the training spells back... how about we just incorporate that spell line into the death's coil line as opposed to having yet another spell line to keep upgraded? This was a pre-existing ability that has gotten it's own spell line, why?
• #5 is still not a worthwile line as it's very situational, especially considering the masters of fear have one of the worst fear spells.
• #6 is a spell completely out of the normal upgrade order, received at 20 and upgraded at 29 then upgraded at 43... how about we get the "lightning" spells into a normal upgrade path?

The purpose of adding spell lines was s'posed to have to do with rounding out the classes, ours sure don't. The lifetap was certainly needed at an earlier level and the transfer life is a cool inclusion but really, how do these brand new spell lines round out our abilities?
Those six lines are just what's there now, I still firmly believe that we should be getting single target concentration buffs like every other mage and even moreso now that running fully buffed we use four concentration with the changes to the pet stance concentration.
See, I can complain about anything!
Edit: I should point out that my complaint isn't with getting spells in general, it has to do with the spells we're getting don't address the core problems with the class, namely utility parity between the mages at all levels and instances of play.
Message Edited by El Chupacabras on 09-08-2005 11:45 AM