So try to keep nostalgia and personal feelings (especially that hate/love for Diablo 3) and please keep the discussion civil
So with the expac finally out I am curious about a few things
What do you guys think about the necromancer overall?
Who did it better? Crate (Grim Dawn), Blizzard Irvine (D3) or Blizzard North/Condor (Diablo II)
What features of the other two (Diablo II and D3) necros do you think are better than Grim Dawn’s necro?
What features do you think the Grim Dawn Necro should have had?
My answers
For pets it seems to be fine, but I have almost zero knowledge about pet builds.
Siphon Souls feels amazing in tough spots, Taco Bell Earth seems good to me, Ill Omen and the new “Oh Lawd!!” skill are good imo
Drain Essence is a horrendous piece of crap skill w/o gear support due to weird scaling on it
The cold transmuter makes even less sense to me due to shit support in gear. I have a build around it and intend to make a feedback thread soon. It’s absurd how bad the skill is because of the above mentioned problems
Bonervest, I have yet to try this. Going to do it today but a new global buff can never be bad
For now due to some itemization issues I am going to stick with Diablo II version but Crate has managed to do a pretty fucking amazing job on their skill. Looking at some Necro pet build videos the skele army looks cool
I personally was a fan of the skill Revive in Diablo II and Corpse explosion. Since they both require corpses and medierra/zantai said they don’t like corpses it will never be implemented
And undead dragon summon. Considering Jagged Waste is full of Drake bones, we could use a cool Undead Dragon summon.
It lacks something general like when you go Arcanist regardless of your other mastery/class/style you are sure to benefit from Mirror, OA, crit dmg and Maiven without a lot of investment
Too much all over the place damage variety like for Nightblade PB but in many skills leading to must have mythical legendary (skill mods) for the build to be great but there is a void till then
Well anal fissure last skill in the line kinda does that:D
Anyway, i think Necro is sadly misinterpreted as pet inclined only when in fact it is a powerhose both as support (spectral line, Siphon, Mark of Torment) and main skills, Bone harvest for Reapers, Eruption, Drain essence apostates or reapers again with transmuters.
I think it will take a bit more for the community to discover this class at it’s fullest potential which is maybe not a bad thing. Longer life span for Necro builds in the end
MedianXL, with proper gear you could have 50+ summons. Honestly, playing modern ARPG summoners is as exciting as a limp dick. Not to mention slower gameplay in general, more so in GD when you can’t initiate a combat, otherwise the whole room gang up on your character ignoring summons.
D2 necro is fine too, but skellies are annoying to resummon when a boss wipes them out.
Minion stats on more than 1 component. Resistance components and augments should also provide minion res.
Never said it was pet inclined but thematically when one says Necro they immediately think Zombie army and Undead Dragon (Crate, where is it?)
Cold DE needs more support, Aether DE has Devastation and Arcanist so it’s good, Vitality DE Ritualist/Cabalist should be good as well
Siphon Souls feels amazing to use
Bonervest is the skill i am trying at the moment, it feels good to me for now.
Ravenous Earth, Mark of Torment are good support skills.
Reaper, Apostate, Cabalist (non-pet), Ritualist, Defiler all are solid class combos. Death Knight is up there but I really hate using the old gear, the class combo has the coolest name. It deserves a dedicated set, besides this problem imo Aether DK should be solid
God all this beast talk has got me excited for Ancient Gove, I hope the new dungeon is released soon. The Lore discussion thread mentioned something interesting in localization files but I am really avoiding spoilers
Yes, sir, you are right about the fact that the necro is a great class and you can make VIABLE builds around most skills (even Drain Essence with inquisitor). However, the problem is that pet necro >>> all other variants.
In order to test this hypothesis, I made two cabalists in softcore because I didn’t know what to expect in AoM. One of them was a full pet build and the other one was a vitality caster. None of them died, of course, but the pet master kills Cronley before his maiven is up. The vitality caster, on the other hand, has to run circles around all important bosses because it can’t destroy them in under 3 seconds. Valdaran fight: pet build annihilates him in 9 seconds. Vitality caster…1 minute+. Edge of the void: fighting oppressors on Ultimate with a vitality caster was monstrously hard. The pet build…well, there is no problem when CD of skeletons is basically 0 and your tank has 100k health and overcapped resistances.
I believe any experienced enough player can basically maintain his death count to zero if he knows what to expect. What can I say… why would you build any other type of necro when a pet build can put 350k/second dps with you staying at the other side of the screen ?
P.S.: Don’t judge pet builds with what you see on this forum…
But the thing is pet builds have always been insane. Especially the ones that never got posted
If we’re doing such a comparison then same should apply to pet Pyromancer and its comparison with any other non pet pyro. The pet Pyro could kill MQ in 7 seconds or so, don’t recall any other Sab could do it (in the same version of the game)
The thing I’m trying to say is that each class has its strong points, Necro is excellent for pets. But what’s more important is that it is good for other build types as well. This is what matters imo
I think Fluff’s I think that is fluff’s point, people are overlooking the mastery thinking it’s only good for pet support when this statement is highly untrue
I did not raise a necrozoomancer but went 2 hand instead dealing mainly vit damage and a necro really delivers in that department… though I kinda wish harbinger of souls has attack speed mod but it can be attained easily anyway. too early to make a conclusion but i can say a necro is a solid melee based mastery and a good support for a variety of damage types.
Diablo 2 necro wins, love the character animation when selecting new character select:rolleyes:… seriously i cant decide for now.
D2 necro: bone spear and poison skills… D3 necro: meh
would love to have a better summon… liche king was cool from tq… not digging reap spirit
Yes, sir, you are right about the fact that the necro is a great class and you can make VIABLE builds around most skills ? Oh cmon, reaper and Aether Death knight are past the point of viable tweaked or not. Reaper breezes through content. Give them a chance. this is far from some pre expac druid viable type situation. You made your opinion on vitality caster and they are slow, especially without end game gear mods. Most things vitality are slow, except maybe a very good pet build
P.S.: Don’t judge pet builds with what you see on this forum. Yes I’ve learned, especially after talking to Dashiv, that late game pet builds require thinking well beyond the obvious.
And Fluff is certainly right in that respect - necro builds can indeed function outside of pets, just like any soldier build can function outside of shields.
The real problem, however, is that in case of the soldier, you will pick it out in a variety of circumstances, viz.:
a) when someone wants to make a physical/internal trauma build;
b) when someone wants to make a retaliation build;
c) when someone wants to make a HC build;
d) when someone wants to make a DoT build using anything besides poison (due to the insane amount of WD% on cadence). And even here I think a Venomlance ranged Witchblade would be quite strong.
For necro, all you have is basically pets and (maybe) melee aether and I’m not even entirely sure that melee aether would not be better with inquisitor. Vitality/Bleed caster - i.e. the other obvious possibility which is supported by a high-lvl. set I haven’t even completed yet - is much better done by Conjurer with absolutely no shortcoming in terms of survivability. Let’s not even discuss poison…
I would like to see Crate expand on the aether part for necro…I really do !
I promise you it’s better with necro, even if Krieg set doesn’t support Necro. Frankly i think it supports arcanist cause it needs it so much more and even then it does not come close to DK Aether face smash level.
PS: that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t also like an actual DK melee set without any pet stuff on it and without the need for illusionist to make it look Death Knighty
So far for aether all we really got is Aether Uroboruuk Abostate, and Spellbinder Diviner set so yes more is better allways
Edit:PS: I really want to try that diviner btw…1 Sec Cd Reap Spirit. It’s like Necro version of Doom Bolt
Love it, and think it’s an awesome implementation of the necro. Also like the new class skill item modifications on some items, which do stuff like allow summoning of two pets instead of one.
I think overall I like Grim Dawn’s the best, only because at this point I just don’t care about D2 anymore. I have no inclination to play it again now that Grim Dawn is out and especially since the expansion.
That said, both iteration completely blow away D3’s necro which frankly I can’t stand. They’ve made it into a twitch class where you have to re-summon stuff every 1-2 seconds for maximum efficiency. I hate it, and once I got to around Inferno (or whatever it was called) rank 5 o 6 I gave up out of frustration. Maybe some people like that kind of gameplay, but I found it obnoxious.
