By pressing skellies’ button, players force skellies to attack a specific target… doing that, players get a temporary buff on that target.
This mechanic is great because you can let skellies doing what they want, while bashing trash for instance, or include them in your skills rotation, for elite packs or bosses.
If you feel that skellies are too OP and players too lazy, weaken skellies’ dmg, not their life and give the choice to players to use skellies’ button as a buff or not.
Spamming skellies’ button for reviving skellies => boring gameplay!
Pressing a skellies’ button for getting a buff => enjoyable gameplay!
It’s normal that skellies don’t die easily at lvl25/World 2. Few weeks after release, when players will hit lvl 50@Tourment, they’ll start complaining that they have to keep spamming skellies’s button as skellies die too quickly when facing some encounters. Then, you’ll have to balance skellies all over again.
Don’t reinvent the wheel please, just use the best mechanics like the one above, taken from D3.
I’m so confused and I’ll have to watch some youtube vids on Necro’s because the thought of playing a class that makes you into an RTS general from StarCraft/C&C seems really boring to me if I’m not playing an RTS game.
To me this sounds…SO LAZY but I’m going to have to find out more. In all good games I’ve played I’ve never known any mechnically sound class that has many adds to control to exist, so the “demand” to want this strengthened and pretty much automated sounds to me like a complete lack of care and passion from the CONSUMER, not the developer.
I’d love to know what your favourite games are so that I can paint a picture of the person/thought process and dive deeper into the description of “fun”.
I’ve played many different games: The Division 1 & 2 (MMO FPS), the Witcher games, many different H&S like Grim Dawn, PoE, Wolcen, Diablo 2 Rez, D3 etc… some MMOs from FPS (see above) to WOW back in 2004, Aion etc… Metal Gears games, XCOM 1 & 2, Metro Games, Souls-(like) games: Bloodborne, Elden Ring, Niohs etc… just my Steam library has 77 games and I have other games in GoG, Battle.net, Uplay etc…
For me, taking care of the skellies like pushing a button to rez them is a very boring gameplay in long term as when you reach endgame Tourment difficulties, they just keep dying… so you spend your time watching how many skellies are up… In D3, a Necro doesn’t need to pay attention all the time to how many skellies are up, as they auto-rez but we pay attention to what they do as you can use them (or not) to strenghten your DPS when needed. In the 1st case, you have a babysitting gameplay when, in the 2nd case, you have a pro-active gameplay.
Despite the fact D3 is soon a 12 y.o game, it’s still one of the best games in terms of In-Fight gameplay as any “Pressing a Button” activity provides a consequent boost of DPS or Survavibility for the current action. You can really see on the screen & feel during the fight what your skills activation does… rezing skellies isn’t something you want to do in the middle of a boss fight or in general, after hundreds or thousands hours of play. I have a Summoner in D3 (Witch Doctor then Necro) since the beginning and I enjoy a lot the skellies auto-rez…
If you want to see some Diablo active skellies gameplay, you can search in Youtube “D3 GR 150 Rathma build gameplay” and check out how the Necro players play the skellies…
I question the amount of work the dev team has to do in terms of settling a good balance of difficulty with many pets. I still feel this would be a lot easier if Necromancer was designed in a typical shell/template instead of it forcibly being unique with the skeleton army…what is exactly wrong with it casting dark spells and having more awesome moments of brief summoning instead of a prolonged summoning thing…I don’t fully get this but when some people are in love they’ll fight for something, clearly.
This makes me think about how the mechanics with the skeletons could be improved. Spontaneously, I can only think of the possibility that they become more resistant and stronger passively based on the length of time they have been summoned, like a kind of buff over time. This would also allow one to be a little more careful with them and not simply burn them up.
Well I’m only intrested in non minion necro builds so I like the change .
On a more srious note… We don’t know how much more frail they are and if they simply have 10% less HP and you need to invest into the minion nodes to have a legit minion build.
We can’t tell but it would be bad when minions drop dead after one blow.
Because in Diablo franchise, Necros/Witch Doctors have 2 different types of gameplay:
The Spells Caster => no Skellies/Golem.
The Summoner => using Skellies/Golem.
Having just a Necro casting spells with brief summoning time, “typical shell/template” as you say, would limit the theory crafting to only one build for that class.
In Diablo games, there’s no such thing. Basically, you build your character the way you want to play. You can make a Barbarian support build, a DPS Necro build etc… it’s up to you.
In Diablos, you have predefined classes but in other H&S, you don’t. In such H&S, your class depends on the weapon you use, for exemple. More possibilities of build to explore but also can become more complicated to find reliable ones.
Theory crafting is very important in H&S because it allows to discover more different types of gameplay meaning, more grinding time so, more time spent in the game.
I’m more a Caster type of Necro but many ppl love the summoner type because it permits a more restful gameplay. You can relax, drink a coffee, smoke a cigarette and have fun watching all these guys running around, doing the job for you… but when you push a GR 100+ with a skelly build, you don’t want to be just spamming the skelly rez button…
duuude, skels are supposed to be fragile and weak, you need to summon more often to push enemies off. You cant just controll OP 100% armored, 100% damage Skels lol.
That’s true, but I think we’re speculating here about how to get around the annoying mechanic of having to revive them all the time, which seems to have been announced in the patch.
I am replaying D2 at the moment and I went the summoning route.
I haven’t played D2 since 2003 or 2004 and since everyone nowadays compares D4 to D2 all the time I thought it’s time to refresh the memory.
I actually hate all this constant re-summoning of all my skeletons. Golem isn’t that bad as he doesn’t die that easily but skeletons… Oh, my…
A lot of bad things could be said about D3 but having your summons respawn slowly after death was one of the best improvements in Necromancer class. Having an active button to force your skeletons to focus on your target was another one.
Now when we are back to this D2 mechanic where you have to resummon everything after each fight, and you can’t control what your summons are doing is a bit backwards for me.
If we have to resummon skeletons more often cause they will die easier, then at least make it as a passive and give us an active focus skill to use to have more control over them.
People won’t use them for AFK gameplay cause they will die more quickly but at the same time we will have more control over them in active fight.
After beta I already found a summoner build a bit boring and will probably go with some blood or bone build. I might keep Golem though.
PS: There is something I want to ask actually, as I didn’t check/test in Beta. If you decide to sacrifice your skeletons for a passive bonus, can you take the skill of your skill bar or does it have to stay on?
I think the Necro changes are mostly crap. There are only a hand full of corpses in bossfights which already made respawning minions pretty hard and now your corpse explosion does less dmg too, which you wont use anyways now since you need the corpses for your minions…
I see it that there will be only valid builds without minions and corpse explosion will be as useless as in d3.
This nerf hits me pretty hard since it takes away both of my most liked mechanics → having an army and corpse explosion
.