Hello my minions!
So, I have announced in the past that Necromancers will be getting an update, and they "soon" will! But it is not a simple update, however, it is more like a near-total rewrite. So, I wanted to go over them a bit to give you a feel for what's coming.
Necromancers in patch 1.7 will have 12 class talent trees and 2 new generic talent trees. The class trees are split by theme into 4 groups of 3 trees each: Minions, Death, Darkness and Cold.
The way souls are generated and spent has changed. There are more ways to get new souls, even in a solo fight, but also more ways to spend them. The intention is that you should have to think about when to spend souls but, they shouldn't feel like consumables either.
So, with that in mind, let's go over the themes!
Minions
What necromancer would go out without an army of undead minions to slaughter their foes? Well some I hope, as I want minion-less builds to be viable, but that's a different matter ;)
One important thing to note is that minions no longer decay outside your necrotic aura! As before, however, all necrotic minions are incapable of passively regenerating life. Another important change is that your minions can't hurt you by default, and you can't hurt them either.
Master of Bones
This tree focuses on the summoning of skeletons with various powers. All of them share some basic properties:
- No summoning timer: once summoned, a skeleton will stay by your side until it is destroyed
- Sturdy: as you levelup most of them will have the skeleton racial shield available to them
- Limited: you can never summon a lot of them at once, so try to care for them!
As a necromancer gains power they learn to summon stonger types of skeletons, including mages.
Necromancers can also combine and enhance their basic skeletons into more powerful forms:
- Bonewall: should the need arise, a skeleton can be "expanded" to create an unmoving bonewall that damages and pins down all foes
- Bone Giant: by combining 3 normal skeletons the necromancer can make a powerful and sturdy bone giant to become the backbone of their minion army
- Lord of Skulls: by funneling even more souls into a single skeleton, a powerful necromancer can create a Lord of Skulls, enhancing the power of the minion even further. At high level they can even grant them new extremely powerful talents.
Master of Flesh
This tree focuses on summoning ghouls of varying power. All of them share some basic properties:
- Summoning timer: once summoned, a ghoul will only exist for some turns, and then they decay
- Numerous: Ghouls are expendable minions, you can summon them in greater quantities than skeletons and you have multiple ways to "expend" them, from a simple corpse explosion to liquifying them into a cloud of gore that follows you around
Raising ghouls is part of any worthy necromancer's arsenal and such a basic task that they can do it instinctively. At the start of each combat and every few turns afterwards a ghoul automatically rises to aid the necromancer. They can also be summoned en masse, however, should the need arise.
Ghouls are expendable minions and no necromancer would shed a tear when one (or 10) die, as long as their death was useful.
- Make them go boom: Once a ghoul has served its time, or when it is destroyed, why not make it go out with a bang (literally), literally exploding in a mass of gore!
- Liquefy them: Once a ghoul is dead, or exploded, why not use their remains to make a cloud of gore that follows you around, damaging all foes.
- Sacrifice them: Who likes debuffs? Nobody! So make a ghoul absorb the effect for you and then go boom!
Master Necromancer
This tree focuses on enhancing and using your existing summons without adding new ones.
With it you can: increase their power, protect them while they are nearby, buff them up, recall them back to you for protection, or even use them to prevent damage directed at you.
Death
Any necromancer worth their salt has some dominion over death. These trees concentrate on utilizing the souls and deaths of your foes to your advantage. Yummy souls!
Animus
The staple talent of every necromancer lives here: Soul Leech. Anytime you or your minions deal damage to a creature, you apply soul leech to it and, should it die, steal its soul for your own purposes.
That is not all, however. This tree also offers you the ability to consume souls to heal yourself and regenerate mana, torture victims of soul leech for even more souls, and gain buffs based on the current number of souls!
Death
Focusing specifically on absorbing souls and gaining bonuses upon deaths, this tree starts with the return of the fan favorite Rigor Mortis and adds ways to teleport to the place of death of your foes, regenerate when you kill, and damage any creature afflicted by soul leech (so hopefully everyone).
Eradication
A melting pot of high end death effects, this tree can unleash your vampiric side, create graveyards to resurrect your minions, hurt your foes, and sees the return of another fan favorite: Impending Doom!
Darkness
A necromancer works in dark and remote places, hidden from the living and shunned from society.
Some learn to use that darkness to their advantage.
Nightfall
The old staple of Invoke Darkness is back, but improved at high-end as a 3-wide beam!
In addition, banes are still present and now improved by Erupting Shadows which doubles down on baned creatures. Poor things.
But what if you want to play minion-less and thus have less "soul dump"? Well River of Souls is there for you! Automatically firing a weaponized soul each turn for AOE damage!
Dread
In all the taverns of Eyal, you can always find an adventurer mumbling in the dark about the terrors they've faced, a glimpse of madness in their eyes. Those who have seen a Dread, or, worse, a Dreadmaster.
Necromancers, however, do not fear the Dreads, they control them! Dreads are expensive support minions. Their purpose is to harass and debuff your foes, making them ripe for the picking by your army or your own spells.
Age of Dusk
Ahhh the Age of Dusk. The Golden Age of Necromancy. A time of plagues and hopelessness.
This tree represents all of that, with Dire Plague, a disease that bypasses disease immunity and can trigger lots of effects in the tree, including ripping out the souls of its victims.
The Golden Age of Necromancy talent offers a slew of saves and resistances, most notably the extremely rare teleport resistance. And when your life drops below 1, you can even gain 2 turns of full immunity to everything!
Cold
The cold embrace of death. A feeling known to every necromancer.
The cunning necromancer goes even further, using cold to damage and defend, or even summon a wraith!
Grave
Chill of the Tomb returns, but with a twist: any minion caught in the blast is covered in a thin layer of ice, reducing all damage they take! So blast away!
In addition, the Black Ice spell gives a way to focus on priority targets, dealing heavy damage and increasing damage taken from minions.
Last, but not least, the Corpselight! It is a static pseudo-minion that deals constant AOE damage and grows in power each time you cast spells, and can even be made to implode in a burst of cold destruction.
Glacial Waste
Damaging your foes is nice, but useless if you are dead!
All of this tree focuses on one spell: Hiemal Shield, a powerful shield that can block damage, retaliate with bolts of ice, create wastelands around you and even regenerate itself.
Rime Wraith
Hailing from the glacial wastes of the north, the Rime Wraith is a powerful, fully immaterial spirit of ice and death. Nothing can stop the cold embrace of this parasitic spirit as it jumps into foes and friends alike each turn, in a fast paced dance of death. A Rime Wraith’s purpose is to protect your other minions and debilitate your foes.
Generic
Necromancers no longer share any trees with Archmages, either class or generic, resulting in some new stuff and some shuffling.
Necrosis
Necrosis is back, but now as a generic which focuses even more on negative life and "anti-nature".
Actually, I did not mention it much yet, but many of the necromancer spells have specific additional effects if you are under 1 HP!
So, Blurred Mortality is back, bringing in the negative life goodness, and the additional effect of increasing resistances if you are under 1 HP.
But that's not all, with Across the Veil triggering whenever the 1 HP threshold is crossed, in either direction and uses the energy of the crossing to blast foes with damage and reduce your cooldowns!
Last, but not least, come the rune-interacting talents, which strongly encourages you to not use wild infusions and only use runes.
"But DarkGod where is Lichdom?!" Well, it's not here anymore! Lich is now a prodigy, like a race evolution. The requirements for it do not change however you still need to do the quest and all.
Spectre
Shared with the future Gravelord class from Lost Land, the spectre talents focus on movement and vision by turning yourself into a spectre! A kind of replacement for Divination and Conveyance trees.
Lich
Ahhh, the Lich! The fantasy of many necromancers, the ultimate form of undead (or so they think).
A lich has a racial tree, along with the usual immunities and stat boosts you've come to expect from them. Their talents focus on self-resurrection (at a cost!), inspiring fear in your foes, commanding an army of shadows and bolstering all allied undead in sight. A true commander of the dead!
There we go, the new Necromancer class in all its undeath glory, coming to you in patch 1.7!
