So I mentioned the vague outline of this idea a few days ago in another post, but since then I’ve actually done some math, pooled some numbers, made a spread sheet, all that good stuff, and now I can present a reasonable explanation of the “Bag of Bones” idea.
To start: What is the “Bag of Bones” well in simple terms, upon completing the temple of Etera quest and selecting the Necromancer mastery, the player’s minions spells will be removed from their unit caps, and the Necromancer will instead use a “Bag of Bones” to summon minions. Each minion type will have a bone cost (which would supplement a reduced mana cost) and so long as the minion is alive, the bones spent on them do not replenish. for easy math, I based everything on a 100 bone maximum. here are the costs:
Skeletons (archers, rogues, warriors): 4 bones (7 with dread phalanx)
Mages: 10 bones (+ all available bones with archmage, granting increasing bonuses for each bone consumed) (edit: upon further consideration, Archmage wouldn’t actually need to be changed from live for the bone system, since the damage that originally would have been lost by going from 5 mages to 1 super mage is made up by having the extra bones from only summoning one mage to put into summoning other minions, and thus the archmage would (although not originally intended, but hey, happy accidents happen) have new synergy with other minions by freeing up more bones to use, if anything, it might actually need to be nerfed from live for the bone system, but I won’t ask for that)
Golems: 16 bones (8 with twinned golem)
Commander (a permanent minion replacing dread shade as discussed in the other post): 20 bones
Wraiths: 1 bone (but they still decay)
Explodey zombies: 1 bone (but they still decay/ suicide into enemies)
Abomination: All available bones (gaining damage/health for each bone consumed)
(Note: when a minion dies, it’s bone cost is refunded, because necromancers are known for their commitment to recycling!)
So you might be asking: Why these numbers? well simply put, I imagined, if my entire army was only 1 minion type, what is a reasonable amount of that minions to have? and went from there, before including talents which would raise/ decrease minion costs, this means you could have a full army of: 25 skeletons OR 10 mages OR 6 golems OR 100 wraiths (which is more than fair for you wraith lovers out there) OR 5 commanders (although i don’t know why you’d want to do this?) OR 1 abomination (I’m excluding suicide zombies from this list for obvious reasons)
The primary idea, of course, is that you could build up your own personal, completely custom army from scratch with whatever units you want, and it should even be easier for the devs to balance to boot (this claim will be elaborated at the end)
do you want an army focused on skeleton archers, but don’t much care for golems or mages? simple! you can make 25 archers, or 20 archers and a commander to boost them higher, or throw on dread phalanx if you want (since it would actually always be good now and not reliant on having an odd number of minions for a cap…) summon 11 archers and a commander, but wait, now you have 3 bones leftover? use them for suicide zombies, wraiths, or even a really small abomination if you want!
Modular armies means PLAYER CHOICES, enhanced class fantasy, and a unique experience for everyone!
Additional Commentary for Devs
So I made a claim that this system would be easier to balance than the current system, and to elaborate on that claim, I was thinking about the subsystems that would be tied to the bones, (the ones players wouldn’t see, but would inform number tuning and whatnot) and came up with a concept of “Damage bones” and “defense bones”, for example, summon skeletons can give you 3 types of minions, archers, warriors, and rogues, but a warrior you wouldn’t expect to deal as much damage as an archer, but you’d want them to be tough, while archers are damage focused, but don’t get hit all that often, and thus are defensively weaker. since in this system, all 3 minion types would cost 4 bones, the archers would have 3 “damage bones” and one “defense bone” while warriors would be the reverse, 3 defense, 1 damage. meanwhile rogues, who are damage focused, but still in melee range would be 2/2, being slightly tougher than archers but dealing more damage than warriors.
to expand on this, mages (10 cost) would be 2 defense bones, 8 damage bones, while golems (16 cost) would be 8/8, and thus you’d expect a golem to do about as much damage as a mage, but would be considerably tougher for it’s increased cost, while also allowing a smaller maximum number which can be summoned (thus allowing mages to still be optimal for pure damage)
furthermore, this hidden bone system would only apply to the base summoning costs of the minions before talents, as talents that before would have increased the minion cap will instead lower the bone cost of the minions (for skeletons, who have 3 nodes on the skill to increase the summoning cap, each one would “reduce the summoning cost of every 3rd skeleton by 1” and thus if you get all 3, then skeletons would just cost 3 bones instead of 4, but would still be tuned for 4 bones, likewise dread phalanx already gives skeletons a multiplier for it’s increased cost, so no additional tuning would be necessary)
special cases for the hidden bone system of course would be wraiths (i recommend a 2/1 scaling, favoring damage since they’re meant to die anyways) suicide zombies (same logic) and the abomination, for whom each bone would act as both a damage and a defense bone, since the abomination is sorta supposed to be that strong lumbering giant that you only get one of no matter what.
What sort of army would y’all make with this system?
but 