Hey Team,
I’ll preface: I’m not here to roast the class designer or anyone personnally.
I’m struggling to find a reason to play the lich at all. I’ve mained a lich since the release on steam. But, warlock does everything a lich can do and more in fact, with greater efficacy from its class and skill trees.
Unfortunately, a complex/wicked problem has been created because the above mentioned class characteristics outshine the lich’s fundamentals.
Necrotic Lich: Hasn’t been a thing since .8. Warlock is better.
Physical Lich: Warlock is better.
Poison Lich: Warlock is better.
Fire/Ignite Lich: Warlock is better.
Minion Lich: Necro will always out perform and I’m sure the warlock would too.
Mix & Match: Warlock out performs without question.
I think the roots of the problems arose from repetitive nerfs to its survival, and, tangential nerfs to things like poison that happened some time ago. More, the lich has been robbed of its identity. The game’s design has shifted so far away from what makes the lich work that it struggles.
The Problematic Lich Skills:
Death Seal - only qualitative at low life; its CDR reliance makes gearing difficult and leaves the player feeling railroaded.
Reaper Form - death save is great…but affiliated affixes are lack luster, no one actually uses reap for damage. Another railroad.
Aura of Decay - Love or Hate…most liches hate it. We’re debuffed enough and adding damned on top of poison is so painful. Either it’s shred built or skipped. It has a lot of potential but the cost to juice it all the way up is…unfair? bad? unforgiving? the return is just…meh. I don’t even think the lich could survive a full juiced AoD at empowered monos without leaning gear alllll the way into it, leaving so many gaps in defense that it just IS NOT worth considering.
Drain Life - Warlock is better at this skill than a lich is, there is no questioning that. Why? We’ve been skipping this skill since .9.
The tree:
Offers a lot of pure damage increases at the cost of a condition like low life.
Liches either lean all the way into this or find their damage elsewhere, there’s no in between.
Scaling ward for lich is impossible with death seal. And, the tree doesn’t lend any meaningful support for it. Unlike the warlock.
Conclusively, we’re being railroaded into low life, which struggles surviving now thanks to incremental nerfs, or, ignoring the predicating attributes of lich and amalgamating extremely complex ways of playing. The later constructs a basic warlock or necromancer, identifying less like a lich. We’re more drawn back than ANY other class. Why do we need to sacrifice more? That’s pretty unfair. And, that’s why not many are playing the class. It used to lead the pack, now its not even a consideration. I abandoned last cycle because it just felt so bad.
What I’d like to see:
More support for poison on items without drawbacks (affixes, lich oriented uniques). We’re already drawn back.
For example: “Your necrotic damage hits can poison.” On a belt. It could literally be the only affix and lich in necrotic and poison form would be in such a better place.
Necrotic damage scaling shouldn’t rely so heavily on death seal and reaper form. The play style makes liches only capable of dishing damage at incredibly select windows that are INCREDIBLY difficult to time because of pack size increases and the rinse repeat cycle gets out of sync so easily that recovering fights can be a nightmare! Oops, i mis-timed my wandering spirits, great. Now i don’t get the extra three seconds. that’s a lot of damage gone.
The fundamental flaw between both is that we stack Int to get our damage but can’t make any use of the ward retention. because of death seal, addressed later on.
Fire damage becomes void damage. That opens so many doors.
I don’t care about minions, but i’m sure that some people would have some better insight.
the blood kit…i’ve never played. it never looked that fun and it always required the most sacrifice, with a clunky play style relying so heavily on CDR that it’s unplayable without it.
Compared to a warlock…what aoe? i haven’t had any. Whats it like?
Survival…is the worst it has ever been. 1 stun, 2 stun, done. Making a ward poison lich? impossible without 3 & 4 LP EXPENSIVE items. Making a ward necrotic lich? HAH. But, the warlock can do both easily without much investment and clear 400+ corruption. Just gotta get to level 90 something.
Leave the warlock alone. Rework the lich. If we’re gunna be railroaded into self-deprecation, at least make it worth our while and make the bonuses unique and exciting. At low-life, you get additional flat % DR/life lost upto ~15-20%. Make endurance threshold have unique effects for the lich, like, we get double endurance threshold from items at low-life, or, it increases our ability to avoid damage with dodge or block. Remove the catalyst dependency nodes. Cap our life gain at X%, all life gained after that % gets added to flat DR~.5-1.0%/100 hp.
Give us the option to remove the ability to play in reaper form while using death seal. So we can :
Remove the ward consumption for death seal.
Remove the inability to generate ward with death seal.
% less ward retention the longer we’re sealed.
Give us the option to play in Reaper Form without Death Seal.
I couldn’t come up with anything. But you could!
Reap
It needs its own tree. There’s nothing else that would fix this. The items for reap are hilarious.
Aura of Decay
I’ve never wanted to play with this ability. I don’t think I will ever. Unless I can use it without risking my success in the game and not having my entire gear set supporting it.