So for the better part of a year now I’ve on and off discussed many topics pertaining to the necromancer, and even articulated that i was willing to take the changes in baby steps, but it seems that even that was asking too much, so now I’m going to discuss the theory of baby steps, or at the very least, I’m going to discuss what went wrong with this patch and what HAS to happen to prevent the actual death of the necromancer as a viable class (and before we begin, as of 0.8.3, the necromancer is no longer considered a viable class by me personally)
To start off, an observation about the development cycle surrounding the necromancer: it has become clear that either someone involved in the class design is bad at math, or there is an actively malicious party attempting to sabotage Necromancers as a class, although the reasons for the later possibility is of yet unknown.
Preface: Necromancers have issues, this is no surprise to anyone I’m sure, but they certainly have a lot more issues that any other class I’ve played (which is basically all of them except marksman, paladin and spellblade) but since asking for sweeping changes or making not of any large scale issues with class design has proven non-fruitful over the past year, i will focus only on the three publicly acknowledged ‘problematic’ skills that have been the hot topic skills of this patch, those namely being Dread Shade, Wraiths, and Abomination. however, not only will i re-iterate on what is wrong with these skills, i will specifically delve into why this patch not only failed to solve these issues, but actively made these issues so much worse as to lead to the Necromancer no longer being viable as a class.
Dread Shade: so for those of you who pay attention, you probably know that I’m not a particular fan of this skill, and never have been (as I stand by the assertion that it should have been a minion and not a buff, but that’s not why we’re here right now) but I have chosen to discuss this spell first, as i will need to use a part of this argument when discussing the next two abilities.
Why did the change fail?: before we can delve into what exactly went wrong with dread shade, I feel the need to articulate a certain idea behind spell value in Last Epoch, this idea being that we are all limited to 5 spell slots, and 5 specializations (naturally the assumption being that the 5 spells we keep on are bar are the ones we have specialized, but some nonsense builds have skirted around this idea in various ways) but we often overlook the value of these individual slots. To elaborate, we are only capable of doing 100% of the damage that we do, and are only capable of being 100% as tough as we are, this is a statement of obvious fact that shouldn’t really need explaining, but in the context of the 5 spell slots it takes on a particularly new meaning, as those slots represent the sum of our potential actions as a player. so with this in mind, prior to selecting any spells, each slot represents equally 20% of our ability to deal damage and to survive. so in a world where all things are equal, the distribution of power around these 5 spell slots must always remain consistent with this idea, even if one slot ends up representing 50% of our total damage, the remaining 50% of our damage must be distributed in some way between the remaining 4 slots. and this brings us to dread shade.
Put simply, Dread shade is a buff. therefore, it represents 0% of our total damage from the spell slot that it occupies, as it does not deal damage (to enemies…) so in order to maintain its value within that spell slot, it must (at the barest minimum) increase the damage potential of the remaining 4 spell slots by at least 25% (since those slots would go from bearing 20% of our potential to 25%, which itself is a 25% increase) and in fact, it used to do exactly this. Prior to the change, it gave a flat 25% damage bonus to all minions within it’s range, which in a best case scenario would exactly match the value of it’s spell slot. then it was nerfed. it is no longer capable of reaching the value of the slot it occupies, and is thus a spell without value, despite remaining mandatory for most builds due to lack of better options, which is a dismal identifier of the current state of the class.
How to fix: in line with the above argument, the bare minimum that dread shade can buff minions just to break even with the value of it’s own spell slot is 25%, and that’s BEFORE factoring in the negative modifier in the form of minion decay. following that, the minion decay ought to be removed as a default function, as it is not a player choice.
Now we move on to Wraiths
Why did the change fail? Although basing numbers around the extremes of builds is generally not a good things, failing to do so in this case would create undeniable outliers in scaling arguments, and thus we will have to look at the pre-patch damage potential of wraiths based on the 300 wraith builds and not something more sensible.
Simply put, wraiths went from 300-wraith potential to 6. and after a bit of number testing, their damage seems to have increased by ~maybe 2.5x, this means a net loss in 95% of their damage potential…
I really don’t think I need to keep explaining why this change failed, but continuing on from that, in order to make them permanent, you will have to further nerf them by 66% by going from 6 to 2 maximum wraiths (the numbers are so arbitrarily small that i have elected not to factor in the 2 extra wraiths from covenant) and in the span of nerfing them by this additional 66%, you will gain… nothing. you go from 100% uptime to 100% uptime, but now you have 1/3 the amount of wraiths. mana means nothing to a necromancer if they aren’t using it to constantly summon wraiths, so having permanent wraiths means making the character even less viable than it already is after the change.
How to fix: 2 days ago, wraiths constituted 90% of a necromancers damage easily, and now that they’ve been nerfed by 95%, Necromancers just… don’t deal damage anymore. simple as that, you’d seriously have to just give a flat 900% multiplier to all minion damage just to approach breaking even with what we were before, and if you thought that the 300-wraith build was too problematic, there were other ways to fix it than just deleting the spell from existence.
Abomination: Honestly the rationale behind this change was so baffling that I can’t even conceptualize how in any version of reality it was put through. but here we go…
Why did the change fail? Well for starters, let us review my argument on dread shade, Each spell slot as a default represents 1/5 of the players ability to deal damage and to survive through means of non-movement mechanics (since avoiding being hit is another way to survive that doesn’t inherently require spell slots) so using that argument, the Abomination needs to either: do an amount of damage representative of the necromancers potential, OR increase the damage potential of the necromancers other spell slots.
in practically any scenario that doesn’t include you taking the talent that makes the abomination not decay, this is actually true, as the abomination is able to meet up to 100% of it’s own spell slots value, without hindering the value of your other spell slots (prior to the abomination, it wasn’t even possible for one spell to actively nerf the potential of another in an exclusivity sort of way) however the problem of course appears when we evaluate the talent in question.
Put simply, being only able to consume mages and skeletons means that at best, the abomination loses 40% of it’s damage potential, which right away makes it fall short of meeting the value of it’s own spell slot, but what compounds this issue even more, is that it then goes on to limit the damage potential of at least one other mandatory spell on your bar by 100% (in this scenario, you’d always elect to summon back your 5 mages and no skeletons, as mages are generally stronger minions to have), meaning that it manages to nerf not only itself, but you as a whole. So just by taking this one talent, you’ve managed to lower your characters total potential damage from 100% to 72%, something which shouldn’t even be possible.
How to fix: The fix is actually simple, and again it’s mind-boggling to imagine what sort of mental gymnastics occurred that allowed it to be skipped over: Just change the talent to make it so that the abomination doesn’t decay… and that’s it. no hoops, no limits, no damage nerfs to itself or anything else… you’d just spend 1 talent point to go from 99% uptime (that extra 1% being the actual amount of time it takes to summon the abomination) to 100% uptime. you wouldn’t gain any damage, you wouldn’t feel worse, you wouldn’t become somehow OP, all that would change is 1% uptime and a much better feeling spell. this exact change would fix wraiths as well by the way. I said in my other post earlier today that talents are meant to increase our power, otherwise why do they exist? so let them do just that and just please, for the love of god, just please stop thinking that basic quality of life changes must be paid for in crippling blood sacrifices every time something feels bad.