Archmage - You can only summon one Skeletal Mage, an Archmage, that has significantly more health and damage (both multiplicative with other modifiers), fires double the amount of projectiles, and is larger.
Dread Phalanx - Skeletons deal more damage (multiplicative with other modifiers) and are larger, but you can only summon half as many as you could before (rounded up).
Damage: +80%
Size: +20%
Maximum Number of Skeleton: -50%
Maybe I’m just not understanding how these skill nodes are worth it as I haven’t had a chance to test them out but just looking at them I can’t see the appeal.
Archmage seems particularly bad since I can summon with my Necromancer up to 5 Skeletal Mages and so have 500% damage as apposed to 260% accounting for the Archmage double projectile.
Perhaps it should have scaling depending on your max summonable Skeletal Mages.
Yeah, Archmage doesn’t really seem worth it, but Dread Phalanx might be if you have an odd max number of skellies that’s less than 9. If you have, say, 7 max skellies, Dread Phalanx reduces that to 4 (3.5 rounded up) & 4 x 1.8 = 7.2, giving you slightly more dps. If you have 9 max skellies that rounds to 5 with Dread Phalanx, 5 x 1.8 = 9 so you’d be doing the same dps (ignoring any chance for poison or armour shred which would benefit from having more minions stacking it). If you have 11 max skellies, however, that rounds up to 6, 6 x 1.8 = 10.8 which is slightly worse.
My impression from Archmage’s numbers was that it was intended to be something a Lich or Warlock would be interested in, rather than a Necro. Because you’re correct that it definitely doesn’t compare to having 5 Mages. However, it could be competitive if you can only have 3. A multiplicative 130% and 2x projectiles should be a little more than 4 Mages-worth in terms of total damage output, if I’m doing math right.
[Edit: Damnit, that was not the comment I intended to reply to]
Another potential benefit is that the added health can help keep minions alive to continue doing damage, where a greater number with less health might have died quickly in a few AoE waves. That can be especially compounded if you have mana issues that affect your ability to quickly resummon minions.
I would guess that they’re balanced around Dread Shade due to inflexible scaling. Currently you can have 3 up at a time. If 1 Archmage’s DPS = 5 regular mages’ DPS then putting Shade on Archmage would be like having 5 instances up. Dread (and Infernal?) Shade also drains health slower for Archmage/Phalanx since it’s a flat tick (everlasting poison) on now-beefier minions.
Now imagine that Shade scaling is reworked and Phalanx/Archmage automatically get the same DPS/HP as a “regular” army. The main benefits they give (FPS, QoL) are still outside the game. You could even argue that one is a niche benefit for playing on a potato. A straight numbers buff would make them auto-includes because now they’d have better FPS, better HP/QoL, and better DPS! At that point, they might as well be default except that the “huge undead army” feeling would suffer for it (arguably a thing that sets necromancer apart).
TL:DR; More/fewer minion parity is a fine bandaid while optimization is being improved. After that’s done, these might need to be reworked as a sidegrade (e.g. phalanx marches and attacks in formation like a real phalanx), benefit/drawback, or something else entirely (e.g. Archmage as its own commander ability).
