Wraiths are problematic to the Necromancer

[Zarono]

I’m sure this particular spell has been on the devs radar for a while by now, but simply put, while the skill is certainly powerful, it’s overly demanding, both of the player and the developers.
to elaborate on what i mean:
you can get like, a lot of wraiths. i mean like, a LOT of wraiths (i think people have gotten up to 300 wraiths at once before) this is unreasonable, since presumably, a necromancer is supposed to summon, i don’t know, other things. a variety army, if you will, but why would anyone bother to put golem, or mages, or normal skeletons on their bar, when 95% of their army is wraiths, they spend all their time summoning wraiths, all their gear is designed to increase the duration of their wraiths, all that they are revolves around wraiths. and sure, you don’t have to use wraiths, but this becomes a problem for the developers, because you might use wraiths, and you might have 300 of them, so then how do you balance them?
when there’s no hard-coded limit on the amount of summons you can have out at once, do you tune their damage to assume the player only uses 3 or 4 wraiths? 10-20 wraiths? 342 wraiths? at what point do you decide wraiths are too strong or too weak? personally, i don’t want to be put in a situation where wraiths are nerfed too hard in favor of using the other minions available to us, but i also don’t like the feeling that they’re mandatory (which is definitely what i started feeling around level 70)
simply put, wraiths either need to be capped, so that they can be balanced around that cap, or they need a hard duration (which would effectively be a cap anyways) i have a single idea that would (in my opinion, as someone who’s invested in the idea of free-form summoner type gameplay) fix most of the necromancers minion problems, but that idea would take a while to explain, and i don’t want to distract from the wraith conversation here, so it’ll probably get it’s own post later.

[Tree]

There’s around 3-4 different threads about Necromancer pets, so I had a difficult time figuring out which thread to respond to. This seemed like the best bet since Wraiths are the direct beneficiary of the “stack minion health regen so that decay doesn’t feel like an issue” line of Necro play.

Ideally, here’s how I believe the Necromancer should feel in terms of Necromancer gameplay:

1. Permanent minion army [Skeletons + Skeleton Mages + Golem + Dread Shade] which depends on keeping standard pets alive. Wraiths become an issue since building a lot of minion health and health regen makes Wraiths mandatory by sheer numbers. Otherwise, building around minion survivability allows you to use Dread Shade and disregard the health costs since you’re building around that.

2. Minion massacre featuring pets which are supposed to die [Volatile Zombies + Wraiths + Sacrifice that allows you to summon Blood Wraiths on death]: this is the opposite side of the spectrum where you throw minions at enemies and have them grant a lot of “on death” abilities that either do large amounts of damage or summon other types of pets and you get to do round 2 of damage.

3. Somewhere in the middle where you have some permanent pets and some temporary pets where if you summon them in the middle of battle, they get large bonuses to help you through the battle. An example would be the Golem nodes where if you summon it near the corpse of another Golem, it gets a large Armor bonus.

That’s the problem with not having a limit with Wraiths: you can always manage to out-gen the decay and then you can just throw mobs on the screen. I would prefer the Wraiths to be on a timer and placing a cooldown on the Wraith casting so that you either get a standard number of Wraiths (let’s say 10) if you’re not specializing for sheer numbers or you build around the maximum wraith concept and you get something like 25 instead.

Additionally, for skills like Summon Skeletons where you have the nodes that give the Skeletons extra damage at the cost of summoning fewer of them, (such as 3 super skeletons compared to 6 regular skeletons), I’d rather have it so that you can have up to 6 super skeletons, but every skeleton you summon after the 3rd one has something like Dread Shade attached to it that puts it on a timer. That way you can get the most use out of things like Sacrifice while also having multiple permanent pets so you feel like you’re actually controlling something instead of playing timer management.

All of these ideas feel discombobulated in my head, but yeah, there are many creative ways we can envision pets that are neither in the “permanent army” nor “all of your pets die too quickly” camp.