Necromancer class: how I would like it to be and to work

Hi everyone! Im Magiber, a random player who is super hyped for AoC and someone who everytime its possible to him plays necromancer class in everygame he plays and its possiblet. The ones I have played enough are GW2, Diablo2&3 and POE. Also I like necromancers in series, like Overlord.

So, since I really wanna play as necromancer class in AoC when it comes out, I would like to share what do I hope to play, what I wouldnt like to play when choosing the necromancer class and just, in general, giving my feedback and also discuss about the class if some1 wants to

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First of all, the best necromancer representation I have found is Ainz in the anime Overlord: a powerful undead (I like playing as undead race but Im not sure its gonna be possible in AoC, btw Im sure the game is gonna be good enough for me to not finding it as a problem) who summons armies of skeletons, turns enemy corpses into zombies, can summon powerful undeads with their own mana and have an enough-to-survive with no summons spell repertory.

More or less this is what I expect from the class to be:
1.-Someone who can turn corpses into allies and can summon powerful undeads, but also has a kit that allows him to survive (a parry that succefuly tps you some meters away, defense buffs, etc) and some spells to kill enemies so you can turn their corpses into your summons. Since dead is corruption and cold, the spells should be oriented to look like ice or corruption.
2.- Someone that has auras that applies debuffs to weak living creatures but that's something I find hard to balance and Im not sure it's something viable in an mmorpg like AoC but I really like the debuffs auras.
3.- Having buffs to the summons: maybe to balance this the best way would be buff/debuff skills (standard mode, def+ dmg-, dmg+ def-, speed+ accuracy-, etc). Also temporally buffs with a cooldown time that you cant spam it with speed and dmg buffs (fury and this stuff)
4.-A thing I find really really important is having some skills to lead the undeads, not being able to select the focus you want your summons to attack can become really annoying in gameplay.
5.- Maybe summoning undead mounts in the highest levels of the class can be something really fun, specially a husbandry dedicated necromancer that can turn into undead versions their profession results with some stat changing results (idk, like more frost resistance mounts or things like that that makes sense coming from undeads), but that's too much effort for one of the 64 classes so I just give the idea of a thing I would find fun to do ingame

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What I WOULDNT LIKE a necromancer to be:
1.- Someone who summons that buff allied players (the class would be really hard to balance, and if you wanna summons that buff allies, you have 7 more summon classes to choose)
2.- Someone who summons demons. A necromancer is a related-to-death class, demons are, for me, aganist the necromancer identity, they are not undead summons, and in my opinion a necromancer is an expert of the death, not a master from powerful demons.
3.- A class that once he has his summons, can turn off the brain. I think that, in order to make a fun summoner class, its necessary to add elements like target selection or pet stats changing during battle. Also having to change your summons set (dps/burst/tanking, ranged/melee, amount/strength) during the battle can become something that makes the class a bit more skilled and gives a better learning curve in general.
4.-Someone who has a lot of long inmobile casts: its just boring to be too much time casting summons, it is something I hope devs think about and balance with their own judgment, you'll have a better idea of it than me, but I find important to consider the cast times of every class not being excessivelong, specially the inmobile casts.
5.- A class with all permament or all temporally summons: I think that there should be a balance like summons you made are permanent until you decide killing them and summons made from corpses have a limited life time.

Now I would like to speak about the 3 systems I find viable to balance the amount of summons a necromancer can have:
1.- Each summoning skill has their own amount cap depending of the level of the skill.
2.- You have a stat called "Lead Capacity" or like that, and every summon has a LC cost and the ammount of each summon you can have is CapacityCost/LeadCapacity, and it scales with gear (you can have an amount oriented necromancer or an strenght oriented necromancer depending of the lead capacity and Attack Power of your gear). IN THIS OPTION THE LC AFFECTS EVERY SUMMON IN AN INDEPENDENT WAY OF OTHERS, so if A costs 2 and B costs 4, and your LC is 10, you can have 5A and 2B.
3.- Same Lead Capacity concept but it is a general pool and every unit has a LC cost and your army must be oriented to how to distribute your Lead Capacity pool.

I really like systems 2 and 3, I find boring the system 1 becouse systems 2,3 allows you to choose betweet amount and quality summons (too much AP = really stong summons with low LC and too much LC = lots of summons but not that powerful). System 1 with strong and quantity skill tree branches would ve biable but I really find it boring and 0 creative.

Im about to end I think, and I would like to speak about something I really would like to have is a massive reward in gameplay when you achive max level (50 in AoC its what I have read), something like a passive skill that gives you a good amount of Lead Capacity (more summons), a high cd super buff to summons or transforming into something like a lich, temporally gaining a good damage for your own spells, or maybe unlocking the strongest and biggest summon that looks spectacular. I dont know, the idea is having a really noticeable difference betweet max level necromancer and max-1 level necromancer.

Finally, let me give you my opinion you of what I think the undead things should look like, some conceptual art from Overlord, just becouse those are the easy-to-get links, and maybe some other written descriptions but with no visual reference:

Bicorn(undead pet): https://overlordmaruyama.fandom.com/wiki/Bicorn
Abyss demon(THIS IS BEAUTIFOUL): https://overlordmaruyama.fandom.com/wiki/Abyss_Demon
Corpse guardian: https://overlordmaruyama.fandom.com/wiki/Corpse_Guardian
Death Kinght (one of my favorites, please give special attention to this one): https://overlordmaruyama.fandom.com/wiki/Death_Knight
Skeleton warrior(I REALLY WOULD LIKE the skeletons to wear better and more beautifoul armors and weapons when the skill is more leveled): https://overlordmaruyama.fandom.com/wiki/Skeleton_Warrior
Red skeleton warrior(The idea of having different colors with different stats skeletons can be something good to consider): https://overlordmaruyama.fandom.com/wiki/Red_Skeleton_Warrior
Lich(undead spell-oriented summon): https://overlordmaruyama.fandom.com/wiki/Iguva=41
Zombie(How I think they should look like, human case): https://overlordmaruyama.fandom.com/wiki/Zombie

Now written ideas:
-Spectres.
-Souls as proyectiles.
-Abominations.
-Corrupted-looking proyectiles.

Well, actually I have been for more than an hour writting this, I think I have said enough of what I would like the class to be and to look like. Things written here can be applied to more summoning classes, specially the Lead Capacity system, something I havent seen anywhere and I think it can be really really enjoyable for the player when thinking about choosing gear and seeing his progression in more clear numbers.

Sorry if I have failed in my eng speach but Im not used to write eng and Im sure I got a lot of grammar fails, please forgive me

.

Regards and hoping you read me, Magiber.

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Comments

Honshu

The notion of a "lead capacity" is interesting because I'm not sure if I've seen another game that does that with a pet class. Mostly I'm familiar with games that either have a straight cap on the different sorts of pets you can summon (Mastermind from City of Heroes/Villains), an overall cap where you're expected to summon pets in a configuration you like until you reach the cap where each pet still eats up the same amount of cap (Dark Age of Camelot's Bonedancer class), functionally uncapped but a pain to take advantage of (Guild Wars 1 Necromancer), or just a plain jane "you have one pet" type class (Hunter in World of Warcraft).

Different pets with different requirements of "lead capacity" to be maintained would enable something like the concept of what the developers are interested in (the Summoner having a choice between fewer stronger summons, or multiple weak summons, aka "zerg mode"). It would also leave design space for simple "pets" that do not require lead capacity but are limited to extremely simple behavior. Dark Age of Camelot Animists had these types of pets, simple turrets that you plop down and shoot at the closest target in range, or wispy balls of light that rush to a target and then explode. Dark Age of Camelot Theurgists did as well; they would target an enemy, summon a pet, and that pet would just unerringly run at its target and beat the shit out of him until the pet or the target was dead. It was hilarious, and really made both these classes feel like Summoners who could just call on an avalanche of asskicking down on someone. There was no sight quite like the target of a Theurgist running away from fifteen Earth elementals beating the shit out of him.

The biggest complexity of Summoners I foresee is deciding how they should interact with the Augment system. I mean, if you have three basic summons from the Summoner archetype (A tank pet, a DPS pet, and a support pet), and you then get Augments (with 4 planned Augments for each secondary class), does that mean now you have to design 96 different types of pets (3 pet types X 4 Augments X 8 Classes)? We're not talking about small mechanical changes anymore. A Beastmaster, for example, should feel very different from a Necromancer, because a Beastmaster is calling on natural creatures, while a Necromancer is conjuring zombies and skeletons. That needs to be reflected in how the different pets will fight, and the abilities they have access to.

It's a lot of work, but I guess everything else in this game is too, so hey, what's another zillion manhours of labor?

Magiber

Honshu wrote: »

The biggest complexity of Summoners I foresee is deciding how they should interact with the Augment system. I mean, if you have three basic summons from the Summoner archetype (A tank pet, a DPS pet, and a support pet), and you then get Augments (with 4 planned Augments for each secondary class), does that mean now you have to design 96 different types of pets (3 pet types X 4 Augments X 8 Classes)? We're not talking about small mechanical changes anymore. A Beastmaster, for example, should feel very different from a Necromancer, because a Beastmaster is calling on natural creatures, while a Necromancer is conjuring zombies and skeletons. That needs to be reflected in how the different pets will fight, and the abilities they have access to.

It's a lot of work, but I guess everything else in this game is too, so hey, what's another zillion manhours of labor?

Well, actually I was thinking about stat changes more than new pets. For example, skeletons when moving slower are tankier than when running, but running they deal more dps, and this stuff of stat changing the summons instead of one skeleton of each type. Also there are gonna be obv summons with non-variable stats due to their own appearence (I mean, a summon with a big shield is gonna be a tank forever and a lich is gonna be a speller XD) this stat changing, my bad not speaking for that, would be more oriented to the "mass spamming summons" rather than for everything.

Also something I didnt speak about is that I think a necromancer will need between 14 and 25 unique summons to feel good. Less than 14 would be a boring small repertory and more than 25 would be too much to think about and to balance imo

Greetings

Sathrago

Because i've been scarred by it for the past few years i will yet again use WoW as an example of what *not* to do. Specifically Demonology warlocks and being unable to properly direct your horde of pets.

So to put it simply, If we are going to get multiple different summons that are under our command, allow us to command all the pets when we hit our pet commands rather than just a primary pet being commanded.

I cannot express to you how frustrating it is to pvp as demonology. Your primary demon follows all of your pet commands but anything else summoned will only attack the last target you cast a spell on, and will keep attacking that target until its timer flickers out or it dies. This means if someone has a speed boost, say a mount, and you send your pets to attack them, you will be locked in combat while they stupidly chase the target for the next 30 to 40 seconds. The developers can easily fix this issue but refuse to so I am hoping that Intrepid can do this part correctly.

Sholer

Sathrago wrote: »

Because i've been scarred by it for the past few years i will yet again use WoW as an example of what *not* to do. Specifically Demonology warlocks and being unable to properly direct your horde of pets.

So to put it simply, If we are going to get multiple different summons that are under our command, allow us to command all the pets when we hit our pet commands rather than just a primary pet being commanded.

I cannot express to you how frustrating it is to pvp as demonology. Your primary demon follows all of your pet commands but anything else summoned will only attack the last target you cast a spell on, and will keep attacking that target until its timer flickers out or it dies. This means if someone has a speed boost, say a mount, and you send your pets to attack them, you will be locked in combat while they stupidly chase the target for the next 30 to 40 seconds. The developers can easily fix this issue but refuse to so I am hoping that Intrepid can do this part correctly.

Blizzard really doesn't care about demonology

PALIT

Magiber wrote: »

Hi everyone! Im Magiber, a random player who is super hyped for AoC and someone who everytime its possible to him plays necromancer class in everygame he plays and its possiblet. The ones I have played enough are GW2, Diablo2&3 and POE. Also I like necromancers in series, like Overlord.

So, since I really wanna play as necromancer class in AoC when it comes out, I would like to share what do I hope to play, what I wouldnt like to play when choosing the necromancer class and just, in general, giving my feedback and also discuss about the class if some1 wants to .

First of all, the best necromancer representation I have found is Ainz in the anime Overlord: a powerful undead (I like playing as undead race but Im not sure its gonna be possible in AoC, btw Im sure the game is gonna be good enough for me to not finding it as a problem) who summons armies of skeletons, turns enemy corpses into zombies, can summon powerful undeads with their own mana and have an enough-to-survive with no summons spell repertory.

More or less this is what I expect from the class to be:
1.-Someone who can turn corpses into allies and can summon powerful undeads, but also has a kit that allows him to survive (a parry that succefuly tps you some meters away, defense buffs, etc) and some spells to kill enemies so you can turn their corpses into your summons. Since dead is corruption and cold, the spells should be oriented to look like ice or corruption.
2.- Someone that has auras that applies debuffs to weak living creatures but that's something I find hard to balance and Im not sure it's something viable in an mmorpg like AoC but I really like the debuffs auras.
3.- Having buffs to the summons: maybe to balance this the best way would be buff/debuff skills (standard mode, def+ dmg-, dmg+ def-, speed+ accuracy-, etc). Also temporally buffs with a cooldown time that you cant spam it with speed and dmg buffs (fury and this stuff)
4.-A thing I find really really important is having some skills to lead the undeads, not being able to select the focus you want your summons to attack can become really annoying in gameplay.
5.- Maybe summoning undead mounts in the highest levels of the class can be something really fun, specially a husbandry dedicated necromancer that can turn into undead versions their profession results with some stat changing results (idk, like more frost resistance mounts or things like that that makes sense coming from undeads), but that's too much effort for one of the 64 classes so I just give the idea of a thing I would find fun to do ingame .

What I WOULDNT LIKE a necromancer to be:
1.- Someone who summons that buff allied players (the class would be really hard to balance, and if you wanna summons that buff allies, you have 7 more summon classes to choose)
2.- Someone who summons demons. A necromancer is a related-to-death class, demons are, for me, aganist the necromancer identity, they are not undead summons, and in my opinion a necromancer is an expert of the death, not a master from powerful demons.
3.- A class that once he has his summons, can turn off the brain. I think that, in order to make a fun summoner class, its necessary to add elements like target selection or pet stats changing during battle. Also having to change your summons set (dps/burst/tanking, ranged/melee, amount/strength) during the battle can become something that makes the class a bit more skilled and gives a better learning curve in general.
4.-Someone who has a lot of long inmobile casts: its just boring to be too much time casting summons, it is something I hope devs think about and balance with their own judgment, you'll have a better idea of it than me, but I find important to consider the cast times of every class not being excessivelong, specially the inmobile casts.
5.- A class with all permament or all temporally summons: I think that there should be a balance like summons you made are permanent until you decide killing them and summons made from corpses have a limited life time.

Now I would like to speak about the 3 systems I find viable to balance the amount of summons a necromancer can have:
1.- Each summoning skill has their own amount cap depending of the level of the skill.
2.- You have a stat called "Lead Capacity" or like that, and every summon has a LC cost and the ammount of each summon you can have is CapacityCost/LeadCapacity, and it scales with gear (you can have an amount oriented necromancer or an strenght oriented necromancer depending of the lead capacity and Attack Power of your gear). IN THIS OPTION THE LC AFFECTS EVERY SUMMON IN AN INDEPENDENT WAY OF OTHERS, so if A costs 2 and B costs 4, and your LC is 10, you can have 5A and 2B.
3.- Same Lead Capacity concept but it is a general pool and every unit has a LC cost and your army must be oriented to how to distribute your Lead Capacity pool.

I really like systems 2 and 3, I find boring the system 1 becouse systems 2,3 allows you to choose betweet amount and quality summons (too much AP = really stong summons with low LC and too much LC = lots of summons but not that powerful). System 1 with strong and quantity skill tree branches would ve biable but I really find it boring and 0 creative.

Im about to end I think, and I would like to speak about something I really would like to have is a massive reward in gameplay when you achive max level (50 in AoC its what I have read), something like a passive skill that gives you a good amount of Lead Capacity (more summons), a high cd super buff to summons or transforming into something like a lich, temporally gaining a good damage for your own spells, or maybe unlocking the strongest and biggest summon that looks spectacular. I dont know, the idea is having a really noticeable difference betweet max level necromancer and max-1 level necromancer.

As a main necromancer my self i do like your POV and i find the LC very interesting if they put that on the game i don't really care if necromancer end up bad i would play it regardles of it. I like it cuz it brings alot of posibilitys in comps. I have dreamed of playing a mele necromancer and i also would like if the habilities have low cast time and not habing to be stuck in one place. The devs said that the weapons wouldn't be class loked so i expect that a necromancer with a sword would end up viable (not 100% efficient but at leas playeable.)
i would also like if there are multiple tipes of undead i think 20 diferent tipes of undead would be epic,
in this month live stream mr. Bacon did say that there will be like 20 biomes so why not put 1 of every tipe of undead in one and u have to go get them for you to progres or something like that. It encorages exploration and its a form of making the player work for it. Imagine that you go to a island with pirates and you find a shipwreak, there you can get a undead pirate that heve buffs on the sea terrain or some thing like this. You go to a snow mountain yo can get a undead ice magician... I feel like this would make the game very enjoyable.

Lets hope they see this post and do some thinking with it.

PD: sorry if my english is weird its not my 1rst language and i just know how to talk it, not write it.

Vhaeyne

I could be wrong about all of this so take it with a grain of salt. (This is just my speculation)

The only thing I expect from the necromancer class in AOC is that instead of summoning a living monster or daemon, it summons a undead.

Seeing that it is Summoner/Cleric I would expect all of the normal Summoner moves to just have a healing or buffing augment option to them. Maybe a line or two of flavor text suggesting that the move uses necromancy.

Personally I am not convinced that the nomenclature of any class name will land it that identity.

If you can't use intuition and roleplaying experience to determine the difference between:
Soul Weaver, Tellsword, and Songcaller it stands to reason that the difference between:
Necromancer, Wildblade, and conjurer would not be very great.

I would rather we just do the FFXI ,GW1, or L2 style (main/sub class) instead of what looks like a pointless nomenclature. Archeage had what? 220 classes? All pointless words.

I only say all of this as a warning for people to not get their hopes up about "Class Fantasy".

Songcaller

Archeage did indeed have tons of classes, about 60 or so weren't even viable classes lol.

Mowaby

Vhaeyne wrote: »

I could be wrong about all of this so take it with a grain of salt. (This is just my speculation)

The only thing I expect from the necromancer class in AOC is that instead of summoning a living monster or daemon, it summons a undead.

Seeing that it is Summoner/Cleric I would expect all of the normal Summoner moves to just have a healing or buffing augment option to them. Maybe a line or two of flavor text suggesting that the move uses necromancy.

Personally I am not convinced that the nomenclature of any class name will land it that identity.

If you can't use intuition and roleplaying experience to determine the difference between:
Soul Weaver, Tellsword, and Songcaller it stands to reason that the difference between:
Necromancer, Wildblade, and conjurer would not be very great.

I would rather we just do the FFXI ,GW1, or L2 style (main/sub class) instead of what looks like a pointless nomenclature. Archeage had what? 220 classes? All pointless words.

I only say all of this as a warning for people to not get their hopes up about "Class Fantasy".

IMO the word class should be given the the 8 archetypes and just like you said the second archetype would be your sub class. Let the players decide what they want to call the combinations of archetypes. I think some people will be mislead by the class names and expect something vastly different from the original archetype.

Songcaller

It also appears the maximum summons will be three but the information is from 4 months ago.

maouw

I like the lead capacity idea!
Gives a lot of freedom to player expression

Honshu

After being a sperg and giving a lot of thought about it, I have a wishlist for what I would like to see in Summoner class

I want to have a pet for each basic role: Tank, DPS, Support

Customizeable "squads": Let me customize the type of "squad" I control by designing a pool of "concentration points" or whatever that you spend on maintaining permanent summons AND maintaining permanent buffs you can put on those summons. Let me pick between going "zerg mode" or focusing my power into a single strong pet. Let me choose between a swarm of meaty tank pets that just try to take agro from another swarm of beasties, create a single strong DPS pet to try to maneuver into position and maximize damage with, a handful of helpful support pets that make the rest of the party's life easier, or maybe do a little of all 3. Its a frontloaded decision space that allows Summoners to feel bigbrained for knowing what situation calls for the best "squad loadout."

In addition to permanent, maintained, controllable pets, let me summon brief, uncontrolled, AI driven pets: instead of giving the class conventional nuke spells or DoTs or whatever, I want to see temporary short lived pets that try to achieve that end. If I am playing a Beastmaster, I dont want to cast some "conjure bees" spell and watch a small bee swarm visual effect engulf my target while a damage over tome spell is applied; I want to literally create a swarm of bees as a tangible creature in the world and watch it rush at my target and start stinging the shit out of him, and he has the option to stop attacking me and start attacking the bees to try to swat them away!

Gameplay based around group management: I want to see very very short duration buffs the Summoner can place on his pets to reward him for managing his pets properly by keeping track of where they are and what they are doing and using a skill to enhance then at the right time. I also want to see good pet controls that allow me to control all of my pets, individual pets, and specific "groups" of pets.

Looking forward to seeing what the devs come up with... this year is going to crawl by so slowly (._. )

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