Necro pet (Liches) bugs

[Dragoth]

As far as balance and class progression goes, there is a very very thin line here and you have to be careful with major changes as you have to balance quite a few things right - pet points for every single undead ( pet points go up every 40 levels so you have to account for that and control horde at avatar too ) + hp/ac/damage of every single undead, summon undead vs animate dead + class of undead ( caster vs damage vs high ac pets ) + undead control bonus + combination of those pets and points ( so mixing different pets is viable ) + position of necromancer in class order ( affects both pet points and available pets ) and on top of all of that you have to match them exactly right for the level they can be summoned at and the levels they will be used untill. If you thought making balanced druid forms is hard, then this one will be nightmarish.

Therefore the line between balance, underpower and overpower is very thin and to be honest i'd be vary of any changes to the old pets such as wights and wraiths as they work pretty well despite having to fill huge brackets of levels (e.g wraiths are the pets of choice for 2x40 untill 4x40)

There is also a very clear distinction between summon undead vs animate undead - I have personally always viewed summon undeads as your go-to pets for exp runs and animate deads as a one-run big mob pets, as finding and killing mobs for corpses ultimately eats the time that you could have been exping.

Again, if you do plan on major changes for the necromancer pets, i'd check not twice, but 10 times before implementing that change. I have played this class for about a year now, i have calculated pretty much all the pet points and know exactly where necro's gain pet points and i cant honestly say that i know exactly right what's needed to make necromancer pets perfectly balanced, although i do have a general idea.

[Thraxas]

There is also a very clear distinction between summon undead vs animate undead - I have personally always viewed summon undeads as your go-to pets for exp runs and animate deads as a one-run big mob pets, as finding and killing mobs for corpses ultimately eats the time that you could have been exping.

Odd, I see animates and summons in exactly the reverse way, summons are the quick summon for a single mob or wuick run, but for a long xp run I'd rather put the time into corpse farming up front and rely on the longer lasting and more durable animates.

I have played this class for about a year now, i have calculated pretty much all the pet points and know exactly where necro's gain pet points and i cant honestly say that i know exactly right what's needed to make necromancer pets perfectly balanced, although i do have a general idea.

I've played necro as prime on my main char now for wbout 6 years and believe I have a similarly well informed view of how the class and its pets work. Necro seems to be a love it or hate it class, personally I love it, balancing time taken up front to plan, farm corpses, gather pets spell them up then execute the planned run, offset against this requirement to plan and put more work in is the increased power the pets should provide. imo necro should be more powerful than other classes esp solo but also require more work to manage the power, on S3 that was true, on S4 its not far off, changes I'd be looking for would be more utility and variety rather than any increase in power, not sure how lowering wights power would fit with that. If wights / wraiths were to be changed it shouldnt be until after any other changes have been implemented and proven otherwise you run the risk of seriously hurting the class.

T

[Dragoth]

@thraxas

Well if we include sloth3 then i have about 4 years of necromancer experience, as i've spent about 3 years as a necro on sloth3.

I cant say sloth3 was better in that regard really, you had your wraiths as your main pet untill bonesnarls and then phantom and demi/dracoliches. Rest of the pets were utter rubbish. But because all of those were so overpowered for their level that noone really cared as long as the previous pet was worse than the next and that you got em at a reasonable interval - lets not forget that leveling in sloth3 was much more bearable.

I guess i could live with the whole corpse farming thing for my next run if the pets were worth it, but at the moment they are not so i see no point.

[Dragoth]

As far as being best at solo ,this is really quite situational and depends on what you are soloing - necro will never be the best at exp soloing because good exp runs always rely on wasting the least resources to kill a mob and this can only be achieved by huge burst damage ( i.e thief or mage ) and as a result taking the least damage. I have experience of both playing a mage and a thief in addition to necro so i am not just theorizing.

Necro style on the other hand is all about consistent good damage but average avoidance, so you take hits which you have to heal and your undeads die and you have to replace them, so you will always waste more resources while exping and hence get less exp as a result, and the further you go the less exp you will make compared to mages and thieves because mobs start hitting more and more and if your pets are not getting better at avoiding those hits or taking more damage you end up wasting more and more resources to heal yourself and summon new pets.

Necro is pretty good for fat eq popping mobs due to our survivability, but again its very dependant on the strength of our pets, if they have low hp and low avoidance then they wont get the chance to do alot of damage during their lifetime and that just means a low mana to damage ratio.

[Dragoth]

And lets not forget that pet's arent anything special and that they are essentially just a damage + a form of damage mitigation and not necessary overpowered at all.

So take a single wraith for example, it has 400hp (unsanced), does 50hp per round damage on average ( if it doesnt miss ), have practically no AC and costs 51 mana.

If this wraith gets killed in 1 round, it only did 50 hp damage for the 50 mana it costs to summon, so needless to say its a very crappy damage spell that has a rate of 1 hp per 1 mana - compare that with firewinds 6hp for 1 mana which is 6 times more mana efficient, thats like casting a restore at 372 mana, not very nice .
But a consequence of this is that the longer the wraith lives, the more damage it will do over its lifetime and that means a better damage to mana ratio. If your wraith lives for 6 rounds it will do 300 damage for 50 mana, which is about the same as a firewind in terms of mana efficiency, but not in terms of burst damage of course.

But how about damage reduction that it provided, isnt it like a heal you'll ask ? Nope!

Damage reduction that this wraith will provide is questionable, since mobs hit different AC differently. So even though wraith died from being hit its not necessary that this mob would have hit you for the same damage that it hit the wraith for and it could have missed you completely if you had less AC than the wraith, meaning that this wraith absorbed 0 damage and yet it still died.
And even if your wraiths had the same AC as you they would still only be absorbing half its HP not the full amount, simply because they are unsanced and since everyone kills mobs while receiving half the damage from sanctuary spell, wraiths do not - so while the wraith got hit for 400 damage, you would have been hit for only 200 damage.
Yes, you could potentially sanc the wraith to increase its mitigation and damage, but that will be like wasting 75 mana for summoning another wraith, which costs only 50 mana ( not very mana efficient )

3 wraiths are not really that much different, except that they have 1200 unsanced hp, hit for 150 damage per round ( on average without misses) and cost 150 mana, but the main principles stay and you can treat them as 1 mob untill one of them dies.

All in all necro pets are nothing special and are suited for very specific encounters where you can maximize their longevity so as to make them as mana efficient as possible. But overpowered, they are certainly not.

[Thraxas]

@Dragoth

thank you for your lessons in how the necro class works, some might consider it a patronising and condescending but not me I find it very welcome, I can now give in to my the memory loss of my advancing years and forget all the personal experience I have built up and rely solely on your tutoring, while I'm at it I will try and remember that I'm not allowed to hold nor express any opinion that in any way differs from yours,

I'll also apply this to my knowledge of taking thief warrior druid and mage classes all of which I might have taken to high Av on S3, but please let me know how I'm allowed to play these classes and what opinions I'm allowed to hold on these too.

T

[Spink]

Well, regardless of what thraxas thinks about it, I liked your exposition, Dragoth.

Approaching these things from a mana-efficiency standpoint is useful and enlightening, thanks for sharing.

I particularly like the comparison to other forms of damage-dealing and mitigation.

[Dragoth]

Sorry for offending you Thraxas, sorry i have no experience talking with the older generations. Thanks Spink, glad someone enjoyed it rather than being all high and mighty about how he doesnt want to hear anything he already knows.

[Teron]

While there are a lot of factors to be considered, in the end it is indeed math: mana cost to do damage, as Dragoth said. So it shouldn't be too hard to work something out for the necro pets, IMHO.

I have a very limited experience playing a necro (34ne in s3, to 2x40 as secondary on s4), but I do agree that it's more efficient to use animates for exp runs, rather than summons, because:
- wights have slightly better hitroll
- wights have more hps
- animates last twice as longer, than summons
- you can use your xp mob corpses to animate, so you only need to use summns for the first few exp mobs (assuming you are killing at least wightable mobs for xp)
- other animates have useful procs (vampires can suck blood from mobs to last longer)

I also have to note that for some exp kills it's possible to wall pets, rather than sanc, which makes walling even wraiths useful. Also take into account the actual mana cost of the summon undead spell. Flesh golem is nice as well.

Obviously, I didn't test much pet points or pet procs beyond wraiths or liches

I also suspect that Dragoth's preference is partly influenced that he has high mana regen and can afford summonning and sacrificing undeads instead of animating them and lighting them to save mana (keeping undeads alive = saving mana).

It's weird that none of you has mentioned a xeg-yi, who heals pets: does it mitigate any downfalls of any pets or it's just useless, since it takes up a good portion of pet points?

Thanks.

P.S. I think Dragoth addressed his posts to imms, who don't play, rather than more experienced necros, Thraxas. I might as well can be mistaken.

[*Chobbs*]

Mornin' folks,

Liches and demiliches have been reworked to be less, for a lack of a better term, idiotic. Stats subject to further change. Constructive feedback appreciated.

Chobbs

[Dragoth]

Thank you Chobbs, for listening and reacting so quickly about this, very professional attitude if i may say so.

I have done some testing and after spending close to an hour looking for the right corpses to test with i can say that i am pleased, Liches may now be used again. I will certainly not be sacrifing my time running for corpses when i could be doing exp ( as it stands now, 6 lichable corpses would take a whole run to get and you would have to know where to look for them too). But if i do come around lichable corpses during my exp runs i will certainly use them over wraiths. They would also be my choice of minion for EQ mobs.

I tested them on a variety of mobs and seem to be doing 10-20% more damage than wraiths (when wraiths take 19-21 rounds to kill something, liches take 15-17 rounds) when they have full mana and blast enthusiastically, coupled with their superior health they do make a slightly better minion just as you would expect for an animate dead. It would be extra nice if 2 of these could be coupled with a vilewight at level 4x40, this would make an interesting minion mix by providing your undead party with more overall survivability granting a 4x40 player a distinct advantage over 2x40 or 3x40.

Another thing that i would love for you to take into consideration Chobbs is granting undead minions that have mana a benefit from Undead Control Eq, this would allow people with a higher Undead Control cap to have an advantage over others. I'm not saying that you should just add more mana on top of what caster pets have now, reducing their current mana and granting bonus mana for undead control EQ is what i have in mind.

My reasoning behind it is this: Because Undead control EQ only affects hitroll and HP and caster minions have weak melee attacks as a given so they get pretty much 0 benefit from it at the moment and as all Liches and Demiliches blast the same spells whether you have 0 undead control or 20 undead control and they have the same mana this creates an imbalance first of all in the whole Undead control EQ concept and grants excessive power to Warrior/xx/necromancer types who can use minions like liches as their blasting mana pools. If they want to have blasting mana, they should get more EQ - in this case Undead control EQ.
To be honest i would go as far as scaling minion's mana regen and movement with increased undead control as well.

But anyway, thanks for taking a look at this Chobbs, as it stands now we have gained another usable pet and that is always good news. Why have all that pet coding if 90% of the pets werent worth using

[Teron]

Oh noes, now he stabs wa/nes in the back

[Dragoth]

Nah, no way dude, where are you getting that from ? You must have not been paying attention! As what i was saying is the exact opposite- as a wa/ne you will only benefit, but people with wa/dr/cl/ne will be worse off compared to you.

As Liches power stems from mana and mana regen beyond everything else and mana and regen are not affected by Undead Control at the moment = exactly the same power for everyone that can get liches.
If mana and regen are made to scale with UC, that will mean that people who actually have a necromancer in such a position that allows for higher UC cap ( WA/ne for example) and actually bother to get UC gear will benefit more than the other guy who does not.

Dont you expect to have more powerful undeads with 10 UC than you do with 0 UC ?
This creates another progression step: it makes you want to pop more EQ and it makes your necromancer poisition in your class important, if Liches power is the same for wa/ne/dr/cl and for wa/dr/cl/ne, this opens a loophole to having powerful undeads AND having better shapeshifts AND having cleric supplications sooner. Catch my drift bro ?

[Dragoth]

Chobbs, is there going to be anything else we could expect from you in this department ? There's alot of work still needed on this if you can spare the time ?

[Teron]

I did some minor testing for viles and here's what I found:
- I like the gas proc, which seems to be -hit -4dam (tested on myself, not sure if dam scales on mobs). However, it doesn't even always proc every fight. I am fine with it not proccing in the first round, but not every or every 2nd fight? The gas proc rate seems a bit low.
- the dam proc does nice damage for a fighter mob
- I liked the hp drain proc
- the hps are good enough
- the damage could be higher for someone, who takes a slot of a lich or 2 wraiths. Hp steal proc isn't worth an almost total loss of dam on a pet, especially, if a necro doesn't kill his pets often (aegis, etc).
- the hitroll is abyssmally low: lower, than wraiths, in my experience

So I'd suggest to:
- increase dam by 8 dam per attack
- increase hitroll by about 3 (Yes, it's that low)
- increase gas proc at least by 2 times, maybe 2.5 (and yes, I rarely ever see it, too).

Of course, Anrok said that banshee has a blind proc and hits twice as hard, so making vilewights hit as hard as banshees would probably is not necessary =)

Thank you for your work, Chobbs.

P.S. Regarding Anrok's suggestion about scaling mana/regen with UC: this isn't that bad, but it's already more or less scaled with UC cap, natural UC and 40 levels after necro. wa/x/x/x/ne wont be getting many liches any time soon. By that time, wa/ne will get many other undeads.