Important Necro Changes

[Obi2Kenobi]

After a few minutes, this is what I have come up with so far: (added a few more after those minutes...)

Skeletons are no longer immune to poison all the time. In normal, with 56% resist all from summon resist, they still did not have it (at least it didn't display them having it when selected with unsummon).

Clay golems get a slows target. Does it work in PvP and bosses? After some testing, it appears to only effect the enemies when they are struck. I wonder how it works with extra fast bosses.

Minions no longer attack bone walls/prisons.

Skeletons appear to be faster.

Bone wall and prison are immune to magic/ have an extremely high resistance. I have a feeling that they have a high base resistance, and then have summon resist help them as well (speculation). My bone spirit does 402-442 magic damage. My wall's life is 69. Its 24 second duration is used up before my 30-40 some odd castings can kill it. Same with the prison. Of course this could be a "feature" to keep you from killing your own bone thingies by accident (meaning it only applies to your things), but then why would you be able to target it (or rather why does your bone spirit target it)?
//edit: There was just a one time display error... It showed their life wrong, but now they are showing it is at 536 life for the wall and 660 life for the prison. This still points to some sort of high resistance.

Monsters no longer stand around like spaghetti noodles and twiddle their thumbs when surrounded by bone prisons when they fill the screen.

Skeleton magi are smarter (they flee when the enemy get too close, and then start attacking them when they are a safe distance) and their spells go through the bone prisons/walls instead of them attacking it. Also, the cold attack from the skelton magi seems to make them [enemies] slower and lasts longer.
//edit: Apparently, only the poison skeleton magi's bolts go through the wall, or when I had tested this there was a small gap.

Skeletons appear to regenerate health faster (did they ever? I don't remember)

A cursed zombie tought me that bone prison/wall are now effected by curses. (not sure if they were before, but I don't think so...) I wonder if auras help them now...

The golems giving each other synergies allows you to put points into all and use them when the situation arises... Does this mean people will cast clay golem on a unique monster to slow them down, then cast their iron golem for the thorns? A Pi Leb is killing you through your blood golem so you switch to Fire? I like these synergies. :)

[Archon_Wing]

You have less skeletons now. It increases like normal until level 4; instead of an extra skeleton, you get stat bonuses. Same thing for level 5. At level 6, you get another skeleton and stat bonuses. This is a nice change as it reduces lag but the skeletons are quite useful now- the last longer than my clay golem. :)

Skeletons don't regenerate health as of 1.09. I didn't notice.

The spell description for bone spirit reads that it lowers maximum resists of hostile players as opposed to simply lowering them.

[Obi2Kenobi]

It increases like normal until level 4; instead of an extra skeleton, you get stat bonuses. Same thing for level 5. At level 6, you get another skeleton and stat bonuses.

I got 6 skeletons in the game... Not sure if it is a bug or not because I had just activated a skill shrine. I must test this out again so I can be sure I didn't misread it.

Level 12 is the breakpoint for 6 skeletons.

The spell description for bone spirit reads that it lowers maximum resists of hostile players as opposed to simply lowering them.

You got me confused for a second there, but then I realized you meant lower resist. :) It does indeed... So if I have 0% resists, lower resist will have a tough time effecting me. :)

[Obi2Kenobi]

Fire golems do fire damage now! Yay! :D

Also, the range of bone spirit has been increased. Very useful for dealing with those annoying carver shaman. I know I've killed them when that little blue swirl from mana per kill comes up.

[DralaFi]

Well here is my discovery. This didn't come from playing the Necromancer but relates to one of his somewhat useful curses.

While in the Chaos sanctuary the Doom Mages would cast many different Necro curses on my and my merc. At times I would see Life Tap, and others.

As before they cast Decripify on your character. Now as far as I remember this is supposed to slow down the monster/player cursed by Decripify. Now it did the opposite. Instead of cursing my character and making him walk/run much slower, it only made him walk/run faster for the duration of Decripify. Now this could be a feature, but it only occurs 75% of the time. Other times it does what it is supposed to do.

This feature or bug also does the same thing in Act 5.

[lemekim]

A cursed zombie tought me that bone prison/wall are now effected by curses. (not sure if they were before, but I don't think so...) I wonder if auras help them now...

Actually that has been like that in 1.09 as well. And AFAIK, in patches before that.

About lower resist lowering maximum resists in PVP - it appears to be a misleading description, it works just like it worked before, by reducing your resist, and then applying the difficulty cap. So if you have 200 total poison resists from items, and you are in normal difficulty, Lower resist will only lower it to 135 or so, which is not enough to bring it below the resists cap in normal. So in this case, Lower Resist would essentially do "nothing".

On a cheerful note, Lower Resist now apparently does not lower magic resistance AT ALL, so your bone spirits and spears do same damage with or without it. I am assuming (and hoping and praying) that it's a bug, and that it will be fixed! =(

[whereagles]

Well, here's my find.

Decrepify slows down attack speed :blink:

While killing stuff in the Throne room, Baal casted Decrepify and my frenzy swing got slower. Before, it was only the run/walk speed that was affected, now it's also the attack speed.

[Sickywicky]

Hehehe imagine a necro who only boosted golem it's probably not viable but you could call him a "pokemancer" then. :P

[Obi2Kenobi]

Attack speed was also affected before.

[Occhidiangela]

Also, the range of bone spirit has been increased. Very useful for dealing with those annoying carver shaman. I know I've killed them when that little blue swirl from mana per kill comes up.

OK's will now be an even bigger Pain in the Rear. :(

[Dagni]

When I fought OK's in Normal difficulty in 1.10, I found them astonishingly wussy. I think I tanked up to five of them with no trouble. Even against DeSeis I didn't bother to dodge his attacks at all. That was just DeSeis, his minions are melee Knights, now.

- Dagni

[Mautaban]

Attack speed was also affected before.

No, definitely not.

If you don't believe me, revert to 1.09 and test it by yourself.

Some importand changes:
- The old cursestack rules are gone (I'm talking about Attract, Confuse and Terror). Oh, and different rules seem to apply to monsterflee and Barbarian cries, when it comes to curse interaktion.

- Confuse now has the same Appeal Effect, Attract, Bonewall and Boneprison have and had before.
Moreover, it is much easier to make COed Monsters fight each other.

- AD/DEC/LR can pierce Immunities. But not the full amount of percentage reduction is applied to immune monsters (20% of reduction percentage, as someone calculated by comparing MPQ monster resistance amounts and in game immunity pierce tests.)

- -xx% Monster Resistance Items cannot pierce immunities, but seem to give the full reduction, after a immune monster was pierced by LR (the difference in killing was w and w/o those Items vs immune monsters was tremendous)

- PN is a cookiecutter spell (runeword bramble/death net wand)
---> Nerf those Items

- CE scales with uniques, minions, champions HP, and does scale in general with players. And as Ruvanal posted, there is a difficulty penalty of 50%/35%/20% for normal/nightmare/hell.
---> CE is way too strong
EDIT: Seems like the difficulty penalty, Ruvanal mentioned, does not work in the game. CE is even in 8play/hell way too strong to have any such penalty.


Hmmm, it's damn late here in Europe.

Good N8

edit:

- Golems are crappy meat shields, as there life does not scale with players now
---> needs a change to scaleability

[Guest]

You mean does 20% of the targets health?

That really doesnt sound over powered at least for hell.

[Mautaban]

in 1.09, CE did 9-16% in 8play. Now it's 20% for Hell. Right.
And don't forget to factor in AD/(LR) and the loss of the GPR.
Don't know, but my impression is just, that CE is too strong. It takes to less corpses to wipe out full screens.

[TaiDaishar]

Corpse Explosion should be fixed damage and not % of monster's life, it's impossible to balance it to be good yet not overpowered when it's a percentage.

[Mavfin]

The necro partially gets back a decent damage skill, and you guys want to nerf it? Jeez.....

[Mautaban]

Keep the necromancer exclusive, as he was.

by the Way: Bramble Runeword + Death Net Wand + some nice skill equip + a maxed poison branch end up in a 60k-60k (no typos here!) PN damage.

[Mavfin]

Heh. What I really mean is....I tossed D2 'balance' out the window years ago. Not gonna happen. I use 'fun' as a measure. Blowing up things is fun. CE Necros are fun. Also, go play in the patch a bit more, and notice that CE isn't as effective in NM and Hell as it is in Normal. In normal it's almost like the old days.

I personally think this patch is going to be a lot of fun, as it makes for more interesting builds. If I have to play SP players 5 all the way through Normal/NM, and go to players 1 for Hell, that's not a problem. As long as I have a challenge to play with, I don't mind. And if I build a char that hits the wall in NM or Hell, so be it. I can rebuild it better the next time. As long as the game is still fun, I'll play it.

[kandrathe]

I've never yet seen a Sur rune. Who knows how hard it will be to find an Elite wand? As long as duping doesn't run rampant again on the realms, I'm sure I will never see one.

But, I agree, there sure is a bunch of cheese out there for you pack rats!!!

[Ignatz]

Yeah really, you people. Throw the necro a bone, for chrissake.