So the week before Update 41, I created a Necro and leveled him to 50. At level 50, it took about 8 BGs before I started seeing some familiar names, and then about 15 total before I was seeing high MMR names consistently. This gave me a great basis to compare my Necro, built as a Stamcro, against players I've faced many hundreds of times on other characters (most recently Stamplar, Stamarc, and Stamden).
There are several significant issues with Necro compared to all the other classes:
1. the sustain sucks, unless you want to use VERY clunky abilities (Mystic Siphon for DPS, Mortal Coil for healing). Both of those abilities are awkward because they use the same mechanic: cast on a corpse to affect targets between you and the corpse. In PVP, this is a major limitation, because the location of the corpses is fairly random and not meaningfully controllable by the player, and PVP fights tends to be very mobile. I'd much prefer to see sustain baked into either class passive or abilities that already serve a useful purpose (e.g. Netch for Warden, Rune Focus Templar). By tying sustain to unattractive abilities, it's essentially forcing the Necro to have poor sustain in order to select more worthwhile abilities
2. Necro has a preponderence of abilities with durations (buffs, DoTs, HoTs) that need to be managed. Some folks might enjoy it, and it can be argued that there's skill in juggling 6+ duration-based abilities, but it is simply unfun. At a minimum in PVP, a Necro has to maintain Bone Armor, Spirit Guardian, and the Assault ability Resolving Vigor. That's already 3 cooldowns to juggle. Then you throw in the myriad of class abilities that have durations (DoTs) and it becomes very tedious
3. there is no class access to Major Brutality / Major Sorcery. Every other class has some skill to access that (Netch for Warden, Drain Power for NB, Molten Weapons for DK, Surge for Sorc, Biting Jabs for Templar, Tome-Bearer's Inspiration for Arcanist). It can be argued that most of those other class abilities are very worth using.
4. hands down the new Grave Lord's Sacrifice morph is the most clunky buff I've used in any MMORPG: you need to be in combat, and there's a 2.5-second delay before the buff activates; no other buff I can think of in ESO has a delay before the effect. On top of all this, GLS is yet another duration-based ability that the Necro has to juggle. I would also argue, as a Stamcro, that ZoS chose the wrong morph to keep around. Stalking Blastbones was more useful in more contexts than Blighted Blastbones, because the damage scaled meaningfully, esp as distance and mobility are king in PVP
All of these things together create a context where Necro feels very clunky to play.
Players shouldn't have to sacrifice capability (gear, food, enchants, etc) to fix class issues, and the end result is a class that is simply weaker than other classes and / or is tedious to play.
Anyway, someone in my PVP guild asked me to share my detailed findings, so here we are.
UPDATE (2024/04/11)
So I've continued experimenting on Necro (Stamcro specifically), and there are 2 key things I've learned that I wanted to shared related to addressing Necro sustain:
1. put Bone Armor on your frontbar, if you don't have a Bone Tyrant ability slotted on the frontbar. Death Gleaning is a great passive for sustain
2. slot 1 ability that has no resource cost. I've already documented above how the corpse-targeting abilities are clunky to use due to the mobile nature of PVP fights, so I slot Elemental Susceptibility on the backbar with the Vateshran staff
Edited by taugrim on 15 April 2024 06:07 PC | NA | CP 2.3k
- Active: Dark Elf Stamina Templar | Dark Elf Stamina Arcanist | Dark Elf Stamina Necromancer
- Inactive: Nord Stamina Warden | Orc Stamina Sorceror | Nord Stamina Nightblade | Nord Stamina Dragonknight
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