It still needs a significant amount of work and it’s not a good sign that it keeps getting ignored.

This ability still feels like garbage to use.

It's a delayed buff, so it feels like a dead cast.

It locks you into using Skulls if you want any sort of burst damage, and the actual buff it gives to your DoTs is nowhere near enough to justify losing out on the amount of damage that Blastbones give.

The pet is also still mislabeled as Stalking Blastbones on live, which feels like a colossal joke at this point more than anything.

Instead of a boring +15% damage to DoTs and class abilities, why not give it something like:

"Your Direct Damage abilities haunt your target, leaving a lingering DoT that deals X% of the ability's damage for X seconds."

I think they are too busy deciding wtf Ghostly Embrace is supposed to be. I hope that eventually GLS ends up being a decent morph option, but ZOS tends to leave stuff unfinished or in some cases take literal years to finally address them.

The sad part is that plenty of feedback has been provided about what exactly is wrong with this morph, but so far ZOS has ignored pretty much everything besides the change that recently allowed the skill to be used out of combat.

It needs to get taken outside and shot. Give me stalking back D;

Alaztor91 wrote: »

I think they are too busy deciding wtf Ghostly Embrace is supposed to be.

I think this is what is happening due to the last circle leaving a corpse. Ideally more power will be shoved into GLS once this is finished being converted into a dps ability so that skulls can be untethered from GLS. I'm assuming this is the case only because we saw a similar thing with Warden's being funneled into being "The Ice Staff Class" for a few patches before they found a different solution. This feels similar, with the skulls functionality being a bandage to help in corpse placement while other alternatives were concocted.

Deimus wrote: »

Maybe they've taken the overwhelming player feedback on GLS into account and decided to go back to the drawing board.

Why waste manpower tweaking and finishing a skill that was so poorly received and disliked by your players when you can dedicate the rest of 2024 into designing a skill that will line up with the expectations of your customers? It would explain why the only non bug change was the in-combat requirement.

U43 has shown that the devs are aware of and can act on player feedback even if there is no communication during the process. Almost every change made to the class was directly or closely related to player feedback and rework threads that I've seen. It might have taken the eruption from years of frustration for them to act, but they did. So maybe they are silently working hard on a new skill, or maybe this is all just cope.

I don't think there was a single rework thread asking for Stalking to be deleted for another buff skill, but it is good they added some baseline buffs to the class. In fact, almost all the feedback about Stalking being deleted was highly negative.

@IncultaWolf that would a great buff for healers cause the 8% healing done with a negative effect on you feels like a joke for the most part

I hope they would come up with something diffirent for GLS. Ghostly embrace is still in ufinished state, all the 3 patches thing has to go to see any use out of this spell, and make it better than scribing alternatives. Its also fun that with scribing you still can have a cc + damage + coprse, but when they added chill+dot+corpse they decided that cc have to go, not realising that situation when you can benefit from whole ability is sparce to say the least. Considering how hard it is to land you have to load at least 75% of ability repertour into first patch, and rest 25% spread on the other too, if you want to keep it the way it is.

I would like to see all "the 3 patches" thing go for plain single AoE instance, that can be targeted on ground inside a radius like impulse for example, and than ZoS can remove root, slow, stun, and chill and give us sticky DoT + AoE direct damage + corpse generator.

And then it would solve for alternative range corpse generator, so GLS might have different design direction.

Aldoss wrote: »

Finish ALL of necro, for real. Here's a quick list of necro contradictions:

• Has tethers that cost nothing, but require corpses in order to use and corpses can't be created on demand, also corpses only stay active for a limited time. Tethers break from LOS (sometimes from tiny pebbles in Cyro)
• Blighted BB is one of the most powerful burst skills, but BB can't be controlled and can be LOSd, CCd, stunned, immobilized, killed, or outran.
• Summons temporary minions, but those minions don't count for the necro's damage, nor can they interact with many sets in the game, such as Pale Order
• Skeletal Mage and its morphs use direct damage, but the devs consider it a dot and lowered its damage to be in line with other dots
• GLS summons a minion called Stalking Blastbones
• Has an entire passive that buffs dot damage, but has no useful dots in its class kit
• Is the only class in the game that debuffs itself with its primary healing skill

I'm sure there are others. Feel free to add to it.

• Skulls is slowest projectile in the game. Does nothing outside of plain damage. While sorcs frags/crystal weapon reduce cost of your next ability by 10%, NB concealed weapon sets enemy offbalance, grants minor expo, surprise attack is offbalanceguaranted crit every 3 sec + guaranted sundered, Funnel health heals you back, wardens cliffracer applies offbalance and bleed DoT or 100(400) sd/wd, Arcanist runeblades build cruxes, have an AoE or increased crit chanse, DKs whip sets enemy offbalnce, grants setthing fury making it deal 66% more damage after 2 ardent flame casts, or a strong healback and slight damage increase against offbalanced targets, etc.
• Sythe is wierd, its fine as a health scaling heal for tanks, but for dps/pvp its useless.
• Has two cleanses for some reason, expunge or renewing undeath should be reworked to grant something else.
• Tethers would be better off a plain corpse pops, creating AoE HoT/DoT around corpse or HoT/DoT that sticks to user.
• Bone totem fears every 2 seconds for 14 sec, starting after 2s delay. Why should it have delay when fear automaticly apply 6 sec cc immunity to anything, its not like you can keep someone permafeard inside totem, it should have fear on cast, and then every 2 secs.
• Animate blastbones cost too much. I would love if they reduced amount of players res to one and reduced cost to a more reasonable 150 ulti.
• Has no consistant shield/roll piercing stuns. Every class has one, except necro.
• Summoners armor dont need 15% cost reduction on summons. Make apply 1000 buff from empowering grasp to yours summons, or make it a self corpse, or spawn corpses at your feet every X second, even on conditions like after recieving certain amounts of damage for example.
• Ghostly embrace and empowering grasp is super unconsistant and unwieldy. Effectivly you can count on hitting only first patch, but then you wasting ~4k mana on ability that is 33% effective of what is written in the tooltip. All patches should appear at same time, or you should get 1/3 mana cost back if patch doesnt hit anyone, or rework it to become more precicly targeted.
• Colosus should stun on first hit, not on last. Also change it to major brittle as its frost and its more fitting, and necros would have their identity of unique dps debuff, that they had with major vuln before we had all the new item sets sourses.

This right here is 90% of the problem :
That's what a necro skill bar should look like for it to be usable in pvp:


There is a problem...

Just look at every necro build there is : eventually, you have to choose to take off essential skills like race against time or ele susc to afford space for major brutality/sorcery.

What is the solution? Give blastbones major brutality/sorcery instead of giving it to a useless skill that no one can slot !
Anyways, the solution for sure isn't to buff skills, it's to make those that are already being used good enough that you can free some skill slots.

Change ideas :
-Make skulls give major breach to targets and the 3rd cast could even stun people. This alone allows you to unslot your previous spammable and ele susc. (and make skulls faster so that it can actually land)
-Give necro a way to unslot race against time. Maybe giving major expedition to mender could replace part of it. How about a passive that makes you immune to snares and immobilisations after dropping below 40% health?

Alaztor91 wrote: »

necro_the_crafter wrote: »

[*] Bone totem fears every 2 seconds for 14 sec, starting after 2s delay. Why should it have delay when fear automaticly apply 6 sec cc immunity to anything, its not like you can keep someone permafeard inside totem, it should have fear on cast, and then every 2 secs.

I have not tested this, but the wording used for the skill description leads me to believe that it applies a fear on cast, in addition to the fear that starts after the 2s delay.

This can't be how it works, right? A Companion version of a class skill having better functionality than the actual class skill it is based on? Surely I'm missing something right?

Actually this has happened numerous times, at least for Sorc, the one class I follow. Maybe it's happened to other classes too. They've teased future class skill changes via companions. Sorc's had/have some underused skills so naturally I and many others have made suggestions for them over the years, but I find it funny that Ember has 3 of them that come to mind.

Lightning Flood and morphs have been dead for 5+ years, I suggested to give it the Templar Shards/DK Ash Cloud treatment, where its damage budget is shifted from 100% DOT to upfront direct + with a weaker DOT for the rest of the duration which just serves to proc something like Concussed or 6% shock damage taken. Ember has the exact functionality that I described, minus the auxillary part.



Endless Fury and Mage's Wrath are a little too similar to warrant 2 morphs and deal much less damage from comparable executes like 2H, NB, and Templar, with the justification that it can be used as delayed burst, by applying it to your enemy before you get them in execute range. I suggested we change Endless Fury to a traditional execute that removes the delayed explosion and changes the execute range to 50% allowing it better scaling and power budget, with the small aoe damage to nearby enemies to keep it unique. Ember has this, obviously in Companion version it doesn't have the scaling, but the functionality behaves as 1 source of damage, no delayed burst, exactly as I requested.



Encase, mostly useless for the entire games life cycle, just recently changed to make 1 morph into a heal, the other into a better CC + guaranteed damage + major maim. I didn't really use these, but I did think they should combine 1 of the morphs into the other to make room for a new skill, as well, I suggested the damage be guaranteed instead of needing the full 4s CC to work. The other 2 only made it to Ember, but this 1 made it to live. Ember had a heal version of Encase in 2022, 2 years before Sorc got it in 2024.



Wards. Heal. Ember. Enough said. The heal being added to Ward made it to live 2 years after she came out, like Encase.



Who knows if Ember's changes were meant to hint towards a future for Sorc changes.. Whats more likely is when designing Ember to offer healing, tanking, and damage dealing, they realized Sorc's kit wasn't properly balanced for that, so they were forced to come up with new designs for Sorc version Companion skills. I just find it funny that suggestions we had been requesting for years, managed to make it on the Companion, before it made it to our playable class.

Maybe Necro is in a similar boat

Urzigurumash wrote: »

I don't think there was a single rework thread asking for Stalking to be deleted for another buff skill, but it is good they added some baseline buffs to the class. In fact, almost all the feedback about Stalking being deleted was highly negative.

For sure but there was feedback about the general bugginess of Blastbones, or running towards a target you're not focusing, not activating procs, not counting for damage in BGs, etc. So they decided to try something different altogether.[/quote]

Funny how new GLS also struggles to find its only target. Just how stalking struggled to find a target you pointed.

Alaztor91 wrote: »

necro_the_crafter wrote: »

[*] Bone totem fears every 2 seconds for 14 sec, starting after 2s delay. Why should it have delay when fear automaticly apply 6 sec cc immunity to anything, its not like you can keep someone permafeard inside totem, it should have fear on cast, and then every 2 secs.

I have not tested this, but the wording used for the skill description leads me to believe that it applies a fear on cast, in addition to the fear that starts after the 2s delay.

This can't be how it works, right? A Companion version of a class skill having better functionality than the actual class skill it is based on? Surely I'm missing something right?

Yeah I tested this, the companion fear totem is better than the one the player has 🙃 It fears instantly.