Necromancer Living Corpse from Patch 11.2.1

MashmalloMan · September 22

Bone Tyrant
Bone Armor: This ability and its morphs no longer summon a corpse when they end or their abilities are refreshed after 10 seconds. Instead, these abilities now grant you Living Corpse if cast while in combat, which allows you to cast a (singular) corpse consuming ability on yourself. This effect is applied instantly but has a 10 second cooldown to ensure the same corpse consuming ability cadence is met.

This is a really awesome change imo. I'm sure Necro mains were requesting this feature when the class set came out so it's nice to see it finally implemented. Also, usually performance changes to abilities hurt identity more often than not, so it's nice to see this is a win/win situation for once.

My only gripe is how long changes like this take, especially since the main reasoning was performance instead of class identity or balance, and appeared week 2 of a of a "minor" patch. It makes me scratch my head because you made such a meaningful change appear simple to implement in 1 week. Has this been worked on for months or did someone come up with this in a few days? Do this more. We're begging you.

With subclassing, I've been thinking about skill lines in a different context where each should be treated as mini classes that can perform well on their own. Necromancer in comparison to Arcanist didn't feel like it met that goal when it comes to corpse vs crux mechanics. Every skill line for Arcanist has a crux generator that can be spammed, and crux spenders for massive payoffs, Necro doesn't do this very well. There was an attempt to make Ghostly Embrace the corpse generator for this line, but as we said back when it was released, it's too clunky to be reliable and should be simplified. For spenders in this line, Bitter Harvest is probably the best for the entire class, so thats not the issue.

I'm not a Necro main, but if you asked me, you need to work on Living Death and Grave Lord with these core principles in mind too.

On the subject of Living Corpse, here's some minor changes I'd love to see for Flame Skull:

Flame Skull

This skill and all morphs now apply Living Corpse instead of creating a corpse nearby on the 3rd cast. The travel speed has been increased by +64% resulting in a travel time of 1s at 28m instead of 1.45s to match similar skills like Wield Soul.
- Ricochet Skull
  - 2nd cast now gives +25% damage and +1 enemy hit nearby, 3rd cast behaves the same.
- Venom Skull
  - The "while slotted" effect based on Necromancer skills cast now works from either bar.

With Living Corpse, you can target cast Tethers, reducing one of the major drawbacks to using them in high mobility encounters like PvP and some PvE fights. It also helps the ability stand out from Blighted Blastbones by providing a different version of corpse generation that is more performant and does not work towards the corpse limit. Ricochet Skull getting a bonus on the 2nd cast and Venom Skull "while slotted" effect working from either bar makes both abilities more consistent and leans into their morph effects. Increasing the travel speed makes these abilities on par with similar ranged spammables, reduces the clunkiness, and improves the reliability.

Also, I could see an argument for giving Living Corpse to Blastbones morphs instead, the morphs would have a fun dynamic of self vs targetted Living Corpse, however GLS would make Bone Armor redundant. I feel it would be too clunky to time everything correctly with the 3s delay on GLS.

CerbinTalYalas · September 22

As a Necro Tank, I really like this change as well, a bit surprised about why it dropped now out of the shadow but eh, I won't complain ^^
Just want to add a thing regarding your Arcanist/Necro comparison : while Arcanist has a Crux Generator and a reliable Crux Spender in every line, Necro has actually an almost permanent Corpse generator from the trash, adds and other entities generated during fights. So not sure they need to rework it, but maybe they could instead add Living Corpse to the Necro class mastery script ?

MincMincMinc · September 22

Honestly even back in elsweyr I was surprised they would even contemplate adding corpses and another pet class when the servers could barely handle the amount of entities present as is.

Having a corpse buff/debuff definitely helps simplify some of the performance issues possible, as best as they could be. Something like blastbones could attach itself to your target instead of leaving a corpse on the ground. The spirit could give you the living corpse buff. The archer could apply living corpse to the enemy after a time period. IDK something along these lines seems like it could work well.

necro always had the positional issues dealing with corpses in a combat system with such high movement speeds that the cast distances were never reasonable for most players.

propertyOfUndefined · September 22

Not tested yet, but I love it on paper...

Will make sure to test its interaction with the Nobility in Decay set, as well as Deaden Pain / Necrotic Potency...

MashmalloMan · September 22

CerbinTalYalas wrote: »

Just want to add a thing regarding your Arcanist/Necro comparison : while Arcanist has a Crux Generator and a reliable Crux Spender in every line, Necro has actually an almost permanent Corpse generator from the trash, adds and other entities generated during fights.

My point was, they went to a lot of effort to make each line for Arcanist self-contained, the same can't be said about Necro. Yes, corpses drop from ads, but not every fight has ads, random corpses should be treated as a bonus, not an expectation.

In PvP you're not going to wait for someone to die before you can use your spenders. It's too random to be reliable, the player wants agency and control. It's one of the reasons Necro can feel clunkier.

There's a few categories imo for consideration:

Passive generators = Bone Armor, GLS, Skeletal Mage, and Spirit Mender.
Active generators = Flame Skull, BB, and Ghostly Embrace.
Little time spenders = Shocking Syphon, Bone Yard, Blood Sacrifice, Renewing Undeath, and Restoring Tether.
Big time spenders = Bitter Harvest, Enduring Undeath, Animate Blastbones, to some degree the class signature script and Corpse Buster.

To me this information says a few things.

Living Death has no reliable corpse generator, especially since it has the most spenders between big and little time this makes it incredibly difficult to pick up on its own for subclassing. You'll need Grave Lord or RNG to make it work properly.

Bone Tyrant has no little time spenders, the best big time spender, and the worst active generator. It's kind of a middle ground between the other 2 lines, mostly relying on RNG for corpses since it doesn't need a generator for a little time spender.

Grave Lord has the best and most consistent active generators, it has a few little time spenders to utilize that, but no big time spender means you'll hit corpse limit or let them expire more often than not. Corpse Buster could be seen as a remedy to this as it requires a lot of corpses to perform well, but usually the excess corpses will just be useful for covering what the other skill lines lack.

CameraBeardThePirate · September 22

MashmalloMan wrote: »

CerbinTalYalas wrote: »

Just want to add a thing regarding your Arcanist/Necro comparison : while Arcanist has a Crux Generator and a reliable Crux Spender in every line, Necro has actually an almost permanent Corpse generator from the trash, adds and other entities generated during fights.

Living Death has no reliable corpse generator, especially since it has the most spenders between big and little time this makes it incredibly difficult to pick up on its own for subclassing.

I agree with everything you wrote except this sentence. Living Death has the best corpse generator out of any of Necromancer's skills: Intensive Mender. Intensive Mender can create a corpse once every 4 seconds, does not require a target to do so, and is nearly required for any build trying to leverage Deaden Pain or Animate Blastbones. It's actually the only skill that's able to comfortably generate 2 simultaneous corpses to be used by a multi-corpse consumer before the first corpse disappears.

Every other corpse generator besides GLS/Blastbones can only generate a corpse once every 8 - 10 seconds, and the GLS/Blastbones corpse is shorter duration than Intensive Mender's, meaning you can't reliably stack corpses for Deaden/Animate with GLS/Blastbones alone as you can with Intensive.

If you're using multi-corpse consumers, Intensive Mender is arguably the most important skill in Necro's kit.

propertyOfUndefined · September 22

BUGS:

1. Activating Bone Armor while wearing Nobility in Decay does NOT proc **both** Living Corpse and Beautiful Corpse. The only way to get this to work is by not slotting Nobility in Decay on the bar that has Bone Armor, then switching to the bar with Nobility in Decay and activating Deaden Pain / Necrotic Potency there. At this point, you are able to activate Deaden Pain a 2nd time. The bug seems to be the fact that Beautiful Corpse doesn't proc while Living Corpse is active.

2. Having the necromancer class script activate via Contingency does not generate a free corpse using Bone Armor. Instead, you seem to get the 2% max stat boost, which implies the class script triggered after Living Corpse proc'd. This is annoying because, previously, you could activate Contingency 10 second after casting Bone Armor, then cast Bone Armor again to get 2 corpses. Now you only get 1 -- coupled with a measly 2% stat boost.

MashmalloMan · September 22

CameraBeardThePirate wrote: »

MashmalloMan wrote: »

CerbinTalYalas wrote: »

Just want to add a thing regarding your Arcanist/Necro comparison : while Arcanist has a Crux Generator and a reliable Crux Spender in every line, Necro has actually an almost permanent Corpse generator from the trash, adds and other entities generated during fights.

Living Death has no reliable corpse generator, especially since it has the most spenders between big and little time this makes it incredibly difficult to pick up on its own for subclassing.

I agree with everything you wrote except this sentence. Living Death has the best corpse generator out of any of Necromancer's skills: Intensive Mender. Intensive Mender can create a corpse once every 4 seconds, does not require a target to do so, and is nearly required for any build trying to leverage Deaden Pain or Animate Blastbones. It's actually the only skill that's able to comfortably generate 2 simultaneous corpses to be used by a multi-corpse consumer before the first corpse disappears.

I'm aware of how it's used, but I still consider that closer to the passive instead of active side if I had to pick a lane since in order to get that function, you need to recast it early wasting half the healing it's suppose to provide. That isn't a fun nor engaging mechanic to deal with. The only plus side as you stated was being able to generate without a target, but there's other ways they could of implemented that. I'm just trying to point out how poorly designed Necro's lines feel in a post subclassing world.

They could simply add corpse generation to a morph of Expunge or Render Flesh, neither require a target as well. This would be a similar dynamic to Arcanist's healing line giving Crux gen on Runemend and Gate, except for Necro it'd be Render Flesh and Mender.

Edit: To clarify, I'm talking about something that can be spammed. Mender is definitely useful in the middle ground it's found itself in with your examples on the duration of corpses and requiring no target, but nothing about it seems intentional. The whole class has this janky feeling to it. Like how is a new player supposed to know x corpse only lasts y seconds, or that there is even a corpse limit to begin with lol.

ESO_Nightingale · September 22

I like this change a lot. As for flame skull. I think ricochet skill should be the only morph that gets +25% damage done on the 2nd skull, as well as 1 bounce. It'd make both of the morphs quite unique from eachother with different playstyles.

MashmalloMan · September 22

ESO_Nightingale wrote: »

I like this change a lot. As for flame skull. I think ricochet skill should be the only morph that gets +25% damage done on the 2nd skull, as well as 1 bounce. It'd make both of the morphs quite unique from eachother with different playstyles.

I would only agree to this if Venom Skull granted the "casting a Necro skill" effect on both bars, since more often than not, you're gonna be on the 2nd/3rd cast so missing out on the 25% isn't a huge deal over an extended fight.

Actually. Yeah I like that, I'm updating the post and including the +1 ricochet per cast lol.

ESO_Nightingale · September 23

MashmalloMan wrote: »

ESO_Nightingale wrote: »

I like this change a lot. As for flame skull. I think ricochet skill should be the only morph that gets +25% damage done on the 2nd skull, as well as 1 bounce. It'd make both of the morphs quite unique from eachother with different playstyles.

I would only agree to this if Venom Skull granted the "casting a Necro skill" effect on both bars, since more often than not, you're gonna be on the 2nd/3rd cast so missing out on the 25% isn't a huge deal over an extended fight.

Actually. Yeah I like that, I'm updating the post and including the +1 ricochet per cast lol.

yeah. im totally happy with that. the 1 bounce thing makes the 2nd skull a complete middleground between the 1st and 3rd casts respectfully and it gives a bit more value to spamming it.

jcole42397 · September 24

I really like your suggestion of adding Living Corpse to GLS and ditching the running skeleton animation. That ability is way too clunky to use as is. I'd be okay with some sort of internal CD so that you could only get it from one of the two as well, as long as GLS becomes more user friendly.

MashmalloMan · September 24

jcole42397 wrote: »

I really like your suggestion of adding Living Corpse to GLS and ditching the running skeleton animation. That ability is way too clunky to use as is. I'd be okay with some sort of internal CD so that you could only get it from one of the two as well, as long as GLS becomes more user friendly.

Actually I was initially against giving Blastbones the effect over Flame Skull. However, yeah it would solve the GLS problem of placing a corpse at a random location 3s after you cast it, sometimes more. It's very clunky for high movement scenario's and awkward to aim at.

Also, I thought Living Corpse could not be stacked so GLS getting it would interfere with Bone Armor, but the patch notes show it can be stacked so as not to interfere with the class set.

For the cooldown, 10s would make sense like Bone Armor since it's a 20s ability.

Either way, they should definitely consider adding it to Flame Skull or Blastbones, I could see it being more useful for BB morphs, but it would be nice to see Flame Skull get some love. I know most people would prefer it on BB because it's more common in a build.

Eg. If you're taking Grave Lord in PvP, you 100% have BB, but you're much less likely to use Flame Skull, having a targetted Living Corpse would allow better use of your tethers. Most players don't seem to run Mystic Syphon.

Khanmorte · 3:39AM

I was also thinking Living Corpse should be applied by Bone Armor, GLS, and Spirit Guardian. The animations of GLS and Spirit Guardian are changed to remove the summon and delay, instead make it add armor type detail so that the with all three active you have a "death knight" appearance.

Living Corpse should allow stacking assuming pure necro you should be able to stack 3 auras (Bone Armor, GLS, and Spirit Guardian) with a 4th if using Nobility in Decay.

I would also make additional adjustments to other abilities to support have special interaction with Living Corpse.
Deaden Pain: When consuming a Living Corpse the heal and Major Protection are extended to last 10 seconds.
Bone Totem/Agony Totem: When consuming a Living Corpse the area of protection and debuff moves with the caster. The Pure Agony synergy is removed.
Grave Grasp: When cast with a Living Corpse active it creates an aura centred on the caster that applies a 30% snare to all enemies in a 5m radius and applies minor maim. The stun and immobolisation is removed.
Empowering Grasp: As per Grave Grasp, but the radius increases to 10 m, it applies major and minor maim to enemies, and empower to allies in the aura.
Shocking Siphon and morphs remain as is.
Restoring Tether and morphs remain as is.

The idea being to create a death/dread knight class sub-identity which debuffs enemies and buffs allies using auras that follow the character. The other morphs supporting a more caster based class sub-identity.