Stalking Blastbones is Necro's BEST damage ability. Please reconsider the change.

CameraBeardThePirate · January 29

Stalking Blastbones accounts for well over 20% of your damage as a Necromancer. On a parse, it's usually 25% - 30%. In a BG, it's anywhere from 25% to 40% of your damage in CMX. It deals more damage than Blighted, and is far and away necromancer's best ability.

Removing it for a 20% buff on only your Grave Lord abilities (of which only 1 or 2 are usable in PvP) and DoTs (something you need to outsource since the class lacks any sticky DoTs) is not the play.

Colossus bombers are really the only winner here, and even then - I'm not sure the 20% buff to Colossus will offset the damage loss from a crit Stalking Blastbones (which usually hits harder than a tick of Colossus - well over 33% of its damage).

The math here doesn't add up. The Sacrifice buff would need to be AT LEAST 25-30% for this new ability to be worth considering. This change will not help Necro, and will only reinforce loading up your bar with non-class DoTs and boring, AoE DoT Proc playstyles.

Please ZOS, from a long-time Necro main, consider moving this new mechanic to the Skeletal Archer/Arcanist - even if that means reducing the buff a bit since it would be usable in tandem with Blastbones. Stalking Blastbones is Necromancer's bread and butter. Leaving the lesser Blighted morph feels like a consolation prize rather than a way to continue Necro's current playstyle.

If the goal was to reduce complexity of the rotation - congrats! Now it's impossible to place a corpse at a target's feet in any sort of ranged fight. The rotation will be a lot more difficult if you're unable to consistently place corpses where you need them to be.

This change will only accomplish 1 thing - a ton of Oblivions Foe/BRP destro necros that don't even feel like a necro because they're loaded up with weapon abilities.

@ZOS_Kevin @ZOS_GinaBruno PLEASE pass this on to the dev team. Removing Stalking Blastbones would be like removing Spec Bow, Whip, or Fatecarver. It doesn't matter that Blighted was left alone because Blighted is nowhere near as good as Stalking in PvP.

Remiem · January 29

Literally the only skill you leave on another player's CMX that tells them you play a magcro...
And they go out of their way to completely destroy it lmao.

ank777 · January 29

You should be more concerned about lack of general changes to the class, it's dead in many senses, lack of self buffs, poor design, ZOS just ignore it and making some stupid changes noone asked for, meanwhile they listen to sorc players that cant play without pets?????? what??
Necro is the weakest class period, especially in PvP.

katorga · January 29

They won't make meaningful changes to Necro until they start nerfing Arcanist to necro levels.

But yeah, horrible changes to Necro. Just horrible.

Cayr · January 29

Seconded. Please, for the love of god, do not implement this change. Necro is actually in a good place. If you wanted to change something - change Empowering Grasp now that Empower as a buff provided by the group is effectively useless as any builds that make use of it have it built in from Oakensoul anyway, and it would serve to bring some more group utility back to the necro healers that have been dead in the ground. NOBODY in the history of forever has had an issue with stalking blastbones as a skill. The current form of stalking blastbones is absolute genius and a completely unique ability to use for those who don't want to do just a spammable ability, which the other morph would effectively be. This proposed change would be taking the one skill that makes necro unique and special and turning it into yet another passive backbar buff and force the necro to rely on guild and weapon skills, since the class lacks sticky DoTs anyway. This is just a bewildering change suggestion, to be honest.

ESO has always had a variety of classes for different playstyles. Sorcerer has been an easy option for those starting out with having to use less skill slots, more recently the arcanist accommodates people who like lower APM gameplay. Necro has always been a great option for people who enjoy a more dynamic rotation. "Significant demand on creating complex and dynamic rotations in real combat" IS the whole point. Not every class has to play the same and not every class has to be for everyone, that's the beauty of it. ESO's motto has always been "play your own way", why remove this playstyle? People who enjoy simpler static rotations already have plenty of options.

I think it's been said for other patches before this, but again - this feels like a change made for the sake of change alone that doesn't actually improve anything. Please PLEASE reconsider.

TX12001rwb17_ESO · January 29

Could of at least made it apply Major Sorcery to the user.

TX12001rwb17_ESO · January 29

Should rename Necromancer to the Warrior class because at this point weapon skills are all you will be slotting.

ItsNotLiving · January 29

This has to be the funniest thing ever to happen off of PTS notes. I don’t understand how anyone could be a necro main now.

IncultaWolf · January 29

Um...major brutality/sorcery please?

IncultaWolf · January 29

ItsNotLiving wrote: »

This has to be the funniest thing ever to happen off of PTS notes. I don’t understand how anyone could be a necro main now.

They will all be playing nightblade or warden soon!

Urvoth · January 29

Lol they took the only decent damage skill the class had and deleted it. A 20% buff to overall damage skills does nothing when the rest of their offensive kit is complete trash. If this nonsensical change goes through it'll be a class that uses nothing but generic skills.

LukosCreyden · January 29

Of all the choices they could make, I did NOT expect this. This morph makes necromancer seemingly completely braindead whilst also, assumedly, giving you the hilarious aesthetic of continuously blowing yourself up with blastbones.
This also means that necromancer will have a grand total of one offensive undead (which is trash) to summon on the field.

They could AT LEAST sacrifice the other morph of the skill for this buff, but they got rid of stalking, the morph that makes the skill's wonkiness come with the consolation prize of extra damage.

And it STILL DOESN'T HAVE MAJOR SORCERY/BRUTALITY LMAO.

Sure, this will likely make necromancer feel beter to play for many, but at the cost of making it feel even less like a necromancer.
I dunno, the idea of summoning a blastbones to jump at YOU and explode is just not the vibe or aesthetic I expect from a necromancer.

Also, what about the other skills that needed help? totem? hand grabby thing which sucks so bad I even forgot the name (animation looks awesome though)?

I saw so many ideas for blastbones improvements, pitched a few myself, and I genuinely think the class mains had overall much better ideas. I wish the devs had looked into those ideas and went with one of those instead.

JerBearESO · January 29

Just throw the stalking blast bones effect onto blighted.... it's not like necromancer can't use the boost to their kit

Urvoth · January 29

Thematically, it also makes even less sense getting rid of the magicka and not stamina morph of the primary necromancer skill when necros in lore and general media are mages/casters

Remiem · January 29

JerBearESO wrote: »

Just throw the stalking blast bones effect onto blighted.... it's not like necromancer can't use the boost to their kit

If they do that then they absolutely need to give it the arcanist treatment, stam or mag cost based on the highest max resource.

i11ionward · January 29

The new skill is good, but why change Blastbones? At the moment this is the skill that makes the necromancer actually the necromancer.

Please bring back Blastbones changes.

If you need to remake skill, make it with a Skeletal Mage morph. There is also a skeleton and it can also sacrifice itself for buff.

CameraBeardThePirate · January 29

JerBearESO wrote: »

Just throw the stalking blast bones effect onto blighted.... it's not like necromancer can't use the boost to their kit

But Grave Lord's Sacrifice isn't even a boost to their kit.

The new Sacrifice buff is 20% to your Grave Lord and DoT abilities. Stalking Blastbones was accounting for at least 25% of your TOTAL damage in a PvE parse. In PvP, that number only goes up - I've seen Stalking account for as much as 40% of my total damage in a BG.

Taking away 25% - 40% of your total damage to buff only some of your abilities by 20% doesn't even make sense.

Urvoth · January 29

CameraBeardThePirate wrote: »

JerBearESO wrote: »

Just throw the stalking blast bones effect onto blighted.... it's not like necromancer can't use the boost to their kit

But Grave Lord's Sacrifice isn't even a boost to their kit.

The new Sacrifice buff is 20% to your Grave Lord and DoT abilities. Stalking Blastbones was accounting for at least 25% of your TOTAL damage. In PvP, that number only goes up - I've seen Stalking account for as much as 40% of my total damage in a BG.

Taking away that damage to buff only some of your abilities by less than the ability you're sacrificing doesn't even make sense.

Exactly, plus it's the only high damage skill the class has. Every other damage skill necros have is mediocre at BEST and mostly just unusable in PvP, so deleting the single decent damage skill is completely nonsensical. I'd like to know where the devs think your damage is going to come from after this change. An extra 20% dmg to your other garbage offensive class skills doesn't help whatsoever. It doesn't even bring the skelly mage/archer back to their pre dot nerf damage numbers when they were already mostly unusable. If the 20% dmg boost came from a different skill in the line, it would actually be nice since you could use it for extra blastbones burst alongside generic skills, but getting rid of blastbones turns the class into a flavorless husk.

VixxVexx · January 29

We can now blastbones ourselves, completing the masochistic playstyle of necro mains.

Alaztor91 · January 29

Does a 20% damage buff to Grave Lord skills and all DoTs justify removing your main damage skill from your rotation? Have to also consider all the extra GCDs you will gain by having to cast every 20s instead of every 3s. I doubt anyone would use this new morph in PvP though.

AScarlato · January 29

Well, that's one way to make all the magcros even more emo. So disappointed in this awful change.

Necrotech_Master · January 29

i was also really puzzled to this change too, like i get the idea of some self buff, but there wasnt enough of a full rework of necromancer to even have this make any remote sense

JerBearESO · January 29

Remiem wrote: »

JerBearESO wrote: »

Just throw the stalking blast bones effect onto blighted.... it's not like necromancer can't use the boost to their kit

If they do that then they absolutely need to give it the arcanist treatment, stam or mag cost based on the highest max resource.

That's a good idea!

And we need to remember, as I see some panic, that we do retain a blast bones morph with their change.

Also a good idea to change skeleton summon instead if blastbones. I mainly want the new effect for use WITH blastbones. Why would I want to increase my grave lord ability damage and not have access to blastbones??? Actually this sounds EXTREMELY nice if it were on skeleton summon instead. Like...wouldn't that be enough to finally save the class altogether!

Grim_Overlord · January 29

Hybrid cost for the remaining Blastbones would be really nice if this change goes through to live over the cost reduction outlined in the patch notes. There are a couple comments in this thread mentioning the change to the base ability being better for Skeletal Mage, but it could also be fitting on Summoner's armor whose cost reduction isn't worth much and the buff to damage, if moved to DOTs and Pets, would fit the name at least.

OtarTheMad · January 29

Just delete the class already and let us pick a new one.

This is a complete joke now.

This change should have maybe been on a morph of Skeletal Summons NOT Blastbones.

Estin · January 29

This skill idea is bad. It completely kills off Magrco and Necro in general. I get they want to make the class more accessible, but this seems like just tossing darts at random ideas on a wall instead of actually trying to fix the class. Necros are already weak, this nerfed them even further.

Remiem · January 29

JerBearESO wrote: »

Also a good idea to change skeleton summon instead if blastbones. I mainly want the new effect for use WITH blastbones.

Clearly not the intent, this stupid Stalking blastbone change looks like an attempt at helping PvE players who were fat fingering their rotation in PvE, so ZOS wanted to give them a way to play without Blastbones.
If both current Stalking and this new buff exist in necro's kit then both skills would be indispensable and bad PvE players would still have to play with Blastbones to maximize DPS.

They just went with this change without even thinking about PvP.

KlauthWarthog · January 29

I have to admit I was not expecting them to somehow make necromancers worse, but here we are.

Urvoth · January 29

OtarTheMad wrote: »

Just delete the class already and let us pick a new one.

This is a complete joke now.

This change should have maybe been on a morph of Skeletal Summons NOT Blastbones.

Exactly, if it were a change to any other skill in the entire skill line, it would've been a welcome buff.

CameraBeardThePirate · January 29

Alaztor91 wrote: »

Does a 20% damage buff to Grave Lord skills and all DoTs justify removing your main damage skill from your rotation? Have to also consider all the extra GCDs you will gain by having to cast every 20s instead of every 3s. I doubt anyone would use this new morph in PvP though.

No, it doesn't.

The math is easy. Stalking is 25%-40% of all your damage depending on the content or environment (lower end for PvE, higher end for PvP)

Is +20% to some abilities worth more than 25% of all your damage? No. It isn't.

Estin · January 29

Remiem wrote: »

JerBearESO wrote: »

Also a good idea to change skeleton summon instead if blastbones. I mainly want the new effect for use WITH blastbones.

Clearly not the intent, this stupid Stalking blastbone change looks like an attempt at helping PvE players who were fat fingering their rotation in PvE, so ZOS wanted to give them a way to play without Blastbones.
If both current Stalking and this new buff exist in necro's kit then both skills would be indispensable and bad PvE players would still have to play with Blastbones to maximize DPS.

They just went with this change without even thinking about PvP.

They went with the change without even thinking about PvE either. I'm really hoping they would reverse this. If not, this change along with scribing completely kills off necro as a viable class.