A pattern of blatant disregard for necromancer players

Urvoth · February 27

Ever since necromancer came out in 2019, ZOS has displayed a consistent pattern of disregard for necromancer players and the class as a whole. Necro is ignored almost every patch while other classes are reworked, buffed, and positively redesigned with the game's current standards, but if it is mentioned, it's almost always a nerf to the already bottom of the barrel class. Here's a few of the significant direct AND indirect nerfs necro has had in the past few years.

Major vuln nerfed to 10% > massive indirect nerf to Colossus in PvP making it mediocre outside of ball groups.
The extra base 1k WD/SD patch was an indirect nerf to Ravenous Goliath's damage since all other damage ultimates significantly scaled up, but not Ravenous Goliath because it scales off HP. Prior to this patch it was a pretty decent DOT/pressure ultimate comparable to Northern Storm.
Empowering grasp was completely gutted with the changes to empower.
The Rapid Rot passive was nerfed to 10% from 15% extra damage to DOTs.
The Skeletal Arcanist/Archer's damage was nerfed 50% in DOT rework patch, despite NOT being a sticky DOT, not being able to choose who the skeleton targets, and the duration was only increased by 4s from 16s to 20s. The duration increase was a double nerf since the 16s duration allowed for faster corpse generation. Actual sticky DOTs had their damage halved this patch, but their duration was doubled, commonly from 10s to 20s. The skeletal summons were already weak prior to the change, and it just obliterated any viability they still had for absolutely no reason.
The Siphon skill ticks were halved from 0.33s to 0.66s, making them significantly worse at proc'ing status effects and 50% as effective with damage boosting sets like Draugrkin.
Both ghost morphs had their healing nuked by 50%.
Boneyard was nerfed and Harmony was deleted, killing off the bomber necro playstyle without giving necro anything in return.

In exchange for all these nerfs, Ruinous scythe and Skulls were buffed, but the scythe is only viable on stam builds, and skulls is still incredibly slow and clunky. How is that fair and balanced while other classes receive major skill overhauls every other patch? That's like 1.5 reworks/buffs for necro over the course of half a decade.

Stalking Blastbones has been the only good damage skill in the entire kit, and the core identity of the class. Deleting the one foundational class skill now for a delayed buff is just insulting to the players that have stuck with necro for all these rough years. What class skills does ZOS even think the buff will be useful for? An extra 15% damage to a list of trash damage skills doesn't help, and just means necro will be even more of an identity-less generic DOT/proc spammer. This change spits in the face of long-term necro players and completely ignores the actual issues with the class that have been reiterated over and over and over both in feedback for this patch, and for the last several years.

I'm sick of the continued blatant disregard for actual necro players and their feedback, including feedback around theming. If ZOS wants to rework/redesign necro, great, the class feels like it was designed purely around a parse dummy. They shouldn't, however, just delete our core skill out of the blue without reworking the rest of the class around it. Take this change back and redesign the class so we have a comprehensive offensive toolkit instead of just a delayed buff to a bunch of generic DOTs/procs.

Rasande_Robin · February 27

My mind is still blown over these changes. But what do I know I only see the small picture. I don't know their road map for the "necro".

Faulgor · February 27

Hold up. While Necromancers are indeed quite neglected, I'm not really seeing all these awesome changes for the other classes - outside of PvP Nightblades and DKs maybe (how old is poop rock?).
Wardens remain quite disjointed except for an incredible heal, with Stamina Wardens non-existing; Sorcerers got some love this patch but still share horribly outdated and lackluster passives with Templars, which were reduced to beam-monkeys. In endgame PvE, Nightblades are still invisible (heh).

Looking at the history of ZOS' class changes, one gets the impression that a certain dev is championing PvP nightblades, and Arcanist was similarly someone's pet project ("Give me a class that makes the game as trivial as possible, oh and make it Herma Mora themed, that's my favorite Prince!"). Point being I don't think there's anyone at ZOS that plays Necromancer, or Warden, or Templar.

With the outright bloody deletion of the main Necromancer skill, ZOS has demonstrated it doesn't shy away from drastic measures. Great! It's time for some drastic class overhaul to bring all classes to the level of cohesion and capability of Arcanists. Get to it ZOS, I won't give you another 10 years.

Aldoss · February 27

Faulgor wrote: »

Hold up. While Necromancers are indeed quite neglected, I'm not really seeing all these awesome changes for the other classes - outside of PvP Nightblades and DKs maybe (how old is poop rock?).
Wardens remain quite disjointed except for an incredible heal, with Stamina Wardens non-existing; Sorcerers got some love this patch but still share horribly outdated and lackluster passives with Templars, which were reduced to beam-monkeys. In endgame PvE, Nightblades are still invisible (heh).

I hear you with the PvE NB point, but you're wrong about DK and Warden, especially stamden. Stamden is unbelievably strong, with the one caveat that it lacks a decent class spammable. The reason why you don't see that many stamdens in PvP is because playing a 45k hp magden is just. too. easy. I don't play PvE, but I know plenty of high dps wardens. You just might not recognize them as stamina because they all fall within the new hybrid meta.

DK was massively overrepresented in PvE before combustion got nerfed. My gut tells me the only reason why you might not see that many DKs in PvE right now is because arcanist is clearly way too strong, but it's too early for ZOS to nerf them as much as they should (gotta sell those chapters before the next one, amirite).

Otherwise, DK has one of the most robust class kits out of any class for both PvE and PvP.

When presented with a choice between doubling down on a bad decision, or reverting the bad decision before it hits live, ZOS will choose double down 99 times out of 100.

I've already told them, if they were to make that 1 out of 100 call and apologize for the rushed and poorly thought out revision to necro and wait until next patch, or the patch after scribing comes out, I will restart my membership within 24 hours.

dinokstrunz · February 27

The accessibility class has moved on to Arcanist and soon back to Sorc, why should they care about Necromancer lol?

Deimus · February 27

I'd love to be proven wrong, but their new method of communication is to ignore you just like the countless others over the past few weeks. Just know that you speak the truth rather it continue to be ignored or not.

C_Inside · February 27

So far ZOS has actively made the class worse and ignored the feedback presented by seasoned necro players that have stuck with the class for hundreds, if not thousands of hours.

As soon as this new SuckBones skill was announced in week 1 I personally could immediately see countless issues with it. Yet a group of devs who should know the game inside and out apparently could not. Either they're making the class worse on purpose for some reason, or they're seriously clueless as to how necro works.

The """"""buff"""""" they made to Blighted Blastbones by giving it guaranteed Diseased procs and the tiny changes they made to SuckBones (which resulted in it being nerfed before it even hit live) just reinforces my stance that they're having a laugh at necro players' expense. Well, if this is the kind of devs we have then I think it's only fair that we necros play the same tune and have a grand ol' laugh by quitting the game altogether en masse.

Alaztor91 · February 27

C_Inside wrote: »

As soon as this new SuckBones skill was announced in week 1 I personally could immediately see countless issues with it. Yet a group of devs who should know the game inside and out apparently could not. Either they're making the class worse on purpose for some reason, or they're seriously clueless as to how necro works.

It really seems that this is the case. Players pointed out the issues that the first iteration of Grave Lord's Sacrifice had with corpse generation frequency and ranged corpse generation on the first day of the PTS. Unless you were on top of a parsing dummy those 2 issues would have been spotted immediately, basically on your first Boneyard or Siphon cast.

Now, to maintain the ranged/frequency of corpse generation (and AoE damage) you are forced to use Flame Skull. They literally made a skill that only gives you half the effect unless you pair it with another one. This is also not even considering the awful ''in combat'' requirement and the fact that you still have to wait for the Skeleton to form and jump to you before you get any kind of buff.

You now also have to keep track of your 3x Flame Skull casts + Corpse Consuming Skill cast. How is keeping track of 4 skills ''less demanding and complex'' than keeping track of 1 skill?

Urvoth · February 28

C_Inside wrote: »

So far ZOS has actively made the class worse and ignored the feedback presented by seasoned necro players that have stuck with the class for hundreds, if not thousands of hours.

As soon as this new SuckBones skill was announced in week 1 I personally could immediately see countless issues with it. Yet a group of devs who should know the game inside and out apparently could not. Either they're making the class worse on purpose for some reason, or they're seriously clueless as to how necro works.

The """"""buff"""""" they made to Blighted Blastbones by giving it guaranteed Diseased procs and the tiny changes they made to SuckBones (which resulted in it being nerfed before it even hit live) just reinforces my stance that they're having a laugh at necro players' expense. Well, if this is the kind of devs we have then I think it's only fair that we necros play the same tune and have a grand ol' laugh by quitting the game altogether en masse.

The current combat team clearly doesn’t understand necro and what the class struggles with. That would be fine if they just listened to the feedback, but they seem too stubborn to go back on their bad design choices.

francesinhalover · February 29

dinokstrunz wrote: »

The accessibility class has moved on to Arcanist and soon back to Sorc, why should they care about Necromancer lol?

2 years max and beam is removed

loosej · February 29

A pattern of blatant disregard for necromancer players.

ftfy

SandandStars · March 2

Faulgor wrote: »

Hold up. While Necromancers are indeed quite neglected, I'm not really seeing all these awesome changes for the other classes - outside of PvP Nightblades and DKs maybe (how old is poop rock?).
Wardens remain quite disjointed except for an incredible heal, with Stamina Wardens non-existing; Sorcerers got some love this patch but still share horribly outdated and lackluster passives with Templars, which were reduced to beam-monkeys. In endgame PvE, Nightblades are still invisible (heh).

Looking at the history of ZOS' class changes, one gets the impression that a certain dev is championing PvP nightblades, and Arcanist was similarly someone's pet project ("Give me a class that makes the game as trivial as possible, oh and make it Herma Mora themed, that's my favorite Prince!"). Point being I don't think there's anyone at ZOS that plays Necromancer, or Warden, or Templar.

With the outright bloody deletion of the main Necromancer skill, ZOS has demonstrated it doesn't shy away from drastic measures. Great! It's time for some drastic class overhaul to bring all classes to the level of cohesion and capability of Arcanists. Get to it ZOS, I won't give you another 10 years.

This is spot-on. Especially agree with the narrow focus on a couple of pet classes. This is the most likely explantion for the unbalanced state and neglect of so many class skills.

ESO_Nightingale · March 2

Aldoss wrote: »

Faulgor wrote: »

Hold up. While Necromancers are indeed quite neglected, I'm not really seeing all these awesome changes for the other classes - outside of PvP Nightblades and DKs maybe (how old is poop rock?).
Wardens remain quite disjointed except for an incredible heal, with Stamina Wardens non-existing; Sorcerers got some love this patch but still share horribly outdated and lackluster passives with Templars, which were reduced to beam-monkeys. In endgame PvE, Nightblades are still invisible (heh).

I don't play PvE, but I know plenty of high dps wardens. You just might not recognize them as stamina because they all fall within the new hybrid meta.

the issue with warden in pve is its abysmal sustain and lack of access to its own class utility, it's damage could be higher if it could sustain it i suppose, but natures gift is terrible, and we can't apply minor toughness well at all outside of consistently popping a healing orb if everyone is stacked on synergy cooldown. hell, we can't even use our class's unique aoe major resolve since it literally does nothing to contribute on a damage dealer.

damage is not everything in pve. but you at least need to deal enough with the others to compete on top of providing something to the group. warden does not do this at the highest end.

we aren't even unique as far as brittle application goes, as tanks and supports have always been able to do it as well as now arcanists can for some reason.

GooGa592 · March 2

It's not just the feedback from necro players being ignored. Think about how many people posted how many thousands of times about the jabs animations and U35 changes or account wide achievement changes.

MashmalloMan · March 2

I feel like the harmony bomb and shock heavy attack builds were rightfully nerfed, but those 2 setups were really the only threats when it came to Necro and have been gone since like 2022? Bashcro seems to be the only viable way to play them in pvp, and any time I see that ult pop up I just walk away until it's over. Waste of time trying to kill a raid boss without a raid team.

I feel for you guys, I tried my best with GLS and they somehow made it worse than week 1. It doesn't take a Necro main, nor a game developer, nor a rocket scientist to understand the issues the class has with its current design and the proposed reworks. I can't help but feel they put an intern in charge of GLS/BB this patch.

They need to spend all of update 43 (the no content update) redoing all the classes from the ground up. Reevaluate what classes should be good at, what is their identity, does their design achieve that, are they fun to play, are they fun to build for, do they feel different from other classes?

To those questions the only real answer is: Dragonknight.

They don't need proc sets to be competitive. It has really good passives all around that play well with the skills. It has a clear design philosophy between fire damage, poison damage, unique effects, named debuffs/buffs, melee skills, dots, ult gen, ult for sustain, every ult does something useful for many different builds, sustain off status effects. Decent or awesome in almost every role across pve/pvp.

DK's aren't perfect, but they're about as close as it can be right now.. Some underutilized skill morphs and some skills like Poop Fist are still a bit awkward, but all in all, it should be the standard at which all classes are brought up to.

NB's just a mess. They keep getting more and more buffs where they don't need them. Everyone asks for pve help, something unique to bring to the table, better aoe dps, and instead, they give them handouts like the new Siphoning Attacks in a patch that was meant to focus on Sorc and to some extent Necro.

Templar feels bland, many dead skills and passives. No difference between playstyles or stam vs mag.
Necro doesn't know what it wants to be, is it an elementalist without a status effect bonus eg. Arcanist? Is it a dot class without dots? Is it a summoner without summons?
Warden is a mixed bag, some of the best one man army type of skills that do multiple things with crucial named buffs/debuffs, but so many skills are bland or have clear morph winners. Why isn't all the damage bleed/frost? Why isn't there a bleed passive? Why is there so much focus on Frost Staves as if stam doesn't matter? Why are they so tied to a bear ult that doesn't work in 80% of content? Crit damage passive, why, damage done was perfect?
Arcanist is overloaded and too simplistic with some of the highest aoe dps in the game for the easiest rotation trivializing most content.. Why is their debuff skill better than their actual spammable? Why does it generate crux, heal, imobilize, debuff, and execute? What is the point of using other abilities when you can beam everything?

Sorc is just below DK imo, any changes I want are largely focussed on bar space problems, cleaning up dead passives, power fantasy, updating underwhelming skills like Fury/Lightning Splash, and buffing pve no pet sorc. Nothing that would increase their pvp potential by too much because they're decent there, although some would argue thats when tied to overperforming sets. Pve pet dps is good, just bad aoe dps.

Urvoth · May 3

We’re likely going to go this entire patch cycle without a single mention of a future direction for Necro or updates to GLS. What a disappointing way to dampen the excitement for the chapter.

Yamenstein · May 4

ZoS capable of communicating. <snip> Scribing is the new rage and looks like they need to focus on everyone being happy with that. You would think with all the money they make from the crown store they could afford to hire more devs to work on multiple features.

<snipped for Profanity/Cursing>

Reginald_leBlem · May 4

I miss necro bombers tbh

IncultaWolf · May 4

In every one of my multiple ESO discords, necromancer is always clowned on as the pay to lose class. 🪦

brandsnipe · May 4

The biggest problem is they dont know what they want the class to be. They're pushing it as a DoT class, but its not designed that way. If they would just own up to it and build the class to how its designed, itd be a dominant class. But instead we have a clunky corpse mechanic that doesnt tie into a DoT class.

Yamenstein · May 5

Could have had stalking BB as it was. And instead have it so when a bone is in use then dot damage is increased.

necro_the_crafter · May 6

brandsnipe wrote: »

The biggest problem is they dont know what they want the class to be. They're pushing it as a DoT class, but its not designed that way. If they would just own up to it and build the class to how its designed, itd be a dominant class. But instead we have a clunky corpse mechanic that doesnt tie into a DoT class.

I guess that promblem is - ZOS dont really care about the necro, becuse its not a popular class.
And its not a popular class - becuse ZOS dont really care about it.

Savos_Saren · May 6

This is just the usual MO. When Warden first came out- it was extremely overpowered and ZOS started tuning it down when Necromancer came out. When Necromancer was overpowered- ZOS started tuning it down when Arcanist came out. Arcanist will start getting tuned down when the next class comes out.

It's the circle of life.

necro_the_crafter · May 6

Savos_Saren wrote: »

This is just the usual MO. When Warden first came out- it was extremely overpowered and ZOS started tuning it down when Necromancer came out. When Necromancer was overpowered- ZOS started tuning it down when Arcanist came out. Arcanist will start getting tuned down when the next class comes out.

It's the circle of life.

yea, except wardens have decent class kit still

Urvoth · May 6

necro_the_crafter wrote: »

brandsnipe wrote: »

The biggest problem is they dont know what they want the class to be. They're pushing it as a DoT class, but its not designed that way. If they would just own up to it and build the class to how its designed, itd be a dominant class. But instead we have a clunky corpse mechanic that doesnt tie into a DoT class.

I guess that promblem is - ZOS dont really care about the necro, becuse its not a popular class.
And its not a popular class - becuse ZOS dont really care about it.

That's been exactly the same problem BGs have had with ZOS

Urvoth · May 6

Savos_Saren wrote: »

This is just the usual MO. When Warden first came out- it was extremely overpowered and ZOS started tuning it down when Necromancer came out. When Necromancer was overpowered- ZOS started tuning it down when Arcanist came out. Arcanist will start getting tuned down when the next class comes out.

It's the circle of life.

The entire necro kit wasn't overpowered though. There were a couple op things like Bash goliath and old major vuln that were tuned down not too long after and it's been mostly unchanged since then. Boneyard synergy bombs were really just a Harmony problem and the old ghost wasn't even as strong as what skills like Polar Wind are now.

Yamenstein · May 7

Would be great if ZoS could communicate out lack of changes when there is so much anger at the recent change they made.

Vulkunne · May 7

I really liked Necro when it came out. Honestly it feels like for right now they really don't know what to do.

It may be something can only be fixed over time, which one could possibly say its been neglected over time. But even so making major changes won't make up for that, only the ones really needed.

OtarTheMad · May 7

MashmalloMan wrote: »

I feel like the harmony bomb and shock heavy attack builds were rightfully nerfed, but those 2 setups were really the only threats when it came to Necro and have been gone since like 2022? Bashcro seems to be the only viable way to play them in pvp, and any time I see that ult pop up I just walk away until it's over. Waste of time trying to kill a raid boss without a raid team.

I feel for you guys, I tried my best with GLS and they somehow made it worse than week 1. It doesn't take a Necro main, nor a game developer, nor a rocket scientist to understand the issues the class has with its current design and the proposed reworks. I can't help but feel they put an intern in charge of GLS/BB this patch.

They need to spend all of update 43 (the no content update) redoing all the classes from the ground up. Reevaluate what classes should be good at, what is their identity, does their design achieve that, are they fun to play, are they fun to build for, do they feel different from other classes?

To those questions the only real answer is: Dragonknight.

They don't need proc sets to be competitive. It has really good passives all around that play well with the skills. It has a clear design philosophy between fire damage, poison damage, unique effects, named debuffs/buffs, melee skills, dots, ult gen, ult for sustain, every ult does something useful for many different builds, sustain off status effects. Decent or awesome in almost every role across pve/pvp.

DK's aren't perfect, but they're about as close as it can be right now.. Some underutilized skill morphs and some skills like Poop Fist are still a bit awkward, but all in all, it should be the standard at which all classes are brought up to.

NB's just a mess. They keep getting more and more buffs where they don't need them. Everyone asks for pve help, something unique to bring to the table, better aoe dps, and instead, they give them handouts like the new Siphoning Attacks in a patch that was meant to focus on Sorc and to some extent Necro.
Templar feels bland, many dead skills and passives. No difference between playstyles or stam vs mag.

Necro doesn't know what it wants to be, is it an elementalist without a status effect bonus eg. Arcanist? Is it a dot class without dots? Is it a summoner without summons?

Warden is a mixed bag, some of the best one man army type of skills that do multiple things with crucial named buffs/debuffs, but so many skills are bland or have clear morph winners. Why isn't all the damage bleed/frost? Why isn't there a bleed passive? Why is there so much focus on Frost Staves as if stam doesn't matter? Why are they so tied to a bear ult that doesn't work in 80% of content? Crit damage passive, why, damage done was perfect?

Arcanist is overloaded and too simplistic with some of the highest aoe dps in the game for the easiest rotation trivializing most content.. Why is their debuff skill better than their actual spammable? Why does it generate crux, heal, imobilize, debuff, and execute? What is the point of using other abilities when you can beam everything?

Sorc is just below DK imo, any changes I want are largely focussed on bar space problems, cleaning up dead passives, power fantasy, updating underwhelming skills like Fury/Lightning Splash, and buffing pve no pet sorc. Nothing that would increase their pvp potential by too much because they're decent there, although some would argue thats when tied to overperforming sets. Pve pet dps is good, just bad aoe dps.

I agree with a lot of this. The issue with the harmony bomb nerf though was that after ZOS nerfed harmony they also nerfed the self synergy Graverobber which was double dipping and killed it. They didn’t need to touch Graverobber after the harmony nerf.

And about Necro being directionally challenged I completely agree. They tried so hard for Necro to not be what other games did with Necro that it’s just confusing. So many elemental damage types and no status effect bonus, no sticky dots but has a dot bonus. Corpse mechanic is kind of weird. The class truly needs a major overhaul with theme and abilities.

And with that Arcanist ink ability I agree. Honestly I feel it’s a simple fix… put the heal on that Inspiration ability so it does a heal when it expires and put the execute part on the Imperfect Ring ability so that it is a little better. Spreads things out.

Perashim · May 8

They need to entirely overhaul the necromancer skill lines imo.

But they won't do anything that actually helps necromancers from what I've seen. They could've just made a tweak or something to Stalking Blastbones to account for it jumping at its target instead of running. Instead we get the stupidest/goofiest skill in the game (Sac Bones/Grave Lord's Sacrifice) that limits necessary corpse generation for us.

Do they ever listen? No.

Will that ever change? Probably not.

LukosCreyden · May 9

Necromancer is ESO's biggest failure. It is laughably bad.
And of course, it just HAD to happen to the class I had always wanted to play.
I miss when it first launched. It had problems, but there was hope that it would see future improvements. However, it did not. It was allllll downhill from there.
Now it is at the bottom of the hill, a broken and ridiculous mess that barely even functions.
No point giving further feedback, it won't be acknowledged. The class is beyond saving.