Regarding Animate Blastbones viability

Alarde · August 2021

I see very few people actually using that morph. It's not hard at all to find out why the skill is so ignored across the board in necromancers: there's far, far more viable ones. I don't want to get into the discussion about the necromancer design when it was released in the game, since the community is so divided about the whole 'raising a little army' thing.

But the more i play a magicka necromancer myself, the more i grow frustrated on using this ultimate due to how cool, expensive (320 ultimate) and poorly performing it is even in no-CP. Sure there are more experienced necro players out there who can help me understand this, but why ZOS didn't tune the cost down a long time ago in exchange, for example, the removal of the ally raising thing? I'm totally fine raising one to three blastbones from corpses in a cheaper version focused in generating a lot of corpses fast. That would be interesting to see in experimentation.

Also, i can't really tell which amount of ultimate would be fair to place on a possible new and more specialized version of the skill, but something under the Colossus cost would be fine, since it's a super predictable - not at all sneaky - skill to use during a fight. And let me not get into the fact that the skeletons will chase whoever they want, so forget about calculating a solid burst damage while using it.

Thanks!

YandereGirlfriend · August 2021

This is the change that I have wanted to see for this ability as well - scrap the ally resurrection and just have it raise the three Blastbones while lowering the cost considerably.

As for its precise cost...

On the one hand, it raises three Blastbones and they can hit nearly as hard as other relatively cheap ultimates like Dawnbreaker and Crescent Sweep. On the other hand, it offers zero buffs or debuffs (really, no group utility at all...) and you have no control whatsoever as to what the Blastbones would ultimately end up targeting. It's also not instant damage. And, as we all know, Blastbones have a very high chance of simply derping out and de-spawning without actually doing anything.

So I would probably put it around 150-175 ultimate cost, i.e. more expensive than a Dawnbreaker of Smiting (which is what Blastbones usually gets compared to) while dealing ~33% more cumulative damage and having no CC or ability to control where the damage goes.

propertyOfUndefined · August 2021

I think this is a great idea. Get rid of the res and lower the cost. It'd turn it into a powerful offensive ultimate, but with a pretty high skill cap due to the corpse requirement and the delay.

PrinceShroob · August 2021

I think that it would be interesting if Animate Blastbones became a self-resurrection morph -- a selfish survival-oriented morph to contrast the "selfless" ability to resurrect allies. I'm just not sure of the logistics -- whether you should actually be able to die and then resurrect yourself by spending Ultimate or whether it should consume Ultimate and heal you when you would die. I'm sure that the devs would have a better idea of how to balance such an ability.

I do know that Animate Blastbones is a very odd morph to have in Living Death, since all those skills are for healing and Animate Blastbones is a strange combination of "healing" allies and dealing damage (and more peculiarly, by casting a different skill instead of having the Ultimate itself do so).

Konstant_Tel_Necris · August 2021

Why not add self resurrection? It will be nice morph for necromancer ultimate, as you choose res ally or res self, its can work as old phoenix set.

gariondavey · August 2021

It is used by some necros. And it 1 shots lol.