Necromancer's mostly fine, It just needs a good spammable and then it'd be set. It's arguable best class PvE, and it's main downside in PvP is the lack of a good spammable and stun
Personally, I think Ricochet skulls should apply burning to nearby enemies (a strong DoT) every 3rd cast, and Stam skulls should become a melee ability where you pick up a skull and crack it against an enemy, and it stuns every 3rd hit
Thoughts?

propertyOfUndefined wrote: »

What the class needs in pvp, imho, is an offensive identity to call its own. Every other class seems to have one. Nightblades put out extreme burst from stealth and are gone in the blink of an eye. Dragonknights are the kings of wars of attrition, and will outlast you with their HoTs and DoTs. Sorcerers are the masters of speed, and can hit and run better than any other class. Wardens' game is usually AoE CCs -- snaring, rooting and stunning their way to victory. Templars are versatile healers with a great execute. the best cleanse in the game, and offering the most utility to their group.

Necromancers have blastbones, which is unreliable even on good days. Outside of that, they have nothing worth mentioning. Their summons (archer and arcanist) deal laughable damage and are literally more useful dead (as corpses to be consumed). Their AoE DoT abilities (shocking siphon and boneyard) pale in comparison to skills like Cinder Storm, and are too easy to just walk away from.

Necromancer honestly feels like the redheaded stepchild of classes right now.

given the class might become garbage out of nowhere because of pvp. I rather it stay balanced like now. even if boring,

Even the necro ult isn't as valuable as it used to be. It feels like there are easier ways to get major vulnerability these days -- e.g. Turning Tide and/or the Archdruid monster set. I feel like there used to be things in the necromancer's kit that made it really stand out. Major protection from Deaden Pain is another good example of this.

The class needs the basic buffs that are now available to every other class through their class skills (one of either major sorc/brut or proph/sav, if not access to both). The mage/archer were given a 50% stealth nerf for no reason recently - this should either be reverted or the skills completely reworked, especially since the skills don't even count as dots and are not buffed by the dot passive. Finally their spammable needs love. Whether it's a total rework, or at the very least given one of the aforementioned buffs, there needs to be a reason to use those skills because as is, they are straight downgrades (at most you could argue theyre sidegrades) to other spammables, and in PvP they're absolutely useless outside of anything other than melee range because of how slow the projectiles travel.

That's really about it. Add the named buffs so that they aren't shoehorned into 2h/entropy/green or blue pots and give them a reason to use their class damage abilities. They have strong healing, and good burst from blastbones, but they're very 1 note.

Editing to add: it irks me that they attempted to buff empowering grasp just to nuke it by removing Empower from pvp entirely. Changes to Empower aside, this skill needs to either give its pet buff passively while slotted or on cast - whether or not you hit the pets themselves. It is nigh impossible to actually hit your pets with this.

Just started a Necromancer for the first time last month. It's currently one of my favorite builds, but one thing I'd change about Shocking siphon so it's not useless in boss fights: Apply it to an active Skellie you made instead--this way you can decrease the summon time by 25% for the extra damage of Shocking Siphon. And the skellies will still move with you! That would be nice.

I supposed you could do the same with the healing siphon for wraiths too.

Then buff the "base" summon times by like 5 seconds for skellies and wraiths.

Edit: Adjusted my ability overhaul to be more balanced and to make more sense.

Just rework it all together. It’s so slow and sluggish.

Necro Identity already has a self synergy; what if one morph had the Skull return to you after impacting an enemy for a new damage synergy? I know, sounds laggy, but imagine harmony for things other than bombs.
One skull morph could add a heavy DoT (passives!), while the other had more burst potential.
The skulls could travel even slower, like the Undaunted orb, and allow self-synergy with greater damage/burst.
I hardly see skulls being used, there's potential to help the Necro class. Pun intended - skulls missed the mark - it would be great to see an improvement there.

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

i agree the necromancer skull throw does seem lackluster, a little on the slow side (but not as slow as the cliff racer wardens have)

i think the utility that necromancers brought to the team before u35 was empower, but since thats basically only for heavy attack builds now and most of those self build for that buff, it certainly doesnt make much sense, nor actually being helpful anymore

i like the suggestion that the skull applies some kind of dot on the 3rd cast (it could apply fire for mag morph or poison for stam morph)

i also agree with the sentiment that the pets are mostly garbage

the other thing i would say the necromancer needs work on is they have a class passive dedicated to buffing dots, but out of their class passive they have maybe 2 real dots, 1 of which is a dmg tether and the other is boneyard, all the dmg pets dont count as dots and count as direct dmg

the other major problem i have with necromancers is that their primary dmg skill, blastbones, cant trigger procs and is useless in a majority of scenarios (cyro examples being attacking from a keep wall, the blastbones cannot jump down), and i find the very slow spawn time and the hard lock on being able to summon another until the first explodes extremely annoying

Necro's difficulty in proccing sets should also not be overlooked. They have to outsource ways to reliably proc sets or are forced to run one of the tethers to "reliably" do so. Both of their bread & butter abilities (ghost and blastbones) are not able to proc anything.