Necro's Corpse Gameplay is LESS Intuitive with Grave Lord's Sacrifice

CameraBeardThePirate · January 30

Blastbones in its current live form consistently places a corpse at the target's feet. In PvE, this is a necessity for the damage tether (Mystic or Detonating Siphon). The siphons have a rather small AoE (5m), so you must have a corpse at the boss' feet to use them well.

With Grave Lord's, you will now have 0 corpses being generated at the boss' feet - yet you'll still have at least 2 corpse consumers that need to be placed at the boss. You can use yourself as a corpse, but for ranged fights, you will no longer be able to hit the boss with your siphon (as it will be limited to a 5m area around yourself). Unless it's a fight with a lot of adds, you won't have too many corpses at the boss' feet.

For stationary/melee range fights, you can get up close, but you'll still have to overcast Grave Lord's Sacrifice in order to keep up with your corpse gen/consumption, defeating the entire purpose of a "less intensive rotation". If you have other corpse consumers like Potency or the heal Tether, you'll have to overcast even more.

The loss of a corpse at the target's location only serves to make corpse gameplay more complicated. Even if you turn yourself into a corpse, your damaging corpse consumption abilities shouldn't be cast on yourself - they need to be cast at the target.

Grim_Overlord · January 30

This seems to be a matching theme or attempt to "fix" tethers by removing the tether part of their damage by making the player act as a corpse, as seen in this new ability and the Class set from the Archive.

However, this feels like weird, band-aid approach to the larger issue that is the corpse mechanic that would be more easily fixed by adding to one of the middling Necromancer passives that "Corpses generate by your skills last 100% longer." Personally, I would tack that onto Corpse Consumption. It isn't a buff to damage or anything, but makes the class's core mechanic much more approachable.

Siphons themselves are a different issue, but that extends to tethers of any kind in the game. Mainly this would be solved by, in exchange for its lower damage due to the lack of an aoe explosion, which mitigates the placement issues on Detonating Siphon somewhat, adding an aoe around the player and the corpse on Mystic Siphon similar to Braided Tether.