Bone Totem and Deaden Pain Bone Tyrant Skill

fenn1539 · April 23

this ability just feels bad... like it could be a actually SOLID tank ability offering major cowardice, minor protection, and a fear effect synergy but it last SUCH A SHORT time at too high a cost for how short it lasts making it hard to fit into rotations and just a magicka drain and deaden pain honestly has the same problem with BOTH need a notable boost to the duration with deaden pain should last AT LEAST double its current at 8 seconds but honestly more like 10 seconds cause even with full necro summons which now a days especially you arent really going to have with subclassing and scribing both, 4 seconds is such a short duration that its basically useless versus just getting a flat boost of ultimate each corpse consumed... like full stop if agony totem had its cost raised to like 5000 magicka BUT ALSO got a duration boost to 20 seconds at base with agony totem still keeping its duration boost over remote totem boosting agony totem to like 25 to 30 seconds while meanwhile deaden pain getting boosted to maybe 10 seconds per corpse or maybe even 15 seconds to fit FAR closer in line to spirit guardian which ALL necro tanks universally run which lasts for 16 seconds meaning it would be SO much better for up time and hell, you could have it be more like 13 or 14 seconds so there will be either a moment you run out or you need to waste the last few seconds of your spirit guardian duration to make a corpse to re up your major protection meaning 100% uptime still cant be achieved on such a powerful buff UNLESS you also risk eatting corpses you woulda liked to maybe restoring tether or use for other abilities in general.

Deimus · April 23

Deaden Pain is one of the best skills Necromancer has. You might not be getting the full benefit as a tank you might only have Bone Armor and Mender slotted to generate corpses, but using those with Blastbones and Skeletal Minion it's possible to use Siphon or Mortal Coil while keeping Deaden Pain up 90% of the time even more if you're better at corpse management. Each corpse gives a 4 second duration not 8 with a max of 6 stacks so 24 second uptime. When running a build with Deaden Pain on average I have it on a 16-20 second timer same as Spirit Mender and Skeletal Minion.

Next patch unless they change things this will be impossible as pets+ corpses will be limited to 10 in PvE and 5 in PvP meaning in most circumstances you will have to reapply it every 8 seconds which is not viable.

Bone Totem got some nice buffs with Cowardice recently, but it's still a horrible cc ability. A small radius you have to keep a target in for 2 seconds to get a fear. If you could already keep the target in place for 2 seconds then what's the point of the cc? For tanking and PvE it might be ok as npcs are predicable and it's probably the metric they used when looking at the skill, but there are still better options. I recommend dropping this skill for Turn Evil in the fighter's guild line. An AoE fear with minor protection and no clunky 2 second wait time. You could also drop it for the shield scribing ability and use the pull and class mastery scripts to pull/taunt enemies and generate a corpse while also boosting your resources. It could give more corpse generation for Deaden Pain to shine you'd just need to cast Shield Throw first to make sure it drops a corpse.

Necromancer suffers greatly when it comes to crowd control abilities. Grave Grasp was good for one 3 month cycle since the class came out and Totem has never been worth it. The class's 2 biggest weak points are lack of mobility and reliable cc. Which is funny as you'd think it would have great cc to keep things near since it's slow or the opposite of being fast with no way to keep things still. If something wants to get away from you on a Necromancer there's not much you can do using the class tools.