Hello. A lot of frantic back and forth between us, community managers, and devs has popped off since U46 regarding the pet limit. Specifically, how corpses are considered pets, and the new rules regarding summon priority when casting abilities.

TL;DR: I propose a refactor to make corpses work similarly to how Crux works for Arcanists

Presently the signaling is that pet count HAS to be capped in consideration to performance. This makes sense to me; any number of players can take just one Necromancer skill line and flood the scope of any instance with ten corpses to keep track of each, along with any other summons. This can easily redline any server with enough activity, especially in spaces like Cyrodiil or the Imperial City.

However, I believe treating corpses as pets under the hood is the root of the issue. Back when Necromancers were first developed it was likely a clever solution to the design initiative of treating corpses as a resource AND active target. Spawn a pet on each XYZ location of the most recent corpse; as an entity it can be targeted and affected by other skills cast by the player, while at the same time being treated as a resource.

But with subclassing out and the performance imperative of managing a reasonable number of pets server-side, it looks to me like this solution causes more problems than it solves. And while summon priority is still being worked on to make sure active skills never fail to cast, passive corpse summoning throws a wrench into the whole initiative.

I propose a refactor of corpses to declassify them as pets. I think that the corpse mechanic would work much better in execution if we treated them like Crux for Arcanists.

1. Enemy dies while a necromancer is in combat
2. Immediately a visual effect similar to bitter harvest draws a spirit essence from the corpse to the Necromancer and persists, the way Crux does with Arcanists
3. A count starts, tracking how many spirits the Necromancer is holding.
   • Like corpses, they persist only for 10 seconds, with a max stack of 10
4. All abilities that formerly required a corpse to be at cast location are now ground target casts
   • Tether skills summon a shade / wraith Lich Chains / Lanterns at target location which casts their AOE effects and tether themselves to the caster
   • All other corpse consuming abilities work as they always have, but consume spirit stacks instead of corpses at their location

This would significantly decongest pets across the whole game population with Subclassing, and eliminate issues with abilities failing to cast due to the presence of corpses.

@ZOS_Kevin , @ZOS_GinaBruno - Sorry for the tags, but I want to make sure this thread is seen while the topic is hot between us, CM's, and the devs. Just in case it falls through the cracks.

Thanks for any consideration and engagement.