D2R Ladder 2 Necromancer Skills Changes For Patch 2.5 - Diablo 2 Resurrected Ladder Season 2 Necromancer Updates

D2R Ladder 2 Necromancer Skills Changes For Patch 2.5 - Diablo 2 Resurrected Ladder Season 2 Necromancer Updates

8/6/2022 4:39:39 PM

Here’s the Necromancer skill review for changes that we’d like to see patch 2.4 walking into ladder season 2 of Diablo 2 Resurrected. We've already covered the Barbarian, for the Necromancer, we came up with probably changes for the majority of skills. Read on and take a look at these changes to Necromancer skills in D2R ladder season 2 patch 2.5.

changes to Necromancer in D2R ladder 2 patch 5

D2R Ladder 2 Necromancer Skills Changes For Patch 2.5

General Summoning Changes

New skill summoner’s call
Moves summons to location/attack

One big overarching summoner focused skill or at least a pair of skills that we would really like to see be added to the game, the first one would be the ability to target an enemy, so that your minions at least for a certain amount of time would choose to attempt to attack that singular target unless they were otherwise physically unable to get to them.

The second ability would be something similar to what happens like when you teleport. So when you teleport, it's going to move all of your summons including your mercenary directly on top of you and while that's all well and good it does mean that a summoner build is focused on getting access to teleport and it makes you even more reliant on something like enigma. Maybe the name of the skill would literally be summoner's call and would move all of your minions to a new location. This would also go a long way to help with the issue of your iron golem dying when it gets caught on things, there's just a lot of viability in being able to move your minions to a location or at least have all your minions run to a location. So perhaps the summoner's target or summoner's mark would either make all of your minions attack a singular target or all move to a location. So that you weren't as reliant on teleport.

Raise Skeleton/Skeletal Mages

The first skill that we really want to look at is skeleton mages and in a smaller degree also looking at raise skeleton. The first glaring problem with these two skills is that when you save and exit all of your skeletons die. The problem with this is if you are a pure summon build, what this means is that at the beginning of every game, you have to go to pindleskin's portal, summon your undead army there or if you haven't gotten to pindle's portal yet, walk outside, wait for your mercenary and your clay golem to kill a monster and then slowly one by one summon your skeletons. For both raise skeleton and raise skeletal mage, we'd like to see it so that they no longer despawn on save and exit and instead stay alive through to your next game.

The second change is specifically to raise skeletal mage and that's that we need to reduce the ai duration between attacks. So if you're not aware, raise skeleton mage and raise skeleton have a 15 frame or three-fifths of a second delay between attacks. So regardless of how fast you make them attack, they are going to wait three-fifths of a second just standing there waiting to attack again. While this isn't a super problem for raised skeletons since they run directly into combat and they'll be staying next to monsters attempting to attack until you move them, raised skeleton mages attempt to move around and shoot very slow moving projectiles. While there's a lot that you could do to raise skeletal mages to change their overall gameplay and viability at the very least reducing the ai delay of 15 frames, means that they'll be putting more projectiles into the air per second.

Blood Golem/Fire Golem

We'd really like to address the two golems that don't see any gameplay or use at this point, that would be blood golem and fire golem.

The blood golem could really use some kind of niche ability other than just returning life to you and you returning life to the golem. We'd like to see blood golem apply or have a chance to apply open wounds on attack and when it is struck. This all of a sudden becomes a really good option for some monsters who have amazing health regen most notably the mini ubers, the ubers themselves and then something like d-clone. On top of that, it has some pvp viability as well since open wounds is a pretty interesting effect to be applying from something like a summon necromancer. Just bringing some kind of utility or identity to blood golem where you could be actively summoning it to increase your kill speed against monsters would go a long way to at least give it some identity and a reason to use it in at least niche situations.
For fire golem, what we ultimately came down to was it would be nice if the fire golem, instead of having a holy fire aura or in addition to it would actually have a minus enemy fire resistance aura. We are not looking to replace something like an infinity if your fire golem were to reduce enemy fire resistance by 1 point per hardpoint, that means that at skill level 20 it would be reducing enemy resistances by 20. In some circumstances, this would even go to just barely break monsters that were 100% resistant to fire damage and in addition to infinity, you would have a reason to use a golem that wasn't just a clay golem until you could be replacing iron golems with insight. Being able to increase not only the golems damage to a target as well as increasing something like your corpse explosions damage, this would also go a long way to increase at least some of the damages from your raised skeletal mage. If you were feeling particularly feisty, you could go revive a bunch of monsters that have firebased attacks and before you have an infinity and you're just running off of lower resistances, you'd be able to go in and farm some areas where monsters are immune to fire and be able to buff up your total summoner kit.

General Golem Changes

Each golem can gain a synergy with a curse from the cursed skill tree that would increase the effectiveness of its niche ability.

For clay golem, we would like to see it have a synergy with decrepify that would go to augment its slow and potentially give it some type of minus enemy physical resistance, so that it does additional physical damage. For blood golem, we'd like to see it synergize with life tap, so that the blood golem could either return a greater amount of life to your party in perhaps your other summons.
For iron golem, we'd like to see this synergize with iron maiden, perhaps increasing the amount of damage returned by the iron golem or adding a flat amount of additional damage return per hit regardless of the percentile damage that was returned.
For fire golem, we'd like to see a synergy with lower resistance where it either increases the minus enemy or it continued on with the idea of increasing its absorb or increasing the damage from its holy fire aura. At least in the case of decrepify life tap and iron maiden, almost no builds are going to put more than 1 point into any one of those curses and you're only ever putting a point into iron maidens that you could build down to life tap and lower resistance. This would give a reason to put more points into curses that you otherwise normally wouldn't except in the case of low res. Potentially enough of a boost to the golems in their entirety to bring up their overall damage and support utilities to the point where they themselves also aren't just one point wonders.

Teeth

Add pierce chance

Teeth is okay, it doesn't shotgun and it doesn't pierce, so it's difficult to layer on a lot of damage from teeth. We would like to see teeth have added pierce. Bone spear damage drastically outperforms teeth and in addition to that, the mechanics between the two skills really go to apply to different areas. Bone spear at the damage that it gets up to can actually be used for gunning down tight packs of monsters even on a higher player account whereas teeth is really just a player's one area damage application skill and at this point, you could add pierce to teeth without it becoming overpowered and it would just go a long way to help make early game farming feel a bit better especially on lower level, trying to cast teeth if you've maxed it out on a level 10 or 15 necromancer, feels like absolute crap because it costs so much mana and it's so difficult to maintain that mana with lower potions, that if it just pierced it would go a long way to reduce the length of time they were holding down right click. It would help to add a bit to its identity, the idea that teeth doesn't pierce is weird. And if it's not going to shotgun, pierce is the next best option.

Bone Spirit

Even though this skill is reigns supreme in pvp and technically does more damage than bone spirit to a singular target, the speed of the projectiles and the kind of identity that bone spirit has this idea that it's a heat-seeking missile that will track down a monster. We'd like to make it a much better option for a single target which is where the bone necromancer really starts to show its weakness when you're trying to bring down a higher player setting single target monster especially act bosses. The idea here would be to add an additional projectile to bone spirit for every 10 hard skill points that you have in this scale, so at one skill point, you shoot one projectile, at 10 skill points you're going to shoot two projectiles and at 20 skill points you're going to shoot three projectiles. That would be a little bit too powerful at its current damage type. So if it were to even be brought down to just one projectile all the way up to level 20 where you would then gain a second projectile, that would probably be in a more healthy spot, but it would go a long way to cement bone spirit as your single target dps mechanism and give bone necromancers a reason for the 20 skill points that you'd put into bone spirit. Because if you're not pvping, you literally don't use this skill. Just something small for both bonewall and bone prison, it would just be nice if you could unsummon these with the skill unsummon. =

Poison Dagger

There are two options that would make poison dagger a much more interesting skill and both of them have different strengths and weaknesses.

Become an enchantable buff: The first one being that poison dagger be more like a poison enchant. So rather than defining the attack that you do with it and requiring a dagger, we'd like to see you be able to enchant the necromancer with additional poison on their attack as well as being able to enchant your mercenary or your summons. You can think about changing the skill name to in venom or just straight up poison, the fact that it's tied down to a dagger on the necromancer's attack frames which are just not good. On top of the fact, that it's really the only melee focused skill that the necromancer has and there's no real way to build around it, you completely throw away any benefit that you would get from poison nova because poison damage doesn't stack. So if you could enchant with this poison, it goes a long way to open up a lot of interesting build niches, as well as the fact that you can get poison dagger charges on gloves. So now you could give this skill over to other classes that have access to poison damage, it just really opens up what you could do with the skill.
Apply enemy poison res debuff: The second option for poison dagger still is going to get rid of the restriction where you need to use a dagger. It would carry along with it a stacking minus enemy poison res debuff. If you decrease a monster's resistance and then apply the same amount of poison damage to them, that poison damage is going to do increased damage and have an increased duration over which it does its increased damage. If poison dagger could stack multiple times applying minus enemy poison res, that would then go ahead and stack with something like lower resistance. You have a reason to use poison dagger and you would be able to use this on act bosses, so that when you do send off a poison nova, now you're getting increased duration and increasing the damage that it does. So the biggest weakness of a poison necromancer is the fact that it has basically no kill speed against bosses. This would go a long way to actually incorporate the skill of poison dagger and help to fill in that niche that poison nova necromancers really need on their build.

Poison Explosion

The biggest problem with poison explosion is that its damage is completely eclipsed by poison dagger's damage and by poison nova. The next issue it applies its poison damage very slowly, so it literally takes a little bit of time for the explosion to go off and fill in a small area, and then the area that it applies to is also incredibly small. What we would like to see is poison explosion have it immediately apply that poison damage within an area around it, just like corpse explosion immediately attempts to apply physical and fire damage to everything around it. We'd like to see poison explosion apply its poison damage to everything around it. The second part that make it worth your while to cast poison explosion instead of just casting poison nova would be to add a synergy from corpse explosion, so that poison explosion would gain an amount of fire damage. In addition to the poison damage, so that your poison nova build has access to multiple damage types as well, and poison explosion would see some play considering you have to put the 20 points into it anyways if you're going to be a poison nova build.

Confuse and Attract

In the curse tree, there are two curses right now that are both very interesting and bring a lot of utility or at least one of them does, but ultimately you never end up using them and the major problem is between confuse and attract. The first major problem is that monsters who are confused and monsters who have been attracted. Don't give experience when they are killed even though you've used a skill on them and they don't consider the necromancer to have killed them so they don't look at your magic fine. So first for both of the skills, we would like to see that the monster give xp when they are killed, and in addition to that actually consider the necromancer's magic fine. For attract while it says that this curse may not be overridden by another curse, you can't cast attract on any monsters that are confused. Confused monsters can be targeted by other skills as well as other curses. So for some reason while you can't curse an attracted monster, you also can't attract a confused monster. Both tool tips are just missing some information and that attract is actually just bugged at this point for how it's supposed to be able to target monsters who are already cursed.

Iron Maiden

For iron maiden, there's just one small little issue and that is if a monster is cursed with iron maiden and it dies by attacking your bone prison, it also doesn't give you xp and it doesn't consider your magic fine for drops. But if a monster has iron maiden on it and attacks a bone wall, it does give experience. Bone prison is like one of the best tools for an iron maiden focused build for a necromancer to use especially in the pacifist run. And it would just be nice if there was parody between bone wall and bone prison because being able to trap monsters into a wall that they eventually kill themselves on dropping you looting giving you xp. The second thing is that for whatever reason even though thorns now has attacker takes damage as well as returning a percentage of damage. Iron maiden does not gain attacker takes damage, for iron maiden to feel a little bit better as a build around thorns mechanic, it'd be great if it had a flat amount of attacker takes damage just so that every time a monster swings at you. You're going to be doing a base amount of physical damage back to them, while a thorns build is not something, you can legitimately build around it would just go a long way to make iron maiden feel better and potentially see some use as an additional curse.

Decrepify

The decrepify tooltip doesn't show you the fact that it also increases physical damage taken by the target tells you that they take amplified damage, but it doesn't include the value in the tooltip itself. So unless you read through the skill and you know that it does this, nothing about the skill right now tells you that it does. So just be nice if the tooltip also included that information.