Lets Talk Necromancers.

Hey everyone, I'd like to create a large post on my thoughts of where the Necromancer Ascendancy stands and why it's made such a huge impact in the community.

I'd like to start off by saying, I'm not the greatest player in the world. My first Uber Elder kill was, in fact, the last day of Blight, even though I had played since Harbringer, mostly off and on. I didn't really get hooked to Path of Exile until recently with the Necromancer changes. I played predominantly Necromancers, nearly every league I'd have atleast 2-3 Necromancers that I'd get to level 93, and have the capability to kill Uber Elder, I just never followed through. I'd get burnt out. Blight was the first time I found myself motivated to keep playing, and it was my goal to kill him finally before he was removed. As of this league, I've killed Sirus on A5, and know that with a bit more investment and farming, I'd be able to do A8, I'm fairly confident. Starting off the league I played Necro, but rerolled two to three times until finally settling on Necromancer, I can't stop playing them for some reason...

Now, for the topic at hand. As everyone knows, Necromancer is very powerful, consuming up to 30% of the player base, for each separate league. This is substantial. The majority of the play base are either playing Necromancer exclusively, or minions mixed into their build somehow. Why is this? Because the league revolves around boss killing. Necromancers have always thrived on boss killing, it's been their niche for a very long time. So lets talk about the evolution of Necro and why I think GGGs design choices were severely flawed, going into Blight, and not this league.

Prior to Blight, Necromancers dealt with.. excuse my language, a lot of fucking shit. Here's the things we had to deal with from builds alone.

-We had to strength stack endlessly for Baron builds, if we chose to go the zombie route, while this is still a viable and strong build, it's just tedious and requires huge investment in both Str and Int, in order to still be able to equip our minion supports, due to int to str conversions.

-Spectres had a ridiculous amount of "BS" we had to deal with, desecrate's level, the map level and the zone mattered based on what spectres we wanted. We were forced to either play a 6 linked vis mortis, which was an exclusive item, so people intentionally priced it high, or 6 link an armor based item which as everyone knows, is off colored, resulting in huge investment. Spectres still have even more issues on top of them!
-Spectres are not properly balanced, this issue will be talked about later, but pretty much only a handful of spectres are ever used because the other ones are terrible.
-Spectres require specific links based on the type of spectre, while this isn't much of an issue, it requires outside knowledge of how a spectre functions. The most common examples are slave drivers requiring spell damage gems, while buffing spectres like the host and carnage chieftains require blood magic to efficiently buff our minions.
-Often times, building into elemental spectres, locks our sockets up even harder, as we have to provide curses on hit setups and/or elemental equilibrium, to stay competitive, on boss fights. This made gem setups even more convoluted and obnoxious..

-For skeleton builds, we sacrificed the quality of life aspects of raw damage gems, because skeleton builds were often required to use jewels to counter-act the terrible skill design from the beginning. They had no movement speed, terrible map clear, unless you invested into the skeleton mages, which again, was the loss of actual damage dealing ghastly jewels.

-Soulwrest builds, while powerful and unknown to most necromancers, requires the loss of sockets, which is one of the largest issues necromancers deal with. We have perhaps the most convoluted gem set up for any ascenancy.

-We're borderline required to have both desecrate, and convocation equipped. This issue has been an issue from the very beginning, it reserves to slots in our gear, always, on top of the necessary links to our minions.

-Defensive options are requirements, due to our "lock" on what we have to take as passive skill points. Necromancers have borderline nothing to scale off of, this is the biggest issue they have. We're required to take specific nodes, not because they're interesting, but because they feel required. Your minions will literally not survive without specific amounts of extra life, or their ability to kill will be greatly affected without these nodes. This is ultimately fine, in how it functions but it creates an issue where the variety of necromancer builds is limited. I've played several evasion based builds but it requires a very awkward and unreliable source of investment.

-Speaking of investment, we're required to use specific gear, which people have, for the past few years, exclusively over priced. This was the biggest issue I had with necromancer. Most necromancer jewels, for the longest time, simply having 3 minion damage modifiers would cost you nearly 1ex, no other build would charge you 1ex for a simple rare jewel. Baron helms and Scourge claws were victim to this as well. I'm assuming this impact was because of Ghazzy, but either way, getting necromancer items on the higher end was cancerous, unless you crafted things yourself.

-Our Ascendancy nodes, prior to the rework offered variety, and not requirements, to an extent, this variety was baked into streamline, which made nodes required. What I mean by this, is that previously you could choose to invest into zombies, spectres, skeletons, offerings, auras, or what ever. The issue about this was that statistically, most minion builds invested in Spectres, making this node almost always a requirement, not so much for the damage, but the 100% increased life the node provided. Spectres would not survive otherwise. Necromancers have this issue, which is even prevalent now, where specific nodes on our Ascendancy is REQUIRED! I could see this from a mile away with the rework, and honestly Blight's Necromancer rework almost made me quit PoE for good.

-Their AI was flat out awful.

-Their movespeed was horrendous. This made spectres vastly superior to other minions, due to their ability to attack things on the other side of the screen.



So I'd like to start my feedback on a statement saying, I love PoE, I'm hooked on it, this game and company are all I think about now days. However, their development philosophy for Necromancer is so far beyond flawed. Here are the actual core issues with the current Necromancer.

-We have very little scaling tools at our disposal, outside of specific high level weapons, ghastly jewels, veiled/crafted modifiers, helmets, or uniques.

-Due to the immense amount of sockets required for our builds, we're required to juggle between auras, movement skills, defensive skills, minions, minion supports, potential curses, and other qualities of life. Button bloat is a SERIOUS ISSUE with Necromancer. Why couldn't the middle mouse button also swap to a new skill when holding control/shift, or what ever it's set to by default?? This would have helped tremendously!

-Minions are subject to death on bosses, which is ultimately okay, this creates more issues i'll talk about later.

-Screen Clutter, biggest issue of necromancer there is.. excuse my language, but you can't see shit. It's like playing some CoC/VD build with the herald of ash explosion infinitely exploding. It's getting to the point where a necromancer pulls the boss, you may as well turn off your monitor.

-Minion levels are too much of a requirement. This is perhaps the biggest internal issue of necromancers that people don't think about, unless they really understand necromancer. The reason they're so powerful is because gem levels impact their power significantly more than gear. There's no gear scaling to even a fraction of the power that minion levels provide. This is one of the reasons why I think that the Necro "rework" that GGG did was a mistake, and poorly implemented.

-Minion movespeed, while buffed to a helpful degree, isn't that huge of an issue. The clearspeed of necromancers have always been what puts them far behind other builds. Between their slow movement and uncontrollable nature, this made spectres the dominant choice in clear speed, unless running an optimized soulwrend build, which thrives on map clear.

-Minion survivabilty is something discussed a lot. It requires specific points of investment, in order to make your minions tanky enough to survive most encounters, and on top of that, they'll still die to fights like the Awakener, if not properly positioned. The biggest factor to minion death is the dreaded, and expensive Animate Guardian. On top of this, resummoning zombies, is ridiculously expensive in mana.. WHY?! More on this later.

-Animate Guardian powerful, uninteresting, annoying, terrible to keep alive, expensive, and just not fun to work around. I hate this skill ABSOLUTELY DETEST this ability. I don't care how powerful Animate Guardian is and the fact that it can roll around with a Kingmaker with cull, or running around with vulnerability curse gloves with auras that make your minions stronger. The amount of investment, the amount of handholding and babysitting, that we have to do for this stupid thing is just absolutely ridiculous. The amount of things a Necromancer has to try to pay attention to, between keeping up offerings, keeping up fortify, trying to figure out where they're standing, are my pets going to die during a boss fight, and now "is my guardian still healthy and alive?". No. Just no. Please, kill this skill, many would not miss it. Just burn it from existence. That, or simply make Animate Guardian not lose everything when it dies. Because the mechanic it has now is just terrible, and I can't believe GGG still thinks this is great design.



Now, that I've touched on the ideas behind my feedback, lets discuss how these issues actually affect the overall nature of Necromancer, and how the game has evolved to create a toxic environment, which people blame on Necromancer, but is not necromancer related at all. It's GGG's own fault.

So, in path of exile, previously, Necromancers were tedious, that was their, "curse", so to speak. We dealt with a lot of bullshit, but was given an easier playstyle, that was only comparable to other builds, outside boss killing. However, even on the side of boss killing, without ridiculous investment, it's not like we were "one-pumping" uber elder and shaper. Often times, our minions, even build as tanky as they could possibly be, could still die to shaper beams, they could die to puddles on the ground during the fight, sometimes they'd just die for no apparent reason. I can't tell you how many, extremely beefy level 21 animate guardians I had that I lost for some unknown reason. It's frustrating. But many times, you have to ask yourself, is this really okay? What is the drawback to playing necromancer. Previously, it was all of the shit you had to put up with, the little nuances that made it not fun, in many instances. The QoL changes removed many of those not-so-fun quirks that made it easier to pick up. So while this was a fantastic thing to happen, it immediately removed the penalty for being a necromancer. Immediately, when i read the changes to spectres, i was super happy, but then I thought about it, "If they do anything else, necro will be op..". This was a terrifying feeling for me. I didn't want Necromancer buffed too much, it was in a good spot, almost, it needed QoL things, it needed ascendancy changes, sure, but it didn't need "this".

The issue with the previous necro ascendancy, was despite it thriving on different builds on the tree, they were overshadowed by spectres already. So, GGG's response, "Fix spectres by making the node baseline, fixing the terrible tedious style of getting them, and we'll be good!". Well, not good, this then made spectres not have to compete with skeletons and zombies, so, what'd they do? "Buff skeletons and zombies in a similar fashion, and remove those two nodes". Well, now what, where does GGG go from there? They create the most overpowered, busted, ridiculous, stupid node, that should not have existed to begin with. "Unnatural Strength". This node, even as my noob self, could smell the overpowered nature of Necromancer, from a mile away. I didn't even have the game installed because I was unsure I'd come back. I saw this node and immediately told my friend. "I'm not going back to Path of Exile, GGG has zero idea how to balance things." He asked why, I told him about this node, and he's like "it sounds good, but it's probably not that good." Well.. needless to say, he was wrong. EVERY Necromancer takes this node. There is no question, this node is the biggest outlier to Necromancer's damage more than anything else.

Unfortunately, GGG didn't even realize it, and instead they nerfed zombies and spectres, without even thinking about this node. Instead, they outright lowered everything about the minions, including their levels, to "make up" for this node, when actually this node should have never existed! Instead, Spectres require a severe investment to get to a point where 4 spectres, which was the norm for a long time, is comparable to other minions. This makes spectres weaker than other minions in most situations, until invested in properly. While I like the idea that necro has things to invest in, this creates a terrible issue that necromancer already has..

"We scale poorly early on and dramatically late game".

This is the biggest issue necromancer has, it's why everyone's playing it. With the buffs to bosses and all content in the game, the game is dramatically more dangerous to literally every build out there. It's difficult for those builds to get enough investment to have the powerful boss killing potentially that Necromancer can do on a simple 5 link. So where does everyone flock to? Necromancer. Does this make Necromancer overpowered? No, this just makes it so more people are playing them. Unfortunately GGG won't see it this way. They'll nerf Necromancer yet again, thinking that it's the strongest build, without looking at any sort of data. This is a big mistake. Necromancer is ultimately in a fine place, it's just too easy to pick up.

So.. how does this get fixed?

Lets start and talk about how this can be fixed, without outright gutting necromancer.

>>First proposal: Remove Unnatural Strength, if it's not nerfed, and replace it with three individual nodes. Each line being their own node.
+1 number of Spectres
+1 to the number of Zombies, and x% reduced mana cost of Summon Zombie
+1 to the number of Skeletons, Vaal Summon Skeletons now summons twice as many Skeletons.
*Note: Half the amount of skeletons from Vaal Summon Skeletons, and reduce the soul recharge requirement and time on the skill.

What this does is now gives Necromancer a choice of focusing on a particular type of minion, while being simple in nature. This also puts VSS in its place as the boss killer, and nerfs it for everyone else without large investment.

>>Second Proposal: Make bone helmets, convoking wands and minion mods that are normally only crafted on gear also found on regular types of gear, with those particular mods being more common on convoking wands and bone helmets. Nerf lower level minion damage nodes to compensate. Make convoking wands have an additional modifier on it, "Adds x to x <damage type> to minions." Outright nerf all minions across the board.

Giving necromancers the ability to level up with minion stats not only teaches them good habits as newer players, it also allows necromancer to scale more reasonably just as any other build seeking power would. Making these items more common would make them not as easy to pick up, but still impactful overall, and make investment matter. It would also make getting higher level convoking wands more interesting as it would give minions flat damage on top of leveling like they normally do. By lowering the damage of all minions across the board, it requires these small investments to make a minion build more viable, without just running minions and being strong like they are now.

>>Third proposal: Nerf holy relic, herald of agony, VSS (which was stated before, with a small SS nerf), and zombie DAMAGE, not life, and slave drivers.

These are the big outliers in necro damage at this moment. Holy relic and HoAG are just too strong for little investment that's needed in the gear, still, even after the nerfs. Most necros and tanky builds run these particular minions because they do so much with little minion scaling. Personally I think HoaG should scale off or your poison/chaos damage, making HoAG function the way it was supposed to when it was created, but that's just me. HR is just strong regardless and is used for map clear and healing. Leave the heal alone, it's nice and helpful for melee based necromancers, but the damage could be toned down a bit, especially when using Geofri's Legacy. The nerf to zombie damage, slave drivers and skeleton damage, is honestly what should be done, leave every other stat on them alone, just nerf the damage, so it doesn't weaken map clear too much, and makes the investment of the Ascendancy more of an interesting choice.

>Fourth proposal, nerf the content in the game just by a little, without buffing every class.

While the game is challenging, i like the challenge, but the ultimate issue of this league is that it's almost "too challenging". People are playing necromancer just because it's easier to deal with the challenge, and then they tackle the challenge just as you would have last league. This time, people don't have to worry as much. Bosses are just a little too rippy for most builds, just by a little bit. Not much, I love this league, I just hate feeling like I can't enjoy PoE without being a Necro. Not because they're OP, but because they can have an easier time getting started.


TLDR; This was my long thought about necromancer, things I'd do to combat their "overpowered" mindset, without them actually being overpowered. A lot of us who actually play necromancer, even before this patch know, we're not overpowered, but we're going to be nerfed heavily because people think we are. It's not Necros that are strong, it's the content. It's the fact that our gearing strats are exclusive to late game, and reliant of fossil crafting. It's the fact that we can run around with a claw, spin like crazy and still do enough minion damage to kill things with HoAG or holy relic. Do I think this is fine? Definitely not, We need overall balance changes, and the removal/change of Unnatural strength. Leave Necro's power where it is, tone the game down, while changing how we invest, and when. Then the game will be fine.

I don't know, but with the advent of 4.0 socket changes i think that the way to go with summoners now would be making them really specialize in a single minion type. One of the reasons necros are so "op" is that they are one of the only classes that can scale and use multiple damage gems at the same time. For example when you are building skels, you can also use spectres and zombies with no downsides outside of socket slots.

So my proposal would be adding a global minion limit in the game (would also solve the screen clutter of minion builds), so players have to choose what minions they want to summon.

Let's say you start with 4 minion limit, and there are ascendencies, nodes and gear that can raise this limit. Skills like hoAG could use all minion slots for example, while skeletons could have a +x to minion limit implict in the gem.

Of course number balances would also need to happen, but they would be a lot easier to do.

Concerning minion survival, the only minions i can agree should be tanky are spectres (and only because their current summoning method is pretty bad) and animated guardians, zombies are just disposable corpses, there is no reason why we should think they should be immortal beings. If they changed spectrer gem to have 2 skills (one record the spectre) and the other summon it, even specters should not be tanky (unless it's a tanky specter)

The reason people are playing minnions is that:

1.)they can dodge/evade while their minnions massacre things, inlucidng bosses. Which other class can deal constant damage at full power while able to evade damage? Maybe only cyclone but even that one is limited to close combat, unlike necro.

2.)skelies "auto" target everything alive or undead, means it's unlikely you will miss any kills while clearing. Also skellies move speed is actualy pretty decent. Myself using 2x vermilion rings with minnion essence craft for like 50% minnion move speed and it makes wonders to clear speed.

3.)skelies allow off-screen killing. Myself killing metamorphs with vaal skeletons then I f. run away to the nearest corner, only to summon skelies when their number drops. relatively safe. I don't know any other skill with which you can do that (maybe burning spirit, but that's minnion, too). If there is, update me please.

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Gaspik2 wrote:

The reason people are playing minnions is that:

1.)they can dodge/evade while their minnions massacre things, inlucidng bosses. Which other class can deal constant damage at full power while able to evade damage? Maybe only cyclone but even that one is limited to close combat, unlike necro.

2.)skelies "auto" target everything alive or undead, means it's unlikely you will miss any kills while clearing. Also skellies move speed is actualy pretty decent. Myself using 2x vermilion rings with minnion essence craft for like 50% minnion move speed and it makes wonders to clear speed.

3.)skelies allow off-screen killing. Myself killing metamorphs with vaal skeletons then I f. run away to the nearest corner, only to summon skelies when their number drops. relatively safe. I don't know any other skill with which you can do that (maybe burning spirit, but that's minnion, too). If there is, update me please.

From what I've heard on the forums, most people generally don't like playing summoner. Take it from me, as someone who's been maining them since I started playing PoE, it's a very lazy playstyle. Drop some minions, walk around while the game more or less plays itself. Some people have the patience or desire to handle that kind of gameplay or lack thereof, most others end up getting bored to tears with it. It's a similar issue with totem based builds. Plop some sticks down, let them wipe the screen, repeat.

I'm not disagreeing with the points you've made, but it goes deeper than that to explain why summoners are popular right now. Hell, they weren't near this popular back in 3.8.

The reason summoners are the go-to build right now is because the blanket buff to monsters and bosses has made a significant impact on every other build that doesn't utilize minions. Browse a few pages here in the feedback board. A lot of people are complaining about one of two things: Everything has 4 times more health and their builds just can't keep up anymore, and Metamorphs are unfathomably broken. So broken, in fact, that the only builds that can still comfortably tackle the things are summoners and their army of skeletons.

I never supported this idea of buffing mob health to make the game more challenging. One of the main attractions of this game is that its complexity allows players to make a wide variety of builds, all of which varying in power and speed. Making mobs tougher with health and damage buffs only serves to narrow this diversity, and players who enjoyed running off-meta builds may have been rendered unviable as a result. Don't even get me started on how bloated and 1shotty Metamorphs are.

I'll give you an example. Years ago, back before we had ascendancies, there was a Marauder build guide on the forum that centered around Pillar of the Caged God and Dominating Blow. It wasn't very strong, especially not on its own, but it was incredibly tanky. It was shortly after I made this build that GGG did their first wave of mob buffs to account for how strong players have gotten. The damage this build wasn't putting out nearly enough that I needed to start snowballing with dominated minions, so I had to drop it and go back to being a traditional summoner.

GGG shouldn't have buffed mobs, this only screws over players who don't chase the meta. What should have happened is that they nerf the meta to narrow the power gap between them and pretty much everything else.

Necromancers are a staple in RPG games. People loved the Necro in D2 and he appeared again in D3. In Grim Dawn the first new expansion class was the Nercro and people gave it much more attention than the Inquisitor. Generally Necromancers and minion builds seem to be extremely popular.

I don't know what GGG were thinking with all the Necromancer updates. People had said for years that they were fine, not amazing but in no way were they terrible. People had also said that fixing the AI would have made Necromancers amazing. How does GGG react to this kind of feedback? By ignoring it. Instead, they gave Necromancers all sorts of new treats while also fixing the AI. They need to take a step back to the patch where they first introduced all these absurd changes and figure out which ones were the most important to their long term plan.

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Pizzarugi wrote:

Everything has 4 times more health and their builds just can't keep up anymore, and Metamorphs are unfathomably broken. So broken, in fact, that the only builds that can still comfortably tackle the things are summoners and their army of skeletons.

Ball lightning mines also work rather well in that regard. They take more care and skill, but they do get the fuckers down...

Necro's not op? What trickery is this?

More resistance than Elementalist, can also shock and chill just from summoning corpses (looking at Aukuna's Will)

As much potential es regen as Occultist, but also with mana regen for a class that specializes in doing very little.

Even before the ascendancy buff, without montergul's or the baron, my zombies only died to chaos damage and maybe the old guardians. I played it a little before making my blight character, and they were even stronger. And spectres.. HotGM was the only place they could die. Nowhere else. And that's just talking about how beefy they are. Triad grip affecting all minions rather than just socketed minions?

And that second proposal makes it harder to get mods for non minion builds. Every non minion build I've made has had to reroll a helmet with +2 minion gems at least a few times.

As another dedicated necro player, but one who I suppose spends more time talking to people that play other things, and who has dabbled in other classes from time to time, I can tell you that most of the things you call flaws with this class are necessary. These are the defense we have against people who say that we need to be nerfed into the ground. Making a good necro build requires careful planning and understanding of mechanics; it's simply that we need to understand different mechanics from the ones that players of more action-oriented classes need to master.

Our gearing in particular is generally much simpler, and you only perceive it as irritating because you've never tried to twink out something that cares about the numbers on the weapon. For almost every necro build, (except baron, as you point out) the main thing you need to worry about is getting a 6l armor, preferably guatelitzi's, and fixing the socket colors. That's a baby fart compared to what most other people have to deal with. Getting a good 5 or 6 link bone helm is the next goal after that, and it's really not necessary until you're deep enough in the atlas that you can definitely afford it eventually.

We're not overpowered. (Actually, we are a little bit.) We have different challenges that are focused more on planning than execution. (Which is why we should be a little OP.) It's probably fair to say we're the aesthetic focus of the genre, and we're generally a good on-ramp for people who are new to it. If we "fix" the things you perceive as problems, we won't be 30% of the playerbase, we'll be 70% of it. That's broken.

i can do minotaur with a few Chaos orbs-build as summoner
which other class is able to do it? or was.