it's a bit late and I don't feel like writing a thesis on this so i'll just post some bullet points: - too much emphasis on getting necro resist. however, once the player has necro resist, he has very little to fear and can spam most spells at will. This is especially problematic for spells like tenebrous rift. eldritch inhabitation is actually worse in terms of spammability because it blinds the player. - one suggestion to fix this is to make the blood debt more severe, but scaled to occur less frequently. rather than a 100$ chance to invoke the blood debt and other debuffs, have these effects instead trigger only a percentage of the time, at a rate that follows well with how often the spell is usually cast and how severe the penalties should be. deathly hex should be something like 5-10% while pact of fleeting life should be slightly higher, 25-50%, eldritch inhabitation should probably be lower than that because the spell is cast more often, while tenebrous rift should invoke bad things 100% of the time. Another suggestion for tenebrous rift is to have it summon hostile deadly shoggoth horrors that cast a self-inflicted suction spell that causes them to teleport next to the player, of course, these monsters are immune to the damage types of the tenebrous rift itself. these shoggoth horror creatures don't deal damage as much as they inflict gruesome debuffs that damage mana, health regeneration, spellpower etc. that way they hinder the player even as the player levels up perhaps even a chance to corrupt equipment.
If Tenebrous Rift had a chance of corrupting my equip, I would probably never play Necro again. Mind you, I don't play it very often right now, but still.
two or three casts of tenebrous rift can kill a zoo. A ZOO! Part of this is because 1. Tenebrous rift is a giant AOE 2. tenebrous rift can target anywhere, without getting blocked. 3. because of zalgo1 the damage increases geometrically with the number of monsters stuck together. a mage with psionics, mathemagic, and necro can literally kill anything. it is ri-diddly diculous how powerful it is. however, you might be right, corruption might be too harsh of a penalty
How about simply giving it downsides that aren't as severe, but last long enough to make it major nuisance? Like, something that stacks, and results in random minor explosions for, let's say, 256 turns. That way, even if one set wouldn't be enough to kill a character, and neither were two (provided you didn't get very unlucky), overusing it would be a way to send yourself to the grave quickly.
Why not just jack up the mana cost of Rift? 30ish mp is way too cheap given what it does. Make it 60-100. If it's on the high end, then you'd start forcing players to actually build for it instead of having Necro as just another skill tree.
Because the point of Necronomiconomics is that you get spells that cost less mana than they should because "you sacrifice some of your life force to fuel them". And the issue is that the penalties for using said "life force" aren't severe enough for the benefits using it gives players. You do have a point, though. But with cost of 60 or more, the skill would be a tad impractical (because after some point increasing the cost means many players won't be able to use it at all, and it's more difficult to use something that requires you to keep you mana level at 90% than it is to use something that requires it at 50% twice [even though the combined cost is higher in the latter case]).
Maybe make the spells do a negative heal to you instead of doing necro damage. Then you would have no way of avoiding that cost.
Honestly, your idea of the Cthulhoid monsters sometimes showing up when you Rift would be pretty damn cool. I just think corruption would be too much. When I've played Necro characters I cast that spell at any group of monsters bigger than 3 or so. Dozens of times per floor. With even a 1% chance of corruption, that's too much. I know it's stupidly good, and agree the rift (and only the rift) could probably use some more downside. I just suspect a better solution to Rift's potency would be to add a couple new monsters with high resist to it's main damage type, the way Promethean fizzles against the late-game Stone Guardian and Iron Man. At least you have to kinda build around Necro. As opposed to Promethean or Golemancy, both of which also make short work of zoos and don't require any special resists. Go read any of the other necro threads, and you'll find the opinions are split between "it's too good" from the folks who have really done the math, and "it's too crappy" from the more casual players. Your first Promethean character dies on Floor 9. Your second Promethean character skips Floor 9 and lives to fight Dredmor himself. Your first Necro character dies on floor 1. Your second Necro character dies on floor 1 or 2, the first time you cast the rift too close to yourself. Add too much more downside to that, and the rift between newb and veteran gets even wider. Pardon the expression.
You know, it'll be a lot easier to make the Necronomiconomics spells act a bit better now that we've got so much more scripting effects in the game. I'll put this on a list somewhere.
ooh! brilliant idea! A monster afflicted with eldritch inhabitation will recieve a delayed spell affect that triggers approx 8-10 turns later. If the afflicted monster dies before effect triggers, their corpse will explode and spawn a hostile shoggoth creature. A lot of tedious work could be done to insure that the creature scales with the dungeon level (a separate triggered effect for each named monster that produces a different horror creature) or it could be a generic monster that does a small amount of melee damage, but inflicts ugly status effects.
Tenebrous Rift aside, would you agree with me that we should, in fact, expect mages to be literally able to kill anything? Just like rogues and warriors. I'm just frightened of people complaining about *any* mana efficient offensive magic and expecting it all to be either support or too costly to use much. I felt a bit of this while I was lurking before I joined here. That said, Necro could lose tenebrous rift as it is now to a spell better focused on supporting melee characters. If the intention is to give some kind of crowd control, it could be done by inflicting lasting nightmares on monsters or something? Doesn't have to be uber-damaging. Perhaps viking magic could get a hyperborean+asphixiative or some other non-necro version of it instead, with much greater mana cost. Viking Magic could use some love after all, given how monsters are able to resist virtually ALL the damage of Arctic Vortex or Skatha's Roots if they roll a resist and don't get DoTed.
Viking Magic and Necro Magic are actually very similar. Both give two good melee buffs, two DoTs and an AoE capstone... that's a line of thought that should probably be followed through some more, but I'm not going to give it the cycles just now. Actually, I think that the Rift would be fine if you just took the Zalgo Blast part of its DoT effect out. That's the part that really makes it wipe out Zoos. And there should be a little more necro resist in the game, at least on Constructs. In fact, I kind of support Constructs being highly resistant to all exotic damages. It fits with their flavor. Except the thing with robos and Voltaic damage. I like that.
...really? I always thought it was a workable but exceptionally unreliable roll to get. Kind of like Mathemagic, except that Diminuating Calculus is consistently useful if you have some way to melee.
Dude, it is the ever evolving meta game of DoD! I have always loved viking and it is great in an all melee build. I have 116 hours on steam and not even close to having experimented with all the skills yet. In reality it feels like practically nothing.
I'm curious as to what impact (if any) the new Deths on floors 11 and 13 of 1.0.10 have had on Necro builds. Both feature 20 points of . Do they provide some needed late-game challenge, or are they too little too late? Has anyone played a necro build down far enough on the new version to know? If you have, please weigh in.
