Please note that these are my personal opinions regarding the updates.
Time Restrictions on the Skeletons/Archers
I felt that this was a needlessly excessive nerf especially when you add the fact that you’ve also reduced the hp pool of our Skeletal friends significantly. After farming for Yellow Caro Antennae for a day I’m sad to see most of my skeletons dropping dead the moment they are afflicted with Poison debuff which usually drop their hp to 10~20% in mere seconds if not kills them. But regarding the Time Restrictions on their uptime, while I personally feel that it was excessive I also feel that it was inevitable considering the sheer number of players abusing the AFK farming potential (myself included). The new playstyle leans more towards active farming which isn’t too bad of a change if you can kill fast enough to replenish your corpse resource gauge.
Summon Skeletons now despawns your current minions and replace them with new ones.
This is a good change, I’ve always wanted to replace my minions who are on the verge of death especially since it’s inefficient to summon 1 or 2 to replace the dead one while spending 10 corpses as usual. Kudos to the lightbulb of the development team who thought of this brilliant quality of life idea.
Skeletal Archers/Corpse Tower and Increased Attack Speed buff
Really at this point any buff to the Archers is a welcome change since they weren’t doing a lot when you compare them to the soldiers. Corpse Tower on the other hand, I’ve had friends tell me they noticed an increase in attack speed animation but I personally can’t seem to notice the difference, further confirmation would be appreciated.
Now for the potential improvements I’d like to suggest.
Personally, I would love to have a way of tracking which of my skeletons are low on hp. Rather than the hp bar if you could perhaps add a visual effect floating on their heads that would be great. Another thing I’d like the dev team to consider is adding a buff on your buff bars which shows how many Skeletons you have active. As someone who went Sorc1/Necro 3 I have a lot of minions out usually when I play. I can’t always stop and count how many are still alive to determine when is the most opportune time to re-summon them while dodging arrows, poisonous puddles of questionable liquid, thunderstorm locked onto my head and a [input enemy attacks here]. Having a buff bar with a counter to display how many are still alive would be most ideal to keep me informed which in turn will help me make the decision to spend my resources efficiently as a summoner.
Another thing I’d like to add is the fact that most of my summons [Salamion/Skeleton Soldiers/Skeleton Archers/Shoggoth/Actually all of them except Sorc summons] are at the mercy of Knockback effects which greatly drops my overall damage output. While I won’t ask the dev team to change minions so that they have Pain Barrier active at all times, perhaps it’s not too farfetched to ask the dev team to give us an ability that allows to maybe Empower our summons to have this effect temporarily. Which brings my next suggestion.
I’d like to suggest the dev team to reward a more Active gameplay of Necromancers who handles resource management well. As an example I’d like them to study how Death Knight class in World of Warcraft is designed to reward the player for executing their rotations perfectly while spending their resources with efficiency. I really appreciate the dev team’s efforts to encourage active playstyle of Necromancers but feel it’s still quite boring when all you’re doing is summoning them. Maybe give us an extra button to apply them with a strong buff, maybe turning them into greater skeletons would be awesome. Perhaps you can grant that ability every 5 minutes or so if you manage to keep your corpse resource floating around 250~300 consistently for 5 minutes (those of us with the Skeleton corpse collection attribute and disinter frequently will have no issues while people who struggle may need to rely on the use of corpse pot if they want to make use of the buff effect). It just adds a bit more to the playstyle of a summoner oriented build. But as always this is my personal opinions, other Necros may not want such a (dare I say Complex?) playstyle.
My overall feedback? it was a good IMC hand job for necros.
I think the patch brought more good things than bad. Perhaps it’s not as good when you were only using Necros to park at AFK zones all day but the nerfs doesn’t heavily affects the active players who doesn’t afk. While the nerfs were unfortunate I have to give the dev team props to balance it so that it only affects the afk players. Likewise you could argue “But macro users will find a way!” frankly speaking though, the nerf on the time limit will be very difficult for them to get around the issue. Regarding the nerf to the hp of your summons, I don’t think it will matter as much on maps where you can kill fast enough to manage your corpse resource, but it might be harder on maps with monsters that hit very hard who can shrug off the dmg your minions can dish out.
totally ok whit all u say.