Hi everyone. My name on Gabija is Searcold and im currently a level 191 Wiz1/Cryo2/Ele2/Necro.
(A lot of regrets involved in this, no need to comment)
You many know me as the guy spamming chat with items that noone wants to buy, or coming down hard on people in chat that base their knowledge of game mechanics on assumption solely. I can be a bit of an ass. At the end of the day all I care about is passing on some first hand knowledge of some of the games aspects so light may be shed on some of the less functional mechanics and game design decisions.
I decided to do skill descriptions for all of the spells leading up to necromancer as the skills have tons of hidden features that aren’t mentioned in game or on skill databases. I’ll enter the value of my own skill spec for reference. Also I’ll be spending more time commenting the less functional skills as opposed to the functional ones. I think this makes sense.
There’s a lot of miscellaneous bugs with casters. Such as being interrupted while casting just as your skill is about to go off, rendering the skill cancelled but the cooldown still going off. I will not bring up them in this thread as it’s focused on necromancer and the classes leading up to it.
Without further ado (Scroll down if you’re only interested in necromancer) :
Wizard 1
[Energy bolt] 0/5
Bread and butter early wizard spell along with earthquake, doesn’t scale well at all and becomes redundant at around circle 3 no matter what classes you choose. Is castable while jumping like most other bolt spells if you time it correctly. Whether this is intentional or not is hard to tell.
[Lethargy] 0/5
Debuff that is useless from level 1 to level 200. It adds a +20% strike damage debuff if you get the attribute for it which may seem good. But really if you’re AOE farming or clearing dungeons there will be no time to cast this before the mobs are dead. Haven’t tried with bosses but feels redundant.
[Sleep] 5/5
AoE sleep for 5 seconds, I tend to pick this whenever i respecc as I feel it has some usability but never even makes it to the hot bar at the end of the day. Breaks after a certain amount of hits. Could have some Crowd control uses in group play, possibly. But in reality you just group all the mobs and kill them as is right now.
[Reflect Shield] 5/5
Really only the useful spell later on in the game as it prevents you from being interrupted while casting for a number of hits. The damage it reflects is minimal, only really useful for its utility. Particularly useful against ranged mobs as you can’t kite them as easily without having your casting interrupted. Affects group members.
[Earth quake] 5/5
Useful AoE spell early on, redundant later on as it neither scales well nor is useful for crowd control as it scatters mobs, sending them flying back. Doesn’t seem to hit flying targets, which makes sense I guess. Doesn’t make it to the hot-keys endgame. (As Wiz1).
Cryomancer 2
[Ice bolt] 10/10
Bread and butter single target spell with small AoE surrounding the primary target, that can hit as many additional target as youre AoE Attack ratio, it seems. (Did some testing with Vubbe fighter gloves on wizard). I still use this as necromancer for freezing small groups or single targets. Has a high freeze chance with attribute at max level 5. Damage is average. Has a hidden two strike effect which would mean that it would scale 200% with your Magic attack. But it seems the second strike is weaker. Around 50-60%. So it’s more like 150% of magic attack value.
[Ice Pike] 10/10
The second useful direct damage spell in the cryomancer tree as it stands. Does good AoE damage if you manage to overlap the many instances of damage in a line this spell does. Scales fairly well into later on in the game as it hits several times for its skill damage + Magic attack. If you jump straight after casting this spell, you can cancel the casting animation and get away quicker. This however also causes the Spell animation to go away as well as delaying any freeze effects on the target visually. (They will still be frozen, but appear as just standing still for another 1-2 seconds after cast)
[Ice Wall] 10/10
Supposedly meant to be a means of utility as it blocks enemies (and allies) physically from passing. It also seems to both freeze enemies upon casting if they come in contact with the wall, as well as having a passive effect that may freeze enemies whenever they’re close it at any point. Summons a number of blocks according to skill level. Notably the skill level also increases the toughness of the individual wall segments. Which means they can be hit more times by you or your teammates. Every time you hit a wall piece tree shards fly out in a cone, in the direction you’re facing when hitting it. It’s possibly to hit up to two wall pieces at a time resulting in 6 projectiles per hit. Projectile damage seems to be equal to attack damage for attack damage classes and Magic attack damage for wizards. As a wizard you can hit it with your staff ( C button default, mouse mode). Doesn’t seem to work with rods however.
[Ice blast] 0/10
Sadly a useless skill from the get-go. Does damage to frozen targets (Does nothing if they’re not frozen and still uses a spell charge) with a chance of thawing them. This might have been useful if the skill was multi hit ( Meaning it would scale better with +Magic attack) or refroze the target and surrounding targets (As I happen to know it was previously like in earlier betas). As it stands now its not worth getting points in as it only does flat damage once, you have to stand still to cast, and does no AoE damage.
[Sub-zero Shield] 0/5
This spell is either poorly designed or unfinished. Supposedly meant to be a defensive cryomancer spell. In reality it does nothing. It is cast for 1-2 seconds for a shield that is erected in the direction you’re facing. The shield only lasts for about a second and only seems to block ranged attacks making it incredibly hard to time as well as inefficient to cast in every way for the value it provides. Personally I think this spell should just be an ice barrier that absorbs x amount of damage. Or a juiced up version of Reflect shield that allows you to avoid spell casting interruption. As it stands now, completely useless and I’ve tried maxing it out. It’s not working.
[Gust] 0/5
Another utility spell that throws your enemies back in a straight line (You’ve probably experienced mobs casting it).
Could possibly have some utility value if the radius of the spell was bigger. It’s currently just a straight line. Does very little damage (half of your Magic attack with attribute) to unfrozen targets. And minimal damage if you put maximum points into it to frozen targets, downside being you thaw them. Does have some interesting interactions with ice wall, as it seems any target that is unfrozen, then refrozen again by the wall and then hit by a second segment of the gust over and over can cause some damage. But it’s not worth setting up.
Elementalist 2
[Electrocute] 0/10
Has some interesting synergy with frozen targets from cryomancer. Whichi may very well be the reason I wanted to try this class combination in the first place. Frozen targets add electricity damage from cryomancer attributes. Electrocute also has an attribute adds damage by up to 100% of magic attack to frozen targets. Looks great on paper. In reality it’s hard to pull off. Electrocute has a couple of seconds cast timer plus you have to wait for the global cooldown after casting any freeze spell (which lasts 5 seconds). After cast has some delay before it starts hitting targets. Which makes the combo hard to play around. Electrocute sometimes misfires doing absolutely nothing. This seems to happen when you’re either too far away from a first target for the chain lightning to leap to, or facing the wrong direction. (I manually use my keyboard to face the right direction as I hold down the cast key for this one).
Doesn’t seem to scale with Magic attack unless it applies damage to frozen targets, rendering this spell redundant eventually. Which is a shame considering most skill that have multi-hit effects (which this one does) are great, as you get to apply magic attack value several times. This one doesn’t.
[Stone curse] 0/10
I tried running this skill at maximum with 5/5 summon skeleton and 2/5 summon shoggoth in the necromancer tree as it has a crazy stun time of around 25 seconds at rank 10. This would mean my summons got a lot of free time to hit their targets. In reality it didnt work out too well. Stone curse is a beam spell meaning it hits the targets in the direction you’re facing. Making it hard to land on a group of mobs, without some effort. It seems it has a hidden mechanic of increasing the defenses of the targets too, notably physical defense. This makes sense I suppose but is not mentioned. Skill has a high cooldown of 90 seconds which makes it not worth taking for me.
[Hail] 10/10
Bread and butter elementalist spell, especially as cryo as it gives you a chance to freeze your enemies when hit. Damage zones are a bit random which makes it less than reliable, but in combination with other freeze spells it’s easy to setup. Scales fairly well as it has many hit instances.
[Prominence] 10/10
Somewhat high cooldown for the short duration, but useful spell as it is the only elementalist spell to not have any cast time.Hit pattern is very random so it’s only really any good for big clusters of enemies. Scales fairly well as it has many hit instances. Does not affect flying targets. Dubious choice to me seeing as it leaps of the ground.
[Meteor] 5/5
The only wizard spell to my knowledge that has explicit scaling (400% of Magic attack + static value based on skill level). The area of effect of this spell also scales with skill level, something that isn’t mentioned in the skill description. Note though that the area and the damage of the spell will be according to the amount of seconds you cast it, 1 sec / skill level. Cool spell, essentially the only way to overkill in late game for wizards.
[Freezing sphere] 5/5
Ironically doesn’t really freeze at all, unless you have Audra. (Staff causing ice spells to have a freeze chance).
Great spell that works much like ice bolt cast-wise only you cannot cast it in the air. But it has an incredibly fast cast timer so it doesn’t really matter. Like ice bolt it hits a number of targets next to the single target based on AoE attack ratio. Also has a double hit effect which makes it scale fairly well.
Necromancer 1
First let me just say something about the corpse mechanic of this class, which feels gimmicky for gimmicks sake and nothing else. You will be drinking corpse potions bought from the necromancer vendor to maintain your shards pool (which is displayed in your necronomicon as X/300 shards). Neither of the corpse gathering skills are remotely functional and even if the mechanics behind them worked or gather corpse did ample damage, it would still not be enough corpses to cast anything without first farming corpses. The corpse mechanic as it is right now is a cool idea, but ultimately just makes the class unnecessarily hard to function, just based on this.
[Gather corpse] 0/5
Sadly completely useless. It does about the same damage as an auto attack and it has to kill the target for you to get one (1) corpse.
[Create shoggoth] 1/5
First of all this skill was changed recently from summoning a creature based on the card in your necronomicon to summoning a shoggoth, which is a tentacle like create ( a static model) with stats based on the card in your necronomicon.
I tried some of the more availible mutant cards to use for this skill to see if it can completely alter the stats of the shoggoth. It can’t. They’re pretty much all the same. I also leveled up a Glauckman card to six stars to see what difference this made. It increases the damage value and armor value of the shoggoth according to the amount of stars and seems to scale fairly well.
The skill itself doesn’t scale too well at all, adding only a slight bonus to attack and defense values of the shoggoth per skill level.
The shoggoth has a breath attack, it does about the same damage as its auto attack but in a line. Sadly it mostly misses those as the AI appears slow.
The auto attack damage is alright, but if the target is moving it tends to miss those too.
There is an attribute to apply decay for x*attribute level amount of minutes after shoggoth is summoned. Seems to not work on flying monsters and it is hard to tell how efficient decay really is (it is supposed to reduce the monsters max hp gradually making them easier to overkill). It seems to do very little.
The shoggoth follows you as long as you’re moving, if you stop it seems that it scans for targets and starts attacking. This means that if you don’t want to attack something you have to keep moving. Also that if you want it to attack something you have to move close to it. This restricts your movement and it’s usability as a tank.
Doesn’t seem to glitch out and get stuck the way skeletons do, but still requires some pampering as it wont stop attacking a target if you move out of screen. You’ll have to go get it by killing the target or summoning a new one (4 minute cooldown).
Overall I’d like to see the old mechanic to summon various creatures with different skills ( stepping on Sorcerer toes here). At least that would have some experimental value. Right now it’s pretty bland and it is frustrating to babysit your own pet to get them to do what you want.
[Flesh cannon] 5/5
Incredibly inappropriate name with the right/wrong mindset.
This is the one skill i find truly entertaining in the necromancer right now. It is very hard to land as it only targets a single square and your target has to remain in that square for full damage. But is easily set up with cryomancer freezes. (Would be even easier with linker, rip)
It does multiple instances of damage which each scale with magic attack making it an absolutely devastating attack if it lands. Also has a high base AoE attack ratio which means it can hit a lot of targets if you stack them up right.
Scales well with skill level increments too.
[Flesh hoop] 0/5
This spell creates a circle of damaging corpse parts around the caster. You have to be in melee range for them to hit and the frequency of which a single target can be hit is pretty low, even if you move around.
What this skills tooltip doesn’t mention is that other than the 15 second duration it also has a limited amount of hits, which if youre using on a group of monsters will run out way before 15 seconds.
Damage scales well but the limited amount of charges makes it very inefficient.
This skill is only really useful for finishing of monsters that are almost dead already.
[Dirty pole] 0/5
Strange spell. It erects a pole from the ground that applies decay to surrounding targets. Sometimes this causes it to take aggro. It is unclear at this point how efficient decay really is. To my experience it does very little to nothing.
[Disinter] 0/1
This skill is fairly useless, it’s intended to gather corpses and has several charges to do so. It seems most of the time it fails to gather even one corpse though. Whether this is due to its lack of range (upgrade able through attributes) or not is hard to tell. has a way too long cast time is just incredibly inefficient when you can just chug corpse potions to keep a healthy level of shards in your necronomicon.
[Corpse tower] 1/5
Summons a tower that shoots nearby enemies for poison damage.
Damage is ok, it can tank like a beast if you manage to get monsters to attack it instead of you. Which is hard considering its low cast range.
Would be better with some measure of scaling, same as raise dead.
[Raise dead] 0/5
Summons X*skill level skeletal soldiers. They work much like the shoggoth as far as hitting and missing goes but do decent damage to static targets.
The skill doesn’t tell you anything about what kind of damage they’ll be doing. It does not appear to scale with skill level nor Magic attack (I tried both). Possibly with character level but it’s hard to test.
Useful little meat shields that are fairly cheap to summon. Unfortunately when passing certain points in a map they tend to deactivate and run to the other side of the map. Even if you go back there to find them and get them to follow you again they will not attack monsters again. This would be fine if you could just resummon them to reset their AI. Problem is you cannot. It will only re-summon as many skeletal soldiers as are dead at the moment. You can switch maps to reset this.
Summary
Necromancer has an incredibly useless corpse system. The class in its entirety would be completely unplayable if it weren’t for the corpse potions sold by the necromancer master, seeing as all the corpse gathering skills are bad to terrible.
The pets AI need work, anything they can do for you damagewise, an elementalist 3 or really any other class can do faster and without less hassle that comes with making sure your pets do what you want them to.
Flesh cannon is amazing if it hits. It’s hard to set up, needs to be castable on the move ( which patch notes at some point stated it should be?) but It’s not.
If you choose to go necro, for the love of god, get linker C1. It’ll make your life so much easier.
If you’re going elementalist, go C3, frost cloud is amazing. Otherwise, don’t bother.
Lastly. I do not know to what extent the skills and mechanics ( and the bugs that come with them) are being tested in this beta. I honestly feel like this ICBT 2 is just a stress test for international servers and to measure interest in the game. As such, there’s not much more to say, I could report on every little small bug I’ve encountered. But I’ve heard they’re already gone in KCBT 3 sooo.
This may have been a waste of time.
Regards, Searcold.
Edit: feel free to ask question!
