Just thought I’d post my thoughts on the necro class, and spread some information as to what it entails.
Let’s start with the unique necro mechanic: corpse gathering. Your corpse count is stored in the necronomicon, and you have a max of 300. Your corpse count persists through zoning, channel hopping, log out and death. There USED to be a bug where your corpse count would fill to 300 when joining a random group for dungeons/missions but it seems to have been fixed. There are 3 sources of corpses:
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Corpse potion - 30 corpses on a 45s cooldown at a cost of 500 silver bought from necro master
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Gather corpse - 10s cd, 3 overcharge, low damage high AoE nuke - must last hit enemies to get corpse - 1 kill = 1 corpse
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Disinter - 24s cd, 3 overcharge, 0 damage - gathers corpses from all dead enemies in a small radius, can increase radius with an attribute (3 ranks, +10 radius each)
Now let’s talk about the summoning skills
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Create Shoggoth - 30 corpses 4m cd. Requires an insect, beast or mutant card in your necronicon. More stars on your card = better stats on your shoggoth, more points in shoggoth makes its damage scale better with your int. It has 2 attacks - a tentacle poke which has a small AoE component and a breath attack which has a narrow but longer cone AoE component. Each is 1 hit. Pretty tanky.
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Raise Dead - 10 corpses, 60s cd, summons 5 skeletons. Each hits for a fair amount of damage, but only 1 target at a time and they have pretty bad hp. Die very quickly to any sort of boss attack.
The summon skills suffer from a couple drawbacks I should mention. One is that it is easy to lose them. If you move away while they are attacking an enemy, or warp, or change channel, or change zone or just reach some specific sorts of terrain they are no longer with you and helping. This is a big problem for shoggoth because its cooldown is so long, and a big problem for skeletons because if you cast the skill while they are still alive, even if they are nowhere near you, it does nothing. For both sets of summons there is zero indicator anywhere on the UI to let you know where they are or how much hp they have left.
Furthermore, for skeletons, int and MATk do not increase damage, so I have no idea how IMC expects their damage to scale into the late game. The summons could definitely use some work in this game.
Now we’ll talk about necromancer pillars
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Dirty pole - 5 corpses, 30s cd, deals minor damage with a small knockback and causes decay on cast. More points makes the pole and debuff last longer, as well as the cast deal a bit more damage. Enemies DO NOT target this pole. Decay is a very powerful debuff - doubling all missile attacks, both skills and auto attacks. Unfortunately it does not appear to work on bosses. For the skill though, I honestly don’t see the point. You can trait the shoggoth to cause decay for its first 5 minutes of life which is plenty of time to gather 30 corpses to summon another. Skip it unless it gets improved in my opinion.
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Corpse tower - 7 corpses, 50s cd, this is a turret. You place it and it starts shooting things. More points makes it last longer and gives it more health. It is considered an object and takes 1 damage from all attacks. I like this skill because it has a health bar and enemies attack it. Since it takes 1 damage from all attacks it is quite tanky. More skill points makes it last longer and have more health. Unfortunately, like skeletons, this tower’s damage does not appear to scale with int or MATK.
Finally we can talk about the necromancer nukes
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Flesh cannon - 15 corpses, 20s cd. Very powerful nuke. 16 hits, lots of skill damage. Trade off is that it costs a lot of corpses, has a long cast and animation time. On a stationary enemy, this is a very strong nuke. You will probably never hit a moving target with it. No complaints, definitely maxing this.
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Flesh hoop - 5 corpses, 25s cd. 15 hits. On paper it sounds nearly as good as flesh cannon, but there a couple significant drawbacks. The first is that every single enemy hit is a separate count. Meaning that 2 enemies will take 7/8 hits each, while flesh cannon will hit both for 16. You also have to be close to your enemy to hit them with this, while flesh cannon has a nice range. On the other hand it has no cast time and is much easier to start dealing damage with. Also 1/3rd the corpse cost. I think flesh cannon wins the competition, but if you wanted to, you could max both.
So my post has been pretty wordy so far, and I’d like to conclude with something short and sweet - a recommended build having reached C2 and played around with each skill. I’ll group it by skill type rather than circle to reflect the way this overview was formatted
Corpse gathering
Distiner - 1/1
Gather Corpse - 1/10 or 0/10
Summoning
Create Shoggoth - 5/5
Raise Dead - 5/5
They aren’t great, for reasons discussed, but they are class defining. Hopefully they will some day get better. If you simply cannot stand their idiosyncrasies, then drop them from your build and max flesh hoop. For all its problems, the shoggoth is better than the skeletons so I’d drop raise dead first.
Pillars
Dirty Pole - 0/10
Corpse Tower - 5/5
Nukes
Flesh cannon - 10/10
Flesh hoop - 3/10 or 4/10
There you have it. Hope that this has been informative, and I’ll do my best to answer any questions you may have.
p.s. Thaumaturge swell arms does not affect skellies or shoggoth, much to my dismay.
