Necro Rework Testing Week

nice

 

@Admiral_Munson

 

due to it weakening your teammates the zombie convertion would only be useful if you can easily undo it or if there is a respawn cooldown

 

*grabs popcorn*

 

This seems like a great new way to bring back necro, but I have a question. Lets say a Assassin gets revived, do they get their redstone back even if they used it right before dieing?

 

An Assassin would be able to regain redstone in a normal fashion (waiting for its timer or Medic restore) after being revived.

 

Whats the german word for remove again

 

Have been playing it for a little while now and have to say, I think it's quite impressive (obviously much better than the previous Necro). One thing I would you like to see added would be being able to see your teammates's health, like Medic can. This way the players know when to right click their totem to revive their teammates.

 

I played Necro for a couple of games, so these are just first impressions. However saying that, to me Necro feels pretty bad to play. I think the idea was to turn it into some kind of tanky support, but playing it makes you feel really ineffective.

Sword: If the idea was that Necro would be a tanky support caster type, then this damage is fine. I have no problem with low sword damage.

Armor: This is decently tanky, but not that tanky. I feel like the damage necro outputs does not match its armor, this should go up imo.

Steak: Feels fine, especially if the armor increases.

Cryptic Skull: Continuing on the tanky support idea, this item does not fit at all. It does a surprising amount of damage, and can affect groups which is great. However its next to useless in most scenarios because a competent player will immediately destroy it, and it can't be used around flagrooms as a general zoning tool. For offense, this tool is useless. You can't attack with it because of restrictions, and you cannot support a flag-carrier with it because the flag-carrier moves, this ability does not. The only viable use I found was camping around it. The absorption to me feels too small to really matter.

Revive: This ability is cool, it's very satisfying to successfully revive someone. Like @xKieran said, I would like to be able to see ally health bars to know when to pop it. I feel like this ability could be useful for a coordinated offense, however it doesn't really feel like much of a reward to revive someone because they are so severely weakened. In a lot of cases the person is just better off respawning, however I haven't been able to test this ability that much so I'm not really sure how effective it can be since it's pretty situational.

Overall, I'm happy that the class is getting looked at in general. However I feel that if the intention was to make a tanky support, then Necro needs some consistency in its abilities. I'm mainly looking at the cryptic skull for this; you cannot effectively use it. A good comparison is to the other support class, medic, and its webs. Those are great, skill based projectile cc's that have an impact wherever they land. You can consistently use them in a wide variety of situations to do a lot of things. Necro doesn't have any cc support abilities like that, and its not strong enough in other areas to make up for it. And in fact, because its main support ability (revive) isn't as strong as medic heal Necro should have better cc tools or buffing tools than medic, but it does not.

 

First impression:

Give me the ability to break the skull without receiving a buff, just so I can place it somewhere else. I get that you shouldn't be able to get the buff out of it, but I want to be able to move it if I accidentally misplace it in a terrible spot.

That's actually it. I think it's fine otherwise.

 

Glad to see this class is getting some love. My thoughts on it are all good except for one thing and thats the skull system. Instead change the features it gives to a mobile radial buff/debuff system. Enemies within (x-radius) are drained of their hp per tick, Allies are healed based on drain tick including zombies. An example of an acceptable damage/heal amount are 1 heart true damage per 20 tick, last 5 seconds. Enemies take damage and your allies including your zombies are healed for the amount of total damage dealt in a 1/2 ratio of damage to health. This debuff/buff cannot be stacked only the duration extended to prevent necro mobbing. Just an idea please comment your thoughts.

My final thoughts about this rework.
The totem will take a unique role in creating a fast-paced last-ditch effort in certain situations. 4 steaks seems a bit dangerous without a system of healing, I mentioned above a possible fix to this. During 1v1 scenarios this loses by a landslide but in clusters and cohesive teams this could work out, but what are the odds seeing that in non-competitive play. Please think of the casual players when reworking this class because its going to be them that are playing it, unless you change the meta then all the competitive players will have to use it. Again please comment on what your thoughts are I hope to see rework get hit right on the dot.

 

New Necro is really cool, and i'm a fan of it. Though it's verging on impossible to be even slightly independent as a Necro, for example, Medic is a support class too but can defend itself relatively well on account of their high steak count and natural regen, making them at least somewhat tanky. New Necro needs either more health or more damage to really be able to stand alone.

The cryptic skull is immensely cool, but i'd say split the buff kind and the debuff kind, or even remove the buff side of it completely. It would be nice if it took enemies longer to break the skull too. A lot of the time i place down a skull in an area i want to defend and some random heavy or soldier grabs it for the absorption. Or at least make them easier to get, maybe they regenerate every 45 seconds or so, but you only get one.

The totem is absolutely great, i love the idea. Although living as a zombie isn't terribly pleasant, perhaps some way to reverse it, like returning to your spawn or getting healed by a medic?

Even if these didn't get added to the rework i'd still be supremely happy that Necro is, at minimum, usable again. Yall did good.

 

Tested this rework on CTF today. Thoughts:

I really don't like this rework. It feels similar in nature to pre rework Necro in that: it doesn't do anything, it's weak, and isn't fun to play. I largely echo the thoughts of @obikenobi21 except I'd go further. This rework isn't just 'bad' because its abilities are too weak, but it's bad because it isn't well designed, period.

Reasons why the rework should be overhauled (and tested again):

1. the Necro skulls suck.

As obi and others have said, they are useless for basically anything. They remind me a bit of Engineer's turret - both do damage and are structures each class benefited/benefits from playing around except... Engineer turret had like 4x the range, did more damage, and could not be destroyed instantly. I talked to @Ninsanity a bit while testing it and one of the things that came up was how the skulls are only useful in closed in spaces with lots of people. On most maps, not all but most, the 'enclosed space' with a lot of players is the flagroom or like right outside the flagroom. Where that's the case, necro skulls *are* useless because you can only place them on open terrain where nobody passes through, and where they won't do anything. The skulls would be more useful on maps like blackout, but they can be instantly destroyed as it is.

Suppose the skulls were buffed, as basically everyone has suggested. Say you fixed everything that makes them objectively terrible: the rng wither, the range limitation (3x3, which I think is the range, is bad), Necro not being able to break/replace his skull, enemies being able to break them instantly, wither skulls being dependent on kill-based snowballing etc. Then you'd have this very annoying wither effect that could be placed at various chokepoints around the flagroom (on some maps, not all) which would be difficult to deal with because suddenly its extremely beneficial to camp around a permanent aoe wither. It wouldn't necessarily be powerful, it would just be annoying and toxic gameplay. Imo, the skulls are a bad idea and should be replaced with something more powerful, mobile, and interesting.

CTF has gradually been moving away from the idea of structures as a permanent or semi-permanent thing yet what do we have as the main ability in the Necro rework? Structures. I think this is inhibiting the potential of the class and should be removed entirely.

2. No damage.

Wither skulls can do damage but they almost never do for reasons outlined above. Necro's sword is weak and its armor/resistances aren't actually that high. Most classes can beat it in a 1v1. This makes the kill based snowballing mechanic for skulls problematic because you have created a class that does not do damage which needs to get kills to do more damage.

As far as being a support class, this has been mentioned a lot, it doesn't work because the only way Necro 'supports' people is with the absorption effect. This is cool but since Necro's skulls

1) do not regenerate independently,
2) can be instantly destroyed by enemies (in particular),
3) cant be destroyed and replaced by the necro (this goes with 1)

it does not support well.

I think it works very nicely as a kind of quirky powerup or whatever (I don't play Mario so someone will get this analogy better than me) which you can use if you're low health/taking damage etc. but Necro cannot activate this often enough or consistently enough. Absorption is just bonus health, not a heal. Medic, Chemist, Engineer, Elf, and Mage all support better than Necro does. I don't consider the revive a support ability because Necro is just temporarily re-animating a dude so they can do damage for him. It isn't a heal, a shield, or a buff.

3. No consistency in design.

If I had to pick a role that this Necro fills, say recovery, defense, offense, capture/stealing, midfielding, I don't think I could. That's because it doesn't fill any roles. Necro has tankiness but not that much tankiness (lower armor than Soldier) so it can't last particularly long in a fight. Necro has a little damage but nowhere near enough to reliably get kills or 1v1 most classes (as mentioned above). Necro has structures but they're instantly destroyed by everyone. Necro is required to killfarm structures to do damage but does not have enough damage to get kills to do damage and even when you do get kills you cannot do damage because people instantly destroy your structures. The revive is the zombie mechanic which is supposed to do damage but it doesn't really do damage because the zombies have like 3 debuffs while revived (It's actually more beneficial for your teammate to do /heavy and respawn with max health and damage instead of playing as a zombie). I think I listed 5 contradictions there.

Necro should be made either as strictly a support class or not. And it should have either rotating abilities that can be used 'in tandem' to do things over time (Elf, Mage) or it should have one or two powerful abilities/tools that it can use for instant effect (Pyro, Dwarf, Archer).

I loved playing Necro way back in the day (early 2012), it was very fun and I've never liked the rework that was put out in March 2012 (the current version minus the mob beacon) and still don't. After 7 years of Necro either being OP or unplayable I think we deserve a better rework than this.

 

One thing about the Skulls that annoys me is that you can't remove them manually (without respawning).

Think maybe adding the -Respawn Structures- item Engineer has and give Necro one, but give it a strong delay before using it again (1 minute)

 

Honestly playing the new necro I was a bit disappointed with how the skull can be instantly broken. But, I do have some other abilities that could replace/rework the class. Firstly, the implementation of a staff that can shoot energy almost like a mage, and an ability which can summon the dead (similar to the mob totem) except the mobs follow you closely like wolfs and aid you in combat.

Secondly, a life steal ability which is able to steal enemy players life source (hearts) as another way to heal during combat using the necromancer staff

Thirdly As you kill more players as necro, your armor becomes stronger from leather--> Iron? not sure really about this one, almost as if you are using the bones of your fallen enemies to strengthen yourself

Lastly, some sort of ritual that needs to charge up almost like a satanic ritual in which the necro has a short period of bezerk of strength, counterbalanced in which after the necro receives weakness and slowness which cannot be removed for a short period of time (15 seconds?) almost like a trump card.

I got some other Ideas if ya'll r interested in more

 

Honestly the revival is so weak. It should be alot stronger. I really don't see the point of running a necro offense, or in general whenever you still have heavy or chemist. The "Zombie" should be completely reworked so an individual can actually be revived (Once per life), or actually make the zombie useful. It's always better to make a class on the stronger side, than on the weaker side. Necro is on the weaker side.

 

Complaints about wither skull:
1) why can’t I pick it up after I put it down to move it? If it’s stuck there and gets one hit, why wouldn’t I just use engineer?

2) why tf does the skull get broken in one hit

3) how come when someone dies of withering, I don’t get a wither skull?

4) why does the damage of the wither skull vary from wither I to wither 5(?) , especially when anything below wither 4 is useless

Complaints about revive:
1) why does my revive despawn after a certain time if the person I tag doesn’t die, and how come if I didn’t use it, it still breaks anyway?

2) if there’s no penalty for respawning in the first place, why would people want to be revived when simply dying and respawning is much more useful in the long run

3) why is my revive tool gone forever after its used?

There are too many limitations set in place on these abilities that aren’t powerful to begin with. It feels like a class that someone tried really hard not to make strong, but come on. Why can an assassin get an instant kill ability that regenerates after use but a useless frucking Necro skull is gone unless you kill someone (good luck with that)

 

Can we like, buff zombies with the sword? That would be greatly appreciated.

 

omg what a model