Idea Necro Rework

Firstly, apologies for the unoriginal name of this thread, but given the subject matter it was appropriate (and I was too lazy to come up with something more interesting).

@DeadRhos recently posted a thread on his vision for CTF, involving numerous reworks which you can read here. Whilst I did disagree with the vast majority of his fixes, it did get me thinking that perhaps I should create a thread offering an alternative rather than just constantly complaining about the terrible ideas being put forward. This is ultimately what led to the creation of this thread. I decided to focus on Necro for two reasons:
1). It's totally useless
2). It's allowed in team matches and could therefore be made both fun in casual and competitive. It's a big opportunity that's currently being wasted.

Any rework of a class should attempt to address the issues the community currently has with it. This is simple with most classes (headshot mechanics and bowspam with archer, pyros not doing enough damage, engineers having an automatically aiming turret with infinite ammo, you get the idea) but things are much more severe with necro. It's more than a couple of simple mechanics; the real problems with Necro are:

- It's not useful > The class currently performs like a weaker version of heavy, dealing less damage and being less bulky. The mobs are a nice body shield but they don't really do anything else. This leads to...
- It has no real role or direction > The class essentially fills in the role of a less useful heavy, being mediocre anywhere on the map. Other classes perform better in these situations, leaving it underused both in casual and competitive. This is not helped by...
- It does not encourage player activity > The current playstyle is intended to be that the player allows the mobs to do the work (not that they do much at the moment), which can be really boring, and distances the player from actively participating other than the odd healing or buffing of a mob. However, despite all of this...
- Necro is a poisoned chalice > it's very difficult to make gameplay with this class in it's current form work whilst addressing all of these issues.

This creates a dilemma - how do we solve all of these problems at once? The committee has tried to do this whilst keeping Necro close to it's roots and unfortunately that turned out to be a complete disaster, remaining underpowered and underused.The way I've decided to solve this problem is by taking Necro in a completely different direction, as I believe keeping the class in the same style it is now is not going to address the major problems it currently faces. My rework builds on an idea suggested a while ago (sorry, I've lost that thread) which centres on losing necro mobs but giving the player the ability to channel their power. This brings the player into active play whilst also retaining the mob theme. As Necro has now been defunct for such a long time, there are virtually no mains of the class left. I've decided to change the role Necro plays in game because of this, plus the fact the original role the class played is now pretty irrelevant. I've changed the direction of the class to focus on offensive support and capturing. This will hopefully encourage more player to play offensively (we seem to have a shortage of those at the moment). So, without further ado:

Necro Rework
Armour

- Mob head [Zombie/Skeleton/Spider] See abilities
- Golden Chestplate
- Diamond Leggings
- Diamond Boots


This allows necro to have no helmet whilst retaining the same number of armour points as before. This retains the classes signature bulk

Items

- Gravedigger [Diamond Shovel with Sharpness 2. 6.5 Attack damage. 1/4 damage above the current diamond pickage]
- 5 Steak
- Rotten Flesh, Bone and String [See abilities]
- Compass
- Class Selector

This allows necro to deal roughly the same damage as it was before.

Abilities
- Mob Channel > Rotten flesh, Bone and String allow the necro to channel the power of zombies, skeletons and spiders respectively (your head is switched to the respective mob). This ability is also subject to a cooldown of 10 seconds. This toggle is automatically set to zombie. Each form is unique:

~ Zombie Form
Resistance 1 > so -20% damage
Strength 1 > increased damage output
Numb > zombies are completely immune to headshots (0 damage) and can only take a maximum of 7 damage from other sources.
Hunger bar set to 5 points, making the zombie unable to run
Brain feast > Zombie gains 1 hunger point for every hit it lands on an enemy player. This can be used to sprint, draining 1 hunger point for every second sprinting.


~ Skeleton Form
Speed 2 > +40%
Weakness 3 > skeletons can't hit very hard! -1.5 attack damage
Skeletal sense > as archers, skeletons have a very strong sense of vision, allowing them to see things invisible to others. As such, skeletons can see invisible ninjas (works the same way as viewing invisible ninjas on your own team) and are immune to blind and nausea effects
Skeletal resilience >Fire resistance (take no fire damage)


~Spider Form
Web immunity > Spiders are unaffected by medic webs and can destroy them instantaneously
Wall-Climb > Walking into a wall will allow you to climb it, stop climbing and remain close to the wall to drop. Climbing and dropping are relatively slow processes. Fall damage is still taken, but negated when dropping (should be twice as fast as video seen here
Venom > Attacking with the shovel applies poison 1 and slowness 1 onto your enemy of 3 seconds
Resistance -1 > Spiders are more fragile than other mobs so +20% damage
Weakness 1
Speed 1


- Undead inversion > As they are channelling the power of undead mobs, harming and poison potions heal a necro, whilst healing and regeneration potions harm them

These abilities allow necros to avoiding damage from archers in the midfield, can steal the flag against a pyro and are mobile due to the skeleton form. These abilities are limited by their combat lock and cooldown, meaning team support is necessary for you to be able to switch effectively. Moreover this new Necro provides an indirect buff to assassin as this class does not have a sword, and so is unable to block assassinations.This can make the class an effective stealing class/carrier. The benefit this class provides to the offense is its versatility, in that it can provide both a mobile support and a heavily armoured tank that's immune to headshots. It can also steal in situations where the pyro would otherwise make it impossible. This should address all the problems with the class currently, giving it a solid role, making it more useful and more fun to play.

This class should hopefully be effectively balanced in the current meta, but this idea is in it's alpha stages and will need tweaks and fixes. I've shown this idea to a couple of people already who said
- 3 seperate items to switch mob powers, and add cooldown - Thanks @hamzacx Resolved
- Skeleton form isn't strong enough yet > Would be underused - Thanks @Feeliq_ Resolved
- Blaze form is too powerful > needs a balance? - Thanks @Foodcourt Resolved
- Does Spider form need poison on weapon?

I'm very much open to suggestions, so do let me know what you like and dislike about this rework!
also credits to @Roll0fSushi for giving me a few ideas to help create this!

 

@Keelb00 Yes, a few people have said that the blaze rework might be a bit too strong for its own good. I didn't want any major debuffs given it only applies fire aspect to the weapon and gets fire resistance - it's not exactly the same as a substantial mobility buff or full immunity to headshots and damage reduction against an already bulky class. The other thing I was finding with blaze form was that there really isn't anything thematic other than water that would really weaken a blaze. I could potentially go the other way and say "arrows now do more damage to blazes" as a counterbalance for the zombie immunity. What do you think of that kind of idea?

@puhdgy I would have liked to keep necro mobs in the mix somehow as well. The problem with me doing that is it makes things a lot more complicated, one of the aspects multiple people like about the rework. It brings up a number of new questions as soon as you start to play with it:
How many do you get?
How much damage do they do?
Can they be different mobs, if so, how?
There'd be many more than this as well. If I were to implement them, I expect I'd take them down the body shield route - essentially the mobs are stationary and damage the player if they get too close, so that they have to kill them to advance. That would give the necro a chance to escape or get further ahead to change form, or to gain distance with the flag. I'm not hugely fond of that idea either, and I thought it would be best to just remove it entirely, even though it is completely changing the way necro is played (which is also an issue some people have raised).

@DeadRhos Each class needs a niche concept - something that makes it totally different to the alternatives. For Necro, it's not the fact each form is perfect in it's own right (as you say, other classes can do what this class does better in certain areas of the map). However, what this class does do is combine it all into 1 class - it's versatile. I further made sure that the drawbacks to each form I gave were countered by using teamwork. Chemist buffs essentially counteract the slowness and weakness, allowing a player to run as normal with zombie form or deal decent damage with skeleton form. Blaze form doesn't have that luxury, again deliberately because I didn't really feel the drawback was as important either.

The real benefit with blaze form over medic is its bulk. Provided you can eliminate the assassin (and again, there's been some debate about whether I should swap the shovel for a sword. I wanted assassin to be the counter to this class), this thing is more like to survive getting in and out the flagroom due to its bulk.

The benefit with zombie is that the slowness in this case can be managed with some good old-fashioned teamwork. Slowness 1 can be totally counteracted with speed 1. As soon as you do this, zombie becomes an attractive capping form, essentially having 19 armour bars with resistance, extra steak and immunity to headshots. It's also not like dwarf - you can run in this form.

Skeleton is where I'm having most of the issues show up specifically because of that weakness. Weakness 1 reduces damage output by 4 points which I recognise is way too much of a damage reduction. That's in part what haste was for - to make the thing attack much faster. You also have the benefit of being able to attack faster with the speed buff. With that said, I still feel it might not be enough. Strength boosts damage output by 3 points per level, and what I might do is change the buffs to Weakness II and Strength II (essentially -8 damage and +6 damage to leave an overall -2 damage from normal) This would mean Necro's skeleton form would be the weakest damaging class around but could still kill a ninja in 4 hits (5.5 damage a hit). Do let me know what else could be done to fix that.

Versatility-wise, my original idea was to make it immediately switchable out of combat but some argued that this might be a little too much. That's why the cooldown was introduced. I really just threw in the cooldown as an afterthought and it could definitely be reduced. How about a 10 second cooldown?

I had mob heads already involved so I didn't want additional ones. If people prefer those I could change it.

EDIT: I've run on a couple 1.9 values and so I'm changing things up to work for 1.8 instead

 

Do you have any suggestions as to how it could be conveyed to an enemy player the form of necro whilst the flag is being carried?

 

@StormNox Whilst keeping mobs would be in line with the old necro, to me it seems more of an afterthought than anything else. It would make this rework a lot more complex than it really needs to be. Spawning rules limiting their placement near the flagroom limits their use for your first benefit, and their bad AI limits how annoying they can really be.

A different option would be to remove the combat lock but increasing the overall cooldown, preventing spam of the ability but allowing it to change mid-fight (credit to @Feeliq_ for the idea)

 

Ok, let's break this down a little:
Firstly, not all class abilities are designed with the pvp of the individual player using the class itself. We see this with medic in that it can heal other players or soldiers mobility - they don't necessarily help you to have a better chance in straight up pvp. Others, like archer and mage, sacrifice their short-range for benefits elsewhere. Heavy is based on straight up, simple pvp, without any additional abilities. The abilities in this rework are designed to help it offensively so I'm not surprised that you would rather play heavy defensively - the class abilities are not designed for that purpose. It's like saying you don't want to play dwarf offence because the class mobility essentially makes it a weaker soldier - whilst exaggerated it's the same premise. However, in relation to whether or not it's a weaker heavy, it was always going to be designed so it has less straight-up power. This class has abilities whereas heavy does not. There needs to be a balancing factor somewhere, in this case at the cost of bulk and a little bit of power.

A couple have said they'd like spawning mobs, mainly to tie in to the old necro class. Let me explain why I specifically left them out of this rework:
1). Makes the class unnecessarily complicated -> there's already 3 forms to deal with, adding mobs with AI, mechanics, damage and other such benefits would make things a lot more complicated than they really needed to be.
2). I didn't make allowances for mobs in this rework -> This rework already has checks and balances for the abilities I gave it. Most likely if I were to give it mobs (which would be both a source of damage and defence) I would have to drop either the armour or damage to even consider adding it. This would probably end up in a Diamond shovel being replaced with iron and armour reverting to original necro values (only - the helmet), which would significantly weaken it's ability to cap in the current meta (lots of ninjas about).
3). The current mob AI makes it a worthless exercise to begin with - they focus on 1 player, meaning they only do damage to that 1 player and allow others past without any fight. They are slow and unwieldy and die in 3-4 hits. The reason they were any use currently was because of the buff system, which increased their speed and damage. You could say "well let's just have that system too" but A). that would require additional balancing of the class (ie even lower armour/weapon) and B) would take it closer to a version of the class which people currently don't want to play. We've seen how the current necro works right now, and nobody enjoys playing the thing - I don't see why taking it back closer to the old form would be anything but a put-off for players
4) Makes necro more stationary - mobs can't run as fast as you, so limits them to an area. CTF is a mobile game. Additional abilities that make it stationary, as we've seen with the stationary elements of dwarf and engineer make the classes stupidly powerful in one area, but completely useless everywhere else. The idea is you're able to play a class everywhere despite it not being the most ideal. In this case, that is possible. With mobs, you distance necro from active play a little, making it weaker when it does want to fight.
5). Spawning necro mobs is limited in the flagroom - you're suggesting using mobs to save you in a fight in the flagroom but you can't even spawn them in there. Even if you could spawn them there, it's an assassin, it's faster than you. The mobs so it would little to no difference unless you spawned the zombie right on top of yourself, which would at best be a risk and worst downright ineffective.

There is no redeemable quality to having mobs with this class - they don't body block well, they can't be used in the areas in which they're needed, they'd weaken the individual worsening it for the main purpose it was reworked for and don't really contribute in a meaningful way. They were removed to give necro both a new direction and put the individual in combat. I understand that you're one of the very few that has actually played necro for any length of time in casual and so could be upset with such a drastic change. However, I believe a drastic change is exactly what we need for this class, as it has been useless for years now (since before coming to brawl, it's that bad).

 

Energy steal makes little thematic sense to necro. It's not a vampire.

Clarifications:
Instant heal pot deals the effects of instant damage
Instant damage pot deals the effects of instant heal
Regeneration deals the effect of poison
Poison deals the effect of regeneration
Does not apply to medic healing nor engineer cake, does apply to mage healing