Idea Necro OP?

People have been complaining about Necro being too tanky and dealing too much damage. I believe this is true, and that Necro is currently the class with the highest potential damage output per life under Archer. Let's get started by assessing Necro's components to see just how powerful it actually is:

Raw Health
- Iron Helmet, Gold Chestplate, Iron Leggings, Iron Boots
- 4 Steaks
I want to say this is roughly equivalent to Heavy's health pool, but I could be wrong. The "lower" armor total does incline Necros to use their skulls for healing quite often, which can heavily sway one's lifespan depending on their first few fights.

Secondary Healing
- Wither Skull (up to 3 with a killstreak of 2 or more)
This is where things get sketchy. Other classes such as Assassin also utilize a kill-to-heal ability, but there's one problem: they have significantly lower raw health pools. This would essentially be like giving heavy Wither Skulls; it makes an already tanky class exponentially harder to kill. I like the ability, but the raw health pool needs to be cut down severely if we don't want people doing /necro and getting 20 killstreaks.

Primary Damage
- Golden Sword [Sharpness II]
Once again, nearly equal to Heavy's damage (6.5 vs 7.0). This becomes important in the next section.

Secondary Damage
- Wither Skull (Wither II effect for 5 seconds upon contact)
Each skull will do at least 10hp (5 hearts) of damage if an enemy is within its radius, and more often then not they will get directly hit and receive fall damage. This means that after just 2 kills, a Necro is able to deal a bare minimum of 30hp of damage in the span of 15 seconds if timed correctly. Keep in mind that Necro without skulls is already nearly equal to Heavy in both primary damage and raw health.

So at the end of it all, we essentially have a Heavy with the ability to simultaneously mow down enemies and healing for doing so. I guess a better comparison would be Heavy with assassinate, but it is quite different. I would go on and make my own rant about what should be done, but I haven't touched Necro since the first month it came out; I'll leave it to more frequent users to reply with their thoughts below.

 

Agreed. Every class will have its situational/map-bound advantages and disadvantages. However, as a primarily casual player, I have noticed over many months that experienced Necros will simply long on and get kill streaks in the 20s from scattered random enemies. Chemist has this same potential, but seldom will you see a Chemist successfully demolishing every class it encounters. Chemist's native health becomes problematic when fighting high DPS classes such as Ninja, Pyro (+ fire), buffed bulk, and Archers (bows). In many cases, even regeneration 3 is not enough to hold out on, making fights against said classes costly for hard healing. Necro on the other hand, when used tactically, can farm any number of Ninjas, Assassins, or other squishy classes by the dozens due to the power of the skull. All the Necro has to do is reach their 2 kill streak, then chain skulls to both damage the player and heal from the few hits it can get in before giving out. Necro skulls deal 5 hearts of Pure Damage because of the nature of the Wither effect, meaning a 2ks Necro can tear down bulk defense quite efficiently, albeit costly in health due to the constant damage that skulls can't make up for.

Of course this my view from a casual standpoint, and we should try to be making classes as balanced as possible for the competitive arena, but I'm simply trying to make casual less of a nightmare for new/less skilled players. I believe that it is rapidly becoming a key hybrid slot for PPMs, and functions well in them; just trying to figure something out in terms of a compromise for the hundreds of players on the other side that rarely ever congregate into groups larger than four.

It does need more observation in PPMs to be placed for competitive CTF, and who knows, maybe over time players will learn new strategies for taking out Necros without sacrificing their KDRs. I guess time will tell.