Topic: Balancing the SkellieMancer (game change suggestion)

[webwalker]

Please consider making the skill "Raise Skeletal Mage" to be a synergy to the skill "Raise Skeleton Warrior", with the effect of adding elemental damage to the (otherwise pure physical) attack of the Skeleton Warrior.

If each point in Raise Skeletal Mage adds 2% elemental damage (fire, lightning, and cold, as in Vengeance) to the Skeleton Warrior, then
1: Skeleton Warriors become more capable of dealing with the many Physical/Magical Immune monsters
2: The Skelliemancer (necro summoner) is not obliged to build a boner with skeleton assistance and call himself a summoner.

Under this plan, maxing Raise Skeletal Mage would add, to each 100 points of physical damage from a Skeleton Warrior, 60 points of cold, 60 points of lightning, and 60 points of fire damage.  This is a smaller synergy boost than bone spear/spirit skills have from bone spirit/spear and teeth.

[webwalker]

No response on this at all?  Joe?

[ChaosEmpire]

i dont saee a way to do this

[webwalker]

Please help me out a bit here; what CAN be done to help the skelliemancer?

Giving Skeletons "Spectral Hit" would address the trouble, can this be done?  If so, does "Spectral Hit" come by degrees? If so, tie that to points in Skeletal Mage and we're done.

Alternately, a Skelliemancer-oriented rune word (imagine a parallel to "bone" giving +2 Necro +4 Summoning and +4 each to Enchant, Warmth, Skeleton Mastery, Raise Skeleton, and Teleport)
 
 Replacing "wand mastery" with Enchant or Teleport would be very very useful.
 
What other options could be brought in to address the need?
 

[ChaosEmpire]

instead of enchant, you can also use the new venom clones, to add elementar damage to the skellies..surely you need to select each..like with enchant

[webwalker]

Can you cast these on Skellies?  Venom can only be cast on the caster, so (in my ignorance, having never had the venom clone spells to work with) I assume venom clone can't be cast on skellies.  What's the status and change ability?

In addition, it would be nice if the venom clone spells affected bone spear/spirit!

[ChaosEmpire]

oh yes, you are right, venom is char only...

and does not affect bone skills, or sorc ice,fire...skills
Post Merge: July 31, 2011, 05:16:21 pmit would affect  the fighting necro, who uses dagger or the long ranged weapon with its posion skill + another elemental damage via one of the new cloned venom skills

[webwalker]

Since this is about the Skellimancer (summoner) with 3 golems, 25 skeletons, 15 skel mages, and 20 revives; NOT about a meleemancer or boner/poisoner who has skeletons as a backup, we still have a few things to think through.
<quote from 2008>
The way to know the skelliemancer is broken, is to play one in Hell.
I understand, that different builds and characters have different attraction to different players, and that the skellimancer is a rare build nowadays.

In D2LOD up til today, and in CE up until 7.62 or so, skellimancer was common.  It was a stable, rugged, powerful build.  Now, I say, as a long-time skellimancer player, it is a greatly weakened, or even crippled, build.

So I take a big drink of "sit back and think", and have a few thoughts to share.

1: Skelletal mages have always been a pain.  They block doorways and keep the warriors from engaging.  They do not have the same attack power as the warriors they block from attacking. The player must stop and wait for the fight to end, or unsummon them, or try to create minions behind "enemy lines" to generate corpses so that warriors can be summoned where they are needed.  In long narrow hallways, like the Dungeon, or Cat 4, or Coldworm's Burrow, this goes from Pain to Major Pain.
Fortunately there are several things that can be done.
1.1: Make the skeletal mages "base creature" the same as ghosts, they will float through the warriors and warriors will walk through them.  Change their name to Ghost Mages.  Use the D2LOD Ghost image for them.  If possible color them to match their attack skill.
1.2: Remove skeletal mages entirely, replace the "Summon Skeletal Mages" skill with "Spectral Hit" that gives elemental damage to skeletal warriors, and revives after the pattern of Vengeance.  Now, with this change, skeletal mages aren't needed, and don't get in the way.

2: Long, narrow hallways have always been a pain.  This has been so for as long as there have been skelliemancers, and long narrow hallways.  Skelletal warriors would be stupid, if they had enough intelligence to be stupid.  They don't follow well, not even as well as the Rouge/Merc/IronWolf/Barb minion, and they're a tad dumb.  Skellies stick to the wall and just evaporate.  Teleport can reduce this evaporation but teleport doesn't work in several important places and losses still occur.  Popping town portals, stepping to town and back, can reduce Skellie evaporation, but not cure it. There are several ways to cure this:
2.1: edit the maps to get rid of long hallways, which melee characters love as much as skelliemancers hate.
2.2: remove the requirement to cast Raise Skeleton on a corpse, allow them to be raised from "nothing" like golems can.  Now, with this change, all the skelliemancer needs is mana and a bit of floor space, and how much army he lost doesn't matter.
</quote>
There's a long list of what we can't do.
What's the list of what we CAN do to fix the skellimancer (meaning skills and abilities acquired before level 70)?
enchant
teleport
summoner-oriented runewords and sets

If we have "fire" enchant, can we have "lightning" enchant or "ice" enchant or "spectral" enchant?  I would prefer this to venom clone spells, as it is castable on summons and fellow party members.

[webwalker]

So ... what shall be the conclusion?  Or, what shall be the next step in the discussion?

[ChaosEmpire]

test server 2+4

wasted the day, and there is no solution that really works
at leastm, the doors should now be passable

[webwalker]

Speaking of doors, I'd REALLY appreciate it if my minions NEVER opened doors!

But, what did you mean about doors being passable?

[Monolith]

Would it be possible then to alter the skeleton mastery skill to include the additional elemental damage?  Or if you were to replace wand mastery you could make another custom skill that would be another summon mastery type skill to add the damage or whatever other effect you wanted?