Quick background on me, big fan of the Elder Scrolls, played both Oblivion & Skyrim extensively. I’ve played lots of MMORPGs and other game genres over the years but now only play a select few games including ESO, starting Nov. 17’.
In Oblivion & Skyrim I almost exclusively played as an Argonian StamBlade with a Bow, or at least that’s what it would be called in ESO today. I decided for ESO I’d switch it up a little and play an Argonian Magblade; early on I race changed to Dunmer, but recently I’ve considered going back to Argonian.
I’ve now played all the classes in a limited capacity, level 10-20 range. I’m almost to max CP currently at 740ish. Up until 500 CP I ran PUG vet dungeons, at which point I decided to start testing out PvP mostly Battlegrounds for a while and recently Cyrodiil. I currently only play on Xbox One X, NA server.
I waited anxiously for the arrival of the Necromancer.
Review – Brenton Magcro
Overall, I really like the class I think it fills a space that other classes can’t accomplish effectively, which I hoped it would, and in both PvE and PvP settings. I tested out all the abilities, save stamina morphs, in normal and vet dungeons including the more challenging ones (as a healer and sometimes pseudo tank), Battlegrounds, and Cyrodiil. I chose to go with the Brenton because I remember the race worked well with abilities comparable to what I would expect from Necro abilities.
After reading patch notes for future updates I see most of my concerns for the class are already being addressed, which is awesome.
A few comments on interactions with the environment, specifically corpses. When the Necromancer first launched the corpses hung around for an extended period of time, which I thought was reasonable. But since then the lapse timer for corpses was significantly reduced, to the point where corpses can disappear in the time it takes to cast an ability or bar swap, which I don’t think is appropriate. I’m hoping this is simply a case of testing out a new mechanic in the live game and that this effect is currently being tweaked.
Sorcerer pets don’t create corpses on death. I’m thinking this might just be an oversight, but I don’t see any reason why they shouldn’t, especially considering you must kill them sometimes.
Dueling in Wayrest: so there’s an NPC named Leonhard Pujol that tools around in the area where players typically duel. Last time I dueled someone I amassed a nice 11K bounty, this guy has cost me like 20K so it might be nice to duel players without having to worry about the criminal act aspect.
If I don’t mention a passive specifically below its because I think its fine the way it is, so its not over powered or under powered, I also wanted to focus more on the abilities.
Grave Lord
Abilities
Glacial Colossus – Great ability to utilize in support or damage roles. For PvE support or damage you’re enabling your entire team to do 30% more damage for 6 seconds. It’s impactful and unforgiving in PvP too, even beefy builds really can’t sustain through the entire ability long after it finishes. I see the damage is being reduced slightly, which I don’t disagree with, the ability is very strong.
Ricochet Skull – Cool animation, I like the bonus damage and cleave effect, but the ability does feel a little lack luster. It’s noticeably dodgeable in PvP, I don’t know if that’s because of the ability duration or what but I don’t think in its current state that it’s on par with alternatives like Force pulse or Crushing Shock. I didn’t notice the cleave proc for this ability go off very often so I’m wondering if you must hit your target to trigger the cleave ability or if it triggers on the third cast even if the primary target results in dodged damage.
Stalking Blastbones – Really fun ability, has some kinks in it but it looks like they’re being addressed next patch, which is good. When the ability does what you want it to do it’s great. I’ve been experiencing technical issues where as described in the patch notes Blastbones gets confused. I’ve noticed issues where the target I summon the ability on leaves the ability range and someone new enters the ability range but Blastbones just runs back and forth between me and the orbital range for pets and then falls apart. I think some of the issues are coming from the 2.5 second summoning time.
Honestly, I’d really like this ability as a summon pet with a cap of 2 in orbit plus potentially a third in transit; you summon it just like the other two pets, but it stays in your orbit until you target someone and then it charges at them. I wouldn’t put a time counter on it but I’d keep it so it can be targeted and killed like it currently can be at which point it would explode. I’d also probably give them collision detection so if a target runs into them, or you run into a target, while they’re in your orbit they’ll go off. You could add a drawback like they’ll do damage to you and other Blastbones in orbit, if they’re killed but only while in your orbit and not released.
Unnerving Boneyard – Great ability, Major Breach and Fracture on an AoE ability is a great way to enable support roles in PvE, plus it does damage to help the team and the synergy heals you too. Excellent work on this one for PvE. For PvP I think the only thing that could potentially make this playable would be if the Major breach and fracture are sticky effects that persist after leaving the area, maybe the damage too but I don’t know if they would be too much.
Skeletal Arcanist – Great pet, really like that it can’t be targeted, body blocking can be kind of frustrating at times and very overpowered. This ability did really need a damage boost, which I see has been done for the next release. I wouldn’t mind if this ability instead had a limited number of attacks before it died instead of having a 16 second timer, still with the 2 second cooldown. Right now, the pets pretty much need 100% up time to be impactful, which is pretty taxing currently on magicka resources, so with the increase in the cost to this ability and Spirit guardian I’m not sure how sustainable keeping both up will be long term. The increase in damage for this ability is significant and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was reduced slightly in the future. Going the limited number of “charges”/attacks route I think will help alleviate some of the resource management in a productive way, while maintaining the average number of corpses available for ability use. If you’re not in combat or damaged, you don’t need to keep continually summoning the pets to be prepared for combat. This also prevents excessive ultimate generation/stalling, especially if you limit the number of charges the pets need to consume before a corpse is created.
Mystic Siphon – Interested to see how this ability works out with no resource cost, really like the idea and excited to test it out. I found it difficult to slot this ability before this change, the damage just wasn’t justifying the cost, even with the 3% static damage boost to your other abilities and resources back. I like how you’ve done the AoEs for this ability; the corpse is stationary, but the player can move around and bring the damage to the target if it’s within range. I’ve always found stationary AoE abilities to be less effective in PvP, you just walk away from them but here you can make the ability more impactful which is great. Still not sure I’ll slot this though.
Passives
Deathknell – I think this passive can be buffed. Everyone has tons of resistance and crit resistance, magicka users also don’t have an execution ability available in any of the universal skills.
Bone Tyrant
Abilities
Pummeling Goliath – Besides the obvious issue with this ability, which has been addressed, I was expecting the damage type for this ability to change to magicka damage instead of staying as physical damage if you have higher spell damage and magicka pool. I’m assuming this means the resource cost type to bash won’t change to magicka either. I pictured this ability being interchangeable between stamina or magicka builds, the Ice staff would need to be reworked to cost magicka to bash instead of stamina.
Ravenous Goliath – Another great ability, honestly as a healer or support roles in PvP you have the propensity to be targeted specifically, which I’m sure can be discouraging at times especially for players new to PvP and Cyrodiil, this ability helps off set being targeted by a coordinated group of 20-30 people, who are specifically picking you out the group. I think this helps off set a collective of 20-30 players utilizing their group quantity not quality. You’re near invincible with this ultimate just on its own, paired with Hungry Scythe you’re going to struggle to die for the 20 seconds this ability is active, you really must be taking a lot of damage, while being continually stun locked to die while this ultimate is up. You also deal a little bit of damage while this ability is up too which is what I think makes this ability playable. You can get very defensive or a little offensive using this ability.
Hungry Scythe – Great ability, the healing on this ability seems a little overpowered while in Ravenous Goliath mode but it’s not super broken. I think I’d rather be able to utilize this ability more offensively/actively, currently I think it’s positioned more as a defensive ability because I don’t think it deals enough damage to really utilize offensively. The HoT doesn’t seem necessary to me, it just seems like overkill. I wish the HoT was for your group or the damage was increased.
Summoner’s Armor – Kind of a staple ability, major ward and resolve. The cost decrease looks like it’ll be very useful next patch.
Beckoning Armor – I thought I wasn’t going to like using this ability being a ranged class but apparently this stuns anyone that’s pulled by it or something to that effect? Pretty impactful as an interrupt/stun effect plus this class has several abilities that are utilized by opponents being in your proximity; siphons, scythe, totem, graveyard, goliath, and embrace.
Deaden Pain – Very strong ability, nice balance, 2 seconds is long enough to have an impact in combat but short enough to where you can’t over utilize collecting several corpses redundantly. I think for the most part when this ability was active it would be on average for about 3 or 4 seconds, and then you must wait for your pets to die again or get lucky and find a corpse.
Necrotic Potency – When I was using this ability I thought I experienced, several times, a cap on how much ultimate you would actually generate from multiple corpses so I decided to not continue using the ability, plus the other morph helped round out my built a little better than having more ultimate generation so I went that route.
Agony Totem – Excited to see the change for this ability by adding more fear pulses. Before I kind of though the ability was a little over costed but with this change, I think it’s a little more effective now. Before you’d have to cast it into a crowd of people and maybe you’d fear one or two, or your enemy sees you summon the totem and avoids the initial fear and then comes back into the AoE.
Ghostly Embrace – I was surprised to find this ability effective in PvP, it reads innocuously, but reducing movement speed, immobilizing, and apply minor maim is powerful. I think the issue with this ability for PvP is the long animation time, high cost, and low duration of the negative effects.
Empowering Embrace – I thought I was going to be using this ability to buff my pets but good luck trying to do that. It’s very difficult to actually hit your pets while they’re in orbit around you, on your flanks, so you have to whiplash your pets around trying to hit them with the ability, once you do manage to do this you realize your pet is half dead already and the buff will only last for a portion of that time. I never tried to do this is combat because I honestly struggled to get it to work just statically, and it only lasts for 5 seconds. I think this ability needs a little work. I just don’t see any place for this ability now, and to be honest I can’t think of a way to easily change it to make it more impactful. Maybe as a buff on summon for your pets? So, if you summon the pet while the ability is slotted its buffed for its life span, that’s my only thought.
Passives
Death Gleaning – This passive seemed a little underwhelming to me. iI I was tight on skill points, I might not bother with this one, it just seems a little too unimpactful. In PvE it seems like it should be handy but in PvP I’m not sure how much this passive is really doing for you.
Living Death
Abilities
Renewing Animation – I really like the revive 3 other players, useful in dungeons and PUGs, it means you don’t have to start a boss fight over again, a lot of the time, which can sometimes be painful. The ability is very expensive though, so you wind up either holding it up the whole time or using your other ultimate and then not getting enough ultimate generation to get back to 320 before the boss fight ends usually. This ability has a pretty good upside; best case scenario you save the day res. 3 people, get 15K mag and stam, some healers might not have a 15K stam bar so only the mag is relevant usually, and kill the boss woo! On the low side 1 person goes down, you resurrect them, you already have max resources and then they die again, and you spent 320 ultimate for them, seems kind of steep. This ability isn’t actively enabling or helping your team win, you must be behind the 8 ball or already losing for this ability to pay out and it comes at a pretty high cost. If the people you resurrected got the resources instead of you, since you start with pretty much nothing after you’re resurrected, I could see a little more of an advantage, maybe, but right now I think this ability needs a little work.
Animate Blastbones – Now this morph seems a little more advantageous to me, resurrect 3 teammates that go down plus deal a pretty good chunk of AoE damage to enemies around them which should help create a little bit a of breathing room while they reapply all their buffs and get healed up. I couldn’t confirm a few interactions with this ability. It wasn’t clear to me during testing if this ability could simply consume the 3 resurrected player’s corpses for the Blastbones or if you needed 6 corpses in total to do this. It also isn’t very clear how damage is being calculated for this ability, there’s no tooltip, so I’m assuming you’d take the tooltip for the Blastbones and multiply that by 3 to get the correct damage numbers. Regardless, the damage ends up being a little low, because the Blastbones doesn’t usually have to go very far before it meets an enemy play, so it doesn’t usually benefit from any of the increased damage over time buffing. Honestly it was difficult to gauge the effectiveness of the ability since you’re usually casting it into a horde of people and they could very easily just be killing it before it can even go off, since it doesn’t explode on death. I think this ability has a lot of potential to be honest and I’ll be excited to see if any changes are made to how Blastbones currently works but now the ability is still expensive, the damage output is comparably low to be honest. Also, it’s not clear if this ability scales off just max magicka or also spell damage.
Resistant Flesh – Again, powerful ability, well balanced super high impact in PvE and PvP, self or target, really enjoy this ability great combination of healing and resistances, nice job.
Expunge and Modify – Nice utility, I like the static cost reduction, wish it worked for both bars, love that it lights up when you can use it very helpful. Getting resources back is always awesome.
Renewing Undeath – This ability is good. I didn’t expect to do that much healing on this character, but I love this ability and it made me want to do healing. Removing negative effects, yes, thank you plus it works on the team too, yes. I will not pay 7000 magicka for purge, the only thing it purges is my whole magicka bar away!
Spirit Guardian – This enables the class to have that much needed beefiness that a support class really needs in PvP and sometimes in PvE, without this I don’t think the class is as viable.
Braided Tether –I’m also excited to test this ability without it costing resources, obviously people want to be healed so it should have a little more impact than the mystic siphon I think, being able to heal yourself for no immediate resource cost is significant and it’s not click intensive like Deaden or Necrotic Potency. Pairing this with Deaden or Necrotic Potency and the Spirit Guardian can add up to some decent healing over time for a low cost.
Again, really great job on overall design for this class, especially the magicka side, it’s strong but balanced and impactful. I’m looking forward to primarily playing on my Necromancer for the foreseeable future.
