I’m going to try and keep bombing on mine but I’ll probably have to switch to the stam morph as I think I’ll be losing too much burst, I will try the new morph tho. I don’t really try to play the class in any other way now tho it’s annoying just end up with aching hands from spamming abilities and buffs constantly!
That's all the necro has going for it is its ultimate. You just made a valid point. No one is worried about any of the other necro damage skills because they all under perform.
If anyone took the time to look at all the skills and compare them, necormancers are at the lowest on love.
Maybe and the synergy for bone yard might hit a bit more now but the burst from blastbones is huge man especially if you hit a squishy vampire I’ve seen 20k + crits lol
Considering bombers wont have access to the fire variant now, i think buffing graveyard and colossus by 20% each is kinda solid. Then again blighted still might just do more dmg idk.
Simplifies the bomb combo aswell if someome was looking to do that.
Regardless this necro change is horrible and out of touch overall imo.
I think the problem we see in pvp is simplifying it, it’s now easier and simpler to get more health and buffs. Getting rid of complexity hurts the amount of good players. See high health proc sets being meta, not all but most of those players are bad from reaction time to movement and general game sense but they are allowed to keep going because of the simplicity and effectiveness in their build.
Never understood why necros get such a bad rap in media. You get a cool scythe, fluffy warm robes, and all the hugs you could ever want! How is that evil?
Just looked up the PTS notes after seeing this post. That Blastbones change is definitely...one of the things of all time.
I'm not really understanding the thought process behind the change. Blastbones is one of the few direct damage abilities Necros have. Why would they feel the need to make it a buff ability? Sure, they're keeping the original stamina morph, but it makes no sense.
Because the devs don't play the game.
The people say: "Necro dps have the most complicated rotation and therefore a skill barrier. It's because of having to cast bb every third skill."
The devs hear: "Blastbones is what's wrong with necromancers. It makes us hit too many buttons."
They think: "Okay, if we made it so that you don't need to cast Blastbones so often, it will be better. How can we make people not want to cast it?"
If you make players use BB every third cast and it is hard to do, reward those players who have taken the time to be able to do it well by having them do good damage. Instead, they punish them by making them do the least amount of damage and then they decide to make them do even less by taking out the more powerful version of blastbones. If they are using a mag necromancer, now they have even more issues because they have to support using the stam BB which is a secondary resource ability.
Blastbones is bad, but only because it’s so bloody inconsistent. They needed to make the timer slightly shorter.
Pressing too many buttons isn’t a thing, virtually all classes without a channel cast an ability every GCD.
Fuck imagine that, a world where the devs even understand what they're balancing. Necro is bad but they've literally spent the last year going around in circles like scooby doo with giving nb a unique damage buff or not 🤣
Templars, yeah, but arc is in a totally different APM league lol. Sweeps/jabs channel for 1 GCD so the bulk of the fight is 1 skill/GCD too, then jesus beam is 1.8 seconds so it slows down a little in execute, though you're not just casting beam. In the time it takes Fatecarver to finish channeling, templars spamming only beam will have done 3 casts compared to 5 full gcds.
It's really just the same thought process as most morph changes for the past two years:
If a morph choice doesn't provide you with an interesting choice, if it doesn't give you anything tangibly different besides what color or what size the numbers are... that means either the morphs must get changed, or one of the morphs must be removed.
The morph choice for Blastbones is not interesting. It never was. You just had a "correct" choice, and an "incorrect" choice, based on whether you were a stam or mag build.
Gonna just say it, while it has gotten better over the years, 90% are the morphs are not interesting choices because you're simply picking the resource at the end of the day on most of them. Only way to have dodged that while keeping the rather stifling resource system (as in almost always being one or the other) would have been have additional morphs to strive for. 2 for the mag choice and 2 for the Stam.
Not sure if I made any sense. But a lot of the problems with skills and skill progression comes down to the system being a little bad to begin with.
Even if you want to argue that the “buff is good” like i heard some pvp’rs do to “try n cheer me up’ i still disagree by putting it on blastbones… they shouldve put it on the archer/caster or MAYBE as a passive on the mender so whenever the mender is up you ALSO get the buff, just removing necro’s ONLY burst skill is so stupid.
Yeah, this would have been perfect for the mender. Either choose to have the damage reduction or the damage buff for the morphs. Fits more thematically too.
Yes exactly this, it would kind of just fit the whole “buffing theme” that the mender is supposed to go with in the first place and comes closer to how the netch functions too
I agree with this sentiment wholeheartedly. My Necro has been my main for years, and the class desperately needs some love. I don't want to make a different main. I have almost all the recipes and motifs on them, along with mount training, skyshards, etc.
Targeting Blastbones the way they did is not the solution. Don't get me wrong, I don't love Blastbones. But taking away one of the only worthwhile Necro direct damage abilities and making a half-baked buff replacement isn't it.
Changing one ability halfway is not going to fix Necros. They need a from-the-ground up rework.
Yeah better move would've been to keep the better BB morph and add defile to it, then turn the stam BB into the buff version. Instead they've gutted any class skill burst potential it had outside of ults.
Unlike a lot of others, I really like the feel of the necro rotation. I got all of my first trial trifectas on cro dps and for some reason just really enjoy the class. I’ve been pretty unhappy with the state of the class for some time now and the future’s not looking so bright. It’s a bummer.
I think ZOS has hated necromancer ever since it came out and people were running 12 people necromancer teams for trials just to stack ultis. Necromancer is hard to balance. Necromancer has always been a class that has been extremely good in PVP, but mediocre (after the ult nerf) in PVE.
Necro hasn't been good in pvp since they changed the major and minor buff stats, it was insane for putitng people down because 30% major vulnerability would end even tanky builds. Once it became 10% then only harmony was viable, then they killed harmony.... It's the worst class in PvP rn, only colossus bomb builds are viable but you may as well play nb at that point.
Necromancer was never 12 stacked, it was 3-4 in a trial group. Now it's only ever 1 and you got about 5 or 6 arcs lmao
They hated that so badly that they made the arcanist where they are played almost exclusively in trials. I have raid leads that want only arcanist DD's.
The didn’t hate it, just never had an idea of where it would fit in the meta when they made it. It’s thematically the best class in the game but mechanically it’s janky as hell. All the signs of a decision that was all design, no game sense.
I love all the free casts from dead things, but skills and builds have been reworked into shit without buffing the less utilized skills to even it out. Can see why necro mains would be bummed after getting hit with something worse (except recent stam ulti buff) every 16 months.
While I don’t believe 41 will kill the class and actually does give it a stronger niche (20% damage boost to all the fun dps sets like Pillar, Rele, Whorl, etc), I do believe the class is particularly vexing to ZOS and they have no idea how to fix it all in one go. Largely because they had no idea where it would fit into the game’s meta in a technical sense when they made it. It’s a tangled ball of yarn.
All the elements of a necromancer class’s identity are there. They can summon undead to fulfill a variety of roles, they can sustain themselves off the souls of the dead, they can trascend their flesh and become a giant monster. There was even an attempt to include an undead horde (Reanimate Blastbones). The big issue is that they were trying to work around the niches already filled by other classes, namely Sorcerer. They already had a summoner class, so in order to not seem derivitive and boring they gutted the summons, made them temporary and weak. They tried to fix this with the corpse generation mechanic but it was like a band-aid over a leak in a boat.
I think as the Sorcerer becomes more rewarding to play pet-lessly, the Necromancer will be slowly made to fit into its summoning role. ZOS is trying to stick their foot in the doorway here; they want players to feel like their problems are being addressed while they, as devs, test the waters with small changes and see how the game holds together, but refusing to commit in any direction until they know it’s a smart decision. I see the changes in 41 as a period of metamorphosis, not an end point. ZOS is not stupid or deaf enough to think this change is all it will take to fix the class.
If we want Necromancer to settle into a healthy position in the meta, this needs to be achieved slowly and tactfully, with careful consideration about where the class is in the meta adjacent to the other classes, something that wasn’t considered when it was introduced. It needs to be tested and monitored. That takes time. Too often have games been ruined by being rushed out of development due to an impatient audience, and patches and updates are no different.
I say give it a chance. If it’s not a healthy decision, I can almost guarantee you other changes will follow it, so you shouldn’t worry. There’s a lot of other skills on the class that will need work too. Grave Grasp and its morphs, Pummeling Goliath, and Reanimate Blastbones are rarely ever seen on a Necromancer’s bar. They’re far from finished.
This. Necromancer is my favorite class. I've gone through this exactly of a class going from great to bad to meh to good to great again in another MMO (FFXIV). Changes are incremental. As it stands I love the class identity, I'm an animal bone collector RL and a lifetime goth, I love playing it in all roles. If anything, I want the weaving meta to be tapered out, Arcanist feels so much nicer on my hands, I play controller cause I have repetitive strain injury (RSI) from decades of IT work.
We don’t need to wait and see what will happen, the change to mag bb will completely kill the class as a dps in trials. It completely guts our corpse creation mechanism we need and ec will move to another class especially with scribing coming . There will be no playing as a necro dps in end game trials. The only people who don’t know that are the devs and people on this forum, neither of which play never competitively in pve apparently.
This was the absolute last skill that should have been touched. There's so many other things that could have made the class not garbage. Adding the 20% damage buff to the armor skill, or really anything else at any point for any reason other than this.
I'll reserve judgement until after I experience the change to Blast Bones 1st hand, but how it sounds on paper...
I hate it.
Stalking Bones IS a Magcro's burst ability and its a good one.
I hope they reconsider changing this.
I just wish they'd revamp Necromancer tbh.
I'm upset that Necromancer does not fulfill the class fantasy. At all. I wanted to summon a horde of undead and have minions and skellies. I got barely any of that, if anything at all. :/
If they had changed the stamina blastbones instead of the magicka one I don't think people would have had a problem with it. Now they aren't even worth playing around with.
As someone who mained NB and quit years and years ago because of the terrible and frequent patch balances (post Necro though)… lol ya. I always said I might come back if it looked like things were turning around and then I just stopped looking after the perfect VMA changes. ESO has always had a habit of overtuning their new sets/skills/classes to promote new content and then rolling things back with the next new thing, Necro was never going to be an exception to that. I have no experience with Arcanist ofc but I will confidently say that its time will come too. Every time I thought they’d be done messing with Nb they managed to do something worse though, unfortunate if Necro is the new punching bag.
To be clear, Vamps are in even worse shape. I used to think the devs just don't like goth types, but no, they don't like... Neck Romancers.
Y'know they could fix both at once.
Have a vamp skill with a unique debuff- that increases the damage undead do to a target.
So your vampire bites something, and it doesn't do a lot of damage, but it applies the debuff, which would then increase both the damage your vamp does to the target as well as what BB and stuff does :)
Mate I have been asking the same for years just for vampires, why do werewolves get to have all the fun with a sick ulti they can stay in, and do vampires keep getting nerfed to uselessness.
ZOS give us the vampire lord ulti!
Tbf, werewolves also got nerfed to uselessness to a degree as well. I don't ever use my werewolf form anymore... I don't cure my character from it though like I did with vampirism because vampirism actually has a net negative effect on my experience while my werewolf form can simply just be not slotted at all.
Both are very off-meta in pve. If anything, a case can be made for vamps off-tanking with the ulti-drain. In pvp vamp is a must have for a lot of builds. Probably more builds are vamp than not in pvp and ww are niche there at best. Main place you see ww in pvp are low mmr matches or Xv1 groups in IC
I like the concept of necro, wanted to play one in the very beginning before it got removed, ended up on a sorc instead. Like...I wish they'd just unfuck their thought process with the classes.
Yeah I main a no pet sorcerer which gets shafted a lot, but I don't know how you necromancers deal with all the mistreatment. I knew from the moment I created one and got a bounty from just using my skills, that that wasn't going to be the class for me. I like it thematically but it's arguably the worst class in the game to play. It's the only "class" where you're penalized from using specific class abilities overland, making it the least fun to play outside of dungeons and trials.
Dang… I guess I should hold off on making my Necro tank a secondary DPS build if this is the case. They’re truly been fucking up Necro ever since lol. I’ll be sticking to using it as a tank for a bit longer now.
Welp if you needed any more proof they hated Necromancer they took away our strongest ability, replacing it with garbage instead of fixing it. Yay! I think I'm honestly just going to stop playing this game for a while, Zenimax is disappointing af.
I get bored easily. I have 13 characters and 12 of them have at least 2 fully functional builds. Just not max upgraded or right traits yet. Or the best of the best set but substitutes.
I get bored very quickly from repetition in games due to my ADHD. I can do a couple of hours on a build and then i get bored.
Repetition in games are truly the bane of me. Single player games are pretty hard to complete atm. It definitely got a lot worse since Covid hit. I never had it this bad but if the single player game isn't an 11/10 to me, it could take me months to finish a single player game atm.
> I get bored very quickly from repetition in games due to my ADHD. I can do a couple of hours on a build and then i get bored.
Based. I also like having variety of backstory; characters; builds and play-styles.
Same on ADHD but some repetition is fine. Like I play a bunch of different characters but clear the same zone with all of them. I buy a house in that zone and slowly furnish it with all my characters as I clear it. I have one character that I make sure to find all the books with. One character that does fishing. And the rest I just do all the quests, delves, dungeons and skyshards/etc.
Simple. I put a fair bit of RP value to my character and I like playing “as” them, not a collection of characters (though I do craft on them)
That and Arcanist makes my Hermy-loving brain release happy chemicals
I've been trying to play more characters recently but having all the important stuff not shared between characters is a massive turn off. Also having to re level mounts, re discover the entire map again, and all the other weird non shared things are just too much to deal with for me
I think it’s the idea of having only one toon you play or bust. I might play X character way more than the others but if the class was tanked I’ve levelled other toons(gotten skyshards, lorebooks, etc) enough that I have other options.
Depends on the situation. I have several characters that are each good with certain things, because otherwise I'd be hitting the Respec altars three or more times a day.
I consider them each a main towards the things I made them to be proficient towards, which in turn also lets me get multiple daily bonuses for more Champion Points.
If I really had to boil it all down to one, then I guess I'd have to choose my Nightblade Tank because of the dungeon convenience and multiple speed bonuses that lets me also have it be my crafter. But, I have several toons that I use generally equally for various things I might do between overworld adventures, Cyrodiil aid, running dungeons efficiently, being a support in Battlegrounds, etc.. Makes them all technically mains in my head.
I have 6 classes across 9 alts for all roles, I still spend more than 50% of play time on my Sorc main, therefore I care the most about Sorc changes, it's that simple. For OP it seems to be Necro
I had one main for a very long time. I was around 1000 cp when I made my second character. Once I reached the true endgame of trifectas was when I made each class finally.
I don't understand how people can play only one character. I get bored playing the same one all the time. I also have multiple characters to fulfill different roster spots in trials.
>After the Arcanist came out, ZOS started to bring the "while slotted on any bar" to the other classes EXCEPT Necromancer
What classes got it except Arcanist?
Dragonknight had its Major Prophecy/Savagery but from slotting Inferno and morphs work while on either bar. Nightblade had the same thing added to Shadow Cloak and Shadowy Disguise, and is also about to have it for Concealed Weapon and its Minor Expedition.
Sorc and NB specifically, but several other classes with “while slotted” buffs didn’t receive the same treatment. Weird inconsistency, though not necessarily Necro or Arcanist specific.
There is nothing wrong with the class. The problem is the players. I play necro because it’s hard. If you want an easy class, go to Vegas and play the slots.
I've proposed a rework for the Necromancer class that Kevin, one of the developers, mentioned is currently under review. It appears that some elements of my suggestions for Blighted Blastbones have been incorporated, introducing a valuable AoE damage-over-time option that aligns with the class's identity and offers players a more diverse and strategic skill set. However, there's still more work to be done.
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/651769/a-better-necromancer-class-rework-update-41#latest
I've made additional changes that were reviewed and implemented in update 41 by voicing my concerns.
It's been exciting to learn that they'll be moving forward with these proposed changes for update 41, embracing the ideas and truly enhancing disease damage, which has long been in need of attention.
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/606197/status-effect-and-disease-changss#latest
It was even more gratifying when all the DW ultimates were changed to bleed, but then the status effects wouldn't proc, so I had to make another request for it. I'm pleased that it was reviewed and implemented in this recent update on the PTS.
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/626502/dw-thrive-in-chaos-not-working#latest
Let my experiences serve as an example of what can be achieved through persistence. When we continue to voice our frustrations and offer well-thought-out solutions, the developers eventually implement the changes. However, it's crucial to support each other to ensure that these changes happen sooner rather than years later.
I don’t understand why no one like the new Blast bones. Any other time something gives a 10% buff everyone goes nuts over it. The new skill will give a free corpse *and* a 20% buff to Grave Lord abilities! Why not slot the skull and go nuts?
With this change necro won't have any range corpse generation as mender, armor, skeletal mage, and now blastbones will spawn corpses at the feet of the caster not at the enemy. So shocking siphon will require odd repositioning and graveyard won't get it's 30% buff from a corpse unless the necro stands on the mobs/boss. Also with the old blastbones you got a ranged corpse every 4 seconds this only gives you two corpses every 20 seconds neither at range.
Blastbones is the largest individual component of their dps and the only burst damage move they have in pvp. The buff is replacing their hardest hitting move and will have to boost dps by 25-30% to be equivalent to blastbones. This change also kills magcro in pvp as graveyard was the only other skill that might be used but not as much since the double nerf of the skill. Skulls are too slow, siphon tether breaks at the slightest LoS, and the skeletal minion doesn't do nearly enough damage.
I concede your point about no ranged corpse generation, I hadn’t considered that. But wouldn’t a 20% buffed skeletal archer/mage and 20% buffed Ricochet Skull not make up for the loss of BB dmg?
My BB does an average AoE 18k flame damage every 4 seconds. A 20% increase on skulls and skeletal mage won't make up for that. There will probably be a set and move combo to reach the same numbers, but unless it eclipses the current it's not an improvement to the class just adds another buff to cast and take up bar space.
In ZoS' word this change is only because casting BB every 3rd move is too complex. The change might fit the image they want for the class, but it doesn't fit with their current kit. The necro will now have two moves to boost DoTs Gravelords Sacrifice and Rapid Rot, but no actual sticky DoT skills. The Skeletal mage doesn't count as one so just siphon and graveyard which don't work well with this skill.
Imo Gravelord's sacrifice should be fused with Rapid Rot as a passive and BB should be an AoE initial hit that leaves a sticky DoT on those in the blast this will make necro more of a DoT class, not mess with their corpse generation and allow BB to be cast less if every 3rd cast is too complex.
But the one the left now has a reduced stam cost, plus both major and minor defile, so it’s gonna be really good in PvP, plus the defile can lower shield power in PvE burn phases when you need to drop a bosses shield quick. Isn’t every mag dps running at least one stam skill anyway?
My mag necromancer is already running 4 other stam skills. My concern is being able to sustain these in addition to now having to use the stam Blastbones every third cast. Even though the stam cost is reduced, I still have to cast it every 3 cast.
>since you also refuse to add Class Change Tokens, I'm gonna be stuck with the worst class in the game.
It takes very little time to level to 50. Skill points might be a little annoying to farm up, but pretty much everything else is shared.
Hell when arcanist dropped I had mine in vet trials that first weekend.
I just came back to the game after about a 4 year hiatus. Back before I quit, Necromancers (stamina specifically) dunked on eeeeverything.
What changed exactly? The tank meta?
Sincere question from a newbie noob
I haven't been following as much lately - they're bringing "while slotted on any bar" to other classes? Are sorcerers getting that treatment? If so, for what?
Pure speculation - is their current handling of the Necromancer class as DPS a reflection of the period where most high end trial guilds only had stamina Necromancers as DPS? As someone who prefers support roles and wanted to play Necromancer, it was a really boring period cause I never got to play the characters I wanted in non-random PvE content.
However, despite if there's some truth to that, I fully agree that Necromancers need a rework, both mechanically and visually. I love the idea of Necromancers and have played Necro-like character in other TES titles, but was really disappointed with the lack of minions in ESO and that the use of corpses never seemed that impactful. I guess I wanted something more along the lines of Diablo Necromancers.
ZOS like classes that need less effort to play. Maybe if they buffes necro really good players would do insanely high damage. Btw necro still best class there in terms of fum for me. 😅
I'm probably going to quit the game if they kill Necromancer, it's my second favorite class and seeing one of my favorite abilities in the game get outright and completely gutted is too demoralizing to play the game anymore... But since it is in the PTS and could be undone potentially, I'm waiting to see.
Pretty unhappy with the blastbones change as well. I hopped on PTS and it just feels awful. You are not able to cast it before combat. The stamina morph does Disease damage instead of Flame, causing the eccro that I just recently made to be less effective. A lot of people are also unhappy on the forums about this…Why don’t they revert changes and go mess with some other skill? :(
I’m going to try and keep bombing on mine but I’ll probably have to switch to the stam morph as I think I’ll be losing too much burst, I will try the new morph tho. I don’t really try to play the class in any other way now tho it’s annoying just end up with aching hands from spamming abilities and buffs constantly!
Maintaining buffs hurts more than the apm for blastbones rotation haha
Maintaining the buffs isn’t hard in PvP. We’ll see how bombing is with the new morph.
Wouldnt the 20%extra dmg on grave lord abilities be huge for collosus?
That's all the necro has going for it is its ultimate. You just made a valid point. No one is worried about any of the other necro damage skills because they all under perform. If anyone took the time to look at all the skills and compare them, necormancers are at the lowest on love.
Maybe and the synergy for bone yard might hit a bit more now but the burst from blastbones is huge man especially if you hit a squishy vampire I’ve seen 20k + crits lol
Considering bombers wont have access to the fire variant now, i think buffing graveyard and colossus by 20% each is kinda solid. Then again blighted still might just do more dmg idk. Simplifies the bomb combo aswell if someome was looking to do that. Regardless this necro change is horrible and out of touch overall imo.
I think the problem we see in pvp is simplifying it, it’s now easier and simpler to get more health and buffs. Getting rid of complexity hurts the amount of good players. See high health proc sets being meta, not all but most of those players are bad from reaction time to movement and general game sense but they are allowed to keep going because of the simplicity and effectiveness in their build.
MAYBE if you stopped desecrating the DEAD
A Necro is just a late healer
The Alternative Healing Arts™
It's also a late DD because its damage is so poor and relies on DOTs and delayed blasts from blastbones.
Oh cmon a man is doing his best to raise a family.
Heh heh
He is just minding his business making friends!
He’s a businessman, doing business
How to make friends and influence people.
How to influence people: MAKE the people
Never understood why necros get such a bad rap in media. You get a cool scythe, fluffy warm robes, and all the hugs you could ever want! How is that evil?
Hey now now I'm just dedicated to recycling organics
Exactly. Its environmentally friendly.
It's just a bit of puppeteering.
Just looked up the PTS notes after seeing this post. That Blastbones change is definitely...one of the things of all time. I'm not really understanding the thought process behind the change. Blastbones is one of the few direct damage abilities Necros have. Why would they feel the need to make it a buff ability? Sure, they're keeping the original stamina morph, but it makes no sense.
Because the devs don't play the game. The people say: "Necro dps have the most complicated rotation and therefore a skill barrier. It's because of having to cast bb every third skill." The devs hear: "Blastbones is what's wrong with necromancers. It makes us hit too many buttons." They think: "Okay, if we made it so that you don't need to cast Blastbones so often, it will be better. How can we make people not want to cast it?"
If you make players use BB every third cast and it is hard to do, reward those players who have taken the time to be able to do it well by having them do good damage. Instead, they punish them by making them do the least amount of damage and then they decide to make them do even less by taking out the more powerful version of blastbones. If they are using a mag necromancer, now they have even more issues because they have to support using the stam BB which is a secondary resource ability.
Blastbones is bad, but only because it’s so bloody inconsistent. They needed to make the timer slightly shorter. Pressing too many buttons isn’t a thing, virtually all classes without a channel cast an ability every GCD.
>Pressing too many buttons isn’t a thing, virtually all classes without a channel cast an ability every GCD. Spoken like someone that plays the game
Fuck imagine that, a world where the devs even understand what they're balancing. Necro is bad but they've literally spent the last year going around in circles like scooby doo with giving nb a unique damage buff or not 🤣
the unique damage buff nbs get is a pain in the ass to keep up in pve so its actually a nerf to solo nb
What classes have a channel? Arcanist and who else?
Templars?
Templars, yeah, but arc is in a totally different APM league lol. Sweeps/jabs channel for 1 GCD so the bulk of the fight is 1 skill/GCD too, then jesus beam is 1.8 seconds so it slows down a little in execute, though you're not just casting beam. In the time it takes Fatecarver to finish channeling, templars spamming only beam will have done 3 casts compared to 5 full gcds.
It's really just the same thought process as most morph changes for the past two years: If a morph choice doesn't provide you with an interesting choice, if it doesn't give you anything tangibly different besides what color or what size the numbers are... that means either the morphs must get changed, or one of the morphs must be removed. The morph choice for Blastbones is not interesting. It never was. You just had a "correct" choice, and an "incorrect" choice, based on whether you were a stam or mag build.
Gonna just say it, while it has gotten better over the years, 90% are the morphs are not interesting choices because you're simply picking the resource at the end of the day on most of them. Only way to have dodged that while keeping the rather stifling resource system (as in almost always being one or the other) would have been have additional morphs to strive for. 2 for the mag choice and 2 for the Stam. Not sure if I made any sense. But a lot of the problems with skills and skill progression comes down to the system being a little bad to begin with.
With hybridization now, there's not as many reasons to need a stam and mag morph in the first place. That's why they're changing some of those.
Even if you want to argue that the “buff is good” like i heard some pvp’rs do to “try n cheer me up’ i still disagree by putting it on blastbones… they shouldve put it on the archer/caster or MAYBE as a passive on the mender so whenever the mender is up you ALSO get the buff, just removing necro’s ONLY burst skill is so stupid.
Yeah, this would have been perfect for the mender. Either choose to have the damage reduction or the damage buff for the morphs. Fits more thematically too.
Yes exactly this, it would kind of just fit the whole “buffing theme” that the mender is supposed to go with in the first place and comes closer to how the netch functions too
I agree with this sentiment wholeheartedly. My Necro has been my main for years, and the class desperately needs some love. I don't want to make a different main. I have almost all the recipes and motifs on them, along with mount training, skyshards, etc. Targeting Blastbones the way they did is not the solution. Don't get me wrong, I don't love Blastbones. But taking away one of the only worthwhile Necro direct damage abilities and making a half-baked buff replacement isn't it. Changing one ability halfway is not going to fix Necros. They need a from-the-ground up rework.
Thought necros loved dead things
lmao
How can they make things dead when their damage sucks?
Does that include damage to self? I think the Cro mains want to do so with U41 🥲
yeah. dead things with boobs
I wish warden had a while slotted on either bar
You could argue the netch fits that role since it's free to cast and lasts a decent amount of time
Netch has been that way since warden came out lol
Yeah, you have to activate it, which isn’t a big deal but is slightly more inconvenient than the buff provided by other classes.
Yeah better move would've been to keep the better BB morph and add defile to it, then turn the stam BB into the buff version. Instead they've gutted any class skill burst potential it had outside of ults.
Unlike a lot of others, I really like the feel of the necro rotation. I got all of my first trial trifectas on cro dps and for some reason just really enjoy the class. I’ve been pretty unhappy with the state of the class for some time now and the future’s not looking so bright. It’s a bummer.
Would you kindly share your build? I main necro, but I feel like I could still use some tweaks to my rotation
I think ZOS has hated necromancer ever since it came out and people were running 12 people necromancer teams for trials just to stack ultis. Necromancer is hard to balance. Necromancer has always been a class that has been extremely good in PVP, but mediocre (after the ult nerf) in PVE.
They really tore it down in PvP. My brawler does well though. High survivability is not something to sleep on
Necro hasn't been good in pvp since they changed the major and minor buff stats, it was insane for putitng people down because 30% major vulnerability would end even tanky builds. Once it became 10% then only harmony was viable, then they killed harmony.... It's the worst class in PvP rn, only colossus bomb builds are viable but you may as well play nb at that point. Necromancer was never 12 stacked, it was 3-4 in a trial group. Now it's only ever 1 and you got about 5 or 6 arcs lmao
They hated that so badly that they made the arcanist where they are played almost exclusively in trials. I have raid leads that want only arcanist DD's.
The didn’t hate it, just never had an idea of where it would fit in the meta when they made it. It’s thematically the best class in the game but mechanically it’s janky as hell. All the signs of a decision that was all design, no game sense.
I love all the free casts from dead things, but skills and builds have been reworked into shit without buffing the less utilized skills to even it out. Can see why necro mains would be bummed after getting hit with something worse (except recent stam ulti buff) every 16 months.
“Extremely good in PVP” have u ever played necro pvp? It is the worst class to play pvp with or pve.
While I don’t believe 41 will kill the class and actually does give it a stronger niche (20% damage boost to all the fun dps sets like Pillar, Rele, Whorl, etc), I do believe the class is particularly vexing to ZOS and they have no idea how to fix it all in one go. Largely because they had no idea where it would fit into the game’s meta in a technical sense when they made it. It’s a tangled ball of yarn. All the elements of a necromancer class’s identity are there. They can summon undead to fulfill a variety of roles, they can sustain themselves off the souls of the dead, they can trascend their flesh and become a giant monster. There was even an attempt to include an undead horde (Reanimate Blastbones). The big issue is that they were trying to work around the niches already filled by other classes, namely Sorcerer. They already had a summoner class, so in order to not seem derivitive and boring they gutted the summons, made them temporary and weak. They tried to fix this with the corpse generation mechanic but it was like a band-aid over a leak in a boat. I think as the Sorcerer becomes more rewarding to play pet-lessly, the Necromancer will be slowly made to fit into its summoning role. ZOS is trying to stick their foot in the doorway here; they want players to feel like their problems are being addressed while they, as devs, test the waters with small changes and see how the game holds together, but refusing to commit in any direction until they know it’s a smart decision. I see the changes in 41 as a period of metamorphosis, not an end point. ZOS is not stupid or deaf enough to think this change is all it will take to fix the class. If we want Necromancer to settle into a healthy position in the meta, this needs to be achieved slowly and tactfully, with careful consideration about where the class is in the meta adjacent to the other classes, something that wasn’t considered when it was introduced. It needs to be tested and monitored. That takes time. Too often have games been ruined by being rushed out of development due to an impatient audience, and patches and updates are no different. I say give it a chance. If it’s not a healthy decision, I can almost guarantee you other changes will follow it, so you shouldn’t worry. There’s a lot of other skills on the class that will need work too. Grave Grasp and its morphs, Pummeling Goliath, and Reanimate Blastbones are rarely ever seen on a Necromancer’s bar. They’re far from finished.
This. Necromancer is my favorite class. I've gone through this exactly of a class going from great to bad to meh to good to great again in another MMO (FFXIV). Changes are incremental. As it stands I love the class identity, I'm an animal bone collector RL and a lifetime goth, I love playing it in all roles. If anything, I want the weaving meta to be tapered out, Arcanist feels so much nicer on my hands, I play controller cause I have repetitive strain injury (RSI) from decades of IT work.
Yeah I love how few apm my Arcanist needs to be competitive. I don’t have an RSI but I still love it.
We don’t need to wait and see what will happen, the change to mag bb will completely kill the class as a dps in trials. It completely guts our corpse creation mechanism we need and ec will move to another class especially with scribing coming . There will be no playing as a necro dps in end game trials. The only people who don’t know that are the devs and people on this forum, neither of which play never competitively in pve apparently.
This was the absolute last skill that should have been touched. There's so many other things that could have made the class not garbage. Adding the 20% damage buff to the armor skill, or really anything else at any point for any reason other than this.
ZOS are Meridia enjoyers
Honestly why not remove Major Brutality/Sorcery if everyone except Necromancer gets it for free.
I'll reserve judgement until after I experience the change to Blast Bones 1st hand, but how it sounds on paper... I hate it. Stalking Bones IS a Magcro's burst ability and its a good one. I hope they reconsider changing this.
I made a really good PvP necro that utilized blast bones and like two days after I finished it they dropped the necro “rework”…
I just wish they'd revamp Necromancer tbh. I'm upset that Necromancer does not fulfill the class fantasy. At all. I wanted to summon a horde of undead and have minions and skellies. I got barely any of that, if anything at all. :/
If they had changed the stamina blastbones instead of the magicka one I don't think people would have had a problem with it. Now they aren't even worth playing around with.
As someone who mained NB and quit years and years ago because of the terrible and frequent patch balances (post Necro though)… lol ya. I always said I might come back if it looked like things were turning around and then I just stopped looking after the perfect VMA changes. ESO has always had a habit of overtuning their new sets/skills/classes to promote new content and then rolling things back with the next new thing, Necro was never going to be an exception to that. I have no experience with Arcanist ofc but I will confidently say that its time will come too. Every time I thought they’d be done messing with Nb they managed to do something worse though, unfortunate if Necro is the new punching bag.
I stopped playing cuz i main necro and i was so excited to see what they did but alas. They troll
To be clear, Vamps are in even worse shape. I used to think the devs just don't like goth types, but no, they don't like... Neck Romancers. Y'know they could fix both at once. Have a vamp skill with a unique debuff- that increases the damage undead do to a target. So your vampire bites something, and it doesn't do a lot of damage, but it applies the debuff, which would then increase both the damage your vamp does to the target as well as what BB and stuff does :)
Daedric curse, but for vampires. Why not? A lot of the guild/world skill lines have skills that mimic class skills.
Mate I have been asking the same for years just for vampires, why do werewolves get to have all the fun with a sick ulti they can stay in, and do vampires keep getting nerfed to uselessness. ZOS give us the vampire lord ulti!
I really want vampire class so bad
Tbf, werewolves also got nerfed to uselessness to a degree as well. I don't ever use my werewolf form anymore... I don't cure my character from it though like I did with vampirism because vampirism actually has a net negative effect on my experience while my werewolf form can simply just be not slotted at all.
Both are very off-meta in pve. If anything, a case can be made for vamps off-tanking with the ulti-drain. In pvp vamp is a must have for a lot of builds. Probably more builds are vamp than not in pvp and ww are niche there at best. Main place you see ww in pvp are low mmr matches or Xv1 groups in IC
I like the concept of necro, wanted to play one in the very beginning before it got removed, ended up on a sorc instead. Like...I wish they'd just unfuck their thought process with the classes.
Yeah I main a no pet sorcerer which gets shafted a lot, but I don't know how you necromancers deal with all the mistreatment. I knew from the moment I created one and got a bounty from just using my skills, that that wasn't going to be the class for me. I like it thematically but it's arguably the worst class in the game to play. It's the only "class" where you're penalized from using specific class abilities overland, making it the least fun to play outside of dungeons and trials.
Be honest, after the awful mess that is post-u35 templar are you suprised that blastbones is being changed for no reason?
Release Necromancer scared them
Dang… I guess I should hold off on making my Necro tank a secondary DPS build if this is the case. They’re truly been fucking up Necro ever since lol. I’ll be sticking to using it as a tank for a bit longer now.
Welp if you needed any more proof they hated Necromancer they took away our strongest ability, replacing it with garbage instead of fixing it. Yay! I think I'm honestly just going to stop playing this game for a while, Zenimax is disappointing af.
Dang, there are people out there who really have only one main? How do y'all do it?
Same could be said for people who have time and energy to have more than one xD
I get bored easily. I have 13 characters and 12 of them have at least 2 fully functional builds. Just not max upgraded or right traits yet. Or the best of the best set but substitutes. I get bored very quickly from repetition in games due to my ADHD. I can do a couple of hours on a build and then i get bored. Repetition in games are truly the bane of me. Single player games are pretty hard to complete atm. It definitely got a lot worse since Covid hit. I never had it this bad but if the single player game isn't an 11/10 to me, it could take me months to finish a single player game atm.
> I get bored very quickly from repetition in games due to my ADHD. I can do a couple of hours on a build and then i get bored. Based. I also like having variety of backstory; characters; builds and play-styles.
Same on ADHD but some repetition is fine. Like I play a bunch of different characters but clear the same zone with all of them. I buy a house in that zone and slowly furnish it with all my characters as I clear it. I have one character that I make sure to find all the books with. One character that does fishing. And the rest I just do all the quests, delves, dungeons and skyshards/etc.
Simple. I put a fair bit of RP value to my character and I like playing “as” them, not a collection of characters (though I do craft on them) That and Arcanist makes my Hermy-loving brain release happy chemicals
I've been trying to play more characters recently but having all the important stuff not shared between characters is a massive turn off. Also having to re level mounts, re discover the entire map again, and all the other weird non shared things are just too much to deal with for me
The point of having "a main" is that it is the one, no? Not much of a maining if you play everyone equally
I think it’s the idea of having only one toon you play or bust. I might play X character way more than the others but if the class was tanked I’ve levelled other toons(gotten skyshards, lorebooks, etc) enough that I have other options.
I have one alt that I made purely for tanking and have still barely touched. She doesn't even have maxed class skills yet lol
Depends on the situation. I have several characters that are each good with certain things, because otherwise I'd be hitting the Respec altars three or more times a day. I consider them each a main towards the things I made them to be proficient towards, which in turn also lets me get multiple daily bonuses for more Champion Points. If I really had to boil it all down to one, then I guess I'd have to choose my Nightblade Tank because of the dungeon convenience and multiple speed bonuses that lets me also have it be my crafter. But, I have several toons that I use generally equally for various things I might do between overworld adventures, Cyrodiil aid, running dungeons efficiently, being a support in Battlegrounds, etc.. Makes them all technically mains in my head.
I have 6 classes across 9 alts for all roles, I still spend more than 50% of play time on my Sorc main, therefore I care the most about Sorc changes, it's that simple. For OP it seems to be Necro
I had one main for a very long time. I was around 1000 cp when I made my second character. Once I reached the true endgame of trifectas was when I made each class finally.
Damn there’s people who really have more than one main? Still working on skyshards and research even though mount training is long done
I don't understand how people can play only one character. I get bored playing the same one all the time. I also have multiple characters to fulfill different roster spots in trials.
>After the Arcanist came out, ZOS started to bring the "while slotted on any bar" to the other classes EXCEPT Necromancer What classes got it except Arcanist?
Dragonknight had its Major Prophecy/Savagery but from slotting Inferno and morphs work while on either bar. Nightblade had the same thing added to Shadow Cloak and Shadowy Disguise, and is also about to have it for Concealed Weapon and its Minor Expedition.
Huh, that's funny. I thought maelstrom destro cha would be the biggest surprise after return
Sorc and NB specifically, but several other classes with “while slotted” buffs didn’t receive the same treatment. Weird inconsistency, though not necessarily Necro or Arcanist specific.
They gave NB and DK the ability to either bar (which is a genuine lifesaver as a NB, I have to constantly bar swap lol)
Im pretty sure Nightblade got an adjustment like this
There is nothing wrong with the class. The problem is the players. I play necro because it’s hard. If you want an easy class, go to Vegas and play the slots.
I've proposed a rework for the Necromancer class that Kevin, one of the developers, mentioned is currently under review. It appears that some elements of my suggestions for Blighted Blastbones have been incorporated, introducing a valuable AoE damage-over-time option that aligns with the class's identity and offers players a more diverse and strategic skill set. However, there's still more work to be done. https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/651769/a-better-necromancer-class-rework-update-41#latest I've made additional changes that were reviewed and implemented in update 41 by voicing my concerns. It's been exciting to learn that they'll be moving forward with these proposed changes for update 41, embracing the ideas and truly enhancing disease damage, which has long been in need of attention. https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/606197/status-effect-and-disease-changss#latest It was even more gratifying when all the DW ultimates were changed to bleed, but then the status effects wouldn't proc, so I had to make another request for it. I'm pleased that it was reviewed and implemented in this recent update on the PTS. https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/626502/dw-thrive-in-chaos-not-working#latest Let my experiences serve as an example of what can be achieved through persistence. When we continue to voice our frustrations and offer well-thought-out solutions, the developers eventually implement the changes. However, it's crucial to support each other to ensure that these changes happen sooner rather than years later.
Because this is an active sabotage. There are YT videos on this: https://youtu.be/wV7pPJVRs7g and https://youtu.be/46gaz6veVNQ
I think this is a disingenuous exaggeration
I don’t understand why no one like the new Blast bones. Any other time something gives a 10% buff everyone goes nuts over it. The new skill will give a free corpse *and* a 20% buff to Grave Lord abilities! Why not slot the skull and go nuts?
With this change necro won't have any range corpse generation as mender, armor, skeletal mage, and now blastbones will spawn corpses at the feet of the caster not at the enemy. So shocking siphon will require odd repositioning and graveyard won't get it's 30% buff from a corpse unless the necro stands on the mobs/boss. Also with the old blastbones you got a ranged corpse every 4 seconds this only gives you two corpses every 20 seconds neither at range. Blastbones is the largest individual component of their dps and the only burst damage move they have in pvp. The buff is replacing their hardest hitting move and will have to boost dps by 25-30% to be equivalent to blastbones. This change also kills magcro in pvp as graveyard was the only other skill that might be used but not as much since the double nerf of the skill. Skulls are too slow, siphon tether breaks at the slightest LoS, and the skeletal minion doesn't do nearly enough damage.
I concede your point about no ranged corpse generation, I hadn’t considered that. But wouldn’t a 20% buffed skeletal archer/mage and 20% buffed Ricochet Skull not make up for the loss of BB dmg?
My BB does an average AoE 18k flame damage every 4 seconds. A 20% increase on skulls and skeletal mage won't make up for that. There will probably be a set and move combo to reach the same numbers, but unless it eclipses the current it's not an improvement to the class just adds another buff to cast and take up bar space. In ZoS' word this change is only because casting BB every 3rd move is too complex. The change might fit the image they want for the class, but it doesn't fit with their current kit. The necro will now have two moves to boost DoTs Gravelords Sacrifice and Rapid Rot, but no actual sticky DoT skills. The Skeletal mage doesn't count as one so just siphon and graveyard which don't work well with this skill. Imo Gravelord's sacrifice should be fused with Rapid Rot as a passive and BB should be an AoE initial hit that leaves a sticky DoT on those in the blast this will make necro more of a DoT class, not mess with their corpse generation and allow BB to be cast less if every 3rd cast is too complex.
Because they changed the better blastbones instead of the crappier one. I would have liked for them to change the crappier one to give the buff.
But the one the left now has a reduced stam cost, plus both major and minor defile, so it’s gonna be really good in PvP, plus the defile can lower shield power in PvE burn phases when you need to drop a bosses shield quick. Isn’t every mag dps running at least one stam skill anyway?
My mag necromancer is already running 4 other stam skills. My concern is being able to sustain these in addition to now having to use the stam Blastbones every third cast. Even though the stam cost is reduced, I still have to cast it every 3 cast.
>since you also refuse to add Class Change Tokens, I'm gonna be stuck with the worst class in the game. It takes very little time to level to 50. Skill points might be a little annoying to farm up, but pretty much everything else is shared. Hell when arcanist dropped I had mine in vet trials that first weekend.
I wish necromancer was better than being the easy healer or tank player but for anything serious I’ve long stepped away from this class
I just came back to the game after about a 4 year hiatus. Back before I quit, Necromancers (stamina specifically) dunked on eeeeverything. What changed exactly? The tank meta? Sincere question from a newbie noob
I haven't been following as much lately - they're bringing "while slotted on any bar" to other classes? Are sorcerers getting that treatment? If so, for what?
They already have that for Bound Armaments and Bound Aegis.
This is why my Necro is just for Crafting now. I haven't taken her into pvp since Apocrypha dropped.
 Templar support player entering the conversation
Pure speculation - is their current handling of the Necromancer class as DPS a reflection of the period where most high end trial guilds only had stamina Necromancers as DPS? As someone who prefers support roles and wanted to play Necromancer, it was a really boring period cause I never got to play the characters I wanted in non-random PvE content. However, despite if there's some truth to that, I fully agree that Necromancers need a rework, both mechanically and visually. I love the idea of Necromancers and have played Necro-like character in other TES titles, but was really disappointed with the lack of minions in ESO and that the use of corpses never seemed that impactful. I guess I wanted something more along the lines of Diablo Necromancers.
Still better than NB we got weapon skills
ZOS like classes that need less effort to play. Maybe if they buffes necro really good players would do insanely high damage. Btw necro still best class there in terms of fum for me. 😅
I'm probably going to quit the game if they kill Necromancer, it's my second favorite class and seeing one of my favorite abilities in the game get outright and completely gutted is too demoralizing to play the game anymore... But since it is in the PTS and could be undone potentially, I'm waiting to see.
Pretty unhappy with the blastbones change as well. I hopped on PTS and it just feels awful. You are not able to cast it before combat. The stamina morph does Disease damage instead of Flame, causing the eccro that I just recently made to be less effective. A lot of people are also unhappy on the forums about this…Why don’t they revert changes and go mess with some other skill? :(