Following Travis’ list of Necromancer issues that are being looked at which we posted about, he has followed up with a few more points.
Diving into a thread on Reddit, Travis added the following points.
[BLUE]One of the top priorities for us internally was to make sure the necro felt like he had a much more active playstyle when interacting with his army compared to the Witch Doctor. One of the primary ways we wanted to accomplish this was giving Necros direct control over their minions, the design of Command Skeleton and Command Golem reflect this. You push a button and those guys do something to let you feel like you are commanding the army.
In the case of Skeletal Mage, we actually started out by having them be part of the normal undead army you summon back at Blizzcon but decided that they didn’t feel strong enough. Our solution to this was to carve them out, make them their own spell and have them be much more powerful than a standard skeleton.
Another thing we had to keep in mind during development was how many “things” you can have on screen at one time. I know it’s not the coolest of reasons from a players pov but making sure that 4 necros in a game together didn’t bring frame rate grinding to a halt is very important to us. So our goal was to set a reasonable limit on the number of units any given player could summon and then make them all feel powerful and awesome.
A side effect of us putting an upper bounds on the number of units that could be summoned was that Skeletal Mage needed a max unit cap so that someone with a Channeling Pylon or the likes couldn’t have 50 out at once. Since there is a cap on them it also makes people feel like anytime they aren’t at the cap they are “doing it wrong” which is certainly not the goal.
We will continue to discuss the assorted skeletons and Revive internally. Overall I think we are really happy with the necro but, as with any new feature, it will need some tweaks and tuning.
Hopefully that explanation helps :)[/BLUE]
On sets:
[BLUE]We will be doing a review of the sets. Currently considering removing the increased health cost portion of the blood set. The idea of the blood set was to double down on what makes blood spells cool and not “remove blood health costs”. Since you have increased health with the set you are already paying more health per cast with it then without so that’s currently at the top of my possibility list for that.[/BLUE]
On Dayntee’s Binding belt he commented:
[BLUE]We will talk about changing the belt, the original idea was to reinforce that Decrep should be the go to curse if you need survivability. That said opening up the item to allow for necros to use whatever curse they want, or to allow multiple necros to all feel like they are contributing while still using the belt seems like a solid idea.
The # hit = death was part of the early design of the skeletons. We wanted them to be crazy tanky like all pets but still feel like they died, because I mean… their skeletons… However since rift guardians who like to drop poop at their feet are killing them far faster than is ideal it is very likely we will just remove that flavor in favor of performance.[/BLUE]