Diablo 3 Necromancer concept/ideas

I love the idea of his proposed Resource so much that I based the whole class around it.

I would really like to see a "dark", morally flexible class in Diablo 3 and I think the Necromancer would be a perfect fit. With a lot of people hoping for a class with a shapeshifting aspect, I also thought up something like this for a Diablo 3 Necromancer and I think it would fit the theme quite well.

Please post some comments on what to add/ change and I will edit this post.




Here is a quick mockup of the Resource:

100 Balance points.

Half black and half white. Some skills lower the balance while others raise it. You can't use certain skills anymore if there is an imbalance.


Main Stat: Vitality

At first I thought that a char with Vitality as main stat would be a bad idea, because the character would probably feel too tanky. After a quick check on d3planner.com it turned out, that even with all ancient items and Vit + Armor + AllRes on almost every piece you're only at ~27mio toughness. You have around ~2mio life, but you're really lacking Armor and AllRes compared to the other classes. This leads to a very low Recovery stat and probably would make the Necro a pretty bad melee character. With the help of some passives that reduce life by a certain percentage but increase your AllRes or Armor, this might be less of a problem though.

Skills:

Skills can either raise the balance or lower it.

Skills that damage an enemy directly raise the balance (you take someones life away), while summoning skills lower the balance (you give life to something).

Bone and Posion Skills

Teeth

Raise balance on hit.

Poison Nova

Bone Prison

Bone Armor

Your armor is increased by 20% for 60 seconds. Your balance is raised by 5 points everytime you are hit.

Curse Skills

I'm not sure how many curse skills there should be and what should be done with runes yet.


Amplify Damage
Increases damage taken of your target. Every cursed enemy raises your balance by 1 point every second.

Runes

• Iron Maiden (Damage dealt is damage received)
• Life Tap (Attacking a cursed soul gives you health)

Weaken

Decreases the damage the target can do. Every cursed enemy raises your balance by 1 point every second.

Runes

• Terror (Cursed enemy runs in fear)
• Decrepify (Targets Speed is reduced)

Vanish

The cursed enemies no longer hinder your movement. Your movement speed is increased by 15%. Raise balance by 5 points. Cooldown: 6 seconds.

This skill is something like a Spirit Walk curse, I can't think of a better mobility skill yet.

Sacrifice

Curse your self by reducing your own life in order to restore the balance by 30 points.

Summoning Skills

Raise Skeleton

Raise a skeleton at the position of you cursor that fights for you for 10 seconds. Lowers balance by 20 points.

Runes:

• Skeleton Army (Raise 3 skeletons that fight for 12 seconds)
• Skeletal Mage (Deal random elemental damage) This should maybe be a skill on its own.
• Giant Skeleton (Raise one giant skeleton for 30 seconds)
• Exploding Skeleton (Summon an unstable skeleton that explodes after 1 second)

Raise Golem

Passive: Raise a Golem that fights by your side. Lowers balance by 1 point every second.

Active: The Golem moves to the position of your cursor.

Runes:

• Clay Golem (More Damage)
• Blood Golem (Life Leech)
• Iron Golem (Maybe there is way for this to work with Legendary Affixes)
• Fire Golem (Burns the Ground it walks on)
• Teleporting Golem (Active attack teleports your Golem to the target destination)

Raise Demon

Raise a Demon that charges to the target position and deals damage on its path. Lowers balance by 20 points.

Would be a mixture of Phalanx and Zombie Charger. A skill that deals massive damage and "costs" resources.

Shapeshifting Skills

Vampre

Inspired by /u/Ceek4y and the Trang-Oul's Avatar set from Diablo 2

Passive: Transforms the Necro into a Demon. Adds life leech and increases Movement and Attack Speed. Lowers balance by 2 points every second.

Active: Cast a Fire Ball. Raises Balance by 5 points for every enemy you hit.

I don't know about skills like fire wall and meteor. They might be too similar to the wizard skills


Edit: Below are my old suggestions for a shapeshifting demon, but maybe it doesn't fit the necro theme very well.

Inner Demon

Passive: Transforms the Necro into a Demon. Adds Resistance to all Elements and Attack Speed. Lowers balance by 2 points every second.

Active: Attack with a powerful melee attack for 400% weapon damage. Raises Balance by 5 points for every enemy you hit.

Runes

• Fiery Demon (Attack becomes ~ Disintegrate - Orlash Style)
• Poisoned Demon (You release a vile stench that deals 500% weapon damage as Poison every second to enemies within 8 yards.
• Demonic Slaves (Summons two Demonic Slaves that fight by your side and are connected to you and to each other with a chain)
• Behemoth (Bigger, more damage)

Winged Terror

When in demon form, you grow a pair of wings and charge through enemies to the selected location. Lowers balance by 10 points.

Fires of Hell

When in demon form, you release a gigantic wave of power, dealing damage to all enemies 15 yards. Raises Balance by 2 points for every enemy hit.

Passives

As mentioned above, there should be somne passives to help the Recovery stat of a Vitality based class. Passives that restore some percentage of your life or that lower your life but increase your Armor/AllRes.

Items

I really like the idea of a set that doesn't support specific skills, but changes the way you play.

My idea would be a "Balance of Life" set, that increases your damage depending on how balanced your resources are. So if they are exactly 50/50, your damage is increased by 1000%, but if the difference is greater than 40/60 the damage increase is only 500%, down to 0% by 10/90.

This would probably be a 6pc set bonus, with the 4pc bonus balancing out your resources by 1 point every second or something like that.


Another set could be focused around your summoning skills, by making your Skeletons last until they die and increasing your pets' damage to cursed enemies. Supporting items could give Raise Skeleton the Skeleton Army rune or give your Golem the Teleporting rune.


I had a lot of fun writing down my ideas and I hope a lot of people join this discussion about possible skills for a Diablo 3 Necromancer. After hearing about the Witch Doctor in Diablo 3 I thought that there wouldn't be the need for another summoning class. But after writing down all this stuff I think that it would fit in the game quite well.

What are your thoughts?

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Hellfire amulets need to roll with a socket.

The rng possibilities on the amulet are absurd. And every single amulet needs a socket no matter what. Same with hellfire rings.

Honestly the idea of jewelry coming with a socket roll aside from any of it's primary/second affix slot isn't too bad. I know "ahh catering to even more casuals ahhhh", but even in a "lore" aspect it fits well. Imagine that each ring or amulet you find is just the base and the gem you socket into it is the stone one would actually find in a piece of jewelry.

Aside from the gameplay changes (which in my honest opinion, is not such an enormous change that deserves riot, you still need to find the right affixes, on top of ancient status, on top of builds that look for specific pieces such as Hellfire or Skull Grasp), the idea kind of makes sense.

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The leaderboards should have a snapshot of the gear and skills used when the GRift was completed.

When you view someone's profile from the leaderboards you can only see their currently equipped gear and skills, and it's usually not the same setup they used when they got their rank. The character model you see when holding your mouse over their spot in the leaderboard gives you the look of what gear they used, but there's no way to show the stats or skills. The items can even be transmogged to look like something else.

What's the point of keeping it secret when most of the builds end up as a youtube video anyways?

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[Idea] Compass Rose + Travelers Pledge set bonus should reveal the map

It'd be something unique, and different from the usual power creep. But if the set slowly revealed the map, it'd be a fun reason to have the pair on.

If it revealed the map instantly, people would snap it on, check the map and pick a direction. But if it did so in a process 3x faster than running in every direction from the arrival point, it'd be worth wearing.

Especially for doing bounties.

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Idea: An option to retire Non Harcore Characters?

With Season 1 coming to an end and Season 2 starting the only way to free up character slots will be to delete your season 1 heroes which seems like a really lame way to see off the character you've been grinding with for the last 5 months. It would be neat if there was a way to commemorate your hero like how ripped hardcore characters are listed.

Just an idea. Obligatory blizzard pls

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Would love a secret 'gold sink' like this.

Little things like this that we would all love to farm for... and since we already have boon of the hoarder... I want to spend some billions on something but Blizzard won't let us. We could only dream

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Make Area Damage a Different Color!

As a longtime proponent for the use of Area Damage as a useful stat, I think making area damage procs more visual would do much for revealing the actual damage done by this stat.

I know D3 devs don't like adding in new menu checkboxes. We already have "Show critical hits" and "show damage" the latter of which shows both damage dealt in white numbers and damage taken in red numbers.

At any given time a player can be seeing white, red, yellow, and green (healing) numbers, which can be overwhelming. I'm just asking that AD remain in the "damage" category, but much like how both damage dealt and taken are included in this I think including area damage as a blue color would be a great addition. In addition I think the AD number needs to hang around on the screen longer than a typical white damage number. Sometimes those are so fleeting it's hard to know how much damage you just did without recording and re-watching game play in slow motion.

Part of the reason I want this is because a lot of people see AD as a stat that is like magic find; it's just hard to know when it's working and how effective it is. If the player could see the numbers I think it would make this game mechanic easier to grasp, going from the intangible to the tangible.

So, I used my legit photoshop skills to make a mock up:

Original 

Blue Text 

I apologize that I didn't use a screenshot that also used crit numbers, but the screens were SO messy that it would have been tough to edit it. I also tried my best to match the font, but it wasn't perfect.

What do you guys think?

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Idea - Make Legendary Items Unrecognizable Before Identifying

I'm probably in the minority here, but I would love for legs to be unrecognizable. I feel like being able to identify the piece just by sight takes away a little something for me. It's kind of like ruining Christmas morning by knowing what I'm already getting, or finding out your wife is throwing you a surprise birthday party two weeks before the damn party.

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Suggestion: Have an In-game Library of Legendaries

With transmogrification coming out, a lot of us will be trying to find each legendary at least once to complete our library of item skins. Unfortunately, there's no in-game way to keep track of what legendaries you've yet to find.

I feel like Diablo could really play up the "collect 'em all" drive in a lot of us in order to motivate us to grind for more legendary drops. To achieve this, all we would need is an in-game library that has a list of all available legendary drops, possibly found under the Quest and Achievements button on the UI (or as a new use for the Book of Cain?). Legendaries you haven't found yet could have a question mark on their icon, their list item greyed out, their text missing, etc. A mouse-over of previously found items could show the item's standard affixes as well as what it could roll, effectively a built-in version of what's currently viewable in the online game guide.

As mentioned before, this would motivate players to play in order to complete their library of legendaries. Furthermore, players would become more familiar with what legendaries are out there, giving them drops to hope for.

Just an idea I had.. Discuss away!

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Lylirra, not everything has to be balanced.

At the bottom of this post, Lylirra asks what people might want in terms of Nephalem Rift balance.

So, on that note, what would you guys prefer?
Would you like Nephalem Rifts to be really, really rewarding, but in return not be able to run them as frequently?
Or would you like Nephalem Rifts to be somewhat rewarding, but in return you get the opportunity to run them more often?

Here's my answer: Why not both?

What if the default Rift is easy enough to get into and as such is a mediocre, default experience? It's viable, it's fun, it's just fine.

Why not go one step further and allow people to craft better Rifts? Let's get some Keystone recipes from the Mystic that we can use to buff the hell out of the Rifts if we want to.

Maybe there's a recipe where combining a Keystone with 10 brimstones makes legendaries 50% more likely to drop during the Rift opened by that now-buffed Keystone.

Maybe there's a recipe where combining a bunch of a certain type of gem with a Keystone switches smart drops to the relevant core stat. That way if you could farm that Rift for Int gear while running your Barb if you wanted to, which helps "fix" the issue of being unable to gear up your alt characters due to smart drops.

• The options are nearly endless and allow for all sorts of fun combinations and customization.
• Monsters do more damage but drop better loot.
• Monsters have more health but drop better loot.
• Buff experience multipliers based on how many mats you use.
• Turn every fifth monster into a boss of some sort for better drops.
• Allow you to run all three followers.
• You take double elemental damage but legendaries drop more often.
• Twice the mob density but no shrines.
• Elites have 5-6 affixes and drop more stuff.
• Elite packs always spawn in groups of two.

There's so much that can be done here. Part of the problem with D3 so far has always been that the developers make things so there's no flexibility. There's this one thing and it'll be done this one way. Trying to "balance" Rifts such that they're always the same in terms of risk vs. reward could very well leave us in the same position.

But by offering us some options people can get and do what they want. That way people can do the default Rifts if they want but they can also save up mats and do crazy Rifts if they think they can survive in order to make them more lucrative.

Thoughts?

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Kripp with some cool Diablo 3 end game ideas!

Kripp earned some points in my eyes for this video. He's saying what everybody else is thinking. This game has a serious end-game problem. People need extrinsic motivation to keep playing this game outside of "fun." Because in games like these that fun is going to be derived from a sense of accomplishment and the progress toward a goal. Finding a slightly better bracer is not a goal, it's a means to a goal.

I really hope Blizzard has a hard long reconsideration about their end-game, because it seriously seems like they feel champ pack hunting / gear farming is it, and it needs to be more deep than that. It's so hard to understand how they could imagine this as a true successor to Diablo II without the core component which made Diablo II such a mainstay. How could they not understand that ladders were the reason people kept playing.

Now they have an opportunity to build on concepts and lessons learned from World of Warcraft to bring us a truly exciting PvP experience. I want to believe they will do it right, but I am worried that Kripp is right. I'm worried that they're going to throw a 60% damage reduction on all abilities and call it a day.

Please don't let us down Blizzard! The core mechanics of this game are compelling. Now give me a reason to continue enjoying them. That might sound counter-intuitive, but it's honest.

An aside: I really enjoyed how excited he got about the game when discussing his ideas towards the end. That's the excitement of somebody who cares about games and gaming. I felt like I could relate to his excitement and was right there with him.

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