Necromancy's wizard specialization is underpowered

[Agog_fr]

Hello to you.

Here is the Necromancy specialization:

Necromancy (opposed by Divination)
Passive bonus:
+2 to Undead Caster Level
Circle of Death scales as Pale Master (HD Cap = Caster Level if > 9)
Signature spell: Circle of Death and Undeath to Death
GSF bonus:
Necromancy summon stat bonuses double what regular GSF provides
Summons gain 15 + (Wizard Level/2) Spell Resistance
ESF bonus: 5 + Wizard Level % chance to create two Dread Mummies with Mummy Dust instead of one

Let's compare it with the Enchantment specilization:

Enchantment (Opposed by Illusion)
Passive bonus: bonus to dominated creatures similar to summon scaling based on spell foci
Signature spell: Good Hope and Crushing Despair
GSF bonus: Dominate Person/Monster duration increases to hours per level
ESF bonus:
Crushing Despair gains 2 + 1 per 10 levels for a debuff
Good Hope gains
2 + 1 per 15 base Leadership + Skill Foci ranks for skills/saves
+1 per 15 base Leadership ranks ranks for AB/Damage

For the players on the discord with whom I have conversed, Enchantment is clearly superior to Necromancy.

Good Hope buffs them more with Leadership. Crushing Despair is much better. Dominated monsters are dominated forever (30 hours).

While for Necromancy, we gain :

+2 to Undead Caster Level

I don't know what precise effect it means.

Signature spell: Circle of Death and Undeath to Death

Circle of Death is negligible, the damage the Summons do is much higher. Undeath to Death is cool bonus but very situational.

Necromancy summon stat bonuses double what regular GSF provides

This is very good. I guess it comes from +3 AB, AC etc. (Epic specialisation) to +6 thanks to this.

Summons gain 15 + (Wizard Level/2) Spell Resistance

Some SR (Something like 15 + 27/2, that is 28.5 SR). That's not bad, but 28 is much lower than the 42 SR you get with sequencers. This bonus is obsolete now that Sequencers exist.

That said! After discussion on the discord, no it is not useless. It protects in pvp against spells cast via scrolls. Which are low level (13 I think for World of Faith). Which means that WoF only has a 30% chance of working. So maybe in the end it's a good feature!

ESF bonus: 5 + Wizard Level % chance to create two Dread Mummies with Mummy Dust instead of one

This is an interesting feature, but it is based on chance. A level 27 Wizard would only gain a 32% chance of summoning two mummies. Per rest.

Compare this to Plannar Conduit. This feat summons two summons instead of one, with a 100% chance of success.



I suggest to consider raising the probability of success to 100%, like Planant Conduct. The goal is to value this specialization school.

[WanderingPoet]

I think you're misunderstanding something about mummy dust. What it summons is dependant on what stream you chose.

For most of them, it summons one T7 and two T6. That %chance is to summon two T7 and one T6.

Compare to Conjuration which has the same percent chance to summon two T7 conjuration summons.

https://wiki.nwnarelith.com/Mummy_Dust

4 (max) Summon Streams: Wraith / Skeleton
3 (max) Summon Streams: Zombie / Ghoul / Mummy / Drowned
2 (max) Summon Streams: Wight / Vampire / Ghost
1 (max) Summon Streams: Abomination / Beast Revenant

I'm not sure what that UCL bonus does for necromancers though, it looks like it does nothing at all though, since you get max UCL just from having mummy dust.

Also not sure what it means if you do one of the 1 (max) ones, do you get two? I imagine not.

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Also, a free casting of circle of death that slays 30d4 worth of creatures (or 27d4, if you're dipping), and 8d6 aoe heal to your summons is alright, good for clearing out mid level mobs while travelling, or even straight up killing one high end enemy in a dungeon. Keeping in mind that it's an average of 67.5 HD - which means you're killing 2-3 enemies that are level 27, or more if they're lower.

Undeath to Death is really good against undead. Undead are very common. It's decent, but hey, free explode a few undead is always nice.

[AstralUniverse]

UCL doesnt do anything at all once you have the mummy dust feat. It's meant to give you stronger undead tiers 2 levels sooner when you're leveling, and it's very meaningful for leveling pre-epic, but that's it.

[-XXX-]

Necromancy specialists can take some of the most powerful summons available in the game and dial them to 11.
Giving up divination is a real tradeoff here as the wizard becomes vulnerable to some spells and abilities that target their player's awareness of the situation, which can be really dangerous.

Enchantment specialists are as close to vanilla wizards as it gets - they get all the specialist perks while none of the spells they are giving up are really essential. When compared to necromancy specialists they give up less and get less in return.

I wouldn't say that this is a clear cut "one's stronger than the other" kind of deal. One just gives up more in return for greater upside than the other. It's very much playstyle dependant.


That being said, I never liked the needless variance in summons tied to conju and necro specialists - either the necro specialist has been balanced around having two tier 7 undead summons*, or not. The variance here does not seem to be adding anything balance related - it only reduces the QoL of these classes for seemingly arbitrary reasons.

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*and the conju specialist having two tier 6 conduit summons

[Svrtr]

Necromancy specialists can take some of the most powerful summons available in the game and dial them to 11.
Giving up divination is a real tradeoff here as the wizard becomes vulnerable to some spells and abilities that target their player's awareness of the situation, which can be really dangerous.

Enchantment specialists are as close to vanilla wizards as it gets - they get all the specialist perks while none of the spells they are giving up are really essential. When compared to necromancy specialists they give up less and get less in return.

I wouldn't say that this is a clear cut "one's stronger than the other" kind of deal. One just gives up more in return for greater upside than the other. It's very much playstyle dependant.


That being said, I never liked the needless variance in summons tied to conju and necro specialists - either the necro specialist has been balanced around having two tier 7 undead summons*, or not. The variance here does not seem to be adding anything balance related - it only reduces the QoL of these classes for seemingly arbitrary reasons.

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*and the conju specialist having two tier 6 conduit summons

I and many others would disagree. Ench spec gives up very little, but gains the best benefits. It gains a bonus spell slot of every level, and the hilariously amazing goodhope that gives +2 AB and damage to everyone in their party and 4 to skills and saves.

You'd be right in saying people don't play ench spec to be an enchanter. They play it because its just better wizard and even better summons, which is why it is arguably better than necro spec. It gives up little, but it gains quite a bit, just nothing that is immediately apparent at first parse

[Vangrave]

I think it's pretty well known at this point that specialists are generally pretty terrible, barring enchanter and illusionist. Some of them are more atrocious than others (Conjurer, transmuter, evoker), some are alright as an RP choice (particularly divination), but in general they aren't especially well thought out, either for enhancing RP or mechanically.

RP-wise, 3 of them are disallowed from being good - and one of those three isn't a necromancer. Good/neutral wizards lean super heavily onto conduit, which isn't an option for evokers, transmuters, or abjurers, forcing them all to be evil, while an actual necromancer can choose not to use undead, which, comically enough, makes their RP more flexible.

Mechanically the bonuses are also often not accomplishing anything sensible. We can use transmuter as one example - its epic spell focus and perks give you extra stat points from zoo spells and basically enhance nothing else useful...but then you lose the only summons that really benefit from the extra stat points, as undead are already at the str buff cap from negative energy burst plus mass zoo spells. Let's not even start about the generally non-functional melee aspect.

Likewise, conjurer's dropping transmutation spells used for enhancement, while enchanters pick up an extra one, leaving it so that conjurers are actually worse at summoning than enchanters, given that they're missing out on 3-4 ab from their summons.

By the way, this isn't to say that enchanter is overpowered - after the DC changes it's probably the only wizard worth choosing, aside from maybe an illusionist that doesn't take any illusion spell focus feats. This post was just to point out just how poorly constructed specialists generally are.

So necromancer isn't really alone in being bad. It's just a general truth of wizard specialists.

[JustMonika]

As far as I can tell they're not 'bad'.

They might not be optomised for PvP, but that's such a tiny fragment of the servers content as not to be super relevent, and even then we're always assuming a prepared and buffed opponent of a similar level, which reduces the % of PvP even further.

Given how many, many class combinations Arelith has, it's a wonder its anywhere as close to balenced as it is. You'll find professional game studios turning much, much less well balenced content with 10% of the variety that Arelith has.

[-XXX-]

IMO the thing here is... wizards are fairly lackluster ATM in general.

They need to lean heavily into summons one way or another, so it'd come down to which version has better pets.
Can the enchanter specialist conjure or dominate anything that would be better than two tier 7 frost wights with SR30 and extra buffed stats?

[Xerah]

Specialists were never a good choice, but players always took them. We wanted to give them some minor buffs so they could at least have a niche function. These updates happened almost 2 years ago before spellswords and warlocks had their own class, before invoker, and before all the summon reworks.

Obviously, they should get another look at the new status of things, but it's more of a systematic issue with wizards than:

"aren't especially well thought out"

[Babylon System is the Vampire]

As far as I can tell they're not 'bad'.

I'm currently leveling my fifth specialist, a necromancer. I have played an enchanter, a abjurist, a divinist, and a evoker all to the mid epics-30, the last three when I was bored enough to kill some monsters but didn't have the time to get heavily involved. And I can tell you two things with absolute certainty. 1, I don't think abjurist and divinist are words, and 2, your instinct is spot on. They are not that bad. I don't think I would even try a transmuter or a conjurer though.


Could they get some looking over for balance's sake? Sure, but Xerah is right. Most of the issue stems from the fact that arelith shifted toward a melee centric balance. Spell swords are better than wizards. The debate could end right there without ever getting into the specialists at all

But since we are here, I personally would rank them like this.

1) Diviner
2) Abjurer
3) Enchanter
4) necromancer
5) Evoker
6) Conjurer
.
.
.
.
7) Transmuter (the bonuses are just not enough for it to do its thing)


I realize that two may be massively disputed because of its lack of summons but find a friend to level with and you have one of the best pvp wizards ever.

[Hazard]

I haven't thought very long and hard about this, but ..
I kinda wish specialties didn't outright ban you from a school, and instead acted more like Shadow Weave does where it gives you -6 CL and DC from the prohibited schools (or some amount, more/less).

Totally losing access to a school in a tabletop game isn't such a big deal, but in a persistant roleplaying world it is kind of a huge deal, and the benefits while really cool just don't seem worth gimping yourself over.

I dunno. Just my really uninformed opinion. I think it would be more fun, though.