Any viable (currently) Necronomiconomics build?

I think I haven't taken Necro past the first day and dropped it after a couple uses of the first ability. I know it's getting some tweaks soon because it's too self-destructive, but I was wondering if anyone has had any success with a mostly-necro build.

 

The damage curses can be countered by certain kinds of armor, (Maybe even just regular damage resist armor) as long as you dont stack them too deep. I have tried it a few times and usually such characters end up dead before they can become viable. But i keep looking for a way to make a decent build with it. (Mostly trying random skills + necromancy.)

If i was going to custom-build a set for it, would probably include staves, necronomiconomics, fungal arts, assassination, wand lore, burglary, and one of ley walker, blood mage, or magical training.

That build is more of a 'themed' build and not so much a 'what is the best possible build for this type of character' burglary could be swapped with artful dodger or mathemagics possibly to make more sense 'character' wise.

 

No, there is no viable build currently. The damage isn't the tough part, the curses reduce your health max and mana max as well, and can't be negated.

Use other magic's until they fix up Necro. Unless you just wanna jack around with a short lifespan .

 

Actually YES, necro is way more powerful than what people give it credit for. While it's spells are crap, it's 2 buff are quite awesome for a melee, specifically a staves build.

First let's look at Mark of Chthon
requirements mp="16" magPowBuff="0.37" mincost="4" (Bad spelling means it's mana stays at 16 always)
It cost 1 mana every 3 turns, for 1 Burliness, 4 blocks, 1 armor, and 2 necromatic damage, 2 necromantic resist, and 30% chance of nightmare. Note: Can be stacked twice.

Nightmare - asphyxiative damage =1 + (0.38*magic power), also sleeps.

It give a fairly reliable sleep for an unforgiving mana cost, but that's not why we use necro of course.


Second is the monstrous Pact of Fleeting Life

requirements mp="11" magPowBonus="0.27" mincost="4"
3 Burliness
13 hp
90% chance to Pact Lifesteal

Pack Lifesteal - Leech = 1 + (0.65*magic power)

Now if you dual Staves, you can easily get that magic power up to 37 (yes keep it right there), that is literally 25 leech damage, or 22.5 expected.

The primary draw back is 1 necropain, which is
necromantic damage =1 + (0.15*magic power), 6 necro pain damage, OUCH. But don't worry, Mark of Chthon already blocks 4, so you just need 2 from another source to enjoy the massive amount of super leech damage for 0 drawback. Get 4 and you can skip a Mark of Chthon and still enjoy it's effect.

You still need max blood magic to keep this up of course, and there are few minor debuffs, but it's well worth it.

 

Aye, exactly what @123stw said, don't use this as a "magic" build, the damaging projectiles are horrible atm. But if you use it as a support for another type of build, like his epic staves build, then it'll work fine.

 

Lol it wasn't my idea to make pretty much everything, even assassination, scale with magic power. So you are kinna stuck with staves unless you are building some pure melee with no tricks whatsoever. Or maybe an unarmed with 2x orb of nothingness. Actually now that I think about it that's not a bad idea at all. It always had good activation and stats and are only lacking in damage, the massive leech damage should nicely make up for this weakness.

Now imagine they make necropain even less "self destructive" so I don't need Mark of Chthon at all. That will just be ridiculous.

 

Hmm, I'll try adding it to one of my monk builds just for the buffs, I hope they make the spells useful in the future though, I don't want promethean to stand as the "main" mage skill (I know about maths, but gold diarrhea is not the same as fireballs and explosions) Thanks for the tips

 

I believe they stated in the Laundry Day post that they were going to tone down the side effects of the Necronomiconomics spells that are having problems.

 

I had a pretty good run with Necro/Astrology/Blood/Ley/Sight/Mushroom/Alchemy. Granted it was supposed to be a miserable GR-PD run, I was able to kill a lot of enemies easily using the sleep spell, and mushrooms and blood magic kept me supplied with plenty of mana. I ended up getting myself killed by using the mask spell and getting trapped by a robot hero, but up to then it wasn't so self destructive that I couldn't get anywhere.

Also surprised there aren't any Necromantic resistance gains when you level up the tree.

 

Nightmare Curse seems like a less overpowered version of Curse of the Golden Ratio. It's a shame that the debuff reduces both maximum mana and magic power. What's the point of calling up some evil power if it's weaker every time you do it?

Necronomiconomics, the way I imagine it, should be a bunch of spells with very cheap mana costs in exchange for other debuffs. The problem right now is the other debuffs either make repeated casts worthless or outright kill you.

I'd suggest making Deathly Hex/Nightmare Curse do a straight cut to maximum health/mana. Spamming Deathly Hex would leave you weak but that's a risk you may want to take as a caster. Nightmare Curse would be usable for bursts but you'd have to decide how much maximum mana you need for other spells while you wait for the debuffs to lift.

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Regarding viable builds: one idea I had was to use Wand Lore with Necro and then get as many Zodiacal Wands as possible.

 

Combining Necro with Wand Lore is a good idea, while you wait for an actual fix. On the other hand, I have played games where I never saw even one zodiacal wand for the first few levels -- any strategy that requires you to be 'lucky' to be effective, is a pretty weak one (that's one of the reasons why I'm learning to hate Smithing as well -- too many games where steel and the resources to create it just aren't to be found have soured me on it). I'd just wait for the skill to be fixed first.

 

Wand Lore has a skill to randomize the type of a wand so that shouldn't be too much of an issue.

I just hate the idea of managing the entropy of all the wands. 80 rounds is way too long for the recharge skill considering it also has a debuff. I think I'll just edit mine down to 60 and then have a go.

 

Necromancy is fine

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eRDTPZLgAs

 

The first character I cleared the game with (on easiest difficulty and non-permadeath, herpaderp ) used Necromancy quite a bit later on.

I used Suit Up (from Master of Arms) + Meat Shield (Fleshsmithing) to get life regen to negate much of the costs and wore an enchanted Vampire Hunter hat to negate the self-damage penalties.

Also the last Necro spell is pretty crazy...
Basically infinite Squid Bolts that travel through walls, but at high cost.

Oh and I used Swordsmanship, not staves.
The Vampiric effect from Necro is awesome even without dualwielding.

 

I tried to create a necromancer character, but at character level 8, so far he has vastly more important skills to get than necromancy. Im not sure what the average level cap for the end of the game should be, but if its not atleast level 16, then i dont think the character i created to be a necromancer is going to be very viable. Lol.

Turned out that other skills were more useful/cheaper/safer to use in the early game which is what kept this character alive long enough to have pondered even turning to the dark side, but it might simply be too late. There may very well be too much good in his heart to ever dabble in the darkly arcane.

Current Skill Level - Skill
2 - Staves (Got a mace that is way more powerful than staves skill entirely, stopped adding)
4 - Mathemagic (Wants L5 teleport)
1 - Necronomiconomics (The whole point of this topic.. but.. other things too tempting)
1 - Astrology (To provide sight radius and anti-necromancy resist)
2 - Assassination (Needed sneaky shiv for stuns)
2 - Fungal Arts (Needed pet)
2 - Alchemy (Wants level 5 for crafting staves, dosnt use potions at all)

 

Lol just beat the game with an necro. Nightmare Curse dominates the first half of the game, then Tenebrous Rift Spam = Instant Win. End up not using Pact of Fleeting Life much because Tenebrous Rift kills everything and is so spammable. That thing kills so much faster than Obvious Fireball it's not even funny.

Now I feel that Necro is OP, as long as you got archeology to grind 1 necro defense on 5 or 6 gears, you stop taking those return damage entirely.

 

Saying that one skill is overpowered based on another skill which is slightly broken and confirmed to be overpowered is a bit silly. But we get what you mean i think, and that is that the viability of the spells depend on your gear. Thats both a good and a bad thing. Its great when it works, you feel like you are growing in power. Negating the damage you do to yourself seems like an improvement. But when it dosnt work, it fails miserably and people think that makes it useless.

So.. building the right gear loadout to use it is going to require a lot of luck, which means it probably wont be very viable until late game. At which point you will have to decide whether or not to 'go back' to pick up some of its weaker skills at the point in which you need the more powerful ones, when there are other skills you could be taking.

Still sounds a bit tricky to balance so that every character who takes it has some viability in it. Someone else posted a nice suggestion though: Maybe the skills should rely more on curses that dont do a ton of direct damage to you, but simply make your character weaker as they keep stacking, until they wear off. Spells that may reduce max health, max mana, sagacity, strength, dodge (speed) vision, those sorts of things. They already do this to some degree, i havnt tested the really high level ones yet though.

Not claiming to know the solution, but if we collectively toss out enough ideas we will eventually come up with a good middle ground that dosnt involve making every spell in the game an identical clone of eachother.

 

@ mysterious person whose name i forgot (sorry!) Send an email to Derek: contact (at) gaslampgames (dot) com and see if he can figure out why your account has become all mysterious. Maybe its from all that dabbling on the dark side.. your soul has become lost in time and space.

 

It was probably due to the hiccup the forum had a couple of hours ago where it looked like a bunch of topics were lost and then restored.

 

Necroing this dead topic.

Wouldn't you be fine with just these skills:

1. Necro 2. Wands 3. Arch 4. Burg 5. Math 6. Blood 7. Magic Training or Astrology

Your entire early game is wand/nightmare centric, mid to late game you could end up going more melee with pact or hybrid or just spell spam if you got any amount of luck.

Really the problem with Necro is that it takes a bit more thought, some times luck, and micromanagement.

And as for a certain person saying that nightmare curse is a weaker version of golden ratio, well nightmare does kind of CC and is cheaper, also comes a lot earlier. You can easily clear levels 1-3 with just nightmare curse alone ;(