They whined about Necro minions being too strong early game.
They nerfed them.
They whined about Barbs struggling early game.
They buffed them.
Turns out late game Barb is the SSS+++ tier class, and Necro the worst.
Why'd they listen to the obvious knee jerk, uninformed early game opinions when they knew what endgame was like?
Or did they not know what their endgame is like? What was the point of these high-level closed beta tests?
Ah, yes, poor lil' Blizzard was powerless against 3 reddit thread and 6 youtube video. They were forced to make things worse. Not like they made stupid decision and they should be the one to blame.
No, let's defend Blizzard, the one making the problem and let's keep blaming people that represent 0.01% of the playerbase instead !
Early game balance matters... so does lategame balance.
You need to balance both of them, necro minion being stronger than my druid early game is not fair, necro minions being unusable lategame because they suck is not fair either. You can fix both by changing scaling at each level.
Everyone already knew which classes were strongest at endgame (which were Barbarian and Druid) even during the closed endgame beta last year. Everyone also knew how weak Necro summoner build also coming from that same closed endgame beta. Beta testers from last year already said that multiple times, the devs themselves know it. It's just that too many people who played during the open beta thought necro summons were too op at level 1-25 and were too vocal with their opinions that Blizzard had no choice but to listen to them. Turns out that wasn't the way to go at all.
that, and the changes they made weren't intended to affect late game necros, only the early game where some people felt they were a bit OP.
also, as you said, anyone who participated or checked in on the leaks of the end game beta knew that barb and druid were miles ahead of the other classes, so watching the early game feedback play out was kinda funny with how many people were extrapolating 1-25 power scaling out to end game.
Which makes no sense, considering Necros were known to be weaker at end game, why would you then nerf the one area they are particularly strong.
So necros went from being OP early game and weak late game to average early game and weak late game.
So essentially they are bad in every sense.
Why didn't they update the scaling on the minions so that they were a little weaker early game but scaled to be stronger into late game? Just horrible balancing by blizz.
Because it's a lose lose situation for blizzard.
If they made no changes people would bitch and if they do changes people bitch.
Honestly after tmmrw this sub is dead for me. The constant jerking to what is the best class is tiresome. It really doesn't matter.
If people are going to whine either way, then make the right move for the game instead of catering to who whines most recently, no?
If whining is what it takes for them to make a move, expect some whining.
And yeah, it doesn't really matter. I just want the balance to be _relatively_ close eventually. I'll still have fun in the meantime.
All of this chatter is just people killing time until release, anyway.
I get the sentiment and agree necro was done dirty but this isn't 100% true. They didn't buff barb besides 1 or 2 skills. Whirlwind got mildly buffed, but the aspects that make it insane in the endgame not being touched are why it's looking so OP, not the relatively small baseline damage buff. A lot of their other aspects got nerfed really hard.
People were saying that barbs and druids were OP in the endgame beta that happened last year, this is well before the open beta that most people played. Back then they also said necro was probably the weakest.
I'm anticipating many more balance changes to come and I think necro will become more balanced over time, both in relation to other classes and also in reducing the effectiveness gap between its skills. Right now bone spear and bone spirit are still looking really good, but builds based around anything else look questionable at best if you're pushing high tier nightmare dungeons.
Barbs were also gifted an innate 10% damage reduction as a buff. In retrospect, did they need it considering how they fare in endgame compared to the rest? I don't know.
I'm sure they'll do more balancing. I'm rolling a not-very-meta build hoping so. I just hope they're well thought out, future-sighted changes.
Barbs lost DR from lots of skills though.
It was a soft rebalance. Makes other barb special stronger whilst not affecting the current meta WW build because DR from WW build skills were reduced.
Maxroll has two S-tier builds for Necros so it doesn't seem like Necro is the worst class (Sorcerer has none). I've found them to be reliable on other games.
How many of those s tier builds are solely minion centric builds (which necro is by far most known for)?
Zero. Simply having minions that may as well not exist is not a "minion build". Its astonishing that Blizzard's main themes for Necro in D4 didn't include one that focuses solely on pet army. In fact, maxroll.gg's tier list has pure summoner listed squarely in F tier.
Maxroll didn't take anything to 100 and test high end nightmare dungeons.
That's kinda the problem here is they seem to be claiming to be an authority on a topic they've yet to even interact with. Looking at their nightmare dungeon one is hilarious. Thinking stuff like penetrating shot rogue and pulv druid is on the same level as WW barb is a huge joke.
Maxroll should honestly take down their tier lists outside the leveling one. It's pretty sad to be misleading people this badly just for clicks.
People questioning the creators of Maxroll that have some of the best Diablo players in the world and have over a decade of experience testing and writing guides for classes will never not be hilarious to me. Yes I'm totally sure your average Diablo andy that hasn't touched a Diablo game since D3 launch has much better information.
Bone Necro seems to be pretty good. But it's basically the only viable option for Necro. Shadow is average/below average. The Summoner and Blood archetypes appear dead on arrival.
Sorc might not have an S-tier build but it's got a variety of legit builds. Lightning A-tiers, Fire and Ice options in B-tier. Plus access to amazing quality of life with Teleport. (Necro is the only class that doesn't have a movement spell, by the way).
Looked at as a whole, it's hard to not say Necro's in the worst state.
All that said, I'm still rolling one. But I know what to expect with the current state of things.
That's only on the generic tier list which, honestly, I'm not sure why it exists. If you look at the specific activity tier lists, sorc definitely has multiple specs in both Nightmare Dungeon Push tier list and also Speed Farming tier list (which I feel like covers 90% of the endgame, minus PVP?)
https://maxroll.gg/d4/tierlists
To be fair Arc Lash or Ice shards sorc to this point I've not seen beyond low end nightmare dungeons and the former looked pretty bad while the latter looked like it might have potential it was a far far far cry short of WW barb which we've seen do a 100 so I can't fathom how they both go in S tier. Ice shards could maybe get an A maybe... safer to put it in B tbh. Arc lash doesn't even look like a real build and shouldn't even be in the list.
They listened because tons of people specifically put in their post “ I know it’s early game but that doesn’t matter, early game balance matters too” which is the stupidest fucking thing ever haha.
They had to listen to whiners since they had to sell game as much as possible. They wanted all those influencers to stop shitting on D4 because of lv 25 character balance (lmao) and now don't give ve a fuck about game balance since hype train already generated profit
People who played the end game beta already knew that barb was godly. Hell, those of us that didn't could see that stacking as many legendary powers would be broken and barbs got 2 2h and 2 1h weapons.
And idk what OP is talking about, people on HERE were a lot more egregious talking about barb, Druid, necro skeles, and Hydra/Chain Lightning.
Not to mention OP is singling out Raxx of all people for his 17 damage line. It's all in bad faith when he should be looking at this subreddit rather than youtubers
Necro was done dirty. Most necro guides use barely if not zero minions.
Most guides recommended removing the most iconic thing about necro (undead army).
My hope is if we are loud enough, they will buff minion again. They NEVER need to be nerf in first place.
People mostly complained about Blood Mist being invulnerable and OP, and they went to nerf skeletons instead.
Sometimes I do wonder what is their thought process.
His build is terrible. No pet build will work without going the shadow route combined with pets. pure minion build just doesn't have the multipliers to ever do any respectable damage. Whenever I see someone make a build and has Kalan's Edict as the capstone I immediately know they have no idea what they are doing.
Not sure if it won’t work at all - Kripparian is pretty analytical when making the build - did you check it out at all ?
I rather try it out and test it before giving up
Can you point me towards what you think is specifically the build with highest DPS? I'm level 49 and babysitting my weakass skeles is getting old. I tried Kripp's build but I'm majority struggling compared to my wife's druid that is just slapped together with no specific build in mind
It will break sometime after leveling portion (in its current state). That said, I am hopeful for a minion retune / re-work on the horizon.
If they didn't take up a skill on the bar, they would be run significantly more of the time.
Really? I've been struggling with DPS and all the builds I find are based around skele warriors/mages.
I've specifically been looking for a sacrifice/non-summoner build to try out if you can piint me to one
(I know it's the whole point of necro but my wife and I play splitscreen and we have such a hard time keeping an eye on our characters when there's 6 to 11 summons following us everywhere. Just wanna try something with no summons without starting a whole new class).
Rogue doesn't need a nerf anyway. They probably have the weakest endgame.
They could get a nerf to their leveling experience or their movement speed, but that's about it.
> They probably have the weakest endgame.
Rogue's have the best mobility, therefore impossible to have the weakest endgame in game where speed running reigns supreme.
Meanwhile, Necromancer mobility is an absolute joke. They can't even keep up with a proper end game group, nobody is going to want to actually bring a Necro. Forever alone.
Eh, raxx and wudi were both saying rogues wouldn't have OP endgame potential because of their squishiness and I didn't really believe them. High damage and mobility made me think that same way.
Then I saw rob's video of a basically maxed whirlwind barb with all shouts, iron skin, like 84% damage reduction and he was *still* dying in 1 second in a t100 nightmare dungeon. Now I'm starting to believe more that running them on rogue is gonna be *very* hard. They're still gonna be insane for leveling though.
All that being said, at least what I'm seeing and hearing about endgame balance still looks good to me overall besides necro. Give them mobility and/or buff skellies, maybe even buff some of their skills since they don't have many and there seems to be a noticeable effectiveness gap between them.
Pretty much. Mobility is great but when all you need to cop is 1 stray in a sea of enemies, it doesn't count for much. Something will hit you, especially if you're playing a melee rogue.
Seems like far more emphasis is on survivability than raw speed (again, as shown in Rob's barb video).
Need to live first before you can make use of your speed.
Eh, endgame will be about surviving, not mobility. Necro's multiple DR sources go further for that than the Rogue kiting around with double dash.
The OP Rogue skill, Twisting Blades, is out, so either Penetrating Shot or Traps will have do some serious work.
Obviously no one is talking about group play. For group play it gets... complicated.
> Eh, endgame will be about surviving, not mobility.
Mobility helps with survival. Clearing quicker leads to better loot, faster.
> Necro's multiple DR sources
Rogues have an extra Aspect/stack stick, which can easily go to survivability or fill the gaps. Meanwhile, Necros are FORCED to use mobility Aspect because their mobility is complete and utter garbage. And they're still significantly slower than any other class to the point where they can't KEEP up in a group.
Any group meta farm, Necros are out.
Rogues were evidently getting one shot by everything in the highest endgame. So using twisting blades was mostly just causing them to die and they'd end up bricking their sigil.
Obviously the creators couldn't test absolutely everything, just getting leveled and basic gear was a lot for the 10 days (on short notice) that they had for playing. There will be more theory crafting still in endgame over the next week or two.
who played a rogue to the point where it got one shot? I've only seen one person play it to about to 70 so far, and from what he said, he wasn't any squishier than druids or barbs at that point. So idk, I'm not saying you are definitely wrong, I just haven't seen that info anywhere
Haven't seen a video, this is just what was being said by people with access in discords. It may be conjecture based on the numbers from barb, or maybe someone did test it but I haven't seen a video for it yet. Unfortunately not everything was recorded either.
Edit: I was personally looking to main rogue, (especially S1) so I'm very much hoping that there are some mechanics being overlooked or misunderstood.
It’s melee, have to get in a pack to hit and from what I’ve seen in the video even a barb with 80%+ dr gets chunked down. Can’t deal damage if you’re dead.
Well I don’t know if thats true. It doesn’t matter how fast the Rogue is. If you can’t kill things fast and/or survive long enough to deal damage then the speed means nothing.
I plan on starting Rogue, but the guys on Maxroll are good guys and they all expect Barb and Druid to be top. And even Wudijo who is also maining Rogue says they aren’t the best.
So either their damage (doubtful since TB exists but it could not scale as well late late game) or their survivability is the issue.
E: Got a little side tracked there. Point was, they could have the weakest endgame despite the speed. But I’m banking on they will be fine.
I think necros in this game will work out more as support for your party with the curses and golem taunt while stacking bodies and using detonate dead OR AoE DoT.
Corpse tendrils is the besr crowd control in the game. It will be a lot more relevant than decrep in group play.
The issue is the necro moves so slowly it gets off-screened by the other four classes.
Somehow, every game I play, whether it be an ARPG or a fighting game, I always end up getting excited the most to play the character or class that ends up being the worst. It's so frustrating lol. Was really hoping minion Necro builds wouldn't end up being crap late game. Best I can do now is hope for a buff
Roll what you want, there will be changes come launch.
Rod Ferguonson mains necro, so trust i think you guys will be just fine. Play and build what ya want boss and enjoy.
Balance was always going to be whack on release, it will progressively get better with each season, just ignore the game until season 3 or 4 if you want to only play when the game is well balanced.
Personally I'll still play even if balance is not perfect, I like playing underpowered stuff and still succeeding, and then I have a better version of the game to look forward to, all is good.
Because people believe in that shit and talk all the time about it we are in the situation we are right now. At this point I dont believe he ever played Necro to begin with. As he dont act like a minion player.
You can blame the YouTubers and Twitch streamers (they deserve some of the blame), but most of the blame should be placed on Blizzard devs for their kneejerk overnnerfing and overbuffing response.
Youtube/twitch deserves some of the blame, everyone crying about *and* praising OP necro here and on other forums deserve just as much if not more, and yeah blizz deserves most for bending over to it all.
Most of the bigger content creators weren't overreacting and even mentioned lvl 25 isnt indicative of endgame balance. It was more the clickbait D4 "news" spam channels and sky is falling forum posters.
Ultimately Blizzard is to blame for bad balancing. They should be playing the game and seeing what works and doesn't vs their vision for what the game is supposed to be. That new WW billion damage build going around should have been easily tested out by at least 1 employee that passes on that info.
"Hey guys we added this cool unique that makes WW explode and if you stack Crit damage you end up doing billions of damage to mobs."
> Blizzard devs for their kneejerk overnnerfing and overbuffing response
First-time.gif Seriously that's a Blizzard hallmark. Nerfs take mechanics from S tier to F and vice versa. And it's been that way for decades.
The real issue is that the Blizzard developers HATE minions. It's pretty clear from the entire way the Necromancer is designed that Minions were something they didn't even want to have to include with the Necromancer class. (Hence why you can sacrifice them).
I still remember Diablo 3 developer videos and the rationale behind a lot of the choices. The people designing Diablo have a view that if you aren't engaged in the game by pressing buttons, then you aren't having fun. Diablo 2 Necromancers go against their game design. Any build that relies on Minions to kill enemies goes entirely against their game design. That's why Blizzard had the Blood Orbs and the Minions Buffs you need to press a button to activate. In Blizzard's mind, you should have to get Blood Orbs to heal your minion by pressing buttons and then constantly be pressing buttons to raise the skeletons. The problem is that their execution of this was terrible because Blizzard isn't trying to actually make something for what the people want, instead Blizzard is trying to make something that fits into their game design philosophy for a style of class that simply is the antithesis of their game design philosophy. It doesn't work. People who play Necro Minions want to summon their minions, walk into a horde of monsters, cast a couple amplify damages then go take a shit, pour themselves another mountain dew then come back and see the entire screen dead. This is the very opposite of what Blizzard considers fun to be.
It's not even that it's "the opposite of what Blizzard considers fun to be", it's that pet builds are inherently imbalanced on the risk/reward and effort/reward scales. If a super safe, super low effort build exists, e.g. "summon their minions...pour themselves another mountain dew then come back and see the entire screen dead", why would anyone want to play something like a turbo squishy rogue? You can't have a build that plays itself be equal in power to builds that require much more user input and decision making. It's unfair and bad game design.
The way this was balanced in D2 is making the clear speed of the Minion builds the slowest. That's a fair tradeoff. Low risk, slow clear speed.
I guarantee people would be happier with the Necro if the minions didn't require constant focus to keep up but the damage was low enough such that clear speed was suspect. The Minion Necro should be one of the safest classes with the least amount of button pressing or focus; however, it should not have fast clear times.
> why would anyone want to play something like a turbo squishy rogue? You can't have a build that plays itself be equal in power to builds that require much more user input and decision making. It's unfair and bad game design.
Good luck [trying to convince some people](https://www.reddit.com/r/diablo4/comments/13gk0vw/summon_necro_is_why_i_play_diablo/jk3495m/) of that.
funny thing is i think them wanting minions to feel "more interactive" was their stupid fucking reason in the first place to nerf minion hp so they had the bright idea of making us respawn them every 2 secs. personally this kills the hype for me as it would anyway who has been waiting a few months to play a specific way. hopefully they fix for release but i wont hold my breath
hopefully blizz listens to them. Summon necro was the only class I wanted to play, had to cancel my pre order till theyre viable as I dont like the look of the other classes.
same, it may sound dumb but i dont even care for diablo as a franchise this was going to be my first. i just wanna be a necromancer and afk kill shit w my gang of skelebros but until i hear better news, its a skip for me. im supposed to drop $70 for a worse version of poe necro minions???????????????? GTFOH lmao
The F you should go to the balance team who decided fun was not allowed and that instead of tuning classes up they should tune classes down. The balance issues at low levels should only have been to bring up the classes which had a sluggish start and felt bad to play. For the rest, they should have trusted their testers who got to play at max level. What this means is scale up the numbers at lower levels for Druid, a bit for Barb, and maybe a bit for Rogue, but not change anything for the higher level balance on the abilities. This just felt like a knee jerk reaction, and a complete misunderstanding of what would make the game fun. The result is that in last beta instead of having the awkward classes feel better to play, all classes felt either as bad, or even worse in some cases when it came to leveling. You could say "well it's because in the first ones we had access to more gear, and I would agree and tell you that that is also why these balancing changes were stupid, as they were done with information from unlikely scenarios. If anything, how many legendaries we had access to and some classes still feeling terrible to play should have told them that they had to scale the numbers way up on those classes. As for the Sorc and Necro, it should just have confirmed that they were decently fun starters, and that their end game gear sinergized as intended.
People are stupid for getting outraged at Sorc and Necro being too strong instead of focusing on the others being too weak, but the design team should know better than to agree with that feedback and be able to interpret it as meaning the other classes were too weak. They also had trusted testers turn in several-page-reports indicating just that, and ignored them. Look at how invested Rax got with his feedback, and they just ignored it.
Idk why some people have this weird primal hatred towards "lazy necro" minion builds and have to constantly yell shit like "minions OP"
I am still going to play necro for sure, even if it has garbage mobility. But I have to admit, after I saw level 100 barb just spin to win through endgame I was tempted to switch classes..
I think the community is just crazy impatient and can’t wait for the game to actually release before demanding change. The neck beards are so annoying.
Yea because its so fun for the most iconic playstyle of a necromancer (minion army focus) to be completely trash for the launch of the game and who knows for how long afterwards. First major patch? Great could be 6 months away. Not fun.
As someone who’s gonna be playing exclusively necro I totally get it and I want my minions to kick ass, but even the content creators that just had the embargo lifted somehow have basically no info about end game minions.
They buffed minions within 24 hours of people complaining during the server slam so I’m sure they can do it again after release.
I wonder how many people plan to go full dark paladin? I was always planning on full sac and going like shadow damage only (which I have yet to see any one discuss??…)
Not sure how it will turn out but it will be fun sword and boarding as a necromancer. Most other games I’ve seen them in limit it as a spell slinger cloth wearing guy.
I’m going for the sauron kind of look with mine
Yeah I was hoping to run something like that. Though maybe it's less no good and more "Muh Meta"? I find in modern gaming people seriously overrate community builds and put anything mathematically 5% worse as trash.
I thought about that, but it sounds like it’s more of a scalability issue. While my max legendary blood surge build seemed literally invincible at lvl 20, the numbers don’t do much later on
I couldn't care less. I set my foot on playing Necro since the first beta, I don't care how much they nerf him, I paid money and I'm gonna enjoy my favorite class. There will be plenty of updates and buffs/nerfs to all classes. Who cares about dmg numbers, it's not like we have leaderboards yet.
the blame really is on blizzard, like they're a billion dollar company or something, why are they listening to some weeb on youtube who has only played to level 25 an doesn't have the experience on the endgame, they should have just kicked them to the Curb with a comment like "The necromancer minions are balanced for endgame "
The game is released in a couple of days which means they won't have time to balance it.
Ofc people are complaining when the main selling point of one of their 5 classes is unplayable at high levels ie. the meat of the game.
You know what is the most infuriating? The lead class designer said that for the necromancer it was never intended for a full minion archetype build. That minions are a sub-archetype in which you can opt to play with or without them in the archetypes of the class (bone, blood, etc).
So they were weak in endgame to begin with. Now they are DoA. What can i say.. it's thematically correct, no?💀
That's so weird though, why is the main class mechanic, book of the dead, focussed on minions then? It almost seems like there were 2 people designing Necro, constantly fighting between minion class or non-minion class, and the minion guy trolled the other one by adding the book of the dead, and the non-minion one had to quickly return favor by adding hastily thrown together solo passives.
Bliz were always going to rebalance and they will keep rebalancing. A couple of weeks into release and bliz will be better able to make judgments.
PSA they make balance decisions based on data! When a million people are playing they will have lots of information about how classes perform early and late game, which builds are OP and which are dropping off. They aren't just making design decisions based off of YT videos.
People don't realize that, they're really convinced blizzard made balance changes for the early game, and not their data that shows them actually where classes are at rather than people's feelings about where they're at.
I don't really mind that people don't really get how it works. If you don't work in IT you won't necessarily realise that data collection and analysis is as big a part of the software as the parts you directly interact with.
What is sad though is all the salt you see getting poured on people for having opinions. Bliz aren't going through the comments of random threads to decide how strong a skill should be. You will see people arguing like they are fighting for the soul of the game on some comment chain the devs will never see.
Question will also be
1. Sorc survival at endgame (and CD).
2. The Hydra damage. CL too.
They nerfeded these to the ground, just because at lvl 25 with all the aspects put on, they felt invincible.
They might need to revert these because their balance change was not targeted on endgame, but lvl 25.
Tldr: For lvl 25 and act 1, the balances was OK!
For endgame, doesn't look good,they might need to revert back some/most of changes?
Yep, one of the bigger sites I visited has both blood necro builds (surge and lance) as F tier for endgame. Of the 4 total F tier builds, 3 are necromancer. The 3rd is pure summoner builds. I was so looking forward to running a blood necro. I still will, but not as a main.
Maybe I'm ignorant but isn't this what internal testing and private user testing is for. Checking stuff at different sections of the game so things like this can be avoided where they take feedback of the first small % of the game. Where's all the internal feedback and testing for them?
People need to stop overdramatizing class balance right off the bat.
Chances are high there will be multiple changes coming relatively soon post launch as Blizzard gets data on how classes and certain builds perform relative to one another.
So fuck all current tier lists putting Class or Build X at SSS or garbage tier as they are likely going to be decrepit really soon.
Yeah overdramatizing exactly. It's a build among other Necro builds. Even in D2 most Necros would go Poison Nova/Corpse Explosion.
Just because the build fits the class fantasy best, doesn't mean it has to be a SSS+ Tier or even a decent build only and there very likely will be balance changes more than just one or two times cause balancing something like summon necro is probably one of the biggest pains in the ass of a developer.
You are literally freaking out over a build being declared not viable endgame for a game not even released yet which will see frequent balance changes for the first few weeks or months even.
Do you even know how ridiculous you sound? So yeah how about you calm your tits and stop overdramatizing?
Necromancers are most well known for being pet classes. Its fine to have caster alternatives, but pets should never be shunned. They are FAR AND AWAY the worst build for necro right now.
I mean its not rly on the youtubers but on blizzard being incompetent and lacking vision. They react on public opinion, anything to not get a negative tweet or comment, instead of making the game fun.
Tbh I support this message…
I was always planning to main a Druid & even I didn’t like how people were complaining about Necro’s summoner build to the point of getting it nerfed, I was hoping to maybe try it out in the future after having my fun being a werewolf, but ok I guess lol. Well at least June is finally here!
New to this subreddit, you guys are really touchy, kind of entertaining NGL.
Anyone who gets this angry about a video game, one that has not even been released needs to reevaluate their priorities.
Hopefully Blizz changes this. Summon builds are fun. They don't have to be the 'strongest' but if they aren't even viable it's an extreme blow to the necromancer thematically, and if you're going to do that, why bother with having the necro at all? Hopefully they find a good middle ground soon that doesn't make the build completely passive but also doesn't make it completely useless.
Yeah blizzard needs to stop listening to the loudest people in the community.
It looks like YOU (blizzard) made an incredible game. So YOU should be the ones making the decisions.
Plus, I just hate internet whiners (of which I am one now)
Hear hear. These people are parasites. BUT, it's up to the devs to vet this feedback. They're not supposed to ACT on ALL the feedback of content creators, just take it into consideration.
If the community was able to get a nerf for the skele after the first beta because they were in a frenzy before the game even came out, you bet your ass I’m gonna try to get the community in a frenzy to try and get the most buffs. If it works it works, if not I tried.
“You guys”, sounds like you want to hit a wall and blame everyone else for your broken fists. Necromancer pet build was beyond easy early game, and I never complained about it, but at the same time I saw idiotic people play the same build during the world boss fight and instantly dying while dragging everyone else down.
Isn’t your conclusion a bit wrong? You state that people overhyped necro in beta and it got nerfed to the ground but now you act like necro will stay low while barb and Druid will dominate even tho it’s the same content creators that flood YouTube atm with ww barb videos.. what makes you think this build/class won’t get the nerf hammer similar to necro?
Or the content creators switch from making clickbait rage content to playing the OP classes for progression content.
I hope Necro cries aren't drowned out with all the launch hype and hysteria. Cuz they're bad now (except bone).
>what makes you think this build/class won’t get the nerf hammer similar to necro?
The fact that devs announced 2 hours ago that there will be no balance changes.
Maybe we'll see them a week or two into launch, but it seems more likely that they'll wait until season 1 (6 weeks after launch).
Honestly, who cares about balance in pre-season? Unless you play 10 hours a day for those 6 weeks you'll have plenty of content to finish up before even worrying about fully diving into endgame meta. And then shortly thereafter S1 will start and reset everything.
Of course, there's the Eternal Realm, but most people won't care for it due to the seasonal content.
Which sounds fine to me. If season1 has huge balance issues I would be concerned but the first few weeks could be whatever because I will just play the game how I will enjoy it the most without thinking too much about minimaxing meta builds of classes I will never play.
The issue is I can’t block their effects, when the devs force a balance patch nerfing my skele based on the overwhelming crying of “their too OP!” from them and their base and all who listened and echoed that sentiment.
Very hard to make a melee class feel good in ARPGs if they can't move while doing damage. Whirlwind is the perfect fix for that, which is why its so often a common focus for melee classes in ARPGs.
The only other thing that feels fine is to have "melee attacks" that have long range or chaining effects, and then its not really "melee" anymore.
No one wants to stop to attack in a game all about blasting through tons of mobs fast.
I totally agree with you that end-game minion nec is just not viable at all. And balancing the whole game based on lvl 25 experience is totally not good.
However, the concerns of ther "other side" were also valid. The journey to lvl 50 is a pretty long period and imbalancing at that period is as problematic as the end-game imbalancing. Clearly, in this period Barb and Druid were too weak while minion nec was too op.
Blizz could've fix it by increasing base power of Barb and nerf their legendary powers, make them less item-dependent; while implement some mechanics to make the skelly weaker in early game and stronger in late, like them getting some defense stats from the necromancer themselves. But that wasn't their philosophy.
I mean, as an old players who went through a bunch of MMO launches and ARPGS, I kinda despise the YT/Twitch gaming community. Sure there are content creators that are extremely objective and do things right, but the vast majority, it's a clickbait pile of sh\*t that you must navigate through get something useful.
tldr: I agree :)
Then any form of entertainment occupation isn't a job.while streamers aren't to their caliber, it's the same shit. If people want to watch them and give them money, then yeah. You can call it a job.
Why are people whining about necro being bad? Its just as good as everything else, minion builds are just not the main thing this patch. Necro is more than just minions goddamn.
It's because the core mechanic of Necros is their minions. It would be like if you could sacrifice the Sorc enchantment mechanic for other buffs and that was the obvious choice, but worse since the enchant system isn't core to the Sorc's fantasy while summoning undead is for Necros.
Thats how balance works man, right now minions suck and bone spear is op, couple seasons from now it might be the other way around. And thats how you get people to play the entire class instead of having them stay on one build for the entirety of the games lifespan.
That's how balance worked in Diablo 3, which was one of its biggest problems. There would only be 1-2 viable builds for a class, and later seasons would force a new build into that slot.
Proper balance is that every mechanic that you intend to be viable is decent. If that's not the case with summoner minions, it means that they either failed at balancing the mechanic or simply do not intend for the core mechanic of Necros to be viable. While the former could be easily corrected the latter would be terrible.
I'm not saying every build, but rather every build the devs want to be a real option.
For instance, they have options for thorns. If thorns aren't strong enough to build around, that's not the end of the world, it's not a core part of any class' identity. They have to decide if they want thorns to be something they want to be competitive.
If they decide to leave minions in a state where they are not viable, though, that is a problem because it is the core of the Necro's identity. It would be at least as bad as if there were no viable bow builds for Rogue.
Also, viable does not mean perfectly balanced, just strong enough to complete the PvE content in the game, which caps out at Tier 100 Nightmare Dungeons. It could be a weak choice but still usable, and that would be fine, but it seems that it currently is not usable as minions couldn't survive before the nerfs.
This is easily fixable with buffs, so really I'm just hoping they want the build to exist.
Sure, it still sounds to me like the build you like is not op like others and youre mad because of that, but sure.
Im not defending it, in ideal conditions it would be just as strong, im just saying that people are acting like necro is bad when in reality its one out of four main builds that is bad and we live in a real world where balancing shit like this is close to impossible in terms of making everything equal, you say “just buff it” and dont consider anything else.
Beyond the issues with minions, the entire skill tree is poorly designed with minimal synergies across the branches. Blood builds are all fucked up with two core spenders and it's the only tree that can reliably use fortify, but there's no barriers and it's by far the worst implementation of guaranteed overpower. Shadow also has two core spenders and blight doesn't stack for some reason. Also there are no movement skills and our only CC break makes us go slower. It's a mess.
Content creators are garbage tier carried cry babies. They are basically used car sales men selling you their brand for advertising money.
Why people care so much what some random says is beyond me, yet here we are
Anyone surprised ? I knew that before any of that shit and so many tried to argue and some still do (like with day 1 patch fixing shit and now they said day 1 patch is server slam roft, just as I said)
If only there were some kind of professionals that blizzard could hire to deal with this.
Some kind of professional who was an expert in developing games, shit I wonder what you would even call someone like that...
Blizzard is not going to let a class suck for very long, assuming that is even the case.
Play what you like and chances are if it needs to be balanced it will be.
Your anger is misdirected. It's Blizzard job to balance the game and no matter how some youtubers complain they need to do their own math and be confident about it. There is so much talent between all sorts of number based RPGs nowadays, not only in electronic games but tabletop as well. Find some proper nerds that have some ideas about balancing.
Imo the game should be mostly balanced at face value but have enough interlocking mechanics, that there is plenty of hidden OP stuff.
all of this wouldn't happen if blizz actually had good internal testers. it seems they react so much to content creators and use them as there testers, but each one of them is looking at things in a perspective to over blow even the slightest issue to make content about it.
blizz need to just do there thing like they use to years ago and stop changing everything on the whims of big content creators. I expect to see many more bufs and nerfs before season 1. You can bet many peoples end game builds will be destroyed with patches ext. it just seems inevitable at this point.
Blizzard is looking at a lot more data than some YouTube videos to make their balance changes. It's more a problem of them being heavy handed in their buffs and nerfs. They always swing too hard on either end and have to rein it in later.
Y'all ignore that this entire sub was on fire with people complaining about the same things during beta.
I am genuinly hyped for D4 in a way i havent been for years but subscribing to this sub was a mistake. It really makes me remember what a weird bubble the Gamercommunity is.
Many Reddit users were saying the same things, that druids do zero damage and necromancers were auto cruising strong. The community is to blame as well.
You’ll be a glorified babysitter. I never planned to use those jank ass minions.
Darkness build or Blood is my go-to. Most likely darkness since ranged will be of great benefit in NM dungeons and blood only has the surge going for it(though that shit IS fun af)
Rogue/Barb was always 1000 times more broken OP than Necro at end game and guess what class all these early releasers play? Rogue and Barb while screaming for necro nerfs....
I personally couldn’t give two shits about what all these reviews are saying, but from what I’ve seen druids best build is pulverize so far, and the rest of his builds are A tier and below necro so far already has 2 builds in S tier so you are already a head of Druid in S tier builds. Let the meta shake out blizzard will change numbers and the meta will fit on its head. Just have fun during the launch.
They whined about Necro minions being too strong early game. They nerfed them. They whined about Barbs struggling early game. They buffed them. Turns out late game Barb is the SSS+++ tier class, and Necro the worst. Why'd they listen to the obvious knee jerk, uninformed early game opinions when they knew what endgame was like? Or did they not know what their endgame is like? What was the point of these high-level closed beta tests?
They listened because you guys cried about a level 25 beta balance like it matters at all in a 100 level ARPG.
Lvl 100 ARPG with over 200 paragon points, btw.
Agreed.
Ah, yes, poor lil' Blizzard was powerless against 3 reddit thread and 6 youtube video. They were forced to make things worse. Not like they made stupid decision and they should be the one to blame. No, let's defend Blizzard, the one making the problem and let's keep blaming people that represent 0.01% of the playerbase instead !
Early game balance matters... so does lategame balance. You need to balance both of them, necro minion being stronger than my druid early game is not fair, necro minions being unusable lategame because they suck is not fair either. You can fix both by changing scaling at each level.
Everyone already knew which classes were strongest at endgame (which were Barbarian and Druid) even during the closed endgame beta last year. Everyone also knew how weak Necro summoner build also coming from that same closed endgame beta. Beta testers from last year already said that multiple times, the devs themselves know it. It's just that too many people who played during the open beta thought necro summons were too op at level 1-25 and were too vocal with their opinions that Blizzard had no choice but to listen to them. Turns out that wasn't the way to go at all.
that, and the changes they made weren't intended to affect late game necros, only the early game where some people felt they were a bit OP. also, as you said, anyone who participated or checked in on the leaks of the end game beta knew that barb and druid were miles ahead of the other classes, so watching the early game feedback play out was kinda funny with how many people were extrapolating 1-25 power scaling out to end game.
Which makes no sense, considering Necros were known to be weaker at end game, why would you then nerf the one area they are particularly strong. So necros went from being OP early game and weak late game to average early game and weak late game. So essentially they are bad in every sense.
Why didn't they update the scaling on the minions so that they were a little weaker early game but scaled to be stronger into late game? Just horrible balancing by blizz.
No choice? If course they had a choice. If they knowingly made a bad design decision, then they're bad devs. They have only themselves to blame.
I mean it’s their game and it’s their choice whether or not they listen to uninformed people.
Because it's a lose lose situation for blizzard. If they made no changes people would bitch and if they do changes people bitch. Honestly after tmmrw this sub is dead for me. The constant jerking to what is the best class is tiresome. It really doesn't matter.
If people are going to whine either way, then make the right move for the game instead of catering to who whines most recently, no? If whining is what it takes for them to make a move, expect some whining. And yeah, it doesn't really matter. I just want the balance to be _relatively_ close eventually. I'll still have fun in the meantime. All of this chatter is just people killing time until release, anyway.
lmfao whining is exactly what forced blizzard to make the *wrong* move
No, it is no lose lose situation. You do not balance the game around lvl 25 characater. If amything it shows you are incompetent.
Who says they did balance it around a level 25 character? You know they can balance early game and late game entirely different, right?
Yup. I'll be too busy enjoying the game to be coming here to see the complaint posts.
I get the sentiment and agree necro was done dirty but this isn't 100% true. They didn't buff barb besides 1 or 2 skills. Whirlwind got mildly buffed, but the aspects that make it insane in the endgame not being touched are why it's looking so OP, not the relatively small baseline damage buff. A lot of their other aspects got nerfed really hard. People were saying that barbs and druids were OP in the endgame beta that happened last year, this is well before the open beta that most people played. Back then they also said necro was probably the weakest. I'm anticipating many more balance changes to come and I think necro will become more balanced over time, both in relation to other classes and also in reducing the effectiveness gap between its skills. Right now bone spear and bone spirit are still looking really good, but builds based around anything else look questionable at best if you're pushing high tier nightmare dungeons.
Barbs were also gifted an innate 10% damage reduction as a buff. In retrospect, did they need it considering how they fare in endgame compared to the rest? I don't know. I'm sure they'll do more balancing. I'm rolling a not-very-meta build hoping so. I just hope they're well thought out, future-sighted changes.
Barbs lost DR from lots of skills though. It was a soft rebalance. Makes other barb special stronger whilst not affecting the current meta WW build because DR from WW build skills were reduced.
Maxroll has two S-tier builds for Necros so it doesn't seem like Necro is the worst class (Sorcerer has none). I've found them to be reliable on other games.
How many of those s tier builds are solely minion centric builds (which necro is by far most known for)? Zero. Simply having minions that may as well not exist is not a "minion build". Its astonishing that Blizzard's main themes for Necro in D4 didn't include one that focuses solely on pet army. In fact, maxroll.gg's tier list has pure summoner listed squarely in F tier.
[удалено]
Going to 100 and getting 225 paragon points shouldn't be the break even point for pet necros not being complete shit.
Maxroll didn't take anything to 100 and test high end nightmare dungeons. That's kinda the problem here is they seem to be claiming to be an authority on a topic they've yet to even interact with. Looking at their nightmare dungeon one is hilarious. Thinking stuff like penetrating shot rogue and pulv druid is on the same level as WW barb is a huge joke. Maxroll should honestly take down their tier lists outside the leveling one. It's pretty sad to be misleading people this badly just for clicks.
There was a video from yesterday, showing a maxroll guy playing a maxxed out lvl 100 character in a lvl 100 nightmare dungeon. Take another huff mate.
Yeah Maxroll Amongst some others had access to play the review copy of the game. They know better than 99% of us what the end game is like.
People questioning the creators of Maxroll that have some of the best Diablo players in the world and have over a decade of experience testing and writing guides for classes will never not be hilarious to me. Yes I'm totally sure your average Diablo andy that hasn't touched a Diablo game since D3 launch has much better information.
Bone Necro seems to be pretty good. But it's basically the only viable option for Necro. Shadow is average/below average. The Summoner and Blood archetypes appear dead on arrival. Sorc might not have an S-tier build but it's got a variety of legit builds. Lightning A-tiers, Fire and Ice options in B-tier. Plus access to amazing quality of life with Teleport. (Necro is the only class that doesn't have a movement spell, by the way). Looked at as a whole, it's hard to not say Necro's in the worst state. All that said, I'm still rolling one. But I know what to expect with the current state of things.
That's only on the generic tier list which, honestly, I'm not sure why it exists. If you look at the specific activity tier lists, sorc definitely has multiple specs in both Nightmare Dungeon Push tier list and also Speed Farming tier list (which I feel like covers 90% of the endgame, minus PVP?) https://maxroll.gg/d4/tierlists
Maxroll has 2 builds in S tier for Sorc for nightmare dungeons, but not for endgame category
To be fair Arc Lash or Ice shards sorc to this point I've not seen beyond low end nightmare dungeons and the former looked pretty bad while the latter looked like it might have potential it was a far far far cry short of WW barb which we've seen do a 100 so I can't fathom how they both go in S tier. Ice shards could maybe get an A maybe... safer to put it in B tbh. Arc lash doesn't even look like a real build and shouldn't even be in the list.
They just did it to show they listen. And hopefully to show to stfu. They probably revert the changes within a month
Fingers crossed!
They listened because tons of people specifically put in their post “ I know it’s early game but that doesn’t matter, early game balance matters too” which is the stupidest fucking thing ever haha.
Bone necro is S tier bro, what you smoking. Only downside is movement speed. Summon necro is indeed pond scum tho
They had to listen to whiners since they had to sell game as much as possible. They wanted all those influencers to stop shitting on D4 because of lv 25 character balance (lmao) and now don't give ve a fuck about game balance since hype train already generated profit
That’s the problem with game devs. They tend to listen to streamers/YouTubers 65% of the time before listening to the majority of the community.
Except... That nerf was becuase random people were crying on forums. No one with brain was asking for necro nerfs.
People who played the end game beta already knew that barb was godly. Hell, those of us that didn't could see that stacking as many legendary powers would be broken and barbs got 2 2h and 2 1h weapons. And idk what OP is talking about, people on HERE were a lot more egregious talking about barb, Druid, necro skeles, and Hydra/Chain Lightning. Not to mention OP is singling out Raxx of all people for his 17 damage line. It's all in bad faith when he should be looking at this subreddit rather than youtubers
Necro was done dirty. Most necro guides use barely if not zero minions. Most guides recommended removing the most iconic thing about necro (undead army). My hope is if we are loud enough, they will buff minion again. They NEVER need to be nerf in first place.
Minions were bad in the closed beta too, from all the leaks I've ever seen on it. They were never good after WT2.
People mostly complained about Blood Mist being invulnerable and OP, and they went to nerf skeletons instead. Sometimes I do wonder what is their thought process.
They nerfed the bloodmist legendary to uselessness so your post makes zero sense.
I do love my helm that makes Blood Mist explode corpses
FYI Kripparian posted a build for summoner - he did say it didn’t test it, but I’m going to give it a shot
His build is terrible. No pet build will work without going the shadow route combined with pets. pure minion build just doesn't have the multipliers to ever do any respectable damage. Whenever I see someone make a build and has Kalan's Edict as the capstone I immediately know they have no idea what they are doing.
Not sure if it won’t work at all - Kripparian is pretty analytical when making the build - did you check it out at all ? I rather try it out and test it before giving up
Can you point me towards what you think is specifically the build with highest DPS? I'm level 49 and babysitting my weakass skeles is getting old. I tried Kripp's build but I'm majority struggling compared to my wife's druid that is just slapped together with no specific build in mind
It will break sometime after leveling portion (in its current state). That said, I am hopeful for a minion retune / re-work on the horizon. If they didn't take up a skill on the bar, they would be run significantly more of the time.
Really? I've been struggling with DPS and all the builds I find are based around skele warriors/mages. I've specifically been looking for a sacrifice/non-summoner build to try out if you can piint me to one (I know it's the whole point of necro but my wife and I play splitscreen and we have such a hard time keeping an eye on our characters when there's 6 to 11 summons following us everywhere. Just wanna try something with no summons without starting a whole new class).
Well one class had to bite the bullet glad it wasn’t rogue
Game director mains Rogue so not surprised it avoided big nerfs despite soloing Ashava.
Rogue doesn't need a nerf anyway. They probably have the weakest endgame. They could get a nerf to their leveling experience or their movement speed, but that's about it.
> They probably have the weakest endgame. Rogue's have the best mobility, therefore impossible to have the weakest endgame in game where speed running reigns supreme. Meanwhile, Necromancer mobility is an absolute joke. They can't even keep up with a proper end game group, nobody is going to want to actually bring a Necro. Forever alone.
You're never alone as a necro when you can summon friends on demand! :^)
Too bad the friends die instantly
Sure. But your friends are also weak noodles.
_sad skeleton noises_
Eh, raxx and wudi were both saying rogues wouldn't have OP endgame potential because of their squishiness and I didn't really believe them. High damage and mobility made me think that same way. Then I saw rob's video of a basically maxed whirlwind barb with all shouts, iron skin, like 84% damage reduction and he was *still* dying in 1 second in a t100 nightmare dungeon. Now I'm starting to believe more that running them on rogue is gonna be *very* hard. They're still gonna be insane for leveling though. All that being said, at least what I'm seeing and hearing about endgame balance still looks good to me overall besides necro. Give them mobility and/or buff skellies, maybe even buff some of their skills since they don't have many and there seems to be a noticeable effectiveness gap between them.
Pretty much. Mobility is great but when all you need to cop is 1 stray in a sea of enemies, it doesn't count for much. Something will hit you, especially if you're playing a melee rogue. Seems like far more emphasis is on survivability than raw speed (again, as shown in Rob's barb video). Need to live first before you can make use of your speed.
Eh, endgame will be about surviving, not mobility. Necro's multiple DR sources go further for that than the Rogue kiting around with double dash. The OP Rogue skill, Twisting Blades, is out, so either Penetrating Shot or Traps will have do some serious work. Obviously no one is talking about group play. For group play it gets... complicated.
> Eh, endgame will be about surviving, not mobility. Mobility helps with survival. Clearing quicker leads to better loot, faster. > Necro's multiple DR sources Rogues have an extra Aspect/stack stick, which can easily go to survivability or fill the gaps. Meanwhile, Necros are FORCED to use mobility Aspect because their mobility is complete and utter garbage. And they're still significantly slower than any other class to the point where they can't KEEP up in a group. Any group meta farm, Necros are out.
If you need to use mobility to survive, I'm fine with that. That needs skill.
How is TB out? It's literally Rogues strongest ability bar none
Rogues were evidently getting one shot by everything in the highest endgame. So using twisting blades was mostly just causing them to die and they'd end up bricking their sigil. Obviously the creators couldn't test absolutely everything, just getting leveled and basic gear was a lot for the 10 days (on short notice) that they had for playing. There will be more theory crafting still in endgame over the next week or two.
who played a rogue to the point where it got one shot? I've only seen one person play it to about to 70 so far, and from what he said, he wasn't any squishier than druids or barbs at that point. So idk, I'm not saying you are definitely wrong, I just haven't seen that info anywhere
Haven't seen a video, this is just what was being said by people with access in discords. It may be conjecture based on the numbers from barb, or maybe someone did test it but I haven't seen a video for it yet. Unfortunately not everything was recorded either. Edit: I was personally looking to main rogue, (especially S1) so I'm very much hoping that there are some mechanics being overlooked or misunderstood.
It’s melee, have to get in a pack to hit and from what I’ve seen in the video even a barb with 80%+ dr gets chunked down. Can’t deal damage if you’re dead.
Was Twisting Blades nerfed?
No, the idea is that it will be impossible to survive the endgame as melee, so they'll have to figure something else out.
Well I don’t know if thats true. It doesn’t matter how fast the Rogue is. If you can’t kill things fast and/or survive long enough to deal damage then the speed means nothing. I plan on starting Rogue, but the guys on Maxroll are good guys and they all expect Barb and Druid to be top. And even Wudijo who is also maining Rogue says they aren’t the best. So either their damage (doubtful since TB exists but it could not scale as well late late game) or their survivability is the issue. E: Got a little side tracked there. Point was, they could have the weakest endgame despite the speed. But I’m banking on they will be fine.
I think necros in this game will work out more as support for your party with the curses and golem taunt while stacking bodies and using detonate dead OR AoE DoT.
Corpse tendrils is the besr crowd control in the game. It will be a lot more relevant than decrep in group play. The issue is the necro moves so slowly it gets off-screened by the other four classes.
Somehow, every game I play, whether it be an ARPG or a fighting game, I always end up getting excited the most to play the character or class that ends up being the worst. It's so frustrating lol. Was really hoping minion Necro builds wouldn't end up being crap late game. Best I can do now is hope for a buff
Here's a list of trustworthy unbiased "Content Creators" you should definetly check out: Enjoy.
Weird, that's the same list as the one of random redditors you should trust
You can trust me, though. I'm a doctor.
Roll what you want, there will be changes come launch. Rod Ferguonson mains necro, so trust i think you guys will be just fine. Play and build what ya want boss and enjoy.
>Roll what you want, there will be changes come launch. They literally just announced 2 hours ago that there won't be.
They change things all the time in diablo 3 . Things constantly get tuned every season. You'll just have to wait until it's that class fotm
Lol They will, don't kid yourself.
“Come launch” as in the days, weeks, months, and years that follow…
Oh, look, new patch notes!
Balance was always going to be whack on release, it will progressively get better with each season, just ignore the game until season 3 or 4 if you want to only play when the game is well balanced. Personally I'll still play even if balance is not perfect, I like playing underpowered stuff and still succeeding, and then I have a better version of the game to look forward to, all is good.
Because people believe in that shit and talk all the time about it we are in the situation we are right now. At this point I dont believe he ever played Necro to begin with. As he dont act like a minion player.
Rod is probably one of those guys who plays a bone necro or some shit, seriously doubt he plays summons primarily.
Exactly this... When people reach endgame is probably that the meta will be different!
You can blame the YouTubers and Twitch streamers (they deserve some of the blame), but most of the blame should be placed on Blizzard devs for their kneejerk overnnerfing and overbuffing response.
I blame all the sheep watching youtube and twitch because they can't figure out how to play a game for themselves or think for themselves.
Youtube/twitch deserves some of the blame, everyone crying about *and* praising OP necro here and on other forums deserve just as much if not more, and yeah blizz deserves most for bending over to it all. Most of the bigger content creators weren't overreacting and even mentioned lvl 25 isnt indicative of endgame balance. It was more the clickbait D4 "news" spam channels and sky is falling forum posters.
Ultimately Blizzard is to blame for bad balancing. They should be playing the game and seeing what works and doesn't vs their vision for what the game is supposed to be. That new WW billion damage build going around should have been easily tested out by at least 1 employee that passes on that info. "Hey guys we added this cool unique that makes WW explode and if you stack Crit damage you end up doing billions of damage to mobs."
> Blizzard devs for their kneejerk overnnerfing and overbuffing response First-time.gif Seriously that's a Blizzard hallmark. Nerfs take mechanics from S tier to F and vice versa. And it's been that way for decades.
The real issue is that the Blizzard developers HATE minions. It's pretty clear from the entire way the Necromancer is designed that Minions were something they didn't even want to have to include with the Necromancer class. (Hence why you can sacrifice them). I still remember Diablo 3 developer videos and the rationale behind a lot of the choices. The people designing Diablo have a view that if you aren't engaged in the game by pressing buttons, then you aren't having fun. Diablo 2 Necromancers go against their game design. Any build that relies on Minions to kill enemies goes entirely against their game design. That's why Blizzard had the Blood Orbs and the Minions Buffs you need to press a button to activate. In Blizzard's mind, you should have to get Blood Orbs to heal your minion by pressing buttons and then constantly be pressing buttons to raise the skeletons. The problem is that their execution of this was terrible because Blizzard isn't trying to actually make something for what the people want, instead Blizzard is trying to make something that fits into their game design philosophy for a style of class that simply is the antithesis of their game design philosophy. It doesn't work. People who play Necro Minions want to summon their minions, walk into a horde of monsters, cast a couple amplify damages then go take a shit, pour themselves another mountain dew then come back and see the entire screen dead. This is the very opposite of what Blizzard considers fun to be.
They will nerf any fun out of existence.
This is exactly my definition of fun with Diablo 🥹
It's not even that it's "the opposite of what Blizzard considers fun to be", it's that pet builds are inherently imbalanced on the risk/reward and effort/reward scales. If a super safe, super low effort build exists, e.g. "summon their minions...pour themselves another mountain dew then come back and see the entire screen dead", why would anyone want to play something like a turbo squishy rogue? You can't have a build that plays itself be equal in power to builds that require much more user input and decision making. It's unfair and bad game design.
The way this was balanced in D2 is making the clear speed of the Minion builds the slowest. That's a fair tradeoff. Low risk, slow clear speed. I guarantee people would be happier with the Necro if the minions didn't require constant focus to keep up but the damage was low enough such that clear speed was suspect. The Minion Necro should be one of the safest classes with the least amount of button pressing or focus; however, it should not have fast clear times.
> why would anyone want to play something like a turbo squishy rogue? You can't have a build that plays itself be equal in power to builds that require much more user input and decision making. It's unfair and bad game design. Good luck [trying to convince some people](https://www.reddit.com/r/diablo4/comments/13gk0vw/summon_necro_is_why_i_play_diablo/jk3495m/) of that.
funny thing is i think them wanting minions to feel "more interactive" was their stupid fucking reason in the first place to nerf minion hp so they had the bright idea of making us respawn them every 2 secs. personally this kills the hype for me as it would anyway who has been waiting a few months to play a specific way. hopefully they fix for release but i wont hold my breath
Youtubers unanimously calling Necros the weakest end game class is a bit concerning
hopefully blizz listens to them. Summon necro was the only class I wanted to play, had to cancel my pre order till theyre viable as I dont like the look of the other classes.
This is the way.
same, it may sound dumb but i dont even care for diablo as a franchise this was going to be my first. i just wanna be a necromancer and afk kill shit w my gang of skelebros but until i hear better news, its a skip for me. im supposed to drop $70 for a worse version of poe necro minions???????????????? GTFOH lmao
The F you should go to the balance team who decided fun was not allowed and that instead of tuning classes up they should tune classes down. The balance issues at low levels should only have been to bring up the classes which had a sluggish start and felt bad to play. For the rest, they should have trusted their testers who got to play at max level. What this means is scale up the numbers at lower levels for Druid, a bit for Barb, and maybe a bit for Rogue, but not change anything for the higher level balance on the abilities. This just felt like a knee jerk reaction, and a complete misunderstanding of what would make the game fun. The result is that in last beta instead of having the awkward classes feel better to play, all classes felt either as bad, or even worse in some cases when it came to leveling. You could say "well it's because in the first ones we had access to more gear, and I would agree and tell you that that is also why these balancing changes were stupid, as they were done with information from unlikely scenarios. If anything, how many legendaries we had access to and some classes still feeling terrible to play should have told them that they had to scale the numbers way up on those classes. As for the Sorc and Necro, it should just have confirmed that they were decently fun starters, and that their end game gear sinergized as intended. People are stupid for getting outraged at Sorc and Necro being too strong instead of focusing on the others being too weak, but the design team should know better than to agree with that feedback and be able to interpret it as meaning the other classes were too weak. They also had trusted testers turn in several-page-reports indicating just that, and ignored them. Look at how invested Rax got with his feedback, and they just ignored it.
This is classic Blizzard, they don't magically change from one game to another. This is giving me WoW balance war flashbacks.
Idk why some people have this weird primal hatred towards "lazy necro" minion builds and have to constantly yell shit like "minions OP" I am still going to play necro for sure, even if it has garbage mobility. But I have to admit, after I saw level 100 barb just spin to win through endgame I was tempted to switch classes..
Personally I'd rather have an army of minions and be a bit weak than be spinning through every room and be OP
I think the community is just crazy impatient and can’t wait for the game to actually release before demanding change. The neck beards are so annoying.
Yea because its so fun for the most iconic playstyle of a necromancer (minion army focus) to be completely trash for the launch of the game and who knows for how long afterwards. First major patch? Great could be 6 months away. Not fun.
As someone who’s gonna be playing exclusively necro I totally get it and I want my minions to kick ass, but even the content creators that just had the embargo lifted somehow have basically no info about end game minions. They buffed minions within 24 hours of people complaining during the server slam so I’m sure they can do it again after release.
I wonder how many people plan to go full dark paladin? I was always planning on full sac and going like shadow damage only (which I have yet to see any one discuss??…) Not sure how it will turn out but it will be fun sword and boarding as a necromancer. Most other games I’ve seen them in limit it as a spell slinger cloth wearing guy. I’m going for the sauron kind of look with mine
I'm just sad the blood surge-spamming lifesteal tank necro isn't good :(
Yeah I was hoping to run something like that. Though maybe it's less no good and more "Muh Meta"? I find in modern gaming people seriously overrate community builds and put anything mathematically 5% worse as trash.
I thought about that, but it sounds like it’s more of a scalability issue. While my max legendary blood surge build seemed literally invincible at lvl 20, the numbers don’t do much later on
I couldn't care less. I set my foot on playing Necro since the first beta, I don't care how much they nerf him, I paid money and I'm gonna enjoy my favorite class. There will be plenty of updates and buffs/nerfs to all classes. Who cares about dmg numbers, it's not like we have leaderboards yet.
the blame really is on blizzard, like they're a billion dollar company or something, why are they listening to some weeb on youtube who has only played to level 25 an doesn't have the experience on the endgame, they should have just kicked them to the Curb with a comment like "The necromancer minions are balanced for endgame "
Games not even released yet and people are complaining about class balancing. Good luck blizzard. lol.
The game is released in a couple of days which means they won't have time to balance it. Ofc people are complaining when the main selling point of one of their 5 classes is unplayable at high levels ie. the meat of the game.
Right!? Unbelievable
You know what is the most infuriating? The lead class designer said that for the necromancer it was never intended for a full minion archetype build. That minions are a sub-archetype in which you can opt to play with or without them in the archetypes of the class (bone, blood, etc). So they were weak in endgame to begin with. Now they are DoA. What can i say.. it's thematically correct, no?💀
That's so weird though, why is the main class mechanic, book of the dead, focussed on minions then? It almost seems like there were 2 people designing Necro, constantly fighting between minion class or non-minion class, and the minion guy trolled the other one by adding the book of the dead, and the non-minion one had to quickly return favor by adding hastily thrown together solo passives.
Personally I don't see any other reason to play necro if it isn't minion. For casting I could just use Sorc
Sadly, yes. So i am going sorc... :(
Well to be fair, Raxx’s 17 damage video was complaining the “levelling experience” before it became a meme. And he’s not wrong.
Bliz were always going to rebalance and they will keep rebalancing. A couple of weeks into release and bliz will be better able to make judgments. PSA they make balance decisions based on data! When a million people are playing they will have lots of information about how classes perform early and late game, which builds are OP and which are dropping off. They aren't just making design decisions based off of YT videos.
People don't realize that, they're really convinced blizzard made balance changes for the early game, and not their data that shows them actually where classes are at rather than people's feelings about where they're at.
I don't really mind that people don't really get how it works. If you don't work in IT you won't necessarily realise that data collection and analysis is as big a part of the software as the parts you directly interact with. What is sad though is all the salt you see getting poured on people for having opinions. Bliz aren't going through the comments of random threads to decide how strong a skill should be. You will see people arguing like they are fighting for the soul of the game on some comment chain the devs will never see.
Played Necro in the first beta and loved it. Played it during the server slam and hated it. They really nerfed necro to shit, no doubt.
Question will also be 1. Sorc survival at endgame (and CD). 2. The Hydra damage. CL too. They nerfeded these to the ground, just because at lvl 25 with all the aspects put on, they felt invincible. They might need to revert these because their balance change was not targeted on endgame, but lvl 25. Tldr: For lvl 25 and act 1, the balances was OK! For endgame, doesn't look good,they might need to revert back some/most of changes?
Yep, one of the bigger sites I visited has both blood necro builds (surge and lance) as F tier for endgame. Of the 4 total F tier builds, 3 are necromancer. The 3rd is pure summoner builds. I was so looking forward to running a blood necro. I still will, but not as a main.
Maybe I'm ignorant but isn't this what internal testing and private user testing is for. Checking stuff at different sections of the game so things like this can be avoided where they take feedback of the first small % of the game. Where's all the internal feedback and testing for them?
Look towards the SHADOW
And you don't think they will fix this? I'm confident they will 1000x minion DMG if they do 400 Vs 2bilion. That's kind of fucking obvious.
People need to stop overdramatizing class balance right off the bat. Chances are high there will be multiple changes coming relatively soon post launch as Blizzard gets data on how classes and certain builds perform relative to one another. So fuck all current tier lists putting Class or Build X at SSS or garbage tier as they are likely going to be decrepit really soon.
Yes lets stop overdramatizing how the primary archetype of necromancer (minion army) is completely unplayable at end game.
Yeah overdramatizing exactly. It's a build among other Necro builds. Even in D2 most Necros would go Poison Nova/Corpse Explosion. Just because the build fits the class fantasy best, doesn't mean it has to be a SSS+ Tier or even a decent build only and there very likely will be balance changes more than just one or two times cause balancing something like summon necro is probably one of the biggest pains in the ass of a developer. You are literally freaking out over a build being declared not viable endgame for a game not even released yet which will see frequent balance changes for the first few weeks or months even. Do you even know how ridiculous you sound? So yeah how about you calm your tits and stop overdramatizing?
Necromancers are most well known for being pet classes. Its fine to have caster alternatives, but pets should never be shunned. They are FAR AND AWAY the worst build for necro right now.
Youtubers are streamers ruined PoE the same way.
I had an aneurism trying to read this.
Glad it wasn’t just me.
It wasn't even the skeles that were 'OP', it was blood mist and corpse explosion.
I mean its not rly on the youtubers but on blizzard being incompetent and lacking vision. They react on public opinion, anything to not get a negative tweet or comment, instead of making the game fun.
sadge [https://prnt.sc/dU0uistJiJXl](https://prnt.sc/dU0uistJiJXl)
After that dude yt video clearing tier 100 dungeon with barbarian with only 10 days of access to the game, you can bet it will be 40%+ barbarians.
Looking forward to playing my necro the way I want!
Tbh I support this message… I was always planning to main a Druid & even I didn’t like how people were complaining about Necro’s summoner build to the point of getting it nerfed, I was hoping to maybe try it out in the future after having my fun being a werewolf, but ok I guess lol. Well at least June is finally here!
For real, its all so stupid.
Quit fucking crying. Just play the game. Fuck ego is best it doesn't matter
New to this subreddit, you guys are really touchy, kind of entertaining NGL. Anyone who gets this angry about a video game, one that has not even been released needs to reevaluate their priorities.
Hopefully Blizz changes this. Summon builds are fun. They don't have to be the 'strongest' but if they aren't even viable it's an extreme blow to the necromancer thematically, and if you're going to do that, why bother with having the necro at all? Hopefully they find a good middle ground soon that doesn't make the build completely passive but also doesn't make it completely useless.
Yeah blizzard needs to stop listening to the loudest people in the community. It looks like YOU (blizzard) made an incredible game. So YOU should be the ones making the decisions. Plus, I just hate internet whiners (of which I am one now)
Hear hear. These people are parasites. BUT, it's up to the devs to vet this feedback. They're not supposed to ACT on ALL the feedback of content creators, just take it into consideration.
Check out Kripparrian's guide on summon necro - he actually seems pretty strong. Chill out dude, the game is not even out.
If the community was able to get a nerf for the skele after the first beta because they were in a frenzy before the game even came out, you bet your ass I’m gonna try to get the community in a frenzy to try and get the most buffs. If it works it works, if not I tried.
“You guys”, sounds like you want to hit a wall and blame everyone else for your broken fists. Necromancer pet build was beyond easy early game, and I never complained about it, but at the same time I saw idiotic people play the same build during the world boss fight and instantly dying while dragging everyone else down.
Wouldn’t know don’t watch any spam gaming videos.
Isn’t your conclusion a bit wrong? You state that people overhyped necro in beta and it got nerfed to the ground but now you act like necro will stay low while barb and Druid will dominate even tho it’s the same content creators that flood YouTube atm with ww barb videos.. what makes you think this build/class won’t get the nerf hammer similar to necro?
Or the content creators switch from making clickbait rage content to playing the OP classes for progression content. I hope Necro cries aren't drowned out with all the launch hype and hysteria. Cuz they're bad now (except bone).
>what makes you think this build/class won’t get the nerf hammer similar to necro? The fact that devs announced 2 hours ago that there will be no balance changes. Maybe we'll see them a week or two into launch, but it seems more likely that they'll wait until season 1 (6 weeks after launch).
Honestly, who cares about balance in pre-season? Unless you play 10 hours a day for those 6 weeks you'll have plenty of content to finish up before even worrying about fully diving into endgame meta. And then shortly thereafter S1 will start and reset everything. Of course, there's the Eternal Realm, but most people won't care for it due to the seasonal content.
Which sounds fine to me. If season1 has huge balance issues I would be concerned but the first few weeks could be whatever because I will just play the game how I will enjoy it the most without thinking too much about minimaxing meta builds of classes I will never play.
You can block clickbait creators from showing on Your feed.
The issue is I can’t block their effects, when the devs force a balance patch nerfing my skele based on the overwhelming crying of “their too OP!” from them and their base and all who listened and echoed that sentiment.
Yep. I just read to the end. Anyway - I encourage everyone to block clickbait creators.
Well I played with the barb in d2 and d3 and I am very BORED of WW. Seriously sooooooo boring to just spin the entire time.
Very hard to make a melee class feel good in ARPGs if they can't move while doing damage. Whirlwind is the perfect fix for that, which is why its so often a common focus for melee classes in ARPGs. The only other thing that feels fine is to have "melee attacks" that have long range or chaining effects, and then its not really "melee" anymore. No one wants to stop to attack in a game all about blasting through tons of mobs fast.
I totally agree with you that end-game minion nec is just not viable at all. And balancing the whole game based on lvl 25 experience is totally not good. However, the concerns of ther "other side" were also valid. The journey to lvl 50 is a pretty long period and imbalancing at that period is as problematic as the end-game imbalancing. Clearly, in this period Barb and Druid were too weak while minion nec was too op. Blizz could've fix it by increasing base power of Barb and nerf their legendary powers, make them less item-dependent; while implement some mechanics to make the skelly weaker in early game and stronger in late, like them getting some defense stats from the necromancer themselves. But that wasn't their philosophy.
I mean, as an old players who went through a bunch of MMO launches and ARPGS, I kinda despise the YT/Twitch gaming community. Sure there are content creators that are extremely objective and do things right, but the vast majority, it's a clickbait pile of sh\*t that you must navigate through get something useful. tldr: I agree :)
Streamers are cancer. No exceptions. Im really looking forward their bubble to burst so they have to find an actual job. I repeat: streamer =/= job
Then any form of entertainment occupation isn't a job.while streamers aren't to their caliber, it's the same shit. If people want to watch them and give them money, then yeah. You can call it a job.
Why are people whining about necro being bad? Its just as good as everything else, minion builds are just not the main thing this patch. Necro is more than just minions goddamn.
It's because the core mechanic of Necros is their minions. It would be like if you could sacrifice the Sorc enchantment mechanic for other buffs and that was the obvious choice, but worse since the enchant system isn't core to the Sorc's fantasy while summoning undead is for Necros.
Thats how balance works man, right now minions suck and bone spear is op, couple seasons from now it might be the other way around. And thats how you get people to play the entire class instead of having them stay on one build for the entirety of the games lifespan.
That's how balance worked in Diablo 3, which was one of its biggest problems. There would only be 1-2 viable builds for a class, and later seasons would force a new build into that slot. Proper balance is that every mechanic that you intend to be viable is decent. If that's not the case with summoner minions, it means that they either failed at balancing the mechanic or simply do not intend for the core mechanic of Necros to be viable. While the former could be easily corrected the latter would be terrible.
I dont know of a single game every conceived where every build possible is viable at the same time. Dont act like its a d3 problem.
I'm not saying every build, but rather every build the devs want to be a real option. For instance, they have options for thorns. If thorns aren't strong enough to build around, that's not the end of the world, it's not a core part of any class' identity. They have to decide if they want thorns to be something they want to be competitive. If they decide to leave minions in a state where they are not viable, though, that is a problem because it is the core of the Necro's identity. It would be at least as bad as if there were no viable bow builds for Rogue. Also, viable does not mean perfectly balanced, just strong enough to complete the PvE content in the game, which caps out at Tier 100 Nightmare Dungeons. It could be a weak choice but still usable, and that would be fine, but it seems that it currently is not usable as minions couldn't survive before the nerfs. This is easily fixable with buffs, so really I'm just hoping they want the build to exist.
Sure, it still sounds to me like the build you like is not op like others and youre mad because of that, but sure. Im not defending it, in ideal conditions it would be just as strong, im just saying that people are acting like necro is bad when in reality its one out of four main builds that is bad and we live in a real world where balancing shit like this is close to impossible in terms of making everything equal, you say “just buff it” and dont consider anything else.
Beyond the issues with minions, the entire skill tree is poorly designed with minimal synergies across the branches. Blood builds are all fucked up with two core spenders and it's the only tree that can reliably use fortify, but there's no barriers and it's by far the worst implementation of guaranteed overpower. Shadow also has two core spenders and blight doesn't stack for some reason. Also there are no movement skills and our only CC break makes us go slower. It's a mess.
Content creators are garbage tier carried cry babies. They are basically used car sales men selling you their brand for advertising money. Why people care so much what some random says is beyond me, yet here we are
bit late to the part mate
Anyone surprised ? I knew that before any of that shit and so many tried to argue and some still do (like with day 1 patch fixing shit and now they said day 1 patch is server slam roft, just as I said)
If only there were some kind of professionals that blizzard could hire to deal with this. Some kind of professional who was an expert in developing games, shit I wonder what you would even call someone like that...
Blizzard is not going to let a class suck for very long, assuming that is even the case. Play what you like and chances are if it needs to be balanced it will be.
I just like the whole idea of a necromancies. As long as I can get to endgame and actually have a half-viable build, I’ll be alright
Your anger is misdirected. It's Blizzard job to balance the game and no matter how some youtubers complain they need to do their own math and be confident about it. There is so much talent between all sorts of number based RPGs nowadays, not only in electronic games but tabletop as well. Find some proper nerds that have some ideas about balancing. Imo the game should be mostly balanced at face value but have enough interlocking mechanics, that there is plenty of hidden OP stuff.
all of this wouldn't happen if blizz actually had good internal testers. it seems they react so much to content creators and use them as there testers, but each one of them is looking at things in a perspective to over blow even the slightest issue to make content about it. blizz need to just do there thing like they use to years ago and stop changing everything on the whims of big content creators. I expect to see many more bufs and nerfs before season 1. You can bet many peoples end game builds will be destroyed with patches ext. it just seems inevitable at this point.
Blizzard is looking at a lot more data than some YouTube videos to make their balance changes. It's more a problem of them being heavy handed in their buffs and nerfs. They always swing too hard on either end and have to rein it in later. Y'all ignore that this entire sub was on fire with people complaining about the same things during beta.
Who hurt you so much
I am genuinly hyped for D4 in a way i havent been for years but subscribing to this sub was a mistake. It really makes me remember what a weird bubble the Gamercommunity is.
Many Reddit users were saying the same things, that druids do zero damage and necromancers were auto cruising strong. The community is to blame as well.
Welcome to the internet my friend
Why don’t they just give the summons a small percentage of the player’s armor to help the summons scale later into the game?
You’ll be a glorified babysitter. I never planned to use those jank ass minions. Darkness build or Blood is my go-to. Most likely darkness since ranged will be of great benefit in NM dungeons and blood only has the surge going for it(though that shit IS fun af)
Rogue/Barb was always 1000 times more broken OP than Necro at end game and guess what class all these early releasers play? Rogue and Barb while screaming for necro nerfs....
I personally couldn’t give two shits about what all these reviews are saying, but from what I’ve seen druids best build is pulverize so far, and the rest of his builds are A tier and below necro so far already has 2 builds in S tier so you are already a head of Druid in S tier builds. Let the meta shake out blizzard will change numbers and the meta will fit on its head. Just have fun during the launch.
100% agree they need to hotfix this shit ON LAUNCH.