lthough the position of Necromancer Team Lead has not been filled since the most noble Avecrien stepped down, the Wizard Team Lead Therrik was kind enough to share the feedback with the community. Mackey's comments have been emphasized for clarity.

The Necromancer Team Lead Report

Concerns:

1. A level 50 necromancer's pet takes approximately 26% more spell damage than another level 50 player.
2. Our pet suffers maximum duration crowd control regardless of resistances or fall off from AoE.

Both of the above issues should either be addressed (things being base do pet's level instead of caster's level) or kept in mind when balancing the class as a whole.

3. Due to pathing and limited resources for controlling the pet, the necro class is clumsy at best. Movement commands do not force the pet to not move or to go directly in any direction.

Pathing is definitely a problem but one that we can only make slow consistent progress on. If there are pet commands that need to work better or differently to help allieviate the frustration factor we can definitely look into them.

4. The pet can not be stopped from attacking a player in range if we cast a spell, no matter what stance it is in.

Make sure this is in the bug forum.

5. The spell queue system makes it very difficult for a necromancer to react to a dynamic situation. If a situation calls for a particular spell to be cast, it can take up to 11 seconds just to start casting it. The necromancer is wholely dependent on the pet's spell queue and attack cycle in order to attack.

Spell queuing can be clumsy if you stack up too many spells. I'll check with the systems guys and see if they have any planned improvments in this area.

6. All spells and abilities in the spell queue can be overwritten by any other spell or ability, causing us to lose RAs and abilities such as FP, activating their timer, without ever gaining their benefit.

Use the bug procedure on this. Not intended to work that way.

7. Any debuff cast on our pet interrupts us. This does not apply to any other class in the game.

Report in the bug forum.

8. Necromancers suffer a cast time penalty while in shade form. Without buffs, we cast noticable slower than the delve speed of spells even though we might have high dexterity.

Report in the bug forum. Grab some logs showing this if you can.

9. It is difficult for healers to heal an injured necromancer due to seeing their health decline in the group window but having to independently find and select the pet in order to heal us.

It's been requested that heals cast on the shade heal the pet. Not sure if there are technical/code limitations holding that up. Will try and check.

Speclines:

All:

1. We feel that our spec buffs are too weak to enhance their respective spec lines. In group situations they are easily overwritten.

There may be some changes coming up that make self buffs much more attractive. We may also be doing an overall self-buff review.

2. When LoS was implemented for our class, it was also applied to our PBAE spells. No other class must gain LoS on anything in order to cast a PBAE.

We're fixing this so that LOS between shade and pet is still required, but the shade no longer will need to be /facing the pet to cast. This should be a huge improvement in overall playability.

3. Our instant debuffs must process through the pet's spell queue and take up space that prevents us from casting other spells.

Yes, that's part of that system design.

4. We feel too restricted by having to use only one specific pet at level 50, especially due to the radically different attack speed of the abomination.

More variety in pets would be a good thing for many classes. Would like to do a pet review sometime, but there's always so much going on that it's tough to get to everything we want to do.

Painworking:

1. This line deals less damage and takes more time do so than the others while also having no means of self defense, healing, or ranged attack.
2. The AoE snare's duration, especially after resists, is considered to be too short to be useful in most situations, especially since it breaks mez.

Deathservant:

1. Our PBAE spell does approximately 2/3 of normal PB damage with increased cast time and only marginally less power usage along with the previously mentioned LoS requirement to our pet.
2. Our HoT spell doesnt last long enough or heal for enough to be considered a viable alternative to using lifetaps or even pure DDs.
3. We feel our damage shield's duration is too short to be adequately used in group situations due largely to the trouble of passing it through the queue in the middle of battle.
4. The shade cast DD spells do only 20% more damage than the deathsight lifetap while requiring twice the amount of power.

All three nerco lines should be rebalanced. Deathsight is the line of choice for obvious reasons. At some point we'd like to rebalance all three, but as of right now the focus is still on fixing bugs.

Item Issues:

1. We are unable to use any item other than breathing potions while in shade form. We would like to have access to quests that require the use of items and acess to the benefits of alchemy, including items procs if possible.

We're looking into adding the abilities provided they can be done in ways that cannot be exploited.

2. The new ToA caster item bonuses that increase casting speed and spell duration do not transfer to the pet. We'd like access to these bonuses.

Report this in the bug forum.

3. Necromancers have no ability to tell whether or not they can use an artifact when in shade form before activating and levelling it.

Bug forum.

Quests:

1. Necromancers would like to see the encounters and quests that they are currently excluded from changed in such a way that the class would be able to participate on the same level as other classes. Whether this is caused from items our class is flagged unable to pick up or because of items we have to use to further a quest but cant /use in shade form, necromancers feel that a class is of higher priority than any encounter.

Create a list of quests and encounters the class is excluded from. I am not aware of any. Not all quests will be doable in shadeform of course, for obvious reasons, but all should be doable.

Documentation:

1. Spells that are shade cast and then processed through the pet are incorrectly labeled as instants on the herald. This confuses many people who are unfamiliar with or are just starting to play the class.

Noted for herald team.

2. There is no easy way to research how exactly a necromancer functions in shade form or exactly what buffs, item bonuses, and realm abilities work for the pet and how they do so. Even searching through all the herald's patch notes, the information is incomplete. Necromancers both new and old are in need of accurate and accessible documentation on the class.

Noted for herald team.

New issues:

1. Many mobs in TOA are 100% magic immune, immune to a specific magic damage type, or perform a counter attack to magic used against them. However there are very few, if any, mobs where magic attacks are a requirement (which would counteract this issue).

Make sure these are noted on the TL forum thread on this topic. We've made a lot of progress addressing these and will continue to do so as reports of these mobs come in.

2. The above/under-water casting restriction makes it very difficult for a necromancer in an aquatic encounter to cast any spells near the surface.

I will mention this but I am not sure what sort of solution, if any, they coudl come up with to make it easier.

3. A pet summoned while underwater to combat the previously mentioned problem will continue to swim and believe it is underwater after you bring it onto land. There is no way to regain LoS until the pet is released and resummoned.

Other issues:

1. Necromancers are completely unable to change the way they look. They must all use the same pet and must all be the same shade. Necromancers would love some way to change their appearance.

I can ask them to add the ability to change how pets look to the improvements list.

User Interface:

1. The new ability to mod our UIs could potentially bring a great deal of equality to the necromancer class by allowing them expand and configure the pet control window so that they can see all of the buffs currently active on them. However, all buffs beyond the sixth are represented by question marks. All spells and abilities present on the pet, and thus the necromancer, are also undelvable. Necromancers believe that this unique class restriction is unnecessary and would like to be able to have this information if at all possible.

Noted for interface team.

Follow Up:

In the last report you reacted positively to the idea of a /distance command to help necromancers overcome the difficulty in controlling the pet and dragging it to the proper loc to gain LoS. Is there any update on the status of this idea?

It was added to the list of improvements. I have no status on it.