Animate Dead Nerf

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Sun Arrow
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Animate Dead Nerf

Unread post by Sun Arrow »

Revision: 2620
Author: Endelyon
Date: Friday, March 15, 2019 4:24:56 PM
Message:
- Animate Dead now capped at HD 10, max of 3 summons

This is the second time Animate Dead has been nerfed and now the spell is completely useless for anyone over 20th level. Also the undead summoned have HALF BAB, the same as a wizard, they were useless as offense anyways and now they don't even have enough HP's to even be decent cannon fodder. This is on top of the fact that summoning them makes you Kill On Sight to most players.

I would like to request that this change be reviewed and hopefully be reverted back. Totally destroying the usefulness of this spell for epic levels is already a kick in the gut for Necormancers who already have so many monsters in the game immune to death magic.

Also Warlocks can now summon level 21 undead pet that are useful in epics but wizard and clerics are limited to level 10?
Last edited by Sun Arrow on Fri Apr 12, 2019 11:09 am, edited 1 time in total.
chad878262
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Re: Animate Dead Nerf

Unread post by chad878262 »

Well, it is a level 3 divine / level 4 wizard spell. Does it make sense to be useful for epic PCs? At epic levels shouldn't the spell being used be Create Greater Undead? I realize it only lasts 6 minutes (12 if extended, but that is a 9th level slot). Even without it there is the level 6 spell Create Undead which is hour per level and still summons some pretty tough critters (level 16+ = Mummy Lord). You also have Control Undead to have a Dominated Ally to go along with any summons. On top of all this with (epic) spell focus all your undead summons are further improved.

So I guess the question is, should a level 3/4 spell have been the go-to summon for a level 21+ necromancer? I mean, for a Conjuration Specialist they are using level 9 (gate) for 40 rounds summon or level 8 (Greater planar binding) for minute/level summon. It would seem the power and durations of the higher level necromancy summons are approrpiate, so if a level 3/4 spell was being used instead at epic levels I would say a nerf was warranted.

No idea what discussion went in to the decision making and not saying you don't have a valid concern. However, on the surface it does seem like Necromancers should be using higher level spells if they want more powerful summons capable of staying power at epic levels.
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Sun Arrow
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Re: Animate Dead Nerf

Unread post by Sun Arrow »

chad878262 wrote: Fri Apr 12, 2019 11:06 am Well, it is a level 3 divine / level 4 wizard spell. Does it make sense to be useful for epic PCs? At epic levels shouldn't the spell being used be Create Greater Undead? I realize it only lasts 6 minutes (12 if extended, but that is a 9th level slot). Even without it there is the level 6 spell Create Undead which is hour per level and still summons some pretty tough critters (level 16+ = Mummy Lord). You also have Control Undead to have a Dominated Ally to go along with any summons. On top of all this with (epic) spell focus all your undead summons are further improved.

So I guess the question is, should a level 3/4 spell have been the go-to summon for a level 21+ necromancer? I mean, for a Conjuration Specialist they are using level 9 (gate) for 40 rounds summon or level 8 (Greater planar binding) for minute/level summon. It would seem the power and durations of the higher level necromancy summons are approrpiate, so if a level 3/4 spell was being used instead at epic levels I would say a nerf was warranted.

No idea what discussion went in to the decision making and not saying you don't have a valid concern. However, on the surface it does seem like Necromancers should be using higher level spells if they want more powerful summons capable of staying power at epic levels.
I would love to see a spell level 7 or 8 animate dead with that scales with epic levels. The problem is the higher level undead spells take up A different summon slot than animate dead. Those higher level summon undead spells are used IN ADDITION to animate dead. That is what makes the Necromancer interesting in this game. With out animate dead the Thaumaturge greatly out performs the necromancer in the pet department. And the Thaumaturge dosen't have to contend with having a KOS status.

Also wizards should have some scalability for lower level spells, just because they are limited in the number of high level spells they can cast. At epic level on my wizard I use my level 1 - 4 spells all the time, if those spells became useless at epic levels the wizard would be a poor class indeed.
chad878262
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Re: Animate Dead Nerf

Unread post by chad878262 »

well you should still use level 1-4 spells all the time. You just shouldn't expect them to compete with the strength of a level 5 spell or higher. When I was playing my drow I used Animate Dead all the time because even without buffs (or with very few buffs) it outperformed level 5 and 6 summons in many ways. I would say as a level 4 Wizard Spell it should be able to tank for you pretty much indefinitely through CR ~15 or 16 mobs. After that there should be diminishing returns and I do not think it is fair to expect that summon you've been casting since level 7 to last long against CR20+ mobs. It should certainly take a few hits and maybe give you a couple rounds to reposition and such, more if you have buffed it's AC and/or have ESF: Necromancy, maybe used desecration first. However, it should not be able to have the staying power you are getting from (greater) create undead. Supplement those separate summon slots, sure, but not outlast.

Also remember to play to your strengths... Stinking Cloud, Cloudkill have no effect on undead so utilize those spells. Same thing with Negative Energy Burst which heals your undead allies while harming non-undead. There are lots of strategies to improve your necromantic activities that are not available to other spell schools.

Once again, not saying admin shouldn't reconsider, but I think there should be some thought in to where the ceiling should be. I can understand the enjoyment of multiple summons, but at the same time I do feel that having played with animate dead it was vastly overpowered for the spell level in prior years.
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Sun Arrow
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Re: Animate Dead Nerf

Unread post by Sun Arrow »

chad878262 wrote: Fri Apr 12, 2019 11:26 am well you should still use level 1-4 spells all the time. You just shouldn't expect them to compete with the strength of a level 5 spell or higher. When I was playing my drow I used Animate Dead all the time because even without buffs (or with very few buffs) it outperformed level 5 and 6 summons in many ways. I would say as a level 4 Wizard Spell it should be able to tank for you pretty much indefinitely through CR ~15 or 16 mobs. After that there should be diminishing returns and I do not think it is fair to expect that summon you've been casting since level 7 to last long against CR20+ mobs. It should certainly take a few hits and maybe give you a couple rounds to reposition and such, more if you have buffed it's AC and/or have ESF: Necromancy, maybe used desecration first. However, it should not be able to have the staying power you are getting from (greater) create undead. Supplement those separate summon slots, sure, but not outlast.

Also remember to play to your strengths... Stinking Cloud, Cloudkill have no effect on undead so utilize those spells. Same thing with Negative Energy Burst which heals your undead allies while harming non-undead. There are lots of strategies to improve your necromantic activities that are not available to other spell schools.

Once again, not saying admin shouldn't reconsider, but I think there should be some thought in to where the ceiling should be. I can understand the enjoyment of multiple summons, but at the same time I do feel that having played with animate dead it was vastly overpowered for the spell level in prior years.
1. Desecrate does not increase your summoning level cap.
2. lower level spells like fireball had their damage dice scaled up so that they specifically would still be useful in epic levels.
3. A thaumaturge can summon 2 level 18 pets with FULL BAB. Necromancers get 1 with 3/4 BAB and a duration of 2 rounds per level. Animate Dead has HALF BAB, with a maximum BAB of 7! with every spell focus. Necromancer pets now fall short of thaumaturge and other pets in the game unless you take enough pale master to get the vampire.
4. spells for pure DC wizards need to scale or everyone just starts playing gishes and warlocks.
5. Healing your animated dead with negative energy burst is kind of useless 20+ WHICH IS WHAT WE ARE TALKING ABOUT. Necros are great until level 15 or so, it is the scaleibility in later levels that is in question? Why would I play a necro focus now over any other focus + Thaumaturge? (who also can summon summons that have no RP penalties) That's the real question.
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Re: Animate Dead Nerf

Unread post by chad878262 »

Wait....did you seriously just give me a numbered list in which FIREBALL is stated to be useful at epic levels? wow...ok, carry on.
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Korchas
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Re: Animate Dead Nerf

Unread post by Korchas »

I'm with Sun Arrow on this one. The undead from animate dead are already useless for anything but cannon fodder in the epics and not particularly gamebreaking at earlier levels either, especially considering the humongous handicap you give yourself in that basically everyone will yell at you, attack you or shun you for the rest of your server existence for calling upon them.
As it is with this update, the spell is completely and utterly useless beyond fluff-reasons, and in that sense, yes, chad, even more useless in epics than fireball. And that is not something that it should be, especially in the light of the myriad ways necromancy is already countered by NPCs on this server at the very minimum, with bosses immune to death effects or percentile damage, ridiculous saves etc.

Would also kindly ask for that to be reviewed, although I do not give it much hope considering the player response back with the last nerf was basically the same, if perhaps a bit louder because there were more active necromancers back then. And the result is... more nerfs. :cry:
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Valefort
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Re: Animate Dead Nerf

Unread post by Valefort »

Do you think it was normal for a level 4 spell to give you up to four 20 HD skeletons for ages ? This spell is still vastly more powerful than summon creature IV (which is somewhat acceptable due to necromancy being shunned), and can be used for longer, that's completely sufficient.

Compare with level 8 spell https://wiki.bgtscc.net/index.php?title=Army_of_Death, which should be tweaked up (but not much either).
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Re: Animate Dead Nerf

Unread post by Korchas »

The comparison with Army of Death has been drawn last time too, and I genuinely believe that the Programming team and DMs alike underestimate the severity of HOW MUCH you are f**ked for using Necromancy in the community. Animate Dead alone (which I rarely used anyways because, as pointed out, even before the most recent nerf it was just cannon fodder) resulted in hour-long discussions on whether or not it was justified in that specific circumstance, and being a specialized Necromancer at all has resulted in my character being shunned by a sizable number of players who actively threaten repercussions to people interacting with my toon at all.
Of note, I never actually used ANYTHING, at all, against players.
And now you cut down one of the spells that enabled necromancers that would likely be, by necessity thanks to such reactions, required to basically be playing solo or in a massive pinch to use that spell at all. While lauding a 8th circle spell that I have used precisely twice because of the long casting time, to have an effect that is lesser than that of other 8th circle spells and lasts for basically no time at all, thanks to the 1 round/level duration.
Perhaps look towards buffing the alleged 'better' alternative first instead of nerfing the admittedly stat-wise superior one to begin with? I am ultimately not affected, because the aforementioned situation already drove me off the server for the most part to begin with, but I thought that BG was meant to be inclusive to players wanting to play evil characters too. Else you can just cut out the evil-alignments and tell people to do only good or neutral characters, at this point.
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Re: Animate Dead Nerf

Unread post by Sun Arrow »

Valefort wrote: Sat Apr 13, 2019 4:07 am Do you think it was normal for a level 4 spell to give you up to four 20 HD skeletons for ages ? This spell is still vastly more powerful than summon creature IV (which is somewhat acceptable due to necromancy being shunned), and can be used for longer, that's completely sufficient.

Compare with level 8 spell https://wiki.bgtscc.net/index.php?title=Army_of_Death, which should be tweaked up (but not much either).
Is there any chance we might see an upgrade, something like:

Greater Animate Dead, level 8

In the future?
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Re: Animate Dead Nerf

Unread post by Valefort »

I've already stated that army of the death should likely be buffed but necromancers are not weak at all, animate dead being that powerful was a huge oversight.

Also there are plenty of characters that are not good or even neutral aligned so I don't think there is an underestimation of the drawbacks of using such necromancy spells (imo there is an overestimation :?, that's what I wrote "somewhat justified" earlier).
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Re: Animate Dead Nerf

Unread post by Balthomer »

If you are going to nerf it at least fix the bugs of the spell first, its bad enough that sometimes you lose summons due to the terrain, now it gets nerfed again?
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Re: Animate Dead Nerf

Unread post by Wolfrayne »

Id have to say i agree with Valefort. the spell was way too strong for what it was (especially for those with the domains to get it earlier) Once army of the dead gets beefed up we should be all good. Even at low HD they were good meatshields/distractions.
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Re: Animate Dead Nerf

Unread post by Ravial »

Well, I have to side with Valefort here, myself.

I'm sorry, but I think you guys look too much at undead-creation line of spells that Necromancy has and forget to see the wide array of death spells + Vampiric Feast +spells like Wrack, Ray of Enfeeblement and others that are opened up for Necromancers as well. Evil aligned spellcasting has a -ton- of useful tools that you can use. Animate Dead being brough in line with what it should've been to begin with (Because that's the truth) is only a -small- nerf that will otherwise not change a lot otherwise. And, as stated previously, Army of Death is likely to see an upgrade.

It's also important to remember that game development is fluid. Things get nerfed and then things get buffed- just like in MOBA games like Heroes of the Storm or League of Legends. It's a neverending struggle of balance.
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Re: Animate Dead Nerf

Unread post by RaiderOne »

As one of my main toons is a necromancer I have to say that this isnt exactly well recieved. The previous version of the spell has its problems; unobstructed space for maximum summon; random summons -some of which are total garbage *cough skeleton archer*; and yes you got several of them and they were ok enough with the boost from desecrate but they were still meh and not worth wasting spells to buff. As pointed out by others in this thread there is the stigma of summoning them, as opposed to every goody goody and his army of planars, which has always made it more difficult to play. At level 18 I use them mostly as cannon fodder and the only one of the bunch that is worth a damn is the scythe wielding skeleton.

I'm not saying that undead summons should be better than normal summons and we do realise that the spell is not high level, but it is the necromancers bread and butter. Now there is a social tax to using them and is not accounted for, and like any deal with the devil there should be some reward to the risks. There are also less undead summons compared to the generic summon creature spells and all the options those spells have to summon specific monsters, benefits from feats, or interactions with class specific abilities. Most of which are bad, or inefficient, or worse choices for an undead summoner.

I can understand that 5 could be seen as too many and can accept 3. It would be nice to always get 3 if that is not the case already. That being said, the bad stats AND a 10HD limit AND the random summons - some of which are total crap. For me is too much, it just pushes the spell to the point where i wont bother casting it. Which I dont think is the intention at all.

Obviously there is a difference in a computer game to the paper version, but the pnp version of this spell animates corpses of those dead around you. Now honestly i think that is too much effort to put into the game and makes the spell somewhat impractical. But when used you got an undead version of what you animated. Which meant that if you killed a 12HD troll you could animate it as a 12HD undead zombie troll. So you might look at the spell and say that its too good to have more than 10HD or whatever but the pnp version is only limited by your caster level (boosted by desecrate) and the HD of the creatures being animated. Essentially you can animate anything and it is permanent until destroyed with no duration limit. It is a very powerful spell for its level because the downside was social and the requirement of powerful dead creatures to animate.

FYI before someone gets it wrong. if you read the spells pnp description it lists only skeletons and zombues but what this actually means is that you get a skeleton or zombie by applying the undead template to the base creature, not that you can only get a regular human zombie etc.

So in comparrison to this the version on the server is very weak.

As a side note, how does this affect the palemaster class and or the use of the desecraste spell?
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