Petition to make necromancers phylactery infinite use and generally buff the faction as a whole.

[roper0502]

The necromancer as a faction is painfully weak and generally unfun to play as. To begin with I have seen as well as head from others that your undead minions cannot utilize experience. a MAJOR drawback, meaning that your minions cannot grow stronger after being made and will become far weaker as the game progresses unlike every other enemy in the game. furthermore the undead faction cannot manufacture jewelry Which further cripples there ability to perform well in combat and, since you require fire resistance to utilize infernium equipment, flat out prevents them from utilizing some of the best endgame gear as well as stopping them from utilizing runes for further improving gear. the only way to get jewelry and runes is to find it in the wild or defeat another players keeper which is way easier said than done given how your minions cannot benefit from experience which may not even matter because said players keeper may not even have what you are looking for. not to mention how rare decent runes and jewelry are to find in the first place.

Neither of these things make any sense whatsoever, if my skeletal warrior can learn how to swing his club harder by bashing a training dummy then why can't he do it by bashing some bandits as well? Furthermore if a goblin artificer can craft a necklace then why cant my zombie artificer do the same? I get that the necromancer may not have been designed to have as good minions as other keepers but that doesn't mean that he or his minions are somehow dumber than an ordinary keepers. I mean, he literally found a way to cheat death, I think he can figure out how to make a fricken necklace. And speaking of cheating death, lets talk about the phylactery.

Fundamentally a necromancer or undead lich which is what I am assuming our keeper is given the're vulnerability to sunlight, guarantees his own life by creating an object in which he stores his own soul. traditionally this object IS NOT destroyed upon the first death of the lich meaning that he need not create a new phylactery every time he dies. I understand that in game this was done for the sake of balance in order to prevent you from endlessly cheating death when you should have otherwise died, however the necromancer faction is not currently capable enough to compete against current ordinary enemies or player keepers without suffering unreasonable losses which quickly becomes expensive, time consuming and even deadly if you cant craft embalming fluids and replace your flimsy soldiers fast enough and lord help you if you try to bring your fragile keeper into battle. not to mention how devastating losing a zombie king could be since there so expensive to make and it cost so much to constantly replace phylactery's in addition to necromancer units not being capture-able.

I understand that the necromancer was designed to work with larger numbers of weaker units and that the phylactery was made one time use for balance. but having to spend a ton of gold to replace the only half decent minions that I have just for them to die again is extremely frustrating and I believe a excellent fix for that problem is to simply make the phylactery infinite use. Not only would that be extremely fun and not to mention cool as ♥♥♥♥ but if one isn't a fan a pure fun it could also be balanced easily as well. For example instead of destroying the phylactery upon use one could simply add a cool-down timer to when it can be used again. Meaning that if say your keeper or bound minion dies, is saved by the phylactery and dies again before the timer is up they die permanently. I reckon a 350-500 turn cool-down would work as that would allow you to raid almost continuously while enduring losses but should your keeper or bound minion die in a raid it would allow the raiders plenty of time to kill them again and even destroy the phylactery before the timer runs out. alternatively one could also make it so that the phylactery takes 350-500 turns to revive your keeper or minion so that raiders don't have to fight them twice before killing them for good. although I don't know how that would work with the keeper since as soon as they are considered dead the game is over. I reckon the first suggestion would work better for that instead of having to code all that extra crap where the game has to check and see if the keeper was bound to a phylactery or not before ending the game.
or just respawn them instantly everytime they die regardless but put a debuff on them similar to the unconscious debuff that incapacitates them for the set number of turns every time they do. definitely make sure that you can swap positions with them in that state though so they don't body block the phylactery so it cant be destroyed before they get up again.

And I think that completes my petition. I genuinely love this game and have kept coming back to play it over the past few years and would recommend it to anyone that loves dungeon and rpg games. the 1.0 update is amazing and I haven't played so much Keeper RL as I have since it came out. The dev for this game does incredible work and I cant wait to see what they do next. goodnight yall.







(also for the love of god please let the necromancer research jewelry crafting I am literally BEGGING YOU PLEASE LET THE BONY BOY MAKE FUNNY NECKLACES I WANT FIRE RESIST FOR TURBO FIRE AXE PLEASE!!!)

[Faerador]

Wait, you can assign the phylactery to someone other than your keeper?

Also, it's easy enough to add in the ability for the Necro keeper to craft jewelry, only for a fresh campaign. The files you can mod are generally stored in:

[Your computer drive]\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\KeeperRL\data_free\game_config

Specifically, you want to open the file, keeper_creatures, and go to the "4_Necromancer" header. In the list "technology =", add in "jewellery" (quotations included, using a single space between entries, just like other entries in the list are formatted). Then, in the "buildingGroups =" list, add "jeweller" (again, with the quotes and separated by a space).

The next time you start a Necro run, he'll be able to learn and craft jewelry, just like "classic" starts. Your standard zombie artificer will have 30 jeweler skill, allowing you to craft from both the jewelry table and magma jewelry table.

[Shiznaggles]

Phylactery is very much worth it as a tool for the Keeper. Once you start using it for other minions like Kings and Dragons, it becomes less useful and more of a money sink.

If you give Phylactery any more value by putting it on a timer, the keeper becomes basically immortal. That's the opposite of what the Necro keeper is supposed to be, same as the Wizard: Squishy.

The Necromancer is a really powerful keeper. The minions do get buffed by kill experience, which in turn is multiplied by their training. You can make a Vamp Warrior with, for example, 1 extra head and 4x melee training, meaning he will have a training limit of 19. That's 19 to attack and defense, as well as the kill multiplier.

The only minions I've seen that don't benefit from kill experience are Kings and Dragons. As well as Archers killing wildlife. I dunno if a hotfix changed this, will have to keep paying attention.

Getting corpses becomes very easy, and there are a few ways to get free corpses. This means you can make an army of undead. For free. In every game. As long as RNG does not screw you hard early on.

Getting balsams, meaning gold, is not so easy. But then the Necromancer has no gold upkeep costs. So you can reserve balsams for minions that you hope will not die, such as vampires. It's 15 gold to make one very powerful vampire who, if you babysit him just a little, will probably survive until the late game. That's value right there.

I agree that the lack of Jewelry crafting is weird. I saw the skill on my zombie artificers but the option was nowhere to be found. Necro should be able to do jewelry. If it needs to be balanced, then take jewelry slots away from skeletons and other undead that should not have them.