Quote:
Originally Posted by jolanar
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Man it would be super neat if there was a way for a bone knight to cast all the same spells but not have to be in melee range.
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Being melee is what makes it so stronk. Pets trying to tank isn't so great. You end up in a race to kill the target before they outpace you in your pet healing (shadow pact is good, but it's only like 80 healing a tick.... pets can't last alone like that, especially not in a fast pace of fighting). That's why usually necros will fear kite instead, to save their pets from damage (which is a good way to fight! I do ice giants like that, but not the best option in a lot of situations).
So you are filling in the weakness of the pets healing by tanking yourself (since you can heal yourself really good). Then the pet becomes more like a strategic shield. Send in first to start the fight and set up your lifetap.... then before it gets too hurt, jump in and melee while it heals through its lifetap proc and natural regen.
You can FAR FAR outtank your pet until 40's... then the pet becomes pretty decent at taking hits, but still isn't like a mage earth pet or anything.
And the melee of boneknight isn't shabby either (it works out to be a lot better DPS over X amount of time than the mana could get you from medding.... ESPECIALLY since most of the damage is going to be dot damage, and mobs will die before you get a full dot duration off).
It's all about minimizing downtime and being the most efficient in terms of damage and recovery.... which anyone who has tried it past 20 or so knows about. Once you find yourself in unrest and clearing the entire yard non-stop alone or with a duo partner.... well, that never stops.
I've tested how a normal necromancer and a tanking strategy works against each other. In sky on the first island, there was one mob up... and me and another necromancer were seeing who could hurt it furthest before needing to feign.
By using my mana to trade off tanking with my pet, I was able to get it hurt it with melee twice as much as they were with dots (their pet just died too fast and he wasn't able to keep up, then needed to feign).
We both took a couple stabs at it too, so it was our prefered strategies against an unfearable mob (though, after that I used hate-kiting to get it down really low! But then I made a mistake of trying to unsummon my pet to reset the agro, and discovered the island was too small to give me time to resummon it... and I was too lazy to try again. But that's really similar to fear kiting since you need so much room, but good against monk GMs and things, like I killed the monk GM in qeynos like that, the one that enrages when low and all them things)
Anyhow.... bone knights is strong!! And also, gnomes is great!