Let's Make Necromancer Better For Everyone!

2 clarifications 1) If necro were a burn trait, you could still buy it. I’d think 2 trait points would be a decent cost. 2) I’m not suggesting that multiple of these changes should be implemented simultaneously. My goal was to identify useful options that could help bring the trait to a less controversial state across skill levels.

As a solo main player the priority fix I would like to see with necro is MMR rebalance. Killing a solo after revive should not effect MMR for the solo or the killer 5 seconds or so after a revive attempt. This would keep more experienced solos in the mmr bracket that they’re suited for. I don’t abuse solo revive or quick play but playing against trios can drop me a star from as little as a couple of bad matches in a row and it doesn’t feel good to play against players who clearly haven’t gained decent game knowledge when I myself have over 1k hours in the game.

One small potential improvement I've never seen anyone float around is making the labored breathing of a downed (but not fully dead) hunter audible to other players. That'd be a way to tell if a downed player can revive again that is diegetic in the game world, would tie into the game's sound-based mechanics, and would require skill to nail down in the chaos of a firefight.

8:24 The mmr advantage is not brought up frequently and i'm glad you included this point. I want to add that not only is the solo more experienced, but in the event that he dies from the lower skilled players (possibly multiple times if they camp his body), his MMR takes a huge dive towards low stars because of how the star system works. A 5 star can get into a match solo, get farmed by a team and be 3 stars by the time he gets back to the lobby, so now you have a 5 star fighting completely new players or legitimate 3 star players. Intentional or not, deranking as a solo is inevitable as you lose more than you gain.

I think it would be cool if a Hunter that could still be revived (whether by themself or a teammate) made a very faint breathing sound. That way you can tell when someone is completely out (not breathing), but because the sound is quiet it would be inaudible in fights, still giving the necro player the advantage of surprise if used correctly. This would also obviously lower the amount of time babysitting dead bodies

A solo spamming revive is just as annoying as a trio spamming necro revives. I think we just need to remove the mmr nerf while solo.

For combating solo hunters use fire, concertina bombs, posion/concertina wire and camp the body. I stopped running necro when playing solo because damn near every time I get trapped and camped

I don't think it needs any changes. I understand it can be overwhelming for new players, but we were all new players once, right? We just get used to how the game works. Also, do you remember when solo necro was introduced there was a sound when the dead person left the game, like their soul just vanished? Yeah, we could have that back.

A team cannot lose off a single mistake, a solo can. What an odd point to make against solos.

Give death a special sound, like it had when they first introduced solo necro, and maybe make solo necro cost two bars of health

I would like to add another topic that is not mentioned. Necro has bought a ton of players. Before Necro it was REALLY rare to see solo player. And those players were almost only sniper. Necro made playing solo FUN and a good choice when you do not have friends on-line or do not want to find random. No necro, or a almost useless necro means that all those solos would eventually vanish except for the snipers, who were already there from the beginning.

I definitely think that you cant give solos something powerful so they can face trios, and simultaneously make them face lower skill trios. Thats kind of double dipping in making the life of a solo easier, and as a solo player, id personally much rather fight trios i feel had the game sense to fight me back. often i feel bad for the teams i wipe if they didnt seem aware enough.

Am I the only one that remembers that game mechanic of seeing a wisp-like effect going off a killed hunter the moment player disconnects from the game? It was on the same event that they added rain, if I remember it correctly, then after event they just removed it. If that mechanic returned I'd probably have no more problems with solos necroing themselves. Just let me know if player is still in that downed body or did he disconnect from the game, it would not only let me know if he's a solo among messy multiple team fights, but also would let me play the game and enjoy fights instead of camping a body of a player who probably already left back to menu.

I feel like this whole discussion is mainly from the pov of teams and a "I do not want to be bothered with solos" mentality. Let me adress some of the points. Necro needs 8 seconds to be available and the stand up animation is roughly 3 seconds. A marathon has plenty of time to duo tab you before you even get control of your hunter. If you kill a solo you have 8 seconds to position, reload, revive, heal or in general prepare for a hunter to stand up. With max 125 hp left, you can easily take him out, you can even stab him. He has no stamina, and is left with the last weapon/tool he used before dying. If he stands up, it's like his teammate mate it to the party, kill him a second time, now he has max 100 hp left, an easy upper body tab. -Easy to couter: fire, constantina, poison, there are endless solutions. Flare, dragon breath ammo, pistol with shotgun attachement, it is way to easy to burn people nowadays -Flow of game: Killing a hunter with peace of mind always requires to burn him. His team mate could sit at the other side of the compound and waiting. It's not a solo problem. -hate waiting: imagine you are the solo, running around for 5-15 min, get killed by some random dude, pick new hunter, wait for game and voila, easily 10 minuits till you are back in action. You on the other hand, need like 5 min to get him out of the game for sure. I do not think that not liking a mechanic or don't bother to prepare against is a valid reason for calling for a "fix". Necro is only a problem in sub 3 star lobbies, where people don't know that it is possible and get suprised. But the same is true for burning, for explosion and bullets going through wall etc. It's something you need to learn and adapt to. I could whine about setting hunters on fire and how I need to bring choke bombs and people camping the body of my team mate after setting him on fire. Honestly, Necro is useless most of the time and could need some buff, rather than a nerf. And don't forget, necro with relentless is 7 skill points already.

If fire would get yet again buffed setting people on fire would have to become significantly more difficult than it is in the current instaburn meta. I agree that death should have serious consequence in the game, but even more so I think the game needs to be fun. Dying as a solo is already practically a permadeath: 4 outta 5 times you can't survive getting downed unless there's some serious chaos going on. Most times I'm burning before I ever hit the ground. As is, from the top of my head I can come up with at least 27 variably reliable or situational ways to deal with a downed solo including all the ones that set them on fire. There are plenty of resources available to combo a set-and-forget type situation for solo necro, and even more if we count soft counters like choke clouds and alert trip mines to let you know they got up. If people don't know how to utilize them, perhaps that's on crytek. But if people refuse to use them and then cry solo necro is OP, that is on them and crytek shouldn't pander to that. What you suggest about nerfing necro + resilience counteracts their exact purpose, which is to give you a somewhat comparable rez chance to that of playing in a team. Nerfing it for teams too doesn't balance it out. Team members can still revive each other time and again, ad nauseam if they have a bounty. Now, I do not think solo necro is balanced! I think it could be implemented better for sure, but the reason is not that it is in any conceivable way OP. The reason is that it is a boring and exploitable mechanic the way it is implemented now. I am really not a fan of balancing by heavy handed nerfs / buffs, and especially when it concerns majority rule (team players) at the detriment to a minority (such as solo players). These tend to create further and exceedingly dissatisfying unpredictable problems since so many game mechanics interact with one another and are built upon each other. I really liked one solution you offered, which is that solos should not be in comparably lower MMR lobbies to begin with. I believe this is far more cause for the issue than the actual mechanical balance of traits and their counters. Furthermore, solo revive should not count toward MMR loss beyond your first death. That would bring it in line with soul survivor in terms of deranking efficiency. Even worse actually, since in SS you can at least get killed by a 1star whereas in your regular team MMR lobbies (at least on EU lobbies) you're not very likely to encounter anyone more than one MMR rank apart from you... These should also preserve some of that ye olde Hunt intensity for the geezers out there since they'd be fighting more uphill battles most of the time. I'd prefer this for myself absolutely. I for one genuinely do not belong in 3 stars, no cap. I try to say this with as much earnest self-reflection and non-bias as I can. I average at the border between 4-5 stars when I play seriously (be it solo or teams, randoms or friends) and therefore whenever I drop to lobbies with players at 3* and below, the game becomes very unjust and un-fun for everyone involved. And the way the MMR swings right now I tend to drop there a lot since I'm one of those thousands-of-hours geezers who have gotten bored with the meta and just go in with like full choke bolt hand xbow and a dinger to just have stupid pew pew fun and to squeeze some novelty challenge out of the game between the new gun additions each event... And I self revive only if I genuinely think I have a chance at getting up. I can imagine the speed people drop if they purposely derank... I personally think MMR should be way less swingy for everyone, teams included. Preferably, it should average your MMR against a longer period instead of being a simple addition / reduction based on match KD to enemy MMR ratio. Perhaps each match should only count toward your MMR as if played against your own average MMR. Perhaps each death should only count within a certain timeframe from your previous death. Perhaps redskull shouldn't count toward MMR at all. Or perhaps each match should only count success/failure toward your MMR as a modifier based on your specific match KDA. Idk, I'm not a game dev. Perhaps each of these alone would already throw balance out of whack for reasons I can't even fathom. All I know is I've played this game long and passionately enough to have witnessed just how inflammatory and bandwagony the public discussion can get, and how out of proportion Crytek tends to go with their balancing when they try to respond to it. The popular hateposting target seems to be solo revive right now and that makes me worried cause when this has happened before the game has changed a lot in ways that have completely destroyed the entire mechanic instead of tweaking it. So I've become very wary of what everyone thinks Crytek should or shouldn't do.... Interesting discussion though, thanks for chiming into it. I genuinely hope they find some sweepingly satisfactory way to mix things around for us. Maybe such an answer ripples from this! GG. :3

I think the biggest problem is the whole MMR thing with necro. Make the gap a bit smaller and also remove the option to dump your MMR by getting yourself killed over and over again and things would look quite different. Overall i just think necro needs to be in the game and it needs to be good, atleast for solos. Not overpowered of corse, but without people will stop to play solo or just go for sniper loadouts mostly.

I think a forced timer on necro would be cool. Like a time limit in which you can revive once you get downed. Ran into a lot of people who just stayed dead for like 10 minutes when I didn't have burn and ran into them later in the match because I was looking for a lantern or just walking away.

Finally, some good bait! To be brief, the only change I'd make would be the matchmaking weight. Incen could be brought up to its dragon breath counterpart by having shots to a downed body ignite with the same rules as standing hunters (two tap beyond x distance). Resilience countering snipers, wire, and poison puts it in a good place, but I've thought about it being regen before, too. Necro is mostly an optics problem. Any situation where a hunter is downed is made worse by that hunter having a teammate rather than being a solo. It's only because most people feel obligated or find it a fun challenge to save a teammate that teams put themselves into seemingly worse positions than solo necros find themselves in. Sniper problem? Your teammate can countersnipe or obscure the body. Revenge cause you didn't burn out? Against a trio, even after taking the time to burn out one body, still has two other members who WILL most likely hunt you down for the bounty revive. Solo necros escaping kill coffins too easily? Teammates can remove all punishment and revive with less health resources lost. People lose their minds when encountering a solo necro, but have no problems brushing aside the added threat and options teams have just because one person wiping out two or three people feels embarassing. I feel like for new player experience, most of it would be solved by enabling post death comms for teams. So, so many times I've died on the inside not being able to explain the obvious.

My view on solo necro was that it was suppose to reward the solo player if they traded with the last person on the team they killed. I like the fire change suggestion. For me I think removing the matchmaking bonus(as well as fix the deranking) and maybe make it so if you are solo necro you burn twice as fast.

I think the only change required is giving a smaller MMR advantage to solos and giving self revive a "grace period" of like 5 seconds after getting up, during which your MMR can't be affected. It would solve the unintentional deranking problem. Otherwise, I think solo necro is fine as is. It already takes your opponents to be careless for you to really take advantage of it in a fight. A regular fire bomb on its own is even very powerful in its current state, because since it burns for a very long time, you have to get up and move yourself to survive or completely die while trying. There is also poison and concertina traps, hand crossbow poison and fire bolts, poison and concertina bombs, dragon's breath, flare guns and fusees, even choke bombs as deterrence if you need time sensitive recovery. So many options to take care of solo necro. If you dont use any of them, I think that's skill issue, sadly. As a mostly solo player myself, I've never encountered another solo and thought "that's unfair". I believe the reason why solo necro is brought up as a problem so much is because it feels bad and unfair to fail taking care of a solo as opposed to being actually unfair or bad for the game to the point it warrants a big change. Solo necro is already a complex mind game at 3+ stars and really hard to pull off at 5+ stars. A direct nerf wouldn't help the lower skill lobbies, it would only bring higher skill players down to lower skill players' lobbies, causing further MMR imbalance.