Update:Necromancy Combat Changes & Beta Update (2024)

This official news post is copied verbatim from the RuneScape website. It is copyrighted by Jagex.
It was added on 20 October 2023.

The launch of Necromancy has seen a surge in players stepping into the role of a new Necromancer, taking on all manner of adversaries with their new tools and skills. This has been an absolute joy to see and we're looking forward to seeing these players continue to grow into experienced PvMers!

Now that Necromancy has settled in, there are two key areas of focus to tackle next based on your feedback - the high-skill balancing of all styles and the desire to see some of Necromancy's combat systems added to the other styles.

We know these topics are really important to many of you, so we've been putting the pieces into place to enable a committed development effort in the months ahead. This all kicks off with some initial rebalancing on Monday, followed by the launch of the Combat Beta on October 30th to bring some of Necromancy's systems to the existing styles. Most importantly, a Combat Beta gives us a great opportunity to work directly with PvMers on getting this right!

Here's a rundown of what to expect in the near future for Combat Balancing:

Full Patch Notes can be found at the bottom of this blog. (click here to jump to the notes)

Necromancy Balancing Update - October 23rd

In the short term, we also want to address Necromancy's presence and strengths as a Combat Style. With that in mind, we want to make a few adjustments as we prepare to take steps towards combat balancing as a larger discussion.

Here's what we're bringing into the game next week:

• We're adjusting conjured spirits to tone down their power level while improving their quality of unlife.
  • Adrenaline cost has been removed from conjure and command abilities
    • We've observed this play style and feel that separating conjures from adrenaline is the best approach going forward.
    • This should help normalize damage across the entire encounter instead of it all being frontloaded at the beginning.
  • Addressing the power of 'Command Vengeful Ghost'
    • There was a bit too much power in the 'Woo'
• We'll also be introducing a new ability: 'Conjure Undead Army'.
  • This ability requires 99 Necromancy and is available at tier 7 of the Well of Souls talent tree. This ability allows a player to conjure multiple spirits at once.
  • Ectoplasm costs will be equal to double each conjure ability included, and the ability can be right-clicked and customized to select/remove conjure abilities.

Please note that we will be closely monitoring these changes and will continue to iterate based on feedback we see during this time. Full Patch Notes can be found at the bottom of this blog.

Combat Beta - October 30th

As mentioned we're going to continue to iterate on combat adjustments as we look towards a Combat Beta with more changes for the other Combat Styles on October 30th.

The goal of this Beta is to get combat system changes into players' hands, get player feedback and direction into the development flow and try out a few ideas on how to improve the combat skills, this will be one part of this process as reworking the Combat Styles is a extensive project with each style having its quirks and eccentricities that need refinement and we want to bring players along on this journey.

The core 3 changes that are going into the first beta release are:

• Enable 'Damage Potential' for all combat styles for the player
  • This is the removal of hit chance and instead, a damage scaler based on% chance to hit (e.g. 50% = do 50% of your damage instead of having a 50% chance to miss)
• Increase the 'Damage cap' for all combat styles
  • This is an increase from 10,000/12,000 to 30,000
• Implement a simplified 'Critical strike system' for all combat styles
  • Each style will have a% chance to critically strike and then when you critically strike your damage is increased by your critical strike damage% which increases with level
    • Critical Strike Chance: 10% by default for all styles, however this could change based on beta feedback
    • Critical Strike Damage: Same formula as Necromancy for all styles, however this could change based on beta feedback (e.g. Melee could have 100% critical strike damage)

*** Note: Melee uses the 'Strength' stat for this

Mods Ryan and Sponge are also working on the next iteration of changes as part of a rebalance and they would like to get these ready for beta launch but it will more likely be in a later iteration of the beta.

We will be sharing more information on how the beta will function closer to the launch. Stay Tuned!

Bonus Feature: Drop Tables

With Necromancy out the gate and players taking on the First Necromancer and the Spirit of War, it's time to dive into the loot tables for both these foes!

Hermod

• 1/10 Hermodic plate -> 1/9 with Tier 3 luck
• Pet: 1/2000 with a threshold of 400

Rasial

• 1/320 to hit weapon table 1/316 with Tier 4 luck
  • Even distribution for both weapons (50/50 chance for lantern/armguard)
• 1/128 to hit armor table 1/126 with Tier 4 luck
  • Even distribution for all armour (20% at each piece)
  • The weapon and armour table are individual rolls, so you can hit both on the same kill.
• Pet: 1/1500 with a threshold of 300

Since the launch of Necromancy and players getting to battle this ghastly duo there have been:

• 10,176 Herman pet drops. That's Hermany.
• 8764 Miso Pet drops!
• Over 1.6 million Hermodic Plates
• 109,281 collective pieces of the First Necromancer armour have dropped. The Crown being the most common at 22070 and the Footwraps being the lowest at 21741 drops, he is surely going to run out of Ensouled cloth eventually.

Numbers accurate at time of typing, may not reflect live rates at time of reading

Necromancy Balancing Update Patch Notes

'Conjure Skeleton Warrior' Ability

• Damage range has been reduced to 22%-28% (was 27%-33%).
• Additional damage has been changed to a damage increase:
  • Previously, each rage stack would offer 1% ability damage, The average damage would be 55% ability damage per hit at max stacks (30% base + 25% from stacks).
  • Now each rage stack increases the damage by 3%. This is now 43.75% at max stacks (25% base + 75% damage increase from stacks)

'Conjure Putrid Zombie' Ability

• Adrenaline Cost Removed
• Base Duration reduced to 42s (-3 seconds)
• Movespeed increased from walking to running
• The zombie's passive poison damage has had its damage range reduced from 27-33% to 8-12%.
• Passive proc interval rate increased from 1.8s to 3s.
  • We have reduced the damage and tick rate of poison as currently it was offering too much passive damage for minimal investment and we want poison builds to have their moments but still require equipment investments to see their full effects.
• Bug fix: Passive damage will no longer attempt to apply poison while wearing Cinderbane Gloves.

'Command Putrid Zombie' Ability

• Ability can now be cast without a target.

'Conjure Vengeful Ghost' Ability

• Adrenaline cost removed
• Heal value reduced to 125% (was 175%)
  • Healing now happens on-hit, as opposed to on-attack, which means that the healing value will scale up based on damage modifiers (e.g. if the target is inflicted with debuffs such as "Haunted" or "Vulnerability")

'Command Vengeful Ghost' Ability

• Adrenaline Cost Removed
• Command now has a fixed duration of 30s and will require recasting to upkeep.
• Changed the effect from 100% of base damage up to a cap of 35% ability damage -> 10% of base damage up to a cap of 20% ability damage as bonus damage.
• The intention with this change is to still enable the benefit of amplifying hard-hitting abilities while reducing how much extra damage was being generated from lots of instances of low-damage hits.

'Life Transfer' Incantation

• Increase duration from 20.4s to 21s
• Changed from maximum life points to base life points. E.g if you have 15000 Life Points with 99 Constitution, you will only lose 4950 (which is 9900/2) instead of losing 7500 which is what you would lose in the current version.

'Invoke Death' Incantation

• Increased duration to 12 seconds (was 6 seconds)
• It's still one application per cast, but there was an overreliance at the start of fights on being tick-perfect with invoke death which made it feel clunky to interact with.

General

• Necromancy shields will no longer cause conjured spirits to despawn.
• Necromancy Shields are now classified as having an 'Underworld connection' which allows them to maintain conjured spirits but they cannot be used to conjure them
• Resolved some issues related to Death Mark
• Fixed an issue that caused it to trigger multiple times
• Fixed an issue where the damage from the mark was delayed
• Fixed an issue that allowed Death Mark's insta-kill damage to reflect at the player.

- The RuneScape Team