You weren't the most lethal of necromancers,

1) Whatever assessment you're making (accurate or not) was about my second hero and first mage, that I played three years ago. I hear people improve over time. (Feel free to put your own summer 2000 character up for analysis on this thread. I suspect you'll see a difference between then and now.) I don't think playing a mage for the first time and ending up as a lich leader of Master (and I held on to leader for about 5 months before being promoted to heroimm) is an ill omen regarding my ability, and I don't think my foes from that time period would accuse me of being an all-RP character who was unwilling to fight when it was called for.

2) Since then, I've become a reasonably high-ranking immortal, who has done design more for mages than most other classes, including writing the code for a lot of the changes you're talking about. I frequently review handy chart-like data of how individuals or groups are doing. My work gets reviewed by people like Zulgh and Sebeok and Nepenthe and others, and we make adjustments as needed. I think any of those three will agree that when they come to me and say "X is too strong/weak", I'm more than willing to defer to their judgement.

3) There's any number of recent necromancers who were brutal on their foes, as a lich or even only as a Spectre. There are no punching bag Spectres, ever. In our recent player poll, the playerbase agreed that necromancers were at the front of the power curve, and I don't think they were referring to the level 20 ones.

3B) Some players have made the argument that 3) is because ranking a necromancer is especially hard. The (disputable) claim is that the weeding out process exclusively prohibits bad Spectres, and the clear-cut imbalance that was at Spectre is a result of selective breeding, and not inherent to the class. If that argument is true (it's on the table, but I'm not convinced yet), it suggests two imbalances (one with Spectres and one with midbie necromancers), and the prescribed course of action would be to correct them both. There's little question in my mind that a human Spectre before the recent changes was the most lethal combination available. Opening up the hero PK range and reining in Sleep slightly were intended to address this. If midbie necromancers are so impossible to rank that it prohibits most of the playerbase from attempting the class, I'm willing to look at it in the interest of class diversity. But saying that we should crank up Spectres and make them only attainable by a small fraction of the playerbase is just pandering to the elite players and worsening an imbalance.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com