Necromancy Elite Skill

Introduction

Welcome dear reader, if you’re reading this, it means you love Runescape just like I do, you’re curious to learn about things that can improve Runescape and dictate Runescape’s future.

This idea started out by me thinking of reworking existing skills, I started thinking about which skills could potentially use a rework; Construction and Prayer came to mind, I believe the skills that need a rework are the ‘’outdated’’ ones that only have 1 or 2 conventional ways of training the skill. These methods usually have to be the very boring ‘’run from A to B and click, wait X seconds, repeat’’ method of training the skill in order to be classified as ‘’this-skill-needs-a-rework skill’’. I absolutely LOVE the way Jagex has reworked mining and smithing into a more interactive skill, where you have the choice of either training in an afk manner, or pay more attention to the rocks and get rewarded for that. Same goes for Archeology, the world is filled with excavation hotspots, mysteries, locations to explore, a management type of minigame etc… Excavating hotspots isn’t that boring, the game forces you to run from 1 spot to another to maximize xp/hour. Not only that, the game forces you to visit different locations in order to retrieve artifacts for collections, completing these collections rewards you with relics and professor progress.

My eyes were on Prayer, the way I trained my Prayer to 99 was by dropping a couple hundred millions into the g.e., buying bones and running to gilded altars. This isn’t fun (but it is a great item sink), it’s the same thing over and over again and adds nothing to the game at all. This journey from 1 to 99 does give you a lot of benefits which I do like, a new prayer ‘’book’’, essential combat and skilling improvements, but that’s all. These ‘’prayers’’ you can use are basically Passive magic spells which you can upkeep using prayer potions. I personally wouldn’t want to rework this entire skill because the rewards are, in my opinion, already good. All it would need for 1-99 is a (couple) new skilling methods. But what about the 99-120 journey? I know Jagex wants to do this to some skills (Summoning would make the most sense right now, and I think Jagex is working on this right now) and I believe it’s important for the game’s growth (if you’re maxed, but you still want to skill and enjoy some rewards, with 99-120 you’ll have some things to do).

I remember in a stream - from I think Mod Osborne - where he explained that if they were to extend a skill to a 99-120 system, then that extended journey would have to introduce something new, a new skilling method that would change the feeling of the entire skill from 99-120. This is what Jagex did with Farming (PoF) and Slayer (player owned dungeons) and I absolutely loved this mentality. This is why - if I were to add a 99-120 to Prayer - I would like to see an entirely new skilling method with its own rewards.

Now, prayer is a combat skill, which increases your combat level and mainly exists to improve your combat performance, a 99-120 would have to directly impact combat (at least, the rewards it would give). The training method would have to be modern, an interactive/interesting/fun way to train your prayer level. When I think of Prayer, I think of religion/gods, but when I think of Prayer in a combat kind of way, I’d think of a ‘’call to the gods for power’’ kind of way.

Taken from the rs wiki:

What if we could train Prayer by doing more than burying bones, and use these bones/ashes in a more interactive way? We know almost all monsters in the game drop at least 1 bone, can we do something with this fact? What if we could use dropped bones to instead sacrifice these on the spot and ‘’resurrect’’ the dead? 99-120 could introduce a Necromancy branch in Prayer, with its own training method combined with general Combat, the rewards could be the ability to Summon ghost versions of slain mobs which help you in combat (telos has associate mobs, araxxor has associate mobs, gwd bosses have associate mobs, kill these first and turn them into your undead ‘’zombies/ghosts’’ that fight alongside and aid you in combat). Why stop there? Why not use your excess caught souls from 99-120 Slayer (ushabti) to Summon your caught souls into creatures that fight alongside you (with improved stats compared to realtime revived monsters)?
I think this actually has lots of potential, why not pivot it into a new skill entirely instead, so we can keep the 99-120 prayer slot for another genius idea (Think of new training methods in the new GWD’s)? Let’s call this skill Necromancy, an elite skill. Why? Because I want you to only be able to use this at a certain later point in your RS career. You’re not going to be necromancing at level 1 of course.

80 Prayer, 80 Summoning, 80 Slayer and potentially a new elder god related quest could be the requirements to unlock this Elite Skill.

Why a(n) (elite) skill?

It has potential for a lot of content, lore wise and gameplay wise. Let’s separate this into a new skill, so we keep room for another idea for a 99-120 Prayer update. Whenever I think of Necromancy ideas, I keep falling back to combining Prayer with Summoning and Slayer. My main reason for making this an elite skill is the fact that it wouldn’t make sense for a soon-to-be World Guardian to be able to revive the dead temporarily, this person needs some holy combat experience in order to do that (including an elder gods quest). Let’s add more maxing efforts, a new skillcape, new lore, completionist requirements and most importantly more combat interactions.

The Skillcape

Before I continue with the details, let me first show you a quick mockup of the skillcape. I used the color palette of the npc Death, yes it’s that simple. I used the wilderness skull icon, but this was just a quick find and art is not my main skill, this is just an idea:

Main details of Necromancy

Necromancy is an elite skill, which requires level 80 Prayer, 80 Summoning and 80 Slayer (and potentially an elder god quest). The main rewards will improve your combat and the main training method will include combat. Necromancy will mainly be described as the skill that allows you to resurrect slain mobs which will directly aid you in combat. Combat is an extremely important aspect of Runescape, so we should be careful of the impact of this skill on combat. This skill - even though it's an elite skill - will also affect your combat level number, because this skill will affect combat heavily. Depending on the power and importance of Necromancy during any combat situation, this skill can affect the course of combat heavily because the current bossing strategies we have now may be edited to take into account spending time to focus on killing the mobs the bosses spawn, rather than directly attacking said boss. This skill could promote the usage of AOE effect abilities while focussing the main boss, hoping to damage the mobs over time (this could also introduce new strategies, a strategy that focuses also on spending a combat rotation to touch mobs with a powerful poison).

Note; this design document will ignore the lore part of the skill, I will leave that to the lorehounds inside jagex to connect this to the rest of the plot of Runescape and potential new locations in the world.

How to start Necromancy: The Grim Underworld

During Nomad’s Elegy we visit the Grim Underworld which is located behind Death’s Door.

The Grim Underworld, known as Niflheim to the Fremennik,[1] and more commonly simply the Underworld, is a world parallel to Gielinor. It is the liminal space through which a soul passes on their journey to their final resting place — the afterlife.[2] The Underworld is fraught with danger, most notably the soul-devouring beasts of the goddess Amascut. The protector and guide of the souls passing through the Underworld is Amascut's brother and rival Icthlarin, god of the Underworld. source: https://runescape.wiki/w/Grim_Underworld

After having met the elite skill’s requirements, the world guardian can kick off their Necromancy journey with a quest teaching him/her the dark undead arts of reviving the dead, by breaking the connection between Gielinor and the Underworld and capturing the souls before they enter the afterlife. After Nomad’s Elegy this underworld location in runescape can be reworked to accomodate a new quest introducing Necromancy. After completing that quest, the world guardian unlocks this newfound power of understanding how to redirect the path of souls to be used once more in gielinor before arriving to the afterlife.

This quest unlocks a location dedicated to Necromancy, where we can place a player owned soul obelisk (Inspired by how Nomad wanted to capture all souls to fill up the soul obelisk in Soul Wars) which you will have to fill up by either sacrificing bones, ashes or captured souls from Slayer. This will act as your main source of necromancy power (just like how prayer points allow you to use prayer). This way we could even revive the minigame Soul Wars and add different rewards.

This Player Owned Soul Obelisk can also act as a gilded altar with permanent lit candles (milestone reward). This obelisk will have a 0-990 scaling just like prayer (or for more flexibility 0-9900) and will display this point bar on your action bar next to your prayer (this scaling can be increased further with certain necromancy unlocks). You unlock - just like a magic book and prayer book - a necromancy book, which is another addition to your UI elements.

How to train Necromancy

At level 1 Necromancy, you gain the ability of reviving an undead/ghost version of the monster you slayed, if you bury the bone of said monster within X seconds.

• Each time a necromancy ability (See page 6 for all abilities) triggers its effect, you gain XP. This can happen during various activities throughout Runescape, but mainly combat.
• Filling up your obelisk also gains you XP, it’s tiny, but still some XP. In order to not make people just buy massive amounts of bones to rapidly level up Necromancy (like Prayer); bones and ashes will grant 1-10% of the prayer XP you would’ve gained from sacrificing these items. This encourages gaining XP by combat.
• Revived mobs will only have a fraction of the power (health, defence, damage) of when they were alive, these mobs grant the player necromancy XP with each damage dealt.

Necromancy comes with a cost, not only do your necromancy abilities drain your necromancy points, but also your life points, because the mobs you revive need some sort of lifesource to stay active, this is the drawback of using powerful combinations of necromancy abilities. It would be wise to combine a necromancy strategy with perks/abilities that increase a combat aspect according to how low your health is! (For example, dharok’s memento)

Necromancy points can NOT be regenerated by using a ‘’necromancy potion restore’’ or something like that on release. (untradeable herblore potion idea with a recipe found in archeology? 99-120 summoning reward?).

The only way to regenerate these points is by filling your obelisk (fear not, there are certain necromancy milestones that can circumvent this limitation ;) ). Life Points you can regenerate of course, by eating food or lifesteal items like vampyrism. Bosses cannot be revived by Necromancy.

In RS3, combat is pretty easy with Revolution on, most of the time it’s easy to find a setup that allows you to afk farm monsters with your aoe abilities (manifest shadows in your player owned dungeon with vampyrism or penance, farming hard clues at hellhounds in taverley dungeon with soul split, demon horn necklace and bone crusher). We can reward the player for paying more attention to the game, so just like the M&S rework, we can add a ‘’stamina’’ mechanic which we can call Soul Focus, this is a bar that keeps draining as you’re fighting, but if you keep re-clicking your enemy monster it will refill the bar. The lower that bar, the lower the XP you gain from your revived monster’s combat.

Here you can see an overview of all skill milestones that I have in mind:

(Note: Illustrations used are bought from a Humble Bundle game dev asset pack, Fantasy Icons Megapack by REXARD)

Please note, what is important here are the core mechanics of the abilities, the numbers that describe the revival chance, necromancy drain rate and hp drain rate have to be tweaked according to trial and error. Drain rates that do not show any number but a ‘’-’’ are only passive milestone unlocks thus not an ability inside the Necromancy book.

Drain rates assume a 0-990 Necromancy Bar with a drain rate of .

All these abilities are located in a Necromancy Book, just like Prayer, where you can simply click the icons to activate them, just like Prayer. We can put these in your ability bars for quick access because I’m already expecting players trying to flick these abilities for efficient output.

New Combat Formula

A quick Excel calculation shows that a Necromancy level of 99 will result in a combat level of (150.975 => 150) (RS3 rounds combat levels down)

Necromancy Shop

Almost all the unlocks you just read above are ‘’Passive’’ skills that drain your necromancy points from your obelisk. This shop will have more “Active’’ type of rewards like combat abilities, scrimshaws, teleports, auras, consumables, items etc. God Soul Fragments will be the currency here, you may have noticed that these fragments can only be earned by skilling using Necromancy Abilities, these abilities are:

Undead Nature at Level 1
Soul Assisted Supporter at Level 55

Undead Nature+ at Level 83

Because Necromancy is a combat skill, it will heavily increase combat performance. But I would still like this skill to benefit skilling in some way, skillers also need love. You simply gain the currency by skilling, and there’s no combat way of earning this currency (yet), so the Necromancy shop rewards can only be acquired by skilling using Necromancy

-WORK IN PROGRESS-

Notes: Lorewise, Necromancy has actually nothing to do with Summoning  (read here: https://runescape.wiki/w/Transcript:Malignius_Mortifer) so we might have to swap out Summoning with another skill.