Neversummer Realms Forums

Hello NS4 community. It has been a few years.

I've always liked experimenting with underused builds, feats, and skills and the Undead Shape has always called out to me. With the exception of Undead Shape, every epic shape wields a weapon that the druid is proficient in, allowing feat selection of appropriate weapon focus and crit. The undead shapes wield H-flail, GS, and kukri, which are martial or exotic. Now, the Undead Shape feat excludes classes other than druid and shifter, thus highly discouraging the use of this interesting epic shape. I would like to request that these restrictions on Undead Shape be lifted, which can be accomplished in any number of ways:

1) Fully or partially lift class restrictions on Undead Shape (e.g. allow any classes, or a specific fighter-type class).
2) Or allow shifter to take simple, martial, and exotic proficiencies during feat selection
3) Or change the weapons of undead shapes to druid ones (but this is boring because Outsider and Construct are already doing this).

I know the devs have plenty of balancing issues and future changes prioritized, but if you could find it in your time to hear the humble request of this NS4 fan, it would be much appreciated.

I've always felt like they don't have a great niche. Lokey strongly disagrees , but he's the limiting factor here.

Heh. maybe Lokey can relax his stance and incentivize the use of more content? As I see it, the only thing undead shape is good for is as a meat shield that is barred from taking any weapon feats, with limited self-heals and RD. Everyone builds saves 40+ now, so none of the offensive specials are all that useful. It can be argued that being crit and sneak immune may detract from the uniqueness of the PM, but hey, shifter is a copy cat from a role-play standpoint and elemental builds in other factions get it too. Even the greater wildshape IV, V and humanoid shapes have higher ending ability scores than undead shape, all while allowing triple classing in order to get the weapon feats. The point is, there is no point in building for undead shape if the regular druid/shifter shapes can do much better. Lokey, please reconsider...I beg!

Didn't want there to be an end-game build on them because:
- No stat recs and you get them at 21.
- Always need to be careful of crit immunity, especially with high ac. See Pale Master.
- They have some turn resistance, but having that huge vulnerability can be a huge problem. Rock, scissors, paper is ok to some extent, but don't want someone having that much buyer's remorse.
- History. Risen Lord was absolutely insane for years, it's still too soon (It had crazy ac plus tons of extra damage.)

Thought they have some good party tricks, but that can be improved. Something fun, but not end-game viable, that was the point of the rd and vamp touch abilities.

ETA: I guess something that would fit in with my criteria would be making greater forms that unlock at shifter level 10 or 15 and would need the druid/shifter classes only (somewhat easy from dev side, design is always the headache there). Maybe lower turn resist or other things on the base form to allow some cheese headroom. Hope that a kukri dev crit dex form with ii doesn't break the bank...

I remember experimenting with undead form. i was crushed to learn that they aren't even immune to negative damage. What sort of undead is not immune to negative damage??

(Greedily anticipates negative/shadow plane farming)

I've been playing with an Undead Shifter for a couple of months, so I'd figure I'd let you know my findings.

All Forms:

- Mass Heal is your bane in both PvP and PvM (including friendly heals)
- Not being immune to negative damage (0% immunity) is a big shocker and surprise.
- Fire and Bludgeon damage is very common in PvP and PvM; you'll find that the fire/bludge vulnerability hugely outweighs the pierce/slash resistances by a fair margin
- Undead forms lack damage in all forms, and their base stats are borderline terrible at 40.
- Vampiric regen is bugged; only applies on first flurry.
- Self-harm is nice; but because the base con on all shapes are fairly mediocre, you'll probably not have time to use it in combat before you're dead - its mostly an after-combat thing

Vampire Form:

- When you first get it, its starts off adequate (good enough for skara), but then it starts losing its power very quickly. Your hypnotic gaze works maybe 15-25% of the time; often its faster just to smack down with the heavy flail.
- Vampiric gaze is really bad; its dc on the wiki is wrong (40, not 42 is max). If we compare it to Mindflayer form, which has higher dc, as well as a guaranteed effect, it's just not very good. Not to mention Mindflayer has a very powerful Inertial Barrier, which is like mini epic warding.
- Your melee is not much better either, getting mid 50s at best in ab.

Risen Form:

- Your only "gimmick", the infinite raise deads, is not appreciated in PvP or PvM. No one likes getting drained on raise. You can't even purposely raise enemies; they will resist your attempts to raise them.
- Otherwise has borderline terrible stats for a "frontline-archtype" form.

Spectre Form:

- The only reedeeming shape that this form offers.
- Infinite invisibilities is useful for travelling or raiding
- The main use of Shadow Attack is not for pvp - its for stuffing as much temp hp before you start a fight. In PvP, anyone worth their salt will carry a NEP scroll or a UEF scroll, and render you impotent.
- Getting infinite temp hp is potentially gamebreaking - however I am not going to spend 30 minutes sucking every animal dry before a raid.
- In the event that someone doesn't have NEP or UEF, they can just run. Shadow attack on average does about 30 damage in pvp per round, and has no burst potential for killing someone in pvp. You could even potentially outregen Shadow Attack with the right items.

In conclusion, I can tell you that Undead Shape is not a frontliner, neither a support/buffer, has no ranged attacks to speak, and has more holes in its defenses than Swiss Cheese. The only redeeming aspect is the ability to get infinite hp, which I suspect should be nerfed cause its neither fun for the shifter or the person fighting the shifter.

My preferred option remains just committing to making it a non-epic shape. Does it become ok when you can go 25/5/10 style builds?

Inferno hasn't eve been nerfed yet and you guys are already trying to pick up a new angle.

Well played.

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Death Dealers ::DD::
Laufer - Gemetzel - Force - Little Fist - Egil - Torture - Hatshepsu - Nemesis - Hierophant - Supernaut - Flesh Hound - Insurrection - Antithesis - Dead of Winter - Volcanus 2000

I'd just like to point out that the 25% bludge vuln. is rather a joke overall if we are talking endgame builds. For instance if you simply wear ia full bludge armor and shield you have 25% overall immunity to all 3 physical damage types. This is pretty much better than what all but a specific few other toons can get at one time. (Funny enough the main exceptions to this that you typically see are other shifter forms.) And nobody other than another shifter or druid will be doing all 3 damage types on every hit.

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Confusion is just a state of mind.

@Garn To your point that immunity doesn't make a difference without DR, I agree to some degree. If hits are doing say 50 damage, 25% will mean you take 38 , whereas with the 20 DR also you would take only 18. But my point is that you will always be able to only take 38 damage regardless of the weapon used. So if you have either 2 people with wpns containing all 3 damage types, or 1 person with all 3 damage types you will ALWAYS receive at most 38 damage from the physical on their weapons. Anyone else in a similar position will ALWAYS take FULL damage from at least one of the people.

So saying you can't get full DR from one damage type totally neglects the impact of being able to have all 3 immunities.
Also I didn't mention you don't get crits with undead type, because if you did the immunities would even matter more nowadays with so many dev crit toons running about. And PS that crit immune is also a huge plus and a reason not to have all 3 immunities available to the form.

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Confusion is just a state of mind.