I think before we start proposing the removal of enemy types, that the consequences of doing so should be carefully weighed.
Right now skeletons appear to serve a purpose. They are an early game enemy which moves relatively fast, and has a particularly high resistance or possible immunity to bullets, but are fairly easy to deal with otherwise. They can cause certain types of characters to need to have a different strategy to deal with them. This type of enemy adds variety and helps to keep gameplay from stagnating by possibly asking a player to change up their preferred combat style once in awhile. I think bullets probably shouldnt bounce off of them and that they should instead miss most of the time, as should small piercing weapons… but thats a minor tweaking issue. I can understand that they dont quite fit with the ‘zombie lore’ and are more typically an ‘undead lore.’ However, removing them on that basis leaves all sorts of other magical, demonic, and scifi enemies in while removing an enemy that poses a specific challenge and requires a changing of strategy in some cases to defeat.
Necromancers pose their own unique style of gameplay threat. By themselves they are not really all that menacing. But in a group and as a support that tends to linger back while the more aggressive enemies attack the player, they cause the player to need to shift their focus from defeating the immediate physical threat to defeating the long term threat, in some cases. They fill a very specific role which as far as i know, no other enemy type does currently. Perhaps they should resurrect a ‘lesser’ version of the enemy in place of a fallen monster, or maybe even some other type all together, but removing these different -types- of threats altogether would allow players to use more single-strategy methods to deal with larger subsets of enemies, and thus would reduce the somewhat dynamic gameplay down into something more grindy and repetitive.
So far, both of these enemy types make sense from a gameplay standpoint. They both behave in a manner in which the player could expect them to, and they both require changing the default combat method to deal with. If we start cutting enemy types like these without analyzing the impact their removal would have on the gameplay as a whole, i think we would be doing the game a huge disservice. Before an enemy is removed its really important to ask things like: What problem will we be fixing with this removal? Will it cause changes to the players behavior at certain stages of the game? What impact will it have on balance for weapons, traits, and even tactics? And most importantly: Does this item/enemy type do anything unique which would leave a void in its absence.
Assume that the default player tactics are to either use melee against enemies, or to use ranged piercing weapons against enemies. Right now, most enemies that im aware of are vulnerable to gunfire + kiting, or melee + slow movement tiles. Skeletons add some balance and force a ranged character to change their strategy, maybe use a non-optimal technique to deal with the enemy. Likewise, a necromancer can cause a melee character to re-prioritize his targets, or to possibly run away if he realizes that all those brutes hes killing in a choke point might just pop right back up again and overwhelm him in the long run. The necromancer as an enemy type asks the melee character to try a ranged tactic, or to leave his safe choke point to take care of a threat which could cause the battle to last longer than he anticipated, or that it might be in his best interest to just run.
One needs to keep in mind the extreme variety in player skill that this community has, id be willing to bet that the majority of players of Cataclysm have never made it to day 7 or experienced any of the late game content. Some know how to (ab)use terrain to slow enemy pursuit, or even to kill many of the early game enemies in melee combat without risking any damage. Some experienced roguelike players would know that you have to run away from some battles, and that there are some battles that you cannot run away from, that you need to put yourself into the best possible position in which to fight them. Considering all of these factors is particularly important before making hasty additions or removals.
