Necromancy needs some love.

[Duranamir]

Currently Necromancy is the weakest of the disciplines and though it does hav an in game guild or two it could do with a bit of love. I do know that some basic work is being done on the mechanics of undead minions and fixing some of the bugs, i.e. the move issue, however i do think that some more spells and variety in there use could be good.

Suggestions:-
Allow at least one of the necromancy spells to heal undead. My favourite would be vampiric touch which is a baseline necromancy attack spell so that you can give some of your own hit points to an undead minion.

Increase the flexibility of the animate dead spell. Currently we always make zombies, would be nice to be able to make skeletons and undead mounts i.e.

Ca 'Animate dead' corpse <option>

Where option would with Skeleton, zombie or mount.

The mount option would require a size large or higher corpse. The intention of the mount version is to allow a cool utility version of some of the big monsters to preserve some balance i.e. you could 'animate dead mount' a wyvern corpse but it would not get to be keep its full alive combat capabiliies.

This might also allow a new spell create undead with stonger options such as Ghouls, ghasts and mummy (level 6 in the SRD)

And even the 8th level create greater undead to make shadows, wariths and Spectres.

Having more options would both increase the utility of necromacy and also make it much cooler

Duranamir who considers Necromancy to be a socially acceptable hobby.

[Solaghar]

Another cool thing to do would be to give necromancy some kind of limited healing capability, but it causes damage to someone else, like sucking the life force from one person to another, i.e. you could suck some of your own life out and give it to someone else, kind of like a reverse vampiric touch.

[Trillarel]

Larloch's minor drain, you mean? This was an excellent spell in Baldur's Gate and I'm sure I saw a 3.x version in some of the official splatbooks...

[Orplar]

Is there a health funnel style spell out there? Taking HP from an Enemy and directing it to a friend, not yourself?

[Casamir]

This idea of expanding the range of vampiric spells bring up a thought of, if doing this, why not do it for more spells? Would it be easier to use the hardcode of existing spells, adjust the numeric value and thus the level and name of that spell, and create a broader of range of similar spells? Would this address short coming in wizard schools, or would it just add an unnecessary glut of more spells to balance and seed into the game? I certainly stand behind revisions of undead minions, and even in monster summons.

[Zorinar]

I believe that the "solutions" are going in the wrong direction.

To find more appropriate solutions than simply adding in a bunch of new spells, let us first examine the issue.

When you say that necromancers are the weakest of the wizards in the game, how are you defining weakest?

If you mean that their spells are the weakest, I would say there is evidence quite contrary to that line of thought. Many of the necromanctic spells are either outright death spells, or spells that weaken the enemy in some way to make them easier to kill. In a pure PVP situation, they technically have quite a good baseline to start from. They even have a healing spell, Vampric Touch, that when used properly, can heal a wizard .. perhaps even better than a cleric can heal them.

If you mean that their total number of learnable spells in game makes them the weakest, then again there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. Necromancers have, excluding Mages, the greatest number of availabe spells to learn in game. They have the most spells available to them on their spell list of all the wizard specialist classes. In fact, the weakest specialist class in this sense is the Invoker's guild. If you want numbers, this link here shows the product of Selveem's research that he passed on to me and that I posted on the forums.

viewtopic.php?f=77&t=14262&p=91305&hili ... ols#p91305

If, however, you mean that by weakest they have a disproportionate number of spells on their spell list that are not in game, (or are blocked due to alignment issues and trainers) then yes there does seem to be a strong argument for that. Although, to be honest, all the guilds suffer from this, more so with spells not in game than with alignment issues, though.

The solution, I think, would be to first start introducing the currently available spells in game before making up new ones. I would even go so bold as to suggest that the introduction of spells not be sitting with a select few that will only pass them on to people in their circle but that the spells be readily availabe to the player base.

Sometimes this game gets to feel more like it's about "who you know on IM" or "Who you annoyed that then tells everyone on their IM list about" rather than "what and how you play in game." But I digress, that is for another day. However, I mention it because I would hate to see the introduction of feats, spells, skills etc.. both in game and being introducted in the future, follow this route of passing on the knowlege. Everyone should have the chance to learn feats, skills and spells. We shouldnt always have to bug Gwain to teach us. (Not that it isn't fun to bug Gwain...)

[Theolund]

All I can add to that Zorinar is if any of you remember Mazikeen the necromancer. She kicked alot of booty.