Shattered Kingdoms

Any tips on playing a necro?
im not new to sk, ive just never played this class.

Level up to GM before you talk to ANYONE that could potentially be a non-friendly person to necromancers.

HIDE! HIDEHIDEHIDE! Everything you do will be hated by 99% of lighties.

The north is probably the easiest place for a necromancer to be.

Zombies are easy to train with. Also, remember that you can heal your undead with "cause" spels (cause light, cause serious, cause critical and harm). DO NOT try and vamp touch one of your undead.

Cause light is a fantastic spell to level with.

In PvP, you can use fear and sleep to disperse and isolate your opponents. Use shadowy wights to bash and deal damage.

For example, if you go into a pvp against 4 opponents, you can cast fear. If two enemies run away, put one of the remaining ones asleep and have the wights bash the one guy left. Then kill the guy you put to sleep, and leave. If none of them run away from fear, I'd quaff word.

You could also open with sleep if one of the opponents is a paladin who will be BoGing you and your undead.

Fear and sleep are two of the most powerful pvp spells, but get underutilized by almost everyone. Most necros just cast and recite FoD, which is pretty stupid imo because necros have much better tools.

Highly recommend you toy around with a sorcerer before attempting a necro.
As a necro, you will likely have to rely on magic implements like various staves and wands for defense and protection. You can control various and multiple undead creatures, but you must also learn where to find them and how to properly equip them.

You will be hated and hunted by more experienced players, and the learning curve is very steep for a new player to go directly to necromancer.

thanks for the info.
i have played a sorc before, and difficulty isnt something that will discourage me, so ill give it a shot.

Necro's used to be a great class before they got dished with the update. If you look around today, you won't see many necros as in the past. Not ones like Delear at least.

Stick with sorcie like mentioned above till you know what is where and what does what (device wise). Then you can attempt to slit your wrists with a toothbrush and if you manage to do that, play a necro

My humble opinion at least.

The necromancer is certainly not as bad as teh1337n00b is making it out to be, imho. It does take some game knowledge, and some patience, and there is a learning curve. Manage your expectations and you won't have as much of a problem.

Necros have a few main options for tactics in PvE or PvP.

A) High damage, low survivability/versatility option. Put up 8 animates and as many controls as you can muster, eject all the animates from your group and have them follow you, give them massive weapons, and use them to o all kill. This is the theoretical maximum damage output for necros. One downside is that you have to do everything through orders, meaning that you spend a lot of precious time in combat in order lag instead of quaffing potions or casting spells. Another downside is that you don't have a lot of concentration/mana for things like sleep or fear. There's a bunch of other downsides, like being weak to AOE, weak to ranged combat, requiring a lot of prep time and weaponry, the fact that animates can't see invis, blah blah. Usually best reserved for PvE.

B) Moderate damage, survivability and versatility. What Baldric said, take a couple controls, maybe some animates, put them in your group and don't bother doing any orders except for ordering your controls to bash someone. Otherwise, focus on casting spells like fear or sleep, or maybe curse if you're really convinced of a win.

C) High survivability, in case you have to go against a bunch of bow wielders or something. Same composition as B) but go mood defensive and stick only to quaffing heals and using magical devices like fear wands, double FoD scrolls, and that sort of thing. I dunno if this even should count as a separate category but whatever.

In 99% of scenarios, dispel magic, sleep, fear, blindness and curse are the only combat spells you should be casting in late-game, whether PvP or PvE. If you want to be a spellflinger who focuses mainly on single-target maledictions like weakness and slow, then delete and roll a shaman or hellion. Necros are way too squishy to expect to spend their time in fights casting weakness, deafness or slow.

Become very familiar with your order lag, and make sure your charisma is always as high as possible. Keep yourself at high HP and don't neglect defensive buffs in combat, or you'll get one or two-rounded by well prepped characters. Avoid anything that can cast holy word unless you have backup. Animates got lowered in damage output and tankiness, so necros don't have a prayer against paladins or holy wording priests without plenty of backup, assuming the paladins/priests even half know what they're doing.