Shattered Kingdoms

Don't forget toughness, Min.

I think your suggestion to look at ethereal wands is a misguided one.

1) This change would affect necromancers who don't spend the time to prepare and gather etherealform scrolls. It would have very little affect on the power of the 'prepared class' overall, because it isn't as though necros need to have a huge supply of etherealform scrolls to be effective.

2) This change would bring a significant wimp to warlocks, the only class that has access to wands and not scrolls. By limiting their means of etherealform to only one staff in the game that is extremely difficult to get, you are proposing a wimp to one class but in essence wimping another that doesn't need it.

Stopping you right there, my argument is that wraiths equipped are stronger than an equal number of wraiths unequipped - hence my suggestion. If you want to argue that the number of animates available should also be wimped, go ahead.

I read the rest of your post but it seems to be largely irrelevant as you are trying to argue with me about the wrong thing. GG though.

Your first post makes no mention of "an equal number." Actually, my post is the only mention of wimping the number of animates. Your argument has changed since your initial post, and that's a good thing - it's a more reasoned argument now.

Still, there are far better ways to wimp the necromancer class that allows it to maintain lots of tactical variety. Removing the ability of necros to equip their undead is a foolish way of fixing the problem of OP necros.

You insinuated in your followup post that I was arguing for a smaller wimp to necros than you did - this is flat out incorrect, you just didn't understand mechanically what was going on. But, cool, keep up the good work .

You couldn't make that inference? I see I'm going to have to take the Muktar approach with you from now on

I consider it a handicap to run around with a mass number of animates, because it lags you and you lose track of things in the spam. I once got siege bolted to death because I had over 150 animates when I attacked the harliquen keep. I didn't notice it until the NPCs stop accepting my orders and I got the inconvienent message you can't do that, you are dead.

Its way more secure and still completely deadly to run around with only 6 wraiths. Though, you are more suseptiable to holy word drive-bys, that can level your group. Or bard chords.

Although it is still feasible to have 150 animates now, it doesn't change the fact that having 6 wraiths is significantly weaker in pkill than having 20 wraiths. Yes, 20 wraiths spam you, but the addition they add in power is worth it.

I do not think a necromancer can solo a cabal's outer guardian while only being able to animate dead into his own group.

Warlocks stay solid to cast spells in PvP. Once ethereal, their elementals alone do minimal harm to anyone. This is not to bring attention to remove wands from warlocks, but store-bought ethereal form wands in a good supply readily available from within 1-2 minutes away for anyone to purchase. Repeatable use.


Anyone that goes through preparation should obviously be rewarded. Without the readily available ethereal form wand, for a necromancer to acquire same means would require another to scribe, which constitutes roleplay. Certainly, the power will remain the same, but near-invincibility doesn't come in 2 minutes.

An alternate solution to removal would be giving the user a debuff after a recent use of ethereal form spell, so that it cannot be done again within a short period of time.

I think the timer for animates should be cut in half.

How hard is it to go to Tlaxcala and kill 10+ GM level priests anyways? It takes what, like 2 minutes?

Wraiths last 45 minutes, all NPCs other than wraiths last 90 minutes, just to clarify.