Shattered Kingdoms

The repeated nerfs to necromancers for years without anything at all in return have pushed them back from the terror-inspiring glass cannons that could solo-raze a city and kill multiple PCs if approached poorly to totally incompetent. One only needs reference Trag's necro getting repeatedly trounced by a solo Fist swash to see that.

No one with any sense of game balance would find the different undead to be useful to use, because holy words, BoGs, aoe damage from a warlock, invis, pets and sanctuary totally neuter them. If you use animates in addition to controls you spend the entirety of every fight spamming the order command while your animates bounce off of sanc. Nothing was made to remove the total uselessness of a necro who does nothing but spam order on the off-chance that he might be able to land a paralyze from a lucky proc off of an animate that does zero damage.

It's painfully obvious that whoever's in charge of balance clearly wanted repeated buffs for warlocks and repeated nerfs to necromancers. They got them, which is why there hasn't been a single necromancer that's anywhere close to scary except Trag's necro, and he was primarily scary because he's a Harlequin caster in a tribunal, not because he's a necro.

No, I didn't account for that. With a group of 3 wraiths, they continued to attempt paralysis on already paralyzed victims. I was not aware of any code that reduced proc rates on victims already affected by it.

I'd like to ask you a few questions that you may be able to answer or if anyone else knows the answer to this, feel free to let me know. I've heard rumor that undead were vulnerable to fire. Is that true?

I've always thought they were vulnerable to divine wrath, but that's entirely anecdotal, and may be wrong.

I'm pretty sure they're weak to illuminating attacks, not just from certain cabal weapons, but any weapon like a certain flail found in the grey wastes or any other weapon that has that "Light" type attack.

Undead are vulnerable to fire in a lot of RPGs, but I haven't personally experienced undead taking extra damage from fire attacks myself in SK. Granted, I haven't tested it. However, one thing I can definitely say is that whether or not undead are vulnerable to fire, I'm pretty sure that a GM warlock would drop every animated undead in the room with 2-3 fireballs. Pongsom 3 shotted Lydia's skeletons with fireball.

Undead do take extra damage from divine wrath spells and attacks, including holy word. The cockroaches in Exile's sewers last longer than animated undead against holy word.

They don't even attempt a touch attack after the victim is paralyzed. I have tested this several times now to try to reproduce what you're saying, but, as soon as the paralysis takes, they don't try again until it wears off. I don't believe they attempt it on victims that are immune to it, either. Some of the Tlaxcala priests are immune to the wraith touch, so any fights against those would also skew the results. The rate I'm seeing is much higher than 7%.

Bringing up paralyzing touch as a legitimate boon to necromancers because paralyzing touch "used to be OP" is extremely misrepresenting the facts.

Paralyzing touch -used- to be OP back when animate dead had no concentration and a shorter duration, meaning that you could get upwards of 30 wraiths if you did things correctly. In addition, paralyzing touch used to actually -be- paralyzing touch, in that it prevented all combat actions including dodging or using any skills or quaffing potions. Now, paralyzing touch has been replaced by interdiction, which not only carries a save on the touch attack itself, but also carries a save on each subsequent action: With a moderate to high will save, paralyzing touch will not only rarely get through, but even if it does it's sometimes not even noticeable that you're under its effects.

So wraiths deal no damage, take up one of your very limited few animate slots, can't fury and thus bounce off of sanc, and paralyzing touch is ineffectual against anyone with a decent will save, including the vast majority of end-game NPCs. Not that it matters since the only places where a necromancer's undead army would legitimately be useful for PvE are past null-magic rooms or other mechanics that prevent bringing a necromancer army with you.

Please stop bringing up paralyzing touch on wraiths as a legitimate benefit. It's about as useful as detect poison.

For counter-points, by the way, these are examples of legitimate buffs to a class.
And that doesn't factor in the much less documented widespread removal of virtually every RE item in the game save 2 or 3 that are either bugged and irretrievable or perpetually hoarded by warlocks. Those three changes combined increased the damage output of magma spray by a factor of 2-4 in PvP.

In the meantime, necros got repeated nerfs without ever getting anything in return.

To be fair, necros started as the most powerful class in the game, and warlocks started as a joke.