Shattered Kingdoms

Don't you ever get tired of making the same arguments over and over just to be told over and over how very very wrong you are...I know I'm getting tired it.

There's a saying. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." There's a reason they have so much power and it's so they can hold their own. Don't you people get sick of asking for red-headed step chlidren to beat? If you had everything balanced your ways, you might as well make Holy word just instantly delete the necro instantaneously. It may be the same arguments, but they're logical and valid. I don't exactly see you refuting it.

Alright, I should be fair and actually state the reasons why necros shouldn't be touched.

1) A necromancer must pay a huge price. In comparison to any other class, they have to spend, by far, the most amount of time preparing for anything. If they want a bunch of undead, they have to gather corpses. Of course, those are worthless unless you can get some armor and weapons on them. For the amount of preparation time they have to spend, nerfing them more would limit the amount of necros played. IMO, they've got the nerf bat way to many times over the years. I will agree with Sypher, in saying that I would accept a nerf on the number of animates if and only if the power of some spells (*cough* not e-drain *cough*) got buffed. Then again, doing that would create drive-by necros, so we'd just exchange one problem for another.

2) Maybe it's a bit of arrogance, but I find it amusing to hear people whine about necros. I managed to solo a necro with my (sub-par) swash. While he wasn't the best to play the game, he certainly did know a thing or two. And, as already stated before, a drive-by holy word will do wonders to an army of undead. There's many ways to take them down. You just have to be smarter then the necro, and if it's a good necro (like any other skilled player playing a merc/swash/shaman/whatever) it's not going to be easy.

3) Thirdly, most necromancers (should) have very few friends. At least 75% of the faiths refuse to rezz necros, so the number of priests available to help them after they die, or the number of people willing to lend them a hand is usually not huge. They're on their own, and they need to be able to frequently be by themselves.

There's a few more, but I won't bother with them now... In short, put away the nerf bats.

sleeper

This change that took place last year was to put a cap on massing undead by the way of having concentration on them. Has it really done the job? Necromancers still wander around with a ton of undead whether by self-creation or magical devices.

Further more, as the poster Sypher has already covered, some necromancers forsake spell-casting completely by creating a ton of undead and then zap the etherealform wand non-stop, staying etherealform whenever melee risks arise.

Limiting the number of undead to that of a group may be too few, because not all different animated dead come in same strength. Perhaps the more powerful versions could use more concentration than their weaker counterparts.

There was already a pretty good buff to necromancers, you don't even need 12 animates anymore. People can just as easily do the control undead route, which IMO is much more fun. Remove compulsion's addition was a pretty big boon for control undead. I'd much rather see their army size get reduced so attacks weren't spam based and if it "weakened" them too much then buff them with some sort of unique protection based spell to give them a bit more survivability outside of etherealform wands.

Just my two cents.

Here is a thought, Just remove the magical devices that allow them to make undead without the concentration.

I agree.

You can animate 19 undead and still sleep, with only 21 int, as a necromancer. The class won't be significantly nerfed when I leave it if this is still possible.

With 21 int and 19 undead, the concentration for the undead needs to be doubled.

If there were a dozen necros running around with 19 undead then I'd see it as a problem. But since that isn't the case, I think you should just leave well enough alone.

Necros are supposed to be the masters of the undead. And lighties are supposed to kill them into the ground - To do so, lighties get a very effective BOG and holy world. Seems like a self correcting problem to me.