Shattered Kingdoms

Necromancers get more than animate dead. They have every debuff spell in the game to start with. Weaken is a -10 str debuff, feeblemind is a -10, or more int debuff. Slow would cancel haste, lowers weapon speed, increases movement lag, and gives -4 to dexterity. They also have sleep, fear, dispel magic, blindness, deafness, curse. There is loads of things of things that necromancers can do outside of animating 30 undead and o all bash victim. If we didn't have Damen in the Nightmare Realms for instance, we would have been up [REDACTED] creek. This does remind me of something I've been meaning to bring up though.

In addition, there are also ways to give your undead more hps: Specifically, by raising the HP of the necro.

I think I only ever once or twice raised a wraith army with Ighae, with max mana he could hold two controls while resting and regain mana. Without holding anything else from memory he could sleep and regain even more.
I played him morea as a maledicting supporter, rather then zerg killer like necros seem to think they should even when most of my cabal mates and allies in game at the time were telling me to make armies anyway.

One of my favourite spells to use was fear, in fact usually used a moderately powered fear wand simply to nullify any NPCs in the group and the poor unenchanted enemies. Malediction wise, ardith is right. Alongside what he said, plague also gives a -4 dex drop and prevents natural hp/mana/move regen. Poison also gives further drop to strength that will stack with weaken.

The way I played him, I enjoyed not just the character a lot more, but PK also. I actually had to think about what I was doing, plan ahead a little. There was alot more micro-management of controls and spells. Other then of course raise 130935 wraiths. If I was still playing Ighae these days, I wouldn't have even noticed the recent changes other then the (yay) controls save on exit.

Plague is a terrible spell and should never be used.

I used to play with it now and then. Not something I used in PK of course unless I really had nothing else to do.