D&D 5E 5.0 necromancer

I could not disagree with this thread more strongly. The 5e Necromancer is wildly overpowered, and he and his skeleton army can easily defeat even the strongest (up to CR17) monsters we've seen so far in 1 round.

A Necromancer's Animate Dead gets you 2 Skeletons at level 3 and 2 more for each spell level above that when cast as a higher level spell, and you have control of them for 24 hours.

You can also cast Animate Dead before that control lapses to 'refresh' your control of 4 + 2/level-above-3 Skeletons.

By spending your spells to summon Skeletons, taking a long rest and then spending your recovered spells to refresh your existing Skeletons and summon more with any remaining slots, you can work your way up to controlling as many as your spell slots will allow within the refresh ratio rather than the summon ratio.

A Necromancer can therefore summon or control up to the following number of Skeletons at each level:

That's a lot of Skeletons, and each one can shoot their shortbow at +4 for 1d6+2+Prof damage. That's not much individually, as we can see from the chart of Skeleton damage per shot by level and opponent AC below, but when we're dealing with large numbers, it quickly adds up:

Let's look at the Adult Blue Dragon from the Hoard of the Dragon Queen. It's worth 15,000 XP and has 225 HP. It's a Medium encounter for a party of 5 level 16 PCs per the just-updated encounter guidelines.

62 Skeletons will, on average, with a +6 Proficiency modifier, kill the Adult Blue Dragon in one round.

If you grant your Skeletons Advantage with Otto's Irresistible Dance (which does not allow a save), it only takes 36 Skeletons.

You can kill the CR16 Adult Blue Dragon in one round, on average, starting at level 13, when you're able to summon 44 slightly weaker Skeletons while still leaving a level 6 slot free for Otto's Irresistible Dance.

I haven't gone into casting all your spells to summon Skeletons, then resting for 8 hours and casting them all again for more, (which obviously doubles the numbers above) but you get the general idea.

In summary; summoned Skeletons bust the action economy wide open and do obscene damage in large groups, which you can begin to create at surprisingly low levels. The 5e Necromancer is ridiculously strong with Animate Dead in its current state.

Everything I said in the OP was, to be fair, in complete absence of any monsters other than the skeletons themselves. Now that we've had a ton of monsters released, we can go back and judge again.

So let's start with our small skeleton army at level 5.

First, a 13 AC is not actually bad. A CR 17 monster has an AC of 19, so really AC isn't some huge thing that's only going to get bigger and bigger. Looking at CR 5 monsters, they range from 9 AC to 17 AC, typically around 14.

Additionally, 18 HP isn't that bad, either - although it's still hardly good. I had assumed that was fodder; in actuality, only one of the CR 5 monsters can do 18 damage in a hit - a hill giant, who can do it twice a round. Most CR 5 monsters do more like 14, which will typically take two hits. Now, every single one of these monsters can make at least two hits per round, but that's still an entire round wasted for one renewable skeleton.

Also, the +4 to hit (which never changes) isn't terrible. Granted: every CR 5 monster has about +7 or 8 to hit, but the average AC is still around 14, giving our skeletons about a 50/50 shot to hit.

However, a skeleton doing 8 damage on a hit is still pretty darn low. Most CR 5 monsters have 100 HP (84-126), and more importantly, resistance to non-magical weapons. (Amazingly, dragons don't have this.) So even 4 skeletons - our max at level 5 - will be doing an average of 16 damage if they all hit, and since they have about a 50/50 shot, that's about 8 damage per round, or 16 if the creature doesn't have resistance to non-magical weapons.

Now, that's still pretty amazing given that it is a bonus action, but keep in mind these 4 skeletons cost you one 3rd level spell (and a few days of prep time). Casting a 3rd level spell that does about 16 damage as a bonus action feels... about right, actually.


So let's fast-forward to level 16, given the example above. According to the online supplement, the Adult Blue has an AC of 19 and 225 HP. At this point our skeletons have 29 HP and attack at +4 for 5+5 = 10 damage. Attacking an AC 19 means we'll hit about 30% of the time, doing 10 damage, so we'll call that 3 average. 225 / 3 is 75, so you would need 75 skeletons to kill the Adult Blue in one round, on average. (I have ignored crits for this equation cause it just makes things harder; you can assume you'd need a few less thanks to crits but it's basically the same.) And as Jack said, this is within possibility for a 16th level necromancer (although my calculations say you can get as high as 82 skeletons with a 16th level wizard, all total, so it's basically almost 100% of your 3rd level and above spell slots).

HOWEVER, this is assuming that you were able to fit 75 skeletons into the space where the blue was, OR that it was dumb enough to let them all get within 80 feet (especially since its lightning attack's range is 90, AND it can use a legendary action after the first skeleton's turn to move another 40 feet away, causing the rest of the horde to attack with disadvantage and effectively making them only hit on crits).

It would also require days and days of prep time, not to mention all the other practical considerations, and basically all of the wizard's spell slots. If a party basically had an unaware threat they could prepare for days to defeat, I would be willing to bet 75 skeletons is just one of many ways they could figure out how to do it very efficiently.

That said: the bigger point is that you COULD do it, you could do it ALONE, and that your ability to do tons of damage with a jillion little guys is actually practical - all fair points. You're basically enabling the use of all your spell slots in one action, potentially. It reminds me of the "Leadership" issue in 3.5, where someone figured out that a character with a high enough Leadership score and CHA could get a few hundred followers to shoot arrows and take down any threat. Unsurprisingly, this also didn't happen much in actual games.

Thinking about it a bit more, really the heart of the potential abuse comes from the "store up" potential of how you're using your spell slots. Even giving up all your spell slots - while a HUGE cost - isn't necessarily a bad trade-off because what you're basically doing is spending a resource value equal to all your spell slots at once in order to get a single, huge effect. It takes days of prep time, but then in one day you can get your 82 skeletons to do one thing in one round: which is like spending 11 spells (from 3rd to 8th level) all at once!

This just leads me back to the idea that summoning more powerful but temporary minions is a better solution.

Another solution would to have put a better cap on your spending; giving up all your spell slots seems like a bad deal but again, it really just depends. Making Animate Dead only work up to a spell slot level of 5, or just not making it work with additional spell slot levels probably would have solved the whole thing. Create Undead can only make a max of 25 ghouls at level 20; that's still nowhere near the 100+ you can do with Animate Dead.

Of course, there are still a lot of counter points. A single fireball or a well-placed breath weapon could cut your army of 82 skeletons by at least 1/4th without much trouble - you are definitely assuming some risk when putting all your eggs in one basket. They still have "poor" AC and HP, and the logistics of using 82 creatures as a single tool can become quite unwieldy. Not to mention it's really all up to the GM; at some tables stuff like this really won't fly. But in the end the potential is there, and it might have been simpler if they had just cut the potential out.

evilbob said:

That's 23 HP at level 10 - probably not more than a single average attack?

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To put it in context, a 10th level GWF fighter will do about 13.3333 damage on a swing, a bit more with a crit. So in general it will take 2 hits from an equivalent leveled fighter to take it down.

I have to say, I like it.

The iconic image of the fantasy necromancer has always been the guy with the hordes of undead, and you could never do it as a PC. NPCs could, somehow, but your PC couldn't short of a Wish.

As for the brokeness of hordes of skelly archers...

For 250gp a day you can hire a mercenary company of 100 crossbowman and a cleric to bless them. So unless you're not planning on giving your PCs access to money, the Necromancer is doing nothing any other PC couldn't do, he's just spending spell slots instead of cash. Spell slots which are far more valuable than the equivalent cash I might add.

Andor said:

As for the brokeness of hordes of skelly archers...

For 250gp a day you can hire a mercenary company of 100 crossbowman and a cleric to bless them. So unless you're not planning on giving your PCs access to money, the Necromancer is doing nothing any other PC couldn't do, he's just spending spell slots instead of cash. Spell slots which are far more valuable than the equivalent cash I might add.

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Not quite accurate, given how many hp and how much damage the skeletons do. Both are significantly more than crossbowmen, and let's face it, for an adventuring party, corpses are never in short supply.

In other words, Jack's analysis is spot on. Necromancers are pretty much broken powerful, with no crazy rules loopholes involved. With bounded accuracy, the action economy rules over all other considerations. A horde of skelly bros trashes it.

This is just awful. On the one hand, they take the action economy to the extreme with the ranger, forcing them to use their own actions to command their pets, but then they let wizards animate dozens upon dozens of undead and up to 24 elementals. I just don't get it. What were they thinking? Do they not see how big of a problem it is for one player to control dozens of creatures? That's enough to grind the game to a halt and make people quit in frustration. And it doesn't even take some kind of rules exploit to do it. All it takes is using the spells as written.

evilbob said:

Unsurprisi1ngly, this also didn't happen much in actual games.

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Yeah, at the moment, this is kind of the poster boy for theorycraft, given the time and resources involved. Though it does make a case for a lower cap on undead you can have walkin' around with you (for instance, limiting it to equal to your level or equal to your INT score or something), just to nix that corner.

Obryn said:

Not quite accurate, given how many hp and how much damage the skeletons do.

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Don't forget the "leadership" loophole from 3.5 was based around the idea that you were only counting on your guys to hit on a crit. That means 100 guys will definitely hit 5% of the time for whatever damage that will do. Even if they only did 1 damage each: hire enough of them, and you can take down a dragon in one round, regardless.

Kamikaze Midget said:

Yeah, at the moment, this is kind of the poster boy for theorycraft, given the time and resources involved. Though it does make a case for a lower cap on undead you can have walkin' around with you (for instance, limiting it to equal to your level or equal to your INT score or something), just to nix that corner.

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Exactly; no GM is going to just LET someone build up an army of undead, especially given the time and resources involved. I mean, one or two "random" encounters per day could thrash your army repeatedly until the player got the picture. And there are clear weak points; anything that resists non-magical damage and can do lots of AOE should just melt these guys. Similarly no GM is going to just LET someone hire 2000-3000 archers and get them all within bow range of a dragon. Looking at these things from that perspective: yeah, it looks bad. But if you look at it from the perspective of what is most likely actually going to happen (like my 5th level example above): it's pretty balanced.


Thinking about the Otto's Irresistible Dance (above), that was quite clever, actually. There are no buff spells that can make 82 skeletons all better at once, but you can sort of indirectly buff your entire army by afflicting the target with a status effect. Suddenly all those lame necromancy spells that only afflict targets with minor conditions make more sense!

Kamikaze Midget said:

Yeah, at the moment, this is kind of the poster boy for theorycraft, given the time and resources involved. Though it does make a case for a lower cap on undead you can have walkin' around with you (for instance, limiting it to equal to your level or equal to your INT score or something), just to nix that corner.

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It doesn't take a hundred to break the game. That's the extreme case. It takes maybe 20.

evilbob said:

Don't forget the "leadership" loophole from 3.5 was based around the idea that you were only counting on your guys to hit on a crit. That means 100 guys will definitely hit 5% of the time for whatever damage that will do. Even if they only did 1 damage each: hire enough of them, and you can take down a dragon in one round, regardless.

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With bounded accuracy, you no longer need to rely on crits.