D&D 4E Necromancers in 4e

[Rechan]

In my experience totally loyal minions are problematic in dungeon crawling, as regards triggering traps and ambushes, and generally making a lot of problems trivial.

"Skelleton, walk down that corridor"

"Zombie, open that door"

Because that's not possible with summoned creatures, or a bag of tricks, right?

By the use of a 1st level spell (after say, 3 or 4 levels), you can have multiple bomb testers.

The big deterrence for avoiding using your skeletons/zombies as trap testers is that whole material component. I ceratinly wouldn't be spending 200gp per defused trap.

 

[Sadrik]

The more I think about it, the more I think I really want this to be the case. The necromancer should be full of all sorts of black magic, just like the medival legends described.

I agree, don't so narrowly focus the class so that only one type of dark magician can fit. Give them everything!- more than one niche: Necromancy, curses, debuffs, undead stuff, demon and devil stuff, physical drains, along with their eldritch blast or whatever they wind up calling it (which in my opinion should begin as a touch attack not a ranged attack).

A narrowly focused character type is fine but it does not offer enough options for the player. It is sort of like the barbarian a nice class but because the fluff is so all-encompassing it eats into the rules (cant read etc.) it doesn't offer an alternative, maybe the barbarian is just a fighter-type whose main ability is that he rages, it doesn't mean that guy has to be dumb and all the other stuff that gets tacked onto playing a barbarian. I hope that the warlock is not so narrowly defined that it can only encompass 1 fluff niche. Warlock take the necromancer's stuff please.