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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 9158707" data-attributes="member: 58197">Necromancers as they stand suffer from a some significant play hassles:1. Any necromancer worthy of the name commands a horde, not a singular undead servant; but tracking a bunch of undead minions can slow battle to a crawl. On top of that, it presents major balance challenges, where fights swing hard one way or the other depending on whether the enemy has AoEs. If they don't, you overwhelm them with action economy; if they do, all your minions can get blown out in an instant.2. Raising and replacing your minions requires a steady supply of humanoid corpses, which may be thin on the ground if you're not facing humanoid foes. It also takes a couple days to recover from a wipeout.3. Because the horde takes a while to build up and has to travel overland, there are a lot of places you can't have your minions (e.g., city adventures). And since they represent a big power investment, that leaves you severely weakened.4. You don't get to actually do your class's thing until level 5.Notably, none of these has anything to do with the necromancer subclass -- they are due to the 2014 implementation of Animate Dead. All could be solved with two spells: A level 1 summon that creates some weak but useful minion(s), and a revised Animate Dead that creates a zombie swarm (mechanically a single summon using the swarm rules).Both should use the same basic format as the other recent summon spells, and they should benefit in some way from the availability of corpses but not strictly require them. Perhaps if you don't have enough corpses, the casting time goes from 1 action to 1 minute as you call ancient dead from deep in the earth. This would go a long way toward easing the play hassles of necromancy, while keeping the essential concept.Just adding these two spells in the 1D&D PHB would make necromancers much more playable even without a dedicated subclass (not to mention putting warlock, cleric, and sorcerer necromancers on equal footing with wizards).</blockquote>

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