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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Magesmiley" data-source="post: 1969356" data-attributes="member: 26292">My first thought upon reading the title of the post was, "are you serious?"The 3.0 vs 3.5 issue makes it more understandable. Having recently played a cleric (Wee Jas)/wizard/true necromancer I can say that its an incredibly great spell. I managed to get an athach skeleton at one point, and it was hideously effective in combat (and when my character died to a series of fireballs, the rest of the party found out just how effective). Even at lower levels, I was constantly wandering around with lower-power skeletons. Even weak ones are very effective at dealing with a number of difficulties. Sweeping for traps, blocking for a round while spellcasters fry things, flanking for the rogue, etc. You do have to be very scrupulous about making sure you're abiding the rules for commanding them however.A couple of considerations here too - if you're planning long-term to have hordes of skeletal/zombie minions, look real hard at multi-classing as cleric/wizard. As the animate dead spell is governed by CASTER LEVEL and not character level, you can potentially have 4x your cleric caster level + 4x your wizard caster level under your control (and tack on a few more via the rebuke undead ability too). Unhallow is your friend when it comesBy adding Practiced Spellcaster for both cleric and wizard, you can bump up your caster level and compensate for mult-classing - essentially controlling 8x your character level in zombies/skeletons.Unhallow is your friend at lower levels for animating too. A 5th level cleric could animate a 20HD creature in an unhallowed area (ouch). The bigger creatures are way more valuable than the small ones as they're tougher and more resistant to turning and rebuking (which is WAY worse if the other cleric manages to command your undead). I typically kept one creature of the largest variety I could get my hands on, and filled out my levels of control with several smaller ones.One last fun tidbit is the vigor spells. These are great as they work on undead as well as live characters. They provide the fast healing ability (which DOES work on undead) rather than using positive energy to heal.</blockquote>

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