Blood Wind, touch range spells, and summons.

[Aluvial]

I think that you can summon/control up to 2 your HD of undead. I would have to look.

There are feats to take and other spells that augment summoning. This will give extra HP per HD as well as bonuses to hit and the like. I would have to look for these things.

IM(last)C, I had a 20th level dread necromancer. This character could control quite a few undead. Summoners want to do a few things. Cast faster would be nice. Summoning more numbers would be nice. Augmenting what is summoned is nice.

Personally, I don't like summoning. Mainly because it bogs down a combat. Essentially, the more actions to adjudicate in a round, the slower the round. I like to get as many rounds as I can into a game. My players and I like a ratio of about 50-50 between plot and play (or some might say between story and swords).

Hmm... now I'm curious. The investment of time into this thread means I must search more... Where was the Dread Necromancer again? Ahh, Heroes of Horror.

I found this old thread....

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=70936

EDIT: Also look at Profane Lifeleech from Libris Mortis pg. 29

Aluvial

 

[Jacob Marley]

I have run a number of summoners over the years (though, admittedly, I have never played a Dread Necromancer). Generally speaking, the monsters you are summoning are weaker than the monsters you are fighting.

For example, a 5th-level Cleric can summon a celestial bison; a celestial bison will have 37 hit points, an AC of 13, 40 feet of movement, a gore attack of +8 melee (1d8+9), some energy resistances, and a smite evil ability. It is the equivalent of a CR 2.

By comparison a CR 5 Manticore (which would be an average encounter for four 5th-level characters) has 57 hit points, an AC of 17, 50 feet of movement flying (30 on the ground), 2 claw attacks at +10 melee (2d4+5) and a bit attack at +8 melee (1d8+2) OR 6 tail spikes at +8 ranged (1d8+2/19-20), and few other minor abilities. If you are expecting your summons to go toe-to-toe with an equivalent CR monster, then you will probably be disappointed.

There are ways to beef up summons: Augment Summoning, Desicrate, etc. but your summons will generally remain secondary or tertiary combatants.

My typical strategy with summons is to use the low-level summons as scouts, trapfinders, and flankers for the primary melee combatants in the party and mid-level summons as combatants against lesser CR monsters on the battlefield.

All that said, it really depends on your DM and how he is building his encounters. From the looks of it, I imagine he is doing a few things wrong as per RAW (as Dandu pointed out) and challenging your party with encounters higher than you should be dealing with. Without more information about what your DM is doing this is the best advice I can give you.

 

[Jack Simth]

Two questions. Blood Wind lets you make ranged natural weapon attacks. Touch spells you have to touch them with your bare hand, which technically would be a natural weapon. So if you cast Blood Wind, could you use a spell like Chill Touch at range?

And also...How do I make summoning stuff viable? They all just seem so....so....weak.

Let's see....

Blood Wind (Spell Compendium, page 33-34) explicitly allows Unarmed Strikes to work, so that's not a problem.

And you can make touch attacks with unarmed strikes - but you're targetting full AC to do so. Relevant portion of the SRD (and Link, for context):

Holding the Charge

If you don’t discharge the spell in the round when you cast the spell, you can hold the discharge of the spell (hold the charge) indefinitely. You can continue to make touch attacks round after round. You can touch one friend as a standard action or up to six friends as a full-round action. If you touch anything or anyone while holding a charge, even unintentionally, the spell discharges. If you cast another spell, the touch spell dissipates. Alternatively, you may make a normal unarmed attack (or an attack with a natural weapon) while holding a charge. In this case, you aren’t considered armed and you provoke attacks of opportunity as normal for the attack. (If your unarmed attack or natural weapon attack doesn’t provoke attacks of opportunity, neither does this attack.) If the attack hits, you deal normal damage for your unarmed attack or natural weapon and the spell discharges. If the attack misses, you are still holding the charge.

(Emphasis added)

So it looks like if you're under the effects of Blood Wind while already holding the charge on a touch-range spell, you can boost it to the range granted by blood wind by targetting full AC. I think....