Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Undead" data-source="post: 8731334" data-attributes="member: 7037374">Undead master is very powerful, but most people cannot read. The animate dead spell allows you to control all the undead you can create from a single cast, with any hit dice over your normal controlling limit from previous castings going out of control. If you cast animate dead and raise 50 hd, and your limit is 50, you keep them all. If you make 150 more with your next cast, you gain control of all 150 and now have 200 HD under control which is over the limit so you must discard the 50hd you created with your first cast. You keep all the 150hd from your latest cast even though it is 3x more than your normal control limit. Agent of the grave helps with control limits, which you don't care about. Desecrate and cruoromancer effect the amount you animate at once, which is all you care about. To properly be a minion type necromancer you must maximize your caster level for animating, which undead master does. Traits like gifted adept, feats like varisian tatoo, classes like cruoromancer, items like orange prism ioun stone, and spells like deathwine are your friend. Properly equipped and specialized you should quickly have caster level bonuses higher than your actual class based caster level. Many of the bonuses i could find worked for all necromancy spells, or all evil spells, so by accident your save or die debuff magic and even your create undead and create greater undead spells will all also have an arbitrarily large bonus.  A cleric normally gains create undead as a 6th level spell at 11th level and uses their 11 effective caster levels to create 5th level juju zombies and skeletal champions. If they boost caster level they could be 11th level casting a 6th level create undead spell with an effective caster level of 25 or so raising level 20 juju zombies or skeletal champions, or morgs, or w/e.   They usually say the create undead spells are traps too, because even if you do create henchmen strong enough to wipe your entire party 15 levels early, you can't easily control them. Stacking casting stat, charisma, and spell dc, the things most casters are already doing, will help with this, but not completely remove it as a concern. Undead leadership and rolling diplomacy might be a superior alternative than the usual magical enslavement that intelligent undead (that remember and resent being bossed around) can challenge at basically every order.  You need 3 metamagics for spell perfection, which is an absolute must have feat. You could take whatever and just get metamagic rods for the rest, but there are some you want to consider for your build. Extend for command undead duration like you thought, and also heighten to raise the spell level of command undead to the highest you can for better dc. Persistent makes all your save or die magic twice as deadly, but also means you get two chances to snag sturdy undead with command. You can choose spell perfection on command rather than animate if you like, it boosts feat based DC bonuses from spell focus, greater spell focus, varisian tatoo, and such things to help if you want to try to command undead stuff with channel resist or intelligence. The other big trap of minion master type necromancer is costs. Blood money, false focus, and making animate a spell like ability all aim to alleviate this. i would recommend the thematic blood money spell until deific obedience Urgathoa comes online. It gives +1 caster level to necromancy if you do an off screen daily ritual and at 12hd you get desecrate, animate, and inflict light as spell like ability options. Diverse obedience lowers the hd needed to get powers by 2 and allows you to pick from the sentinel and evangelist powers that normally take a prestige class.            I like to play necro wizard, but their channel pool is much more limited than a cleric. If you build cleric you could run conductive grayflame weapons with channel smite, shatter resolve, and channel force feats and do channel variant disease too. Weapon damage +channel damage +1d6 +1 per channel die +shaken +sickened + contagion +domain bad touch ends up being prettt nasty. But if you aren't cleric i wouldn't waste a slot on quick channel because the wizard can only use it to command.</blockquote>

Verification