Shattered Kingdoms

So it's been probably a few years since I played. I pretty much quit after Mephistir and Draken. Was curious as I remember reading about some changes to necromancer and animate dead and could've swore I even commented on them but I can't seem to find the exact changes.

Was possibly thinking of rolling a necro but not entirely sure. I know back when I had Ixy, Delves could hold 43+ wraiths and then there was the change to animates that capped em to the size of your party, basically, only 8 or 9 or so. However the Wraith paralyze at the time was broken or so it seemed from the logs.

So I'm curious, what are the current state of necros and the exact changes to animate dead? I know you can create the other types, which me and others advocated for a long while but vaguely recall the notes mentioning that the undead were reworked to have their own classes or so ? Could someone point me to the patch notes as searching has yielded in vain on various attempts or give me a rough idea what's going on with them. Thanks in advance, guys and gals.

Haven't decided if I'm going to make a character but necros were always one of my favorite classes.

Are you banned from the game?

Here are the help files.

Wraiths have no weapon skills.
The only aggressive combat ability that animates have now is kill. No berserk/fury, no bash, no dirt, no disarm. I don't recall if any still have rescue.
Animates now display as the corpse of the thing they were raised from, which mostly serves to clutter up the room and group info and also make it ten times more likely that you will target your own NPCs by accidentally hitting one of the dozens of extra adjectives that your animates possess.
Skeletons, Wights and Ghouls are the only animates that have weapon skills, and as such are the only ones that can be used for melee damage, but their damage is drastically lower than wraiths used to be (on account of no berserk/fury), and the hp pool of wights and ghouls is abysmal compared to what wraiths used to have. A single GM holy word -will- kill them from 100% due to the double damage they take from holy word.

If you had even the slightest amount of trouble PKing on a necro before and don't want to roll a frustrating class, don't waste your time rolling a necro. They're the most fragile class in the game, and with nerfed animates and no utility they have very little to show for their glaring weaknesses. If you want to be a dangerous/utilitarian caster, roll a sorc. If you want to be a maledictor, roll a shaman.

If you do still choose to roll a necro, don't plan on using animate dead for much more than a flavor spell or to speed up PvE trips that don't involve null-magic, and do expect to eat arrows and holy words every time you think about PKing.

You're getting close to going full D-A about necromancers. Any class has lots of glaring weaknesses when you assume that your opponents are always prepared for you and you are never countering by doing unexpected things or preparing properly yourself. Necromancers are probably not top tier but they're still good.

^^
What he said.

The trick is to not really rely on animates for pvp, but controls. I only ever found animates useful for PvE, but now that wraiths have paralyzing bite again, Id maybe throw two extra into the formation for the lulz. You have to pick and choose your battles. Obviously, you will not typically want to fight against ranged classes and would have to have a quick plan to nullify paladins. Controls and the mana drain that comes with it somewhat force you into one cabal because its skillset meshes well with the control build.

I'm coming from the perspective that he already knows about everything that wasn't changed, so I filled him in on the things that were. I did forget about the animate "special attacks" that fire when they're in melee and unarmed though. Those fire more often now, but they do require that you have unarmed undead, so if you choose to use them a lot you end up spending a lot of time using "o all hit" in combat, yet don't gain damage from it.

Touch special attacks require unarmed combat

Bite attacks from wights and ghouls do not

One change that seems to be very recent is that undead no longer can sleep and can only rest. So if they do get hurt, you have to idle longer for them to recover.

Animates are still useful. Skeletons can do decent damage with enchanted massive weapons.

Controls have been weaken a little more as of recent too but remain the primary pet for any necromancer.

Overall necromancers are still a strong class. They do have a lot of exploitable weaknesses, but also require very little preparation to be lethal. So if you do get ganked, you can get back on the pvp horse rather quickly.

A necromancer can heal his undead and they are pretty expendable, though. Is it really important to have them be able to sleep to recover their hp faster?

Zombies and wraiths can use daggers (though their effectiveness in doing so is questionable).