So why some people think necromancr is underpowered?

[Vvv]

I played artificer and it's probably my favourite. Not gonna play alchemists because it's not my style to use consumables.

Just tried necromancer and I find him very strong. It's probably the easiest one imo. You rely on mana which is easier to get than money, it's easy to catch 1 or 2 tier 3 souls and make really strong units like draugr giant with 50% life steal for ex...And it's super easy to win fights because you can raise undead that the AI will gladly smack.

And even if you don't find tier 3 souls you will find tier 2 souls that give a bonus of 20hp which makes the tier 1 skeletons tank more than tier 3 keepers.

If you lack ingredients, simply buy inexpensive glyphs that give 3 purple or orange.

[Celeborn]

I think some of the difficulty of it that some people have is there is generally more enemies and mages that will be a counter to undead. Also depending on what location may not have access to buy things to reach higher thresholds so while other classes can craft stuff to make higher things necromancers can not. The higher tier souls as well is rng and not guaranteed to drop. If you don't have higher tier souls then you are stuck with maybe being able to make a skeleton out of all your ghouls if dont have mats. People have mentioned that took a bit before could get tier 3 on some runs and the soul well is really needed for efficiency on crafting and getting souls. One playthrough as necro I was surrounded at start by enemy mages which were strong to undead and was just lucky I picked enchanter so I had phantom warriors which evened my army out. Also another thing is the undead are pretty reliant on the mages or apprentice getting undead healer otherwise you will be blowing through mana to keep armies up. The upside to necro is that have easier access to increasing stack size so can be even with the enemy stacks when normally outnumbered. Don't think necro is weak but sometimes they are more at the mercy to rng which why some people make sure they have the level up mod to least alleviate the chance of not getting the undead healer.

[Gravedigger]

Just beat my necro campaign, the first tier units aside from mages are pretty weak but once you start getting tier 2+ souls you get super fun armies. So much variety too. :D

[Jaeger]

I think the issue is that necromancer is a bit trickier, benefits from already knowing how the game and map work, and in some ways counter-intuitive compared to the others.

You're told that necromancers lean towards having lots of expendable minions, and it's difficult or RNG-based to get consistent heals for them without burning mana you're probably already stretched thin on thanks to undead upkeep. However, level ups in this game are pretty nice, sometimes outright game-changers, and newcomers may not realize that upkeep free walking corpses spawned in and out of battle are the true cannon fodder.

Necromancers need better souls to craft better minions, but getting those consistently requires planning with soul cage, expending precious mana on spells, or being able and willing to farm relations with a city to leech high quality souls off them. Even then, materials for necromancers are a bit trickier/RNG dependent since they can't convert low tier ones into higher tier ingredients like Alchemist and Artificer can.

Then you factor in undead having a large weakness to White damage, which is not terribly uncommon, and it can all seem pretty rough. Granted, that weakness can be mitigated through undead mages and the like, but again, that requires some experimentation and knowledge fresh players may not acquire before they get frustrated.

It's far from all doom and gloom, for the reasons you pointed. Necromancers have some pretty neat tricks to work around most of those limitations and can make highly varied and uniquely buffed armies far faster than anyone else as long as they have the souls, materials, and crafting slots, but their competition is universally useful glyphs and consumables.

[Vvv]

Originally posted by Jaeger:

I think the issue is that necromancer is a bit trickier, benefits from already knowing how the game and map work, and in some ways counter-intuitive compared to the others.

You're told that necromancers lean towards having lots of expendable minions, and it's difficult or RNG-based to get consistent heals for them without burning mana you're probably already stretched thin on thanks to undead upkeep. However, level ups in this game are pretty nice, sometimes outright game-changers, and newcomers may not realize that upkeep free walking corpses spawned in and out of battle are the true cannon fodder.

Necromancers need better souls to craft better minions, but getting those consistently requires planning with soul cage, expending precious mana on spells, or being able and willing to farm relations with a city to leech high quality souls off them. Even then, materials for necromancers are a bit trickier/RNG dependent since they can't convert low tier ones into higher tier ingredients like Alchemist and Artificer can.

Then you factor in undead having a large weakness to White damage, which is not terribly uncommon, and it can all seem pretty rough. Granted, that weakness can be mitigated through undead mages and the like, but again, that requires some experimentation and knowledge fresh players may not acquire before they get frustrated.

It's far from all doom and gloom, for the reasons you pointed. Necromancers have some pretty neat tricks to work around most of those limitations and can make highly varied and uniquely buffed armies far faster than anyone else as long as they have the souls, materials, and crafting slots, but their competition is universally useful glyphs and consumables.

Yes might be harder when you don't know the map or how capturing souls work even if you start with minion that can capture souls. I assume it might not be obvious to newer players.

[meiam]

Because the other two are incredibly OP.

Alchemist can spam potion, you can just use it to summon infinite minion in a tough fight to easily win without even involving your real army. Mage circle fight is a joke this way.

Artificer can craft glyph, like vampirism and such to put on the whole army.

Necro can craft undead, but those aren't particularly stronger than regular units, they're just different. Except that they can't heal by themselves, so early game with them is pretty rough since you can't really use them extensively because after every fight they'll take some damage and can't just go on fighting the next stack. The mana upkeep is nice, except mentalist makes upkeep an afterthought.

Necro also start, by default, with death spell book which is by far the weakest of all spellbook. That's something that can be overcome with custom mage, but for player who don't know it'll suck.

I think balance wise necro are fine, it's the other two tree that need to massively come down in power (limit number of potion used per fight and nerf most glyph).

[valiant43e]

A bit off topic, but out of curiosity, is there any hero which is good for necromancer?
Since none of them is undead, it means that you can't heal them with Last Aid.

So basically, you need to keep healer+living units stack for your hero that will eventually join you.

I played as necro only once and got dwarf bard and she was... kinda useless.

[Gravedigger]

Originally posted by valiant43e:

A bit off topic, but out of curiosity, is there any hero which is good for necromancer?
Since none of them is undead, it means that you can't heal them with Last Aid.

So basically, you need to keep healer+living units stack for your hero that will eventually join you.

I played as necro only once and got dwarf bard and she was... kinda useless.

Lytra Storme had some really good skills to use with my necro units, which is funny cause she's a paladin.

[Jaeger]

Originally posted by meiam:

Because the other two are incredibly OP.

Alchemist can spam potion, you can just use it to summon infinite minion in a tough fight to easily win without even involving your real army. Mage circle fight is a joke this way.

Artificer can craft glyph, like vampirism and such to put on the whole army.

Necro can craft undead, but those aren't particularly stronger than regular units, they're just different. Except that they can't heal by themselves, so early game with them is pretty rough since you can't really use them extensively because after every fight they'll take some damage and can't just go on fighting the next stack. The mana upkeep is nice, except mentalist makes upkeep an afterthought.

Necro also start, by default, with death spell book which is by far the weakest of all spellbook. That's something that can be overcome with custom mage, but for player who don't know it'll suck.

I think balance wise necro are fine, it's the other two tree that need to massively come down in power (limit number of potion used per fight and nerf most glyph).

Fair points, and while I haven't played much with Artificer, I can confirm that just spamming bottled elementals (which aren't *too* hard to make) is pretty potent on top of all the other antics you can get up to with potions.

Though, necromancers can get similarly out of hand with raising walking corpses between liches, apprentices, and undead mage level-ups. Granted, that requires one or more units to die first, but you can do it potentially forever as long as you have the focus points for it.

As far as units go, how do the other classes compare? I know Nature lets you tame and recruit tier 1 and 2 animals while Earth can forge golems out of ore nodes as a pretty hefty cost in magic and upkeep, but are they otherwise limited to the barracks options for tier 3 units?

I've found that being able to make a wide variety of undead tier 3's on-command and possibly for zero upkeep leeching pristine souls from Sevenkeeps is pretty potent.

[Vvv]

Originally posted by meiam:

Because the other two are incredibly OP.

Alchemist can spam potion, you can just use it to summon infinite minion in a tough fight to easily win without even involving your real army. Mage circle fight is a joke this way.

Artificer can craft glyph, like vampirism and such to put on the whole army.

Necro can craft undead, but those aren't particularly stronger than regular units, they're just different. Except that they can't heal by themselves, so early game with them is pretty rough since you can't really use them extensively because after every fight they'll take some damage and can't just go on fighting the next stack. The mana upkeep is nice, except mentalist makes upkeep an afterthought.

Necro also start, by default, with death spell book which is by far the weakest of all spellbook. That's something that can be overcome with custom mage, but for player who don't know it'll suck.

I think balance wise necro are fine, it's the other two tree that need to massively come down in power (limit number of potion used per fight and nerf most glyph).

Hard disagree. The other 2 may have the potential to surpass the necro, but the t3 units he can create are very strong on top of everyone having life leech easily.

And I think people don't get the necro, you're not supposed to care about ghouls it's the higher tier units you should care about. I would go as far as say no one can beat the necromancer because he can raise the dead, sure glyps and potions can be op but so is the necro.

You go 2 fight for ex, ghoul gets killed, you raise a corpse, corpse get's killed you raise it again. That's how you win without even taking damage early on. And often time your dead ghoul is replaced by another zombie that costs nothing because of zombie curse.

You have as much minions as you can have focus to throw at the enemy that even if you lose will be replaced by others without you doing anything until you get stuff like draugr giant, death knight or the hollow armour that all have more or less 200 hp with life leech without the glyph.

And just for laughs, when you get a lich you can raise every corpse in a 3 hex radious. hard to beat that one tbh.

[Vvv]

Originally posted by valiant43e:

A bit off topic, but out of curiosity, is there any hero which is good for necromancer?
Since none of them is undead, it means that you can't heal them with Last Aid.

So basically, you need to keep healer+living units stack for your hero that will eventually join you.

I played as necro only once and got dwarf bard and she was... kinda useless.

Usually your hero should be with living units just to balance out mana vs gold, unless you make him or her undead later on. You can make everyone undead as you research death spells.

[Vvv]

Originally posted by Jaeger:

Originally posted by meiam:

Because the other two are incredibly OP.

Alchemist can spam potion, you can just use it to summon infinite minion in a tough fight to easily win without even involving your real army. Mage circle fight is a joke this way.

Artificer can craft glyph, like vampirism and such to put on the whole army.

Necro can craft undead, but those aren't particularly stronger than regular units, they're just different. Except that they can't heal by themselves, so early game with them is pretty rough since you can't really use them extensively because after every fight they'll take some damage and can't just go on fighting the next stack. The mana upkeep is nice, except mentalist makes upkeep an afterthought.

Necro also start, by default, with death spell book which is by far the weakest of all spellbook. That's something that can be overcome with custom mage, but for player who don't know it'll suck.

I think balance wise necro are fine, it's the other two tree that need to massively come down in power (limit number of potion used per fight and nerf most glyph).

Fair points, and while I haven't played much with Artificer, I can confirm that just spamming bottled elementals (which aren't *too* hard to make) is pretty potent on top of all the other antics you can get up to with potions.

Though, necromancers can get similarly out of hand with raising walking corpses between liches, apprentices, and undead mage level-ups. Granted, that requires one or more units to die first, but you can do it potentially forever as long as you have the focus points for it.

As far as units go, how do the other classes compare? I know Nature lets you tame and recruit tier 1 and 2 animals while Earth can forge golems out of ore nodes as a pretty hefty cost in magic and upkeep, but are they otherwise limited to the barracks options for tier 3 units?

I've found that being able to make a wide variety of undead tier 3's on-command and possibly for zero upkeep leeching pristine souls from Sevenkeeps is pretty potent.

Very well summed.

[meiam]

Originally posted by Vvv:

Originally posted by meiam:

Because the other two are incredibly OP.

Alchemist can spam potion, you can just use it to summon infinite minion in a tough fight to easily win without even involving your real army. Mage circle fight is a joke this way.

Artificer can craft glyph, like vampirism and such to put on the whole army.

Necro can craft undead, but those aren't particularly stronger than regular units, they're just different. Except that they can't heal by themselves, so early game with them is pretty rough since you can't really use them extensively because after every fight they'll take some damage and can't just go on fighting the next stack. The mana upkeep is nice, except mentalist makes upkeep an afterthought.

Necro also start, by default, with death spell book which is by far the weakest of all spellbook. That's something that can be overcome with custom mage, but for player who don't know it'll suck.

I think balance wise necro are fine, it's the other two tree that need to massively come down in power (limit number of potion used per fight and nerf most glyph).

Hard disagree. The other 2 may have the potential to surpass the necro, but the t3 units he can create are very strong on top of everyone having life leech easily.

And I think people don't get the necro, you're not supposed to care about ghouls it's the higher tier units you should care about. I would go as far as say no one can beat the necromancer because he can raise the dead, sure glyps and potions can be op but so is the necro.

You go 2 fight for ex, ghoul gets killed, you raise a corpse, corpse get's killed you raise it again. That's how you win without even taking damage early on. And often time your dead ghoul is replaced by another zombie that costs nothing because of zombie curse.

You have as much minions as you can have focus to throw at the enemy that even if you lose will be replaced by others without you doing anything until you get stuff like draugr giant, death knight or the hollow armour that all have more or less 200 hp with life leech without the glyph.

And just for laughs, when you get a lich you can raise every corpse in a 3 hex radious. hard to beat that one tbh.

Why use crappy low level Tier unit when you could use T3 unit in its place? Sure maybe if necro started with an extra 2 unit per stack that could only be filled with low tier unit it would be good. But it doesn't, so that's all pointless. Also most ability to raise undead are from fight come from the dead spell, ie something any mage can use, no need to be necro.

T3 necro units are good, but so are non necro unit (I'd argue most of the strongest T3 unit come from summoning rather than making/hiring, lightbringer and forgemaster are incredibly strong). Given enough time to collect good glyph and potion, way past endgame, necro could probably be considered the strongest of the three, but that's far after you've already won the game.

Lich can raise dead... but who cares, occulist/shaman can summon stuff and don't need a corpse for it (and again, alchemist can just spam bottle emental). Needing a corpse is actually a pretty big deal since it means you can't summon at the start of the fight. Plus there's no summoning behind the enemy line to force the range unit to move. Honestly, by the time you can raise mass undead with Lich, you've already won the fight (or lost it), big whoop you can have a parade to celebrate wining, I'd rather use the lich focus to win in the first place.

[Drakilian]

Because it is lol. You're at the mercy of RNG for healing, have to use excessive amounts of resources to heal if you didn't get lucky with said healing rng, the units you can make are not actually much better than other units until you hit tier 3, and then you have terrible rng associated with the tier 3 units as well.

After playing around with the slavery mechanic for a bit I'm kind of wowed at the fact that they included what the undead raising mechanic *should* have been (Slaves are basically ghouls from age of wonders 3) and instead made it so that all you can get from your zombie curse are endless hordes of trash that you can basically do nothing with other than park them near cities and cycle out as disposable trash for your frontline to raise with raise corpse.

The sheer numbers you can get are quite high but you can't actually leverage them in any significant way because you can't join multiple stacks together for a fight, and if you're just doing human wave tactics of throwing multiple stacks at a tower it's more effective to hire troops (since they have no hire cost, only upkeep) and do that with them instead. I took a circle mage tower on impossible by recruiting two stacks of brutes in 4 turns and throwing them at the tower in auto-resolve, cost me about 24 gold worth of upkeep to take out one of the circle mages with the largest advantage against me, a necro player, Yrya of the light.

You can still win the game with them but you won't do so by relying on your mechanics, as your mechanics are actively countered by a large swath of the enemies in the game or are generally just not very strong/hinder you until you get to late game and can actually craft your tier 3 undead. Or unless you bumrush Baron meldevic with some wisps to get ridiculously powerful tier 3 soul early (nevermind that the reason you can do that to begin with is that undead are so ridiculously weak to white damage that any consistent source of it is enough to sweep the toughest undead fight in the game in the first 2-3 weeks). Hell, I beat Hokan Ashri outnumbered in his domain with two phantom warriors from the ghost ship, an apprentice specialized for buffing and fire damage, an orc summoner and a vampire acolyte. The phantom warriors at 2/3rds health were still able to wipe out half his stack after the acolyte and spider summons ate up their action points to avoid retaliation, and this was after they were buffed with 50% white resistance.

Just, sitting here, I see Alchemists getting infinite summons and consumables crafting, the only ones able to actually leverage superior numbers in fights, I see artificers get invincible units and optimal unit specialization and modification, and then necro gets to craft some largely useless trash, wraiths, eventually get inconsistent access to tier 3 units, and then not even any interesting tier 4 unit crafting or anything along those lines, meaning your crafting doesn't even hold up to the highest end of combat and you have no unique tier 4 options.

The biggest issue by far is the prevalence of white damage and the fact that undead are far, far too weak to it, it is utterly crippling to expansion efforts and makes it very hard to explore into many areas of the game. If there were more diverse damage takes maybe it wouldn't be so bad but as is there are 4 damage types and most undead are weak to 2 of them.

[Vvv]

Crappy tier levels was to portray early game vs later game. And even if you don't need to be necro to raise dead it's the only one that can afford to have it's unit's killed non stop. The other 2 would be bankrupt if they did the same.

Why is it a big deal to need a corpse, early game ofc? I understand that for the other 2 that care about their armies you must protect them by summoning units but the ghouls are basically summons that did you did not summon.

You can easily have your apprentice, undead mage and zombie that spits poison with whatever in front of you early game and you will have easy time. The lich example was just the power potential it has if needed, by the time your necro gets T3 units you most likely will never need it.

[Vvv]

Originally posted by Drakilian:

Because it is lol. You're at the mercy of RNG for healing, have to use excessive amounts of resources to heal if you didn't get lucky with said healing rng, the units you can make are not actually much better than other units until you hit tier 3, and then you have terrible rng associated with the tier 3 units as well.

After playing around with the slavery mechanic for a bit I'm kind of wowed at the fact that they included what the undead raising mechanic *should* have been (Slaves are basically ghouls from age of wonders 3) and instead made it so that all you can get from your zombie curse are endless hordes of trash that you can basically do nothing with other than park them near cities and cycle out as disposable trash for your frontline to raise with raise corpse.

The sheer numbers you can get are quite high but you can't actually leverage them in any significant way because you can't join multiple stacks together for a fight, and if you're just doing human wave tactics of throwing multiple stacks at a tower it's more effective to hire troops (since they have no hire cost, only upkeep) and do that with them instead. I took a circle mage tower on impossible by recruiting two stacks of brutes in 4 turns and throwing them at the tower in auto-resolve, cost me about 24 gold worth of upkeep to take out one of the circle mages with the largest advantage against me, a necro player, Yrya of the light.

You can still win the game with them but you won't do so by relying on your mechanics, as your mechanics are actively countered by a large swath of the enemies in the game or are generally just not very strong/hinder you until you get to late game and can actually craft your tier 3 undead. Or unless you bumrush Baron meldevic with some wisps to get ridiculously powerful tier 3 soul early (nevermind that the reason you can do that to begin with is that undead are so ridiculously weak to white damage that any consistent source of it is enough to sweep the toughest undead fight in the game in the first 2-3 weeks). Hell, I beat Hokan Ashri outnumbered in his domain with two phantom warriors from the ghost ship, an apprentice specialized for buffing and fire damage, an orc summoner and a vampire acolyte. The phantom warriors at 2/3rds health were still able to wipe out half his stack after the acolyte and spider summons ate up their action points to avoid retaliation, and this was after they were buffed with 50% white resistance.

Just, sitting here, I see Alchemists getting infinite summons and consumables crafting, the only ones able to actually leverage superior numbers in fights, I see artificers get invincible units and optimal unit specialization and modification, and then necro gets to craft some largely useless trash, wraiths, eventually get inconsistent access to tier 3 units, and then not even any interesting tier 4 unit crafting or anything along those lines, meaning your crafting doesn't even hold up to the highest end of combat and you have no unique tier 4 options.

I am playing necromancer right now and I am in disbelief of most of what you wrote.