necromancy is completely unusable

[Doomi]

necromancy had to be designed to be useless, you can't ♥♥♥♥ something up that badly on accident, this was entirely on purpose
let's have a list of problems:

-souls and how rare they are
-weak units
-barely any units
-spells being either useless or so expensive that using them is impossible

now for the details

-souls are terrible, necromancy is the only type of magic with it's own special currency, and that'd be fine if it was handled properly, instead you get maybe 4 or 5 souls per victorious battle, and a grand total of 6 with soul wells, the only thing that let you generate them passively
but getting 6 passively each turn could be fine, if it wasn't for the fact that even the most basic and weakest undead unit, the skeletons, cost 10 souls, while most spells will need over 100, that's downright silly

-undead units are both too expensive due to the previously mentioned soul requirement for all of them, but also ridiculously weak which would be fine, random undead don't need to be strong, but the problem is the expense required, and the fact you still need to train them.
You have to train ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ skeletons. As a necromancer. You can't just raise them up from the ground, You have to spend turns training them, turns you could use to train actually useful units instead; and what you get are unit that die almost instantly in any battle while barely able to do any damage themselves.
Completely useless

-you wanna know how many undead units there are in the game?
4
skeleton,zombie,bone golem, reaper
of those 4; the reaper is a mythic unit that costs 150 souls to summon so good ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ luck,skeletons are useless, bone golems are barely better, zombies can't even be obtained as real units and can only be temporarily summoned during battles, and they die at the end.
banshees, despite being summoned with a necromancy tome and being a floating skeleton in a dress, don't count as undead but rather as etheral
now there is wightborn, but i'll get to that in a minute
there just isn't enough undead units, and more importantly, there's no reason to use them. If you could raise swarm of weak units, that'd be fine, but instead you get to make 2 units that are completely useless and cost way too much, or summon reapers which is also too expensive.


-spells
necromancy spells, besides create bone golem, are few in numbers, and all cost way too many ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ souls
wighborn costs 200, which means that while every other faction in the game gets to have their transformation on the same turn as they unlock it, necromancers have to wait ages to get enough souls, and even then the benefits barely exists because necromancy doesn't ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ work
summon reaper costs 150, despite it being the only useful undead unit
raise undead army costs 150 and is a tier 4 spell despite summoning tier 1 units; it should be a tier 1 or 2 spell considering the cost and how weak those units are


So, combine of all this, and i have to ask; what did the devs have against necromancy? because again, you can't ♥♥♥♥ it up that badly by accident, this was designed to be completely useless from the ground up. Using necromancy is basically guaranteeing you're gonna lose because you'll be weaker than everyone else, with less units, less usable magic, and no good units anyway

[aqvamare]

Originally posted by Nexian:

Are being using the book of the horde along with the undead? Not played them myself, but my assumption is that they want undead to have more options than just swarming?

When you take the book of horde, you want the Tier 2 unit, which calls a "war hound" as archer in every battle, which adds 11 units per battle, 12 if you go golem update as fast as possible,

Only advatage, this dogs die, and give you free souls.

This unit solo carry every map until you reach Tier IV units

[Gaslov]

Originally posted by Paladin Dark:

I haven't even played Necromancer

That should be your first clue that maybe this isn't the right discussion for you. Any ideas you have about necromancer on paper aren't going to translate into practice. There are some one-off cool things necromancer can do, but pretty much any tome path has cool and powerful things without the souls bottleneck. Any retort you have is moot until you've played the class.

It should also be noted that "Gifted Casters" does not reduce souls needed for casting necromancy spells.

[Darkfireslide]

Originally posted by Gaslov:

Originally posted by Paladin Dark:

I haven't even played Necromancer

That should be your first clue that maybe this isn't the right discussion for you. Any ideas you have about necromancer on paper aren't going to translate into practice. There are some one-off cool things necromancer can do, but pretty much any tome path has cool and powerful things without the souls bottleneck. Any retort you have is moot until you've played the class.

And OP hasn't played enough to know balance yet because the game hasn't been out long enough. What do you mean other tomes don't have a bottleneck? That's what Mana and Gold do lmfao and guess what, Necros can still use both of those resources too. Make an argument about why Necro is bad comparatively instead of just saying "souls are bad" without any justification

[Bomjus]

"the only thing that let you generate them passively"

you get souls from heroes in your crypts.

[Gaslov]

Because gold and mana create a lot more value per unit than souls do for the same amount of effort to acquire them. As a necromancer, 90% of your units are going to be gold/mana non-undead units. Seems silly. Just play the class, dude. You'll see what everyone is talking about.

[Silvertongued Devil]

Um. You seem to be... misunderstanding the advantages of necromancy.

First, Soulwells generate +3 - not +2 - so by default you can get +9/turn - almost as much as a free unit every turn.
Second: there are several ancient wonders that also generate souls. In my last game I ended up with +13-14 a turn.
Third: Your soul-priced units can be used in conjunction with gold-priced units, meaning you can spam both of them and end up with a vastly larger army than anybody else except maybe barbarians and life affinity boys.
Fourth: You can revive your units in battle pretty much indefinitely. Your normal unit die? Well, just revive it as a zombie. Zombie died? Well, just revive it again. You can create an indefinite and almost farcical loop of undeath in combat and the only limitation is your mana.
Fifth: You need to be aggro. Like, really aggro. Use soulbound, wage wars, feed your army. You literally get stronger based on the deaths of your enemies so if you aren't currently killing things you're not really doing it right. You can't sit in your base and hope to make Necromancy work effectively.
Sixth: Necromancy spells are bad? What? You what? Raise Zombies regularly revives 3+ units, rotting explosion withers entire enemy armies. Soul Siphons as a siege equipment are hysterical good fun and give you oodles of free souls, encouraging aggression. Harvest population lets you gain souls, too. Marked for Death literally auto-kills enemy units after three turns. Battlefield Reanimation is quite plainly the most fun spell in the entire game, IMO. It turns all dead enemies into zombies and all dead friendly units get revived.
Seventh: You forgot about the Banshee. You know, that undead unit that is basically a morale bomb you can lob into the enemy army. Works even more entertainingly if you slip in some Tyrant-Order stuff for more morale shattering. Intimidation Aura is good fun with Banshees, Joy Siphoners and Cause Despair. The enemy will be fumbling every other swing for the rest of the fight, if they don't just break and give you easy souls.

Honestly my first Necromancy game was rough because I wanted to turtle. My second I decided to go aggro and it was the most satisfying Necromancy experience I've had in a video game in years.

My only real complaints are that Wightborn looks ugly as skin - there's weird artifacting (for lack of a better term) with the models where you can see the outlines of their models' noses and stuff from pre-undead and that distracts from the whole "zombified the whole species," the inability to start as an undead race, and the inaccessibility of the Bone Dragon unless you get lucky with RNG and find the right Ancient Wonder.

None of those are really dealbreakers, ultimately, but they are the only parts of necromancy that are kinda bleh.

If you want Undead Knights, play Undead Feudal. Masses of units with bonus damage for being together + knights, etc.


Oh, and while I do admit it would be neat to keep raised units in your army after the fact, it would also annihilate the balance of the game and go against the design decisions that Triumph made for this game. They wanted to ensure that players had to, well, stop waging war at one point, that it was possible to attrition them until they had to retreat instead of just recovering tons of HP/units/etc. Zombies being combat-only means Necromancers can still win seemingly impossible fights with infinite gribblies, but also that they're going to have to eventually retreat to get a new mob of pawns to do their war-waging for them.

TL, DR: Necromancy is flawed, but mostly fun, and your complaints seem to be largely due to inexperience with the mechanics Necromancy is based around.

[Caz]

Originally posted by Paladin Dark:

Originally posted by Gaslov:

That should be your first clue that maybe this isn't the right discussion for you. Any ideas you have about necromancer on paper aren't going to translate into practice. There are some one-off cool things necromancer can do, but pretty much any tome path has cool and powerful things without the souls bottleneck. Any retort you have is moot until you've played the class.

And OP hasn't played enough to know balance yet because the game hasn't been out long enough. What do you mean other tomes don't have a bottleneck? That's what Mana and Gold do lmfao and guess what, Necros can still use both of those resources too.

You accuse OP of not knowing balance, then immediately show you know nothing of how badly souls are balanced.
Regular units (those that cost gold and/or mana) can be recruited en masse due to how high gold and mana per turn can be. Like OP said, souls per turn is extremely limited. I was able to get 9 per turn when I did a necro run. That's 3 per city, because that's the constraint you're under. You can only build one soul well per city.
Meanwhile, I can get over 200 gold per turn per city. T1 units cost less than 100 gold. Meanwhile, the T1 undead unit, Skeleton, costs multiple turns of souls to get a single unit. And compared to other T1 units, it's weaker than wet toiler paper.

Necromancers do, indeed, use gold and mana. To recruit non-undead units. Perhaps you're misunderstanding what necromancers are?

Originally posted by Paladin Dark:

Make an argument about why Necro is bad comparatively instead of just saying "souls are bad" without any justification

So you want an argument for why necromancers are bad without using their central mechanic? You don't seem to understand how any of this works.
But I'll indulge your misunderstanding.
Without souls and units/spells that require souls, Necromancers are.... just simply Dark Wizards. They aren't Necromancers. Without souls and the units/spells that use souls, Necromancers don't exist in this game.

[Darkfireslide]

Without souls and units/spells that require souls, Necromancers are.... just simply Dark Wizards. They aren't Necromancers. Without souls and the units/spells that use souls, Necromancers don't exist in this game.

Okay but is this post about whether Necromancers are weak, or just that they aren't only raising bodies from the dead to fight for RP reasons? Skeletons and Bone Golems ONLY cost souls, and necromancer spells ONLY cost souls to cast, too. So that frees up a ton of mana and gold to produce units normally and cast spells and summons from other schools. How is that bad, especially when undead units cost significantly less Draft to produce?

[BoogieMan]

It was probably OP in AOW3, but it's crap in AOE4. I've ran it 4 times and it sucks every time.

Souls are overly rare early on even if you gimp yourself by not using spells that require them, which by the way, are generally terrible spells anyway.

By the time I have enough souls to go wild, it's pointless. I've unlocked other tomes and spells that are not only way more powerful, but use standard resources.

Skeletons are terrible units, but expensive to summon during the only phase of the game where they are viable, and their mana upkeep cost is frankly absurd for how weak they are.

[Caz]

I'm seeing a ton of replies accusing OP of not understanding how Necromancy plays in this game. So let me put those accusations to rest.

You're wrong.

If you exclude all the units and spells that require souls, you have Dark Wizard units and spells. Not Necromancy units and spells. Necromancy is about the undead. Dark Knight is not undead. Pursuer is not undead. Like Doomi accurately pointed out, there are only FOUR undead units. Banshee isn't even one of them (which is just asinine).

If the spell is not specifically a buff for the undead or raising undead, it's not a Necromantic spell, it's a Dark Wizard spell. A spell that can buff the undead, but also buffs regular units, is not a Necromantic spell, it's a Dark Wizard spell. Because Necromancy is about the undead, raising the dead to fight for you, making the undead stronger, creating a legion of undead to consume the world.

What we currently have is a Dark Wizard that can occasionally call up an undead unit to be part of their army, that can be wiped out if someone sneezes near it, and some rickety zombies that don't last past the current combat encounter they're raised in. That's not Necromancer. That's Crab and Goyle levels of dipping your toes in the necromantic arts. It can only be called necromancy as a courtesy, not in any serious classification.

The only people I'm seeing that don't understand what Necromancy is, are the people claiming that Dark Wizardry is Necromancy. While all Necromancy is Dark Wizardry, not all Dark Wizardry is Necromancy.

Perhaps they made Necromancy a weak, piddling branch of magic because they intend to sell us the real path of Necromancy in a DLC. Scummy if that's what they did, but that seems to be the norm for non-indie games these days.

[Caz]

Originally posted by Paladin Dark:

Without souls and units/spells that require souls, Necromancers are.... just simply Dark Wizards. They aren't Necromancers. Without souls and the units/spells that use souls, Necromancers don't exist in this game.

Okay but is this post about whether Necromancers are weak, or just that they aren't only raising bodies from the dead to fight for RP reasons? Skeletons and Bone Golems ONLY cost souls, and necromancer spells ONLY cost souls to cast, too. So that frees up a ton of mana and gold to produce units normally and cast spells and summons from other schools. How is that bad, especially when undead units cost significantly less Draft to produce?

You answered your own question. Regular units are not undead. So.......

[Darkfireslide]

Skeletons are terrible units

They're a tier 1 unit. They're not supposed to be super strong. You combine them into Bone Golems, which are a much better unit with a good charge and the ability to self-heal for 30HP as a free action. Every 10 units you klil can get you a bone golem if Soulbinding. On maps with high creep density, that's every 2 turns, maybe less, and they cost significantly less draft to produce. Can you explain why these units are bad when they are relatively cheap and use a resource you get essentially for free? And sure, they cost mana upkeep, but every unit costs upkeep, so it's not like that's a great argument. Their mana upkeep is 25% cheaper than summoned units, too.

I'm sorry but no argument here has swayed me that there isn't some element of skill issues and not fully understanding the class yet considering I can find so many reasons why it works.

Skeletons aren't even that bad. They're more frail than other tier 1's but they do more damage than peasant pikes out of formation, resist blight and cold damage, and still get Charge Resistance. They're a cheap, affordable frontline for stronger backline units, and they get their defense from Weakness abilities Dark culture gets.

[Veg]

only thing I would change is that you should get a big surplus of souls for razing a city

[Darkfireslide]

What we currently have is a Dark Wizard that can occasionally call up an undead unit to be part of their army

So it's an RP thing and not a game balance thing. I guess turning your entire race into the undead doesn't count, either, you have to have dedicated undead units that only cost this soul resource that you apparently have to have an abundance of instead of the traditional gold and mana, even though doing so would require there be an Undead Culture to have the number of core units required, before any of you are happy with the implementation

[Bloody Roar 2]

Necromancy in general has most of their usefull spells and their best unit in the tier 4 and 5 tomes. Early on they are defenitely not easy to play. To get a shield unit, i took the "tome of protection" as my first starting tome. It has ghost soliders with shields you can summon.

And it has a spell where you can make one of your units invulnerable for a round. Plus tons of shield spells.

I agree on the fact, that getting 200 souls to turn your faction undead is a lot of work. I used all the soul gathering spells, i even used sould harvest on my own cities. Plus souls passive income and crypts. Since most of your necro spells cost souls too, the pool can be depleted very quickly.

Necromancy was the only tome tree where i had to grind for a long time, to get better in the endgame. Necromancers don´t snowball as hard as standart orc horde for example, or the standart dwarves or standart wizzards. Even the standart holy humans snowball better.

They simply need an endgame spell which gives them a lot of souls aside from the soul grind spell to kill your own pops for 60 souls each.

Overall the necromancer right now is not a real necromancer. It is a patchwork of a lot of different units untill you can turn your faction into real undead for 200 souls. And compared to other factions and builds it takes a lot of time!

(WIth dwarves i could have like 10 golden golems without problem in the endgame. They only cost imperial authority and gold. Having 10 reapers is nearly impossible or very hard to get as a necro. Because of the souls.)

(And by the moment you can afford 5 reapers, the game is allready long over normally.)