Solo Necromancer

[Horthas]

Just finished a god playthrough last night: http://wins.zorbus.net/r58/files/god_2023-06-02_015754_xl25_solonecro.txt

Some of the minutia I think I've understood (but correct me if I'm wrong):

I tried this build maybe 50 times before I tweaked it to start with 14 spirit and thus 4 skeletons at the start and then suddenly it clicked.

Animate Dead seems to scale only with the dungeon floor, not level or magic score. It doesn't seem to care about where the bodies came from, I've carried bodies down to lower floors and they seem to get the new stats.

Since all the summoned undead don't seem to have a level, or rather are level 1, things like a bonus to body stat don't seem to help them much.

Disease is extra dangerous since you can lose control of your possibly armed and armored army when your spirit stat dips.

I didn't take poison cloud but at some point I had used an orb of control on a wizard that had that spell and that's probably one of the best picks if you wanted a damage spell that goes with this earlier since your undead will be immune.

I see why Greater Animate Dead is only in limited supply, if you can get those skeleton soldiers and gear them up they're quite good. The other types this spawns don't seem that great. Plus high poison/mind/necrotic resist.



Some minor ideas related to the above:

It sure would be neat if things like the bodies of certain enemies or from certain rooms (Summoning Chambers? Torture Rooms?) could randomly contain slightly better corpses . It could spawn a specific type from the Greater Animate Dead spell or just be a little stronger and that would be interesting enough. Maybe on deep levels spawning some higher level undead like a banshee.

On that note, some kind of way to make a ranged unit would be nice. Skeleton archers, mages, etc. Because of the sort of self-imposed limits I took on this run I had every single arrow and bullet at the end of the game still stocked up. I did start using summon celestial to sort of fill for that, but that felt like I cheated on my own limitations at that point (I was avoiding having the other summoning spells because I used those so heavily on a previous playthrough, I wanted to be thematically a necromancer).

Building up your skeleton soldier as your own personal death knight is fun. I wish there was a way to build towards that sort of idea without having to pray on RNG for a greater animate wand and dicerolls on what undead you get. Maybe something that exclusively rules out/replaces clone for a build (clones go hostile if you take this) that lets you create a death knight/flesh golem. Put it at the same spell level as simulacrum. Maybe wrapping this up with the previous point and let this one be smart enough to use ranged weapons.

[Lights]

Interesting build, I might need to try this sometime. I've been eyeing up an elf animal companion based run and a gnome summon spammer run (in my quest to win with every race), but I hadn't considered the value that undead would bring given that they can use equipment. Poison cloud is good early game, but even better (imo) is acid cloud in the midgame- this is usually my goto for floors 4-7 on magic based builds. might accidentally take out your skeleton squad though.

I went to look at the specifics of your build, but it looks like the leaderboard is dead ;-; pls dont let this be another reset.

EDIT: its another reset. new update hype lets goooo

[Zorbus]

Thanks, Horthas! Something to think for the next update.

As the leaderboard was just reset, the link to the character is:
http://wins.zorbus.net/r58/files/god_2023-06-02_015754_xl25_solonecro.txt

Old leaderboard:
http://wins.zorbus.net/r58/

[Lights]

wow, 19 starting mind is absolutely crazy- even on my mage runs i've never dumped body and mobility that hard- seems like it was well worth it given the amount of talents it yielded, though. I feel like webs / slime would be particularly terrifying for this build. some pesky spiders and a strong archer seem like they would melt through this build (looking at you floor 8)- I assume thats why boots of mobility were prioritized.

Good stuff- will certainly try a variation of this build in the near future.

[Horthas]

Originally posted by Lights:

wow, 19 starting mind is absolutely crazy- even on my mage runs i've never dumped body and mobility that hard- seems like it was well worth it given the amount of talents it yielded, though. I feel like webs / slime would be particularly terrifying for this build. some pesky spiders and a strong archer seem like they would melt through this build (looking at you floor 8)- I assume thats why boots of mobility were prioritized.

Good stuff- will certainly try a variation of this build in the near future.

Yeah at floor 4 I was struggling to clear the last couple things and I was definitely chased around by slimes at some points. I think you could take some offensive spells instead of more stats earlier and solve some of those issues. I almost used up all the corpses on that entire floor. It's good your zombies don't need to eat everything. Similar problems with anything with high physical resists at times.

Acid cloud would be good too, throw some acid resist rings on some skeletons too.

Edit: and updated the link in my post.

[Horthas]

So I've been trying this again and I didn't realize some potentially broken things.

As I mentioned, the floor seems to determine the level of the skeleton/zombie instead of the corpse.

The merchant demiplane is actually a very high floor.

You can bring corpses up to that floor (make your skeletons carry them if you want).

A bunch of 50+ hp skeletons on a 1st level character may be a bit unintended.

In my mind a nerf to this that would also be more flexible is to just generate all corpses with a level and let that level determine their stats. That means the corpse at the center of a summoning room could be a couple levels higher than the floor, while dragging floor one corpses to zorbus woudln't do anything special and the npcs that are lower level on zorbus wouldn't be giving high level undead. And things like the corpses stuffed in the barrels in a kitchen might be lower level.

I have not yet tested if this works the same for greater undead. I presume so. An 80 hp skeleton soldier is going to be a beast on the lower floors if so.

Despite this, I still get killed by basically anything coming for my character so there are trade offs, but it might be something people not trying to play under a strict set of self-imposed rules could go for.

[Zorbus]

Ouch, that's an embarrassing bug. I'll try to fix that quickly, and work on necromancer-related things on later releases.

[Horthas]

Well I'm going to try my hand at more silver spoon runs where I just get greater animate wands and make 90 hp skeleton soldiers at level one while I can.

Last one I died drinking a well I really didn't need to at low hp.