How do I play necromancer?

[Acebrandon117]

I have played as every single class or specialization while having fun doing it to, except as Necromancer it doesn't work out to well. Does Necromancer require a different mind set or something?

[Gloweye]

I think every class works best with it's own mindset.

As a necro, you need to be careful early on. Healing is limited. When you get better at it, you'll notice a large difference (healers of the dead tech, or reanimators. Both is awesome as well.)

That suddenly makes you able to get going and by that moment, you'll probably be expanding as fast as the other classes.

Then you get to late game, with Deathbringers, and you'll snowball everything else out of the competition as long as you got independent sites where you can create more ghouls.

As for spec, I think shadowborn makes it easy - life steal on your ghouls is great, and if you happen to have goblins/frostlings, your pikes are really gonna rock with Life Drain.

[AnimeKnowAll]

Necromancers in the start are slow due to lack of healing. Ur hero/s pretty much are the only way to heal ur units at the start.

1 of their specialties are the "Ghoul Curse" which is inherent to necro heroes upgrades and deathbringers. It allows any living enemy unit to potentially become a ghoul for ur army. The lower their morale, the higher chance of it working so it works in tandem to skills like despair, weakening, poison, fever, etc. So long as it is not a Dragon, Elemental, Incorpereal, Undead, or those with 100 Spirit proc, it works on any tier unit.

Another perk is that while undead cities grow a whole lot slower than normal races, its not affected by border and happiness. A frostling can set up camp in a magma area and still wont have any negative penalties.

The Necro heroes also show their potential as they level up. With their "Greater Reanimate Undead" allows them to reanimate any tier unit that may hv died in combat(as long as the corpse is still present) and even recruit Archons and Bone Dragons that spawn from boneyards that are unaffected by ghoul curse.

Necros are definitely slow in expanding in the start due to thier limitations but in middle or late game they show their potential.

[Iguana-on-a-stick]

A few tips in addition to the more general (and helpful) answers the others have given:

* Research and cast Whispers of the Fallen as soon as you can. "Seeing battles fought near your cities" sounds like it sucks, and it does, but it also gives you a research bonus for all battles fought near your terrain, including your own. This will double your early research speed. More than double if you assign the bonus research points carefully.

* Grow by using the City Plague spell. Scouting is incredibly important for any class in AoW, but it's doubly so for necromancers. Declare war on every neutral city your scouts find (Yes, necromancers do best when they're evil) and cast City Plague on it. This will easily double, triple or even quadruple the growth of your important cities.

* Boost the economy by sacking and reanimating cities When you conquer neutral or enemy cities, plundering them can give you a lot of gold and will be just as quick as ghouling them, usually. Quicker if you have Destruction Adept and Hasty Plunder. Then just cast Reanimate Ruins and you have a ready made undead city and a few hundred gold and mana.

[Gloweye]

Note: Using (Hasty) Plunder + Animate Ruins on a well-developed city may cause improvements to get lost.

[BBB]

Originally posted by jaccovandorpGloweye:

Note: Using (Hasty) Plunder + Animate Ruins on a well-developed city may cause improvements to get lost.

May? Thought it was a dead cert, making the hasty plunder+reanimate trick not a no brainer if you end up (like I always seemed to) rebuilding the city anyway.

And seeing battles fought near your cities is imho a good thing. It's liking having radar!

[bbolto]

My limited experience (tried once, stalled, tried again recently, got going) is that it's pretty slow going until you get Ghoul Curse up, either on your heroes (get them to level 10 or so?) or by having Deathbringers. Then you really start piling it on.

In the meantime you have to learn to use cadavers and Lost Souls, which is a bit of a different mindset (they're both sort of disposable in that you can reraise cadavers with necromancer heroes and Lost Souls pop back once with Undying, and, Lost Souls are a very opportunistic unit).

I found myself unable to control Bone Dragons – I guess they are classed as dragon so they cannot be converted. Archon Titans, though

Ghoul Curse is fun because you can grab troops you can't grab by charming. Manticore riders!

[hiliadan]

Originally posted by AnimeKnowAll:

1 of their specialties are the "Ghoul Curse" which is inherent to necro heroes upgrades and deathbringers. It allows any living enemy unit to potentially become a ghoul for ur army. The lower their morale, the higher chance of it working

This is incorrect. Inflict Ghoul Curse checks spirit resistance, not Morale. Inflict Despair gives both Spirit Weakness and Morale maluses so you may have confused the two.

@Acebrandon117: you may want to check that article http://www.the-battlefield.com/aow3/index.php?page=commnews&eingabenewsid=41 and especially these videos to see how to become extremely powerful by turn 9 while playing Necro: https://www.youtube.com/embed/videoseries?list=PLVegwVpl7gLENQGy5fjGryvor43W_GA3j

Basically Necro is the most powerful class and by far, with crazy starts, as soon as you learn how to play it correctly. That is why the PBEM balance mod (steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=661597466) significantly nerfed it, while giving it economic bonuses to compensate its early economic disadvantage somehow.

[glythe]

Necro starts in a strange spot as the hero is living but the army is undead. Later on your heroes become litches (undead) and everything is fine. Overall undead units are better than living units because they ignore poison fumes and curse debuffs from battles as well as have no morale penalties for terrain. They can be given lifesteal yet lifesteal does nothing against them. Unless you pick a race to prepare against fire/spirit there can be some problems but overall the undead are just "better" against most damage types.

Undead have a hard time fighting undead unless you pick a race/specialization (or both) to counter them. This is generally a good idea because often your toughest fights are going to be against high tier undead units and holy units.

Originally posted by bbolto:

I found myself unable to control Bone Dragons – I guess they are classed as dragon so they cannot be converted.

You can kill a bone dragon and resurrect it with greater reanimate dead (Archons too). Stealing either can be game over early on if you attack at the right time.