It's clear that something's not worked out right in the game-wide balance of things regarding necromancy + magery. I had some stuff about it in another thread.
The spawn teams of the succesful guilds in Fel that I have seen are generally comprised of necro-mages, nox-mages, maybe some wrestle-mages, one or two dismount archers (which is a specialized operation, not like you're getting to really use your archer well), and an occasional, token nox dexer. There's your lineup.
There are guilds that won't take you unless you can field a 'red mage'.
There's complicated reasons for it. One of them is that the interaction between mage spells and necro spells can be really very powerful, and not just in an individual but, you take a team comprised of pure mages and necromages and you have a really powerful offensive team. Inescapable insta-death to the target that is unlike what any other team could pull off, in some cases.
Another is that mage fields are so important to spawn defense and there's no equivalent for them provided within any other class.
Another is that other classes can't crossheal properly.
Another is that Holy Light's differences from Wither don't work out well. Yes you can run spamming holy light whereas wither stops you in place, and yes that's interesting, but wither does significantly more damage and that increased damage outweighs the mobility factor in the most important applications (which are choke points and pushing into enemy fields). Holy light comes off more like an annoying although sometimes effective nuisance that's used by renegade PK chiv melee dexers. You don't see spawners doing it.
High-level Chivalry is crap. You can wipe your ass with 120 chivalry scrolls. 105 - 120 necro is decent, though.
You put it all together and... yeah.
I don't think there's anything in the house that does what a group of 3+ mage+necro chars can do, just all around in everything plus in offensive combat.
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On a different topic somewhat:
Necromancy is thematically linked to "evil" and bad karma, and is to a small extent affected by maintaining bad karma. Chivalry is linked to "good" and is greatly affected by having good karma. Both skillsets are offered to reds and blues, but reds are not allowed to go above neutral karma because red supposedly means that you're an evil PKer (murderer) and that's a thematically nasty thing to be.
It may look nice on paper and in the storybook you read to your kids before bed but, for PVP balance considerations it's not quite right.
Some chars are red through exclusively spawn defense related activities and not raw player killing. Here in 2008, the game tells us to get a group of blues together and 'protect' spawns, but then you have a group of raiding blues come charging in to screw with the champ.
In the storybook thing, everybody would get along and the blue 'raiders' would just get protected by the original protector and nobody would fight, right? Well, not in Fel. Nobody operates that way that I've ever seen. In the real world, people defend 'their' spawn, and those defenders will take counts and be red, one way or the other. It's just how it goes.
In this environment, punishing chivalry-using reds from within their templates for being... red.. is not quite right. In the current situation, reds who run chiv go out to deliberately work their karma PVM to deal with it, and that's not so horrible I guess, I'm not lazy. But even then, being forced to stop at the halfway point is ********.
I wouldn't complain if they either allowed red chars to put their karma all the way up or removed the karma link entirely. Not that it would be some sort of sole fix for all the weirdness involving chiv/necro imbalance but it would be one thing resolved.
