New to Necromancy : what are the good spells for what ?

[popps]

I am new to Necromancy and was trying to figure out what are the really usefull spells and for what.

It seems that Necromancy, as a skill, can be usefull as aid to other skills.

I read posts about Necro/Mages, Necro/Tamers, Necro/Warriors and so forth.

Question is, what are the Necro spells most usefull depending on the combination of skills, and why ?

Also, I see very few posts claiming the usefullness of 100+ necromancy or spirit speak skills.

It is not worth to invest skill points past 100 in these 2 skills ?

Thanks.

 

[Guest]

To add to this post, can someone tell me what would be a good spell combo on the Dark Father? I have a necro mage in Doom.

 

[Jaimes]

Sure, I'll bite.

Necromancy is a really, really useful skill. It's my favorite skill in the game. I've played two Necro/Mages pretty extensively in PvE and PvP (one on Chessy, one on Siege), and I've played variants of Necro/Dexers (Vampire/Samurai and straight up Necro/Dexer).

It depends on what you're planning to use Necromancy for. If you are PvPing, you need Necromancy at 105 after items. This allows you to cast Wither 100% (incredibly useful area effect spell which has a low mana cost) and Strangle at 100% (everyone hates strangle! it's a damage-over-time spell which does damage based on your target's current stamina. it also interrupts and, the higher your spirit speak, the longer it lasts). Beyond 105, the next breakpoint is 120 Necromancy to cast 100% Revenant. This is great to cast on stealthers since it will follow and reveal the stealther even if they smoke bomb or restealth, all while constantly doing damage.

Depending on what you use Necromancy for in PvE though, you may not need 105 Necromancy. The really useful stuff in PvE for a Necro are the forms. You can change into Wraith Form (leeches mana based on your melee or spell damage), Lich Form (grants insane mana regen), or even Vampire Form (gives you considerable mana and stamina regen, life leech capabilities, and automatically cures all but lethal poison). You may only need enough Necromancy to cast these forms if you use them. You can even use jewelry to get +Necromancy skill, cast the spell, then put your normal jewelry back on (I think, it's been a few months since I played).

Other useful spells --

Blood Oath (PvP) -- whatever damage is done to you is reflected back onto your attacker. It has the side effect of making it suicide to stack combos onto you when you have a person Blood Oath'd. It's really good to let someone cast Explosion on you, then quickly Blood Oath them, then start your own offense. Their explo damage will stack with whatever damage you do to them. If I get this casted on me, I spam interrupts, locking both of us down. It kind of sucks when you get blood oath'd by a necro/dexer.

Corpse Skin (PvP or PvE) -- increases fire or poison damage by a lot (-15 Resist). Great to cast on champs, peerlesses, so that your team's fire damage will get a boost. On Siege, where people have lower resists, I can redline someone with an Explo/FS if this is up. Two mages focusing on a corpse skinned target will drop it, very fast.

Evil Omen (PvP) -- not sure if they fixed this. You can Evil Omen -> Poison or EO -> Paralyze, or even EO -> Mana Vampire. They won't be able to resist the spell, regardless of their resist skill.

Summon Familiar (all) -- Wisp is good mana regen boost, wolves for stamina regen, horde minions are awesome at a champ spawn since they pick up stuff on the ground.. in this case, all those piles of gold. Which I think is fair since necros do all the withering/working of spawns.

Curse Weapon (all) -- For a meleer, this will give you a BIG chunk of life leech. Not sure if they nerfed it since I haven't used it on a dexer in a while, but I would be pretty much invincible, even against things like doom bosses, with this up and in vampire form.

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All these skills mean that Necromancy is an amazing skill in PvP or PvE for certain templates. In PvP, you want to push Spirit Speak as high as possible as a necro/mage to increase your damage and curse effectiveness. It's a little less restricted in PvE, and you can get away with lower. There are a few other spells in Necromancy besides what I mentioned, and a lot of them have very creative applications. I definitely recommend it!

 

[imported_Farsight]

I'll vouch for the current usefulness of curse weapon as well. My favorite new trick is having my dexer in wraith form with curse weapon always on. It is only very rarely that I actually run out of mana and I almost never run out of hit points, even to the point where I need to run off and heal.

I also frequently use pain or poison spike as a PvM final blow. This is especially useful in the citadel, where I'm always in a position where if I move before all the mobs are dead, I usually drop quickly. Strangle is also exceptionally useful against the mobs.

I haven't used my necro dexer in PvP and don't have a necro-mage, so I won't comment about them.

 

[popps]

Thanks for the replies which prompt me some more questions....

When using necromancy along with fighter skills (for wraith form, the curse spell and so forth), people actually invest skill points into necromancy and spirit speak for their templates ? If so, all the way to 120 Necro/Spirit Speak?

Or is it just that they have a suit that brings them up to the level to cast those spells and then switch suit to a different one for fighting ? Thus having barely any points invested in their template for Necro and Spirit Speak ?

 

[Jaimes]

It completely depends on the playstyle and the template. If you use Necromancy for the utility of the forms, Spirit Speak's usefulness is suspect. But if you use Necromancy for curses, damage, forms, healing, etc -- you'll want to squeeze in as much as you can.

For instance, you can have a wep skill/anat/tact/heal/parry/bush sampire with just enough necromancy to cast vampiric embrace with items on. Take the items off, and you're good to go (only needing to recast after every death). You can reach 99 necromancy with something as low as 34 necromancy (I cba to figure out the exact value).

However, there's a very fun (and complex to use) PvP template which involves having poison, wep skills, and necromancy. You use Necromancy for a lot of things, from CW, to Blood Oath, to Pain Spike and Strangle. Spirit Speak is critical in this template for the duration and magnitude of your spells, and obviously you won't be able to switch out jewelry since you need to cast your spells in combat.

I'm not 100%, but I believe the mana leech of wraith form is based on your spirit speak, so that will be worthless without a fair amount of SS on the template.

So really, it depends on what other skills you have, what you're using the character for, etc.