Baldur's Gate : The Sword Coast Chronicles : NWN2 Persistent World

Animate dead was no problem regarding the end game. Its issue was that it didnt scale well - it was too powerful at early levels. The logic here - for whatever reason - is that some low levels spells should not scale well and not be usable in the epics. Its the same issue with all blasting spells that in practice are useless in the epics. Try for example to use a fireball against epic mobs. Basically you are limited on DC spells, which scale in the epics ( Epic CL to DCs, Epic focus, uncapped etc). On the other side, after about level 18 you should forget about summons, blasting spells etc.

Spell too weak, literally powercreeped necromancer so hard that combined with the rp implications of playing a necromonger just makes it very unappealing. Spell was not very powerful before, now its just not worth a slot, maybe for canon fodder but now they cant even do that well.

Well the main strength of the pnp version of this spell is that has unlimited scaling potential. As long as you can find quantity or quality of corpses you can do as you wish. I could just go into the woods and magic missile a bunch of squirrels and then animate those if i wanted to. Said zombie squirrels might not be that tough but at like 1/4 HD a pop you get a heck of a ton of them. Which is all the more fun when you can send them down someones chimney in the middle of the night and have them eat the locals. No risk either.

Balthomer wrote: ↑Tue Apr 23, 2019 8:37 am Spell too weak, literally powercreeped necromancer so hard that combined with the rp implications of playing a necromonger just makes it very unappealing. Spell was not very powerful before, now its just not worth a slot, maybe for canon fodder but now they cant even do that well.

I wrote the following elsewhere, but I feel like I should post it here as well, because there is a lot of quite bad misinformation going on here.

Even after we made it possible for wizards to pick their prohibited school, necromancy remains by far the absolutely best school to specialise in for a wizard. It has all the great attack spells and it has some of the most ridiculously powerful summons. The Create Greater Undead is even quite buffed on the server (because of a communication failure in the past, that I can explain if you want me to), making them better than even Gate used to be before it was customised.

On Animate Dead. The spell was one level 5 zombie or skeleton in vanilla. I think it was buffed to a level 12 at some point. But it was still one, low level summon that wasn't useful in the higher levels - as, frankly, it should be! Compare this to the summon creature IV, V and VI or the Planar Binding. I include two levels higher than Animate Dead here, to make a point. These are also lower level spells that fall out of use later. This is how spell balance works.

But then it was buffed to ridiculous standards. I remember I laughed a lot about how powerful these undeads were when I had my drow Palemaster. You could get four really quite good pieces of cannon fodder. I'm not sure if the Palemaster animate dead ability is exactly the same as the spell, but I think it is.

And lets talk about Palemaster. Apart from druids, spirit shamans and clerics with animal domain (and I guess rangers, but their buffs can't really keep up with that), palemaster has the best long-duration summons. Both the mummy from Summon Undead and the two vamprie variants from Summon Greater Undead are brutally powerful. At palemaster 10, the mummy is a level 20 cleric! It heals, harms and casts all sorts of fantastic spells. The vampire with its 5 regen is practically unkillable versus mobs if you give it some buffs.

the way i had animate dead originally (as in before others messed with it after) was just fine, you couldnt say it scaled too early because it literally went off of caster level for how strong it was all the up to CL 28 when it capped, and then someone didnt like that and changed it to something else and here we are

as far as all the arguments that it shouldnt scale to epic levels dont forget that in pnp animate dead -is- one of the core spells for any necromancer and is used to greater effect the stronger they get and is augmented by spells like desecration, unhollow, iron bones and such

skeletal guard which is the high level animate dead is still stronger than animate dead only because it adds in turn resistance to the summons

and in general regarding undead, yea they are "insanely" strong compared to most because of all the immunities but they are also "insanely" weak against any divine creature or character

when i was testing the ones i made i had the 20HD ones in a 10 vs 1 fight against a 16 HD angel and the angel was barely injured after it killed all of them

if you havent figured out that holy counter evil then i think you may have other problems than how strong undead appear to be because with the limitations of the game engine, they are really not

basically if you cant handle going thru the vault of undead then you probably have troubles with undead in general regardless of the source; and pve wise it just depends where you are if the summons are good, and how many spells you want to put on them to make them better

Animating undead in public can kill your rp pretty fast, nerfing it was a bad idea and made no one happy.

Ravial wrote: ↑Sat Apr 13, 2019 4:59 pm Well, I have to side with Valefort here, myself.

I'm sorry, but I think you guys look too much at undead-creation line of spells that Necromancy has and forget to see the wide array of death spells + Vampiric Feast +spells like Wrack, Ray of Enfeeblement and others that are opened up for Necromancers as well. Evil aligned spellcasting has a -ton- of useful tools that you can use. Animate Dead being brough in line with what it should've been to begin with (Because that's the truth) is only a -small- nerf that will otherwise not change a lot otherwise. And, as stated previously, Army of Death is likely to see an upgrade.

It's also important to remember that game development is fluid. Things get nerfed and then things get buffed- just like in MOBA games like Heroes of the Storm or League of Legends. It's a neverending struggle of balance.

This is not a moba and animate dead nerfs should be reverted

Animate Dead is a pet spell. Many people got into Necromancy for the pets. So, do not bring "but there are other spells" into this too, or you're really going to show how Conjuration is superior.

Conjuration:
- Summon 1 - 9 (minute per level)
- Planar Ally/Binding Set (minute per level - unique and cool Dusty tomes)
- Gate (round per level badass)
- Epic Gate (round per level EPIC badass)
- Horde calls (take time to cast - but gain 1 - 3 bonus bodies for up to a MAXIMUM of 2 minutes - Max 17 HD before feats)

Necromancy (before this nerf)
- Animate Dead (hour per level - counts as a Horde/swarm spell - can grant up to insane levels of HD - benefit from Summon Augment FEATS!)
- Control Undead (pretend to be an Enchanter)
- Create Undead (hour per level - get 1 undead - comparable to low-tier Planar summons in power)
- Create Greater Undead (2 rounds per level - weaker than a Gate)
- Army of Death (round per level - gain 1 - 3 bodies for up to 2 minutes max - Max 16 HD before feats)

Aside from Army of Death compared to Conjure Metalmen, trying to compare Necromancy to Conjuration is rather pointless. The durations, HD, resistances, spell abilities, AB all don't match.

Before this nerf, I wondered why Necromancers created anything OTHER THAN Animate Dead. Seriously. The other summons - even Army of Death - were inferior when you knew for a fact you were calling a Brachina to back up your wall fodder with unlimited Missile Storms and Firebrands. Add that you can stand in the middle of the group, spamming Inflict X Wounds Mass to keep your wall standing while also whittling the enemy for clerics, or picking your favourite Evocation/Conjuration/Necromancy/Enchantment/Illusion combat ender cast from safety as a WIzard; and you have a true concept of just how incorrectly undead pet spells are categorized, balanced, and utilized.

Nerfing Animate Dead to a cap of 10 HD misses the entire point of this discussion. Two questions need to be asked, and thoroughly debated.

1) Will Conjuration be the superior pet class, or will Necromancy be allowed to be comparable?
2) How useful/reliable do we want pets to be in general?

There is a hard-cap rule on this server where no summons can have more than 24 HD. This almost (I stress almost) makes the "I cower behind my minions" strategy too weak. What instead happens with every druid, cleric, and wizard (with their free-caster varients sorta included) is that at least one spell slot is dedicated to dropping a pet to help pump out consistent damage even in PvP fights.

And if I can turn a Spiritual Weapon - a level two GARBAGE spell - into a front-line tank, Animate Dead hasn't lost it's value.

Decide if there will be 1 champion of pets or two. Decide if pets can compare or even surpass players. Decide how long pets should last since their DPS output is immeasurable when compared to DPS spells. This is your topic.

The only reason the "RP Tax" is a problem is because right now too many people revolve around Baldur's Gate. Candlekeep has a "no outsider rule" at all, and all the surface cities have laws which deny the use of any pets within their walls or on their lands. Allow people running around with angels in the Underdark to be free PK just like undeath is on the surface. Why would Lloth even tolerate celestial scum in her realms? As players decide where they fall; that is what will determine which pet class is in vogue at the time.

Finally, where's the Undead Dusty Tome or Undead Epic Pet spell? This leads me to think that Necromancy was never intended to be the driving pet class to begin with. Remember - any specialist wizard can choose what school they give up for their specialization in Necromancy. You can keep Conjuration and have ALL THE PETS!

FYI - All the pets is a Cleric with Death and Animal (somehow) as their domains with levels in Thaumaturge. Or, go Conjuration specialist Red Wizard, barring yourself from Necromancy, and taking levels in Pale Master to get the summons anyway.

I've looked too much into this; and I can tell you Necromancy had only one advantage over Conjuration - the Animate Dead spell - and with that nerf the Conjuration School is just completely superior. Better summons, more summon versatility, teleportation, better damage spells, no RP shenanigans unless ALL THE OUTSIDERS are banned. All of them. Including Elementals!

- Featherfox

Comparing necromancy and conjuration is like comparing apples and oranges. Necromancy has a lot of other tools at its disposal. D&D was never built for everything and everyone to be perfectly equal.

people need to stop trying to make everyting the same as everything else and pulling out the "This class/spell/race has X but this one doesnt its not fair" because thats not how the world works.

Necromancy has pros and cons. So does conjuration. So what? they changed one spell. One single spell and people are acting like its the end of the world.

Wolfrayne wrote: ↑Thu Apr 25, 2019 2:13 amNecromancy has pros and cons. So does conjuration. So what? they changed one spell. One single spell and people are acting like its the end of the world.

It's like taking firespells away from the fire wizard and saying it's ok because icedarts was better to begin with.

RaiderOne wrote: ↑Thu Apr 25, 2019 11:55 am

Wolfrayne wrote: ↑Thu Apr 25, 2019 2:13 amNecromancy has pros and cons. So does conjuration. So what? they changed one spell. One single spell and people are acting like its the end of the world.

It's like taking firespells away from the fire wizard and saying it's ok because icedarts was better to begin with.

There is no such thing as a fire wizard.

But even if there were, this analogy doesn't work. It's like nerfing a fireball spell that was set to 30d6 instead of the current 15d6 back to 15d6 because that is more appropriate and then telling the higher level fire wizard that he should be using firebrand, fire burst, delayed blast fireball and meteor swarm by now anyways.

Reducing the power of a low level spell to a more appropriate place doesn't mean that the higher level spells are suddenly gone.

The common thing between fireball and the now nerfed animate dead, is that they are useless in the epics. The same applies for most in game spells. Why should all low level blasting spells and summoning spells become irrelevant in the epics? There is no logic behind that. There is no need for nerfs on such spells ( on the contrary they should be made relevant in the epics - a wizard with no fireballs? C'mon...). At most one should change how powerful they are at low levels. No summoning spell comes close to spells such as dominate monster and control undead that always give you a pet of the areas CR which you can buff to be more powerful than everything in the area, so obviously this type of gameplay isnt considered problematic - animate dead and all summoning spells do not come close to those power levels.

PS I guess the world ends only when the Shadow Adept or the Robe of Eyes change

What's the logic behind buffing all spells to make them playable in epic levels ? I fail to see it, level 30 wizards don't cast fireballs on dragons ... and when you fight a bunch of giants you also might want to use a summon monster IX instead of a wolf from summon monster I.

Why would the wolf from summon monster I scale to a power relevant enough to be playable against monsters of much higher levels ? No reason at all, the same applies to animate dead and fireball, use the right tools for the right situations. And if it scaled how far should the level 9 summoning spells scale ? Summoning spells are not meant to replace a melee PC, even bad ones (there's really no debate there, anything else would make playing melee characters irrelevant compared to a caster at all times). At the moment the summoning spells are very strong, playable until early epics and rather overpowered in the teen levels.

Another thing to note is that dominate spells are DC based, they can fail while summoning will always work, also you can't transition with those monsters (which is rather unfortunate but experience proved we can't have nice things), making these domination spells less of a problem.

The logic behind buffing all spells to make them playable in epic levels, is to allow for more variety. Will it be game breaking if fireball was at least relevant in the epics against the buffed 400+ hp giants? Will it be game breaking if summons were at least relevant in the epics as if they dont die after 2 mins even if you spent a lot of spells buffing them? There will be 0 issues and will allow for more options not as powerful as the DC counterparts which is the only mechanically viable option.

Until then we can suggest to everyone who plays a wizard "Dont bother with blasting/summoning spells" Go with DC spells, like we have been doing all these years.

EDIT: You keep suggesting that if for example the summons are buffed they will replace a fighter... isnt there a middle ground with you? Why they have to be either useless or too powerful in the epics?

Variety already happens along the way to 30 though. Making fireball alone relevant in the epic levels is of course not a problem but this spell is not an island, it remains that an evocation spell of an higher spell level would have to be better than a level 3 fireball so you would have to similarly buff all evocation spells.

If you want to keep a decent power increase between spell levels then buffing a lvl 3 spell to be playable in epic levels, like say 30d6 fireball from 15d6, how far would you have to buff burst of glacial wrath which is already at 30d6 ? 45d6 ? And then greater ruin to 70d6 ? Isn't that quite too much when blasters are already playable, altough quite inferior to DC casters ? Keeping the difference between spells constant that's what it would look like. As far as I'm concerned the only feasible solution to make blasters relevant is areas where other ways of killing monsters become much worse than they usually are.

The other option is to reduce the difference in power between spell levels, watering down the importance of spell levels, not very appealing to me.

As for summons and fighter PC replacement, where is the middle ground ? 35 AB ? 20 damage ? 40 AC ? Aren't the best summons already near the power of a bad melee PC ?