ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

So I'm trying a horrible rotten no good hilariously fun idea. I'm playing a Roguelike Nightmarish Necromancer!
I've already died a ton and most often to my stupidity before even getting through a few teir 2 dungeons. It's *fun* though.

"BUT WAIT!" you might say, "Necromancer isn't THAT bad if you get lots of dark penetration"

Yes, I might agree, but I'm not playing the arguably meta reliable caster-focused Necromancer... I'm running Ye Olde Horde-mancer. This is going to be !!FUN!!

Current character link:
https://te4.org/characters/191722/tome/8871b24f-20ec-4f46-9988-efbc390d2e3f

Just got run out of Derth. So much lightning, and so much of it ignoring my minions to target me! I'm going to do the Old Forest in hopes of picking up some lightning resist. If I can't get some serious protection, I don't know if I can take on the stupid tempest a-hole.

If you're going to play Horde-o-mancer, you might as well completely consign yourself to death and play ghoul as well.

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A little bit of a starters guide written by yours truly here.

I was actually doing OK, went dreadfell for a bit to farm up souls in between taking out those stupid bosses in the graveyard, killed Celia, unlocked lichform, got a few points in, and went 'Oh hey yeah far portal thing, I should be able to clear that out.'

... Then a stupid saw horror time wardon paradox mage steam butcher bullshit thing popped out and wrecked me. I activated a movement infusion, game froze up,a nd turns out I pressed a button too many times (or it said I did) so that I moved a ton, and was suddenly dead. Obnoxious that is. Till then though I was doing... passably well, and it was fun.

...

That said, Necromancer need need NEEDS a way of getting a net gain on souls with their hordes and the '25% chance to refund a soul' thing isn't nearly enough. Yes it's fine in dungeons with lots of trash mobs but at some point something will come along that it takes 4-6 minions to kill, and that's a loss.

... Incidentally animus purge got buggy around the end and refunded the souls used, but wouldn't convert the thing I used it on.

So, after playing a necromancer built around actually being a necromancer, I gotta say they need some love. I don't think anyone ever uses the shades tree, and the advanced minion thing is... underwhelming except for the sacrifice shield. Minions also need some heavy investment to be worth using, and even then you'll need to give them an undead surge to really lay on some damage (it's more than the numbers suggest).

Actually on the note of damage, with an effective talent level of 3 in undead surge, and 7 in create minions, I was able to generally do 5-600 damage per turn on average, though occasionally I'd get 3 master archers and mages and then it was just a firing squad. It can put out a lot of damage, has some great meat-shielding (weirlding beast was cake), but in the end... they become too flimsy and sumoning more requires you to kill at least 3 things to summon a full sweep of 6 and if you get unlucky with a boss, you're going to run out of souls between summoning and healing.

I've got a minion-based Necromancer to 30ish in EoR and concur with what you've said. The whole "souls" resource is pretty garbage and, as you say, seriously hurts viability against solo bosses who have AoE. The minions' damage is actually pretty good: I have 5/5 in both minion skills and the Blighted Summoning prodigy so they can wreck a lot of stuff.

I know. Now, know what good way to fix this would be? Make Create Minions castable without souls at like, half the effective level OR at decent mana-conversion cost so you aren't utterly screwed if you're at 0 and the only thing around is a boss or rare.