Dread Necromancer v1.13

[Zaive]

Using consumption on a skeletal guardian doesn't seem to be giving me a shield?

[Razakai]

Added a few fixes for some rarer bugs.

[Razakai]

More fixes! Not seen any obvious 1.6 bugs yet, so this is just solving the errors with Consumption and not auto assigning talents on birth.

[marshmallowpeep]

Ghouls, Ghasts, and Ghoulkings gets virulent disease from Blighted Summoning, but do no blight damage to trigger it.

The skeletons from this class are treated as generic minions (meaning they get virulent disease and 10% blight conversion). It's unclear if they're supposed to be (On the one hand, they're a skeleton warrior, mage, and archer. On the other hand, they're not proper noun Warriors, Mages or Archers.)

Seems odd to me that wights and dreads get a talent that half of what it does is increase blight and acid damage, which they do not do.

[Erenion]

So... after playing a few runs on Insane (and actually winning), I'd like to say that this class is one of the most fun classes I've played.
It also feels very powerful, depending on the build.

Winners:
https://te4.org/characters/199593/tome/ ... 322e937304 (main campaign)
https://te4.org/characters/199593/tome/ ... 29c8fb3900 (Embers of Rage)

After these wins, I feel confident enough to give a bit of a guide on the style of build I chose.
That style is what I like to call the Mass Necromancer, or the "just toss wave after wave of minions at them until they die."


Core Overwiew
This is what I see as core for this build. Obviously, this leaves a lot of talent points open, which can be distributed as you see fit.
I will discuss the individual talents below, this is just an overview.
Numbers marked with a + are at the lowest I recommend, more on them in the detailed discussion.

Class Talents
Spell/Grave: 3/1/1/5
Spell/Ghoul mastery: 4+/4/1+/5
Spell/Necrosis: 1+/1/3/2
Spell/High Necromancy: 5/0/0/0
Optional: Spell/Death: 3+/1/3/0

Generic Talents
Spell/Soul: 5/2/1/4
Spell/Necromancy: 5/1/0/0
Spell/Spectre: 1/2/0/0


Talent Discussion
Individual talent discussion, plus short tree overviews.

Grave
Your basic damage spells. All of these also affect your minions in some way.

Deathknell
You deal darkness damage in an area and apply a debuff to enemies hit that causes the next minion attack to deal bonus damage and heal the minion.
3/5 gives you radius 2. Not much to say, this is your bread and butter damage skill. Use it when it's off cooldown and there's no pressing need to use anything else.

Grasping Dead
Deals damage in a cone and pins enemies hit, also reducing their accuracy and dealing damage each turn.
However, if a pinned enemy takes too much non-minion damage, they are freed.
1/5 to unlock further skills. The pin is nice, but if you want to use your damaging spells, it won't last very long.

Chill of the Tomb
Choose a minion. They gain immunity to all debuffs, reduced damage taken and a cold damage are around them.
This is rather nice if you are using a bone giant, which we're not. We are cycling through minions extremely quickly, so it also won't stay long.
1/5 and move on.

Rigor Mortis
And here we are. Deal cold damage in a radius 2 area, reduce global speed and increase the damage your minions deal to enemies hit.
This is what we really want out of the tree. 5/5 gives us 85% increased damage from minions, which is insane.
However, please note the following two things:
1: it has only 7 range, where Deathknell has 10. If you want the damage amplification, you will have to get a bit closer.
2: it deals cold damage. We mainly scale darkness damage, so the actual skill damage might end up being a bit underwhelming.
5/5 if you have the points. Note you don't have to get this skill immediately. Empty the Crypts, Animate Dead and Surge of Undeath have priority over this.
You can also easily make do with 4/5 points, but we have points to spare and I really recommend the fifth point for those extra 9% damage taken from minions.


Ghoul Mastery
Your core minion category.

Animate Dead
Every few turns, while in combat, you will summon a ghoul. This is automatic and has no cost.
Ghoul summoning is (almost) impossible to prevent, so you will always have bodies in combat.
You can activate this talent to spend souls and summon more minions. These have no duration, but disappear when combat ends.
Activating this talent will kill all minions summoned by previous activations.
IMPORTANT: If you gain a soul while at maximum souls, the cooldown of this talent is reduced by 1.
That is the reason I don't invest heavily into skeletons or Haunt. I want to be at maximum souls as often as possible, so I can keep throwing out minions like they're free.

4/5 or 5/5. I'd usually say 5/5 this to summon the fifth minion, but an argument can be made that you always want to have at least one soul for Spirit Feed.

Surge of Undeath
When you activate Animate Dead, all your undead minions (including those summoned by the activation) gain a buff that increases global speed and life leech for a few turns.
4/5 gives us +40% global speed and 15% leech for 9 turns, which is just amazing. Fifth point is luxury.

Corpse Explosion
When one of your undead minions dies, they explode, dealing darkness damage in an area and healing your other minions.
Important here is the fact that activating Animate Dead kills your old minions - and triggers this.
1/5 early on. 4/5 later for radius 2 explosions.

Touch of Rot
Your minion attacks apply a disease that does darkness damage and reduces stats.
If an enemy dies while affected, there's a 20% chance per raw talent level (so guaranteed at 5/5) to trigger Corpse Explosion centered on that enemy.
This means that whenever you kill an enemy, your minions get healed and nearby enemies are damaged.
5/5 for the guaranteed damage/heal. The stat reduction isn't that important, but still nice.

Notable here: the damage dealt by the debuff counts as your damage. See the Prodigies section for what that enables.


Necrosis
Your defensive category.

Blurred Mortality
Your life rating and life from CON are reduced, but you gain die_at and take reduced damage while below 1 hit point.
Invest here whenever you feel that you need more health.

Necrotic Shell
You gain bonus armor. If you are hit in melee while below 1 health, you retaliate with darkness damage that also heals you for a portion of the damage dealt.
1/5, maybe invest more points later if you want the armor. Note that this only gives 25% of the benefits if you are wearing heavy or massive armor.

Death's Door
You gain a damage shield and for 10 turns, single hits can't do more than x% of your maximum health.
However, this puts you to 1 health and you cannot heal above that for 10 turns.

While this is a pale imitation of what it was when the class was first released, it is still good.
3/5 gives you a nice sized shield plus a 35% damage cap.
This also plays nicely with shielding runes. Note though you want to activate the rune while the shield is still up - otherwise you don't gain much and the shield lasts for 10 turns anyway.

Antilife Field
While at 1 health or below, you damage nearby enemies each turn and reduce the damage they deal.
1/5 if you're long ranged, if you want to be in melee more, I'd recommend 3/5 combined with more aggressive usage of Death's Door.


High Necromancy (locked, unlock at 10)
This category enhances your minion summoning capabilities.

Empty the Crypts
Each minion you summon with the active of Animate Dead now has a chance to be replaced by a stronger minion.
They can be ghoulkings, which can deal damage in a cone in front of them, wights, which apply bane debuffs, or vampires (at higher talent level), which can grapple enemies and heal themselves.
5/5. Since each of these minions is massively better than a ghast (default Animate Dead active summon), we want as many of these as possible.

Ossuary
Each of your skeletons buffs your stats while it's active. Since I don't use skeletons due to wanting to maximize souls, this is worthless. If you invest heavily into skeletons, feel free to invest here as well.

Essence of the Dead
Whenever a minion dies, you gain a stack of a buff.
You can consume all stacks to summon a dread for one turn per stack.
The dread curses nearby enemies and can teleport.
This talent is not necessary for the build, but if you have spare points, feel free to use this. This build has its minions die incredibly often, after all.

Demilich
You spend all your souls and all your minions to summon a very powerful minion, which is enhanced based on how many minions you sacrificed to summon it.
This has a very prohibitive casting cost, since you need to be at maximum souls and it isn't that strong without a few minions lying around, but it can be very powerful. This is especially true due to the fact that the demilich summons his own minions.
Once again, not core, but if you have spare points, feel free. I'd recommend 3/5 or 4/5 in that case.


Death (locked, unlock at 34/bile (whichever comes first) if you want to)
Enhance your spellcasting capabilities.

Death's Embrace
One of your only two sustains. Whenever you deal damage, you have a chance based on the enemy's missing health to deal additional damage and heal yourself.
The helming is based on your own missing health.
If you want this category, go at least 3/5 here to gain a nice amount of free extra damage and healing. Any more is very nice, but you can make do without.
Lategame, this can lead to a Deathknell thrown into a pack of wounded drakelings healing you for half your health.

Circle of Death
Deal cold damage in an area, causing blindness or confusion plus darkness damage over time.
This is a nice damage spell, but once again, the fact that it has a soul cost means that using it interferes with your minion spamming.
I might undervalue this, though. If you are okay with not being quite as minion-spammy, this might be really nice.
1/5 to access Reaper's Grasp.

Reaper's Grasp
The talent we want the most out of this tree.
Removes buffs and/or sustains from the targeted enemy and spawns a soul nearby. Damaging the soul damages the enemy it was created from, and if the soul dies, the enemy takes a burst of damage and is stunned.
This effectively allows you to double some of the damage your area spells do to a boss, while also removing potentially nasty buffs or sustains.
Use this for bonus damage if the boss has no sustained nastiness, otherwise use it to get rid of what the Rune of Dissipation can't remove.
3/5 gives you 4 removed buffs/sustains, 5/5 gives you five.

Extinguish
Deal massive darkness damage, increased by missing health. If the target is brought low enough, they are instantly killed and turned into a ghoul.
Once again, the soul cost makes this too expensive for a minion-spamming build.
Bug: Targeting an empty tile with this gives you a harmless error.


Soul
Gaining souls and using them for value.

Soulkeeper
Whenever you or your minions deal damage to enemies, you gain soul fragments, with more soul fragments gained if the enemy was a boss. Once you have enough fragments, you gain a soul.
This is your way of gaining souls, and you want to gain as many souls as possible so you can constantly toss out minions and keep Surge of Undeath going.
5/5 for maximum soul gain.

Reaper's Shroud
Whenever you gain a soul, you gain a shield. If you already have a shield, this increases the durability and potentially extends the duration.
2/5 gives you a nice amount of value, but if you want more durability, feel free to invest more.
This can, if there are enough 'trash mobs', give you shields of 2000+ durability.
Bug: On my Embers playthrough, I suddenly gained a shield with 80000 durability from this talent. I think this is related to Inner Demons somehow, since this was also the only time the debuff wasn't cleansed immediately and actually spawned a clone.

Sacrifice
You lose 30% of your maximum health over the next ten turns.
In exchange, you gain increased damage and a steady influx of soul fragments.
I actually never used this, since I was happy with my soul income. As for the damage, I either didn't need it or didn't want to take the life loss, since the situations where I would really need the extra damage were also those where I needed my health.

Spirit Feed
The other sustain or only sustain this build has.
You gain darkness and cold penetration as long as you have at least one soul. In addition, you gain mana region and saves per soul.
This is the reason you might not want to 5/5 Animate Dead. Having it at 5/5 can lead to the massive blowout situation where you spend all your souls, then your minions die to a big aoe and now you deal almost no damage since you have lost your resistance penetration, so you now have difficulty regaining your souls.
4/5 or 5/5, depending on how much resistance penetration you want/need.


Necromancy
General minion enhancement.

Master Necromancer
Your minions gain improved stats based on your stats.
Yes please, 5/5, give me the whole package.

Consumption
Destroy a minion, heal yourself, potentially gain a bonus effect based on the minion eaten.
1/5 for a nice burst heal.

Reanimation
Any non-ghost minion now has a chance, increased for minions that cost a soul, to turn into a boney thing upon death.
This is nice, because it creates bodies between you and your enemies. This is also bad, because it blocks your other minions from accessing the enemies.
If you want this, I'd say 3/5 this for a 20/60% chance to create the extra minions.

Undeath Link
For a few turns, you transfer a portion of all damage you receive to one of your minions. The same is true for the first few debuffs you gain.
This is a nice durability gain, but it is locked behind Reanimation - which is always active once you get it.
Get a few points in this if you feel like you need the durability bonus.


Spectre
Spooky ghost.

Ghost Walk
Teleport to a location within line of sight. For three turns afterward, you can decide you really didn't want to do this and can teleport back.
1/5, since further points just increase the range. Note that this needs line of sight, which means a Cursed or Doomed rare can really ruin your plans.
Also, Ghost Walk takes time, but returning is instant.

Spectral Sight
Using Ghost Walk gives you a track-style effect. In addition, you passively gain undead telepathy and can see enemies near your minions.
The last part is what you really want out of this. This allows you to see what's going on when you are surrounded by Creeping Darkness and there's three more rares behind the corner.
2-3/5 gives you a nice amount of vision for the investment, in my opinion.

Intangibility
After using Ghost Walk, you gain a chance to ignore damage and debuffs.
This is nice, but not worth it in my opinion.

Path to Beyond
When you return from your Ghost Walk, you summon spirits that taunt nearby enemies.
I'd rather use the Mirror Image rune than a taunt that required me to use my main escape skill.
Skip this.


Other categories
The above skills are what I use for this build. However, feel free to experiment with talents form other categories and pick what works.
One talent in particular is worthy of mention in my opinion: Haunt (from the Spirit mastery tree)

Haunt does cold damage to a random enemy and gives them a talent failure chance. The damage is good, and the failure really nice. However, it is held back by the following things:
1: the duration does not scale. No matter what, it lasts two turns. Unless you are a Doomelf, this means you need to spam it.
2: it has a soul cost. See my comments on Circle of Death or Extinguish.
3: it always targets the enemy with the lowest health. This is a good thing, because it is predictable. This is also a bad thing, because this means you cannot reliably target a boss while it is healthy as long as there are other enemies around.


Prodigies and Gear Choices

Prodigies
I won't go over every prodigy, only those that interact with the class specifically. Once again, my word isn't gospel, feel free to pick anything you want.

Through the Crowd
Not worth it in my opinion. Your minions cannot damage you already, and the ability to damage your own minions might actually be relevant for soul gain every now and then.
The global speed sounds nice, but your minions already have Surge of Undeath (meaning almost permanent +40% global speed)

Armor of Shadows
The fact that Touch of Rot counts as your damage is what makes this actually a pretty decent choice if you want a tanky build. I took this on my AoA winner, and it felt fairly good.

Blighted Summoning
Oh boy, here we go.
Blighted Summoning works on Dread Necromancer - more or less. As noted in a comment above, your ghouls don't actually gain diseases from this.
Your vampires turn into burst machines however, and your wights deal decent damage with their curse.
The Bone Shield given to all your minions increases their durability, and if you have any other summons, they also benefit.
Lightbringer's Wand in particular becomes a disease orb.
If you are using a bone giant, this can also be good. In that case, I recommend giving the Bone Giant a Dragon Skull in order to put more magical debuffs on your enemies.

Meteoric Crash
If you have nothing else you want, go for it.

Adept
This does not do much for this class. It gives some additional chance to Empty the Crypts, but otherwise no major breakpoints are hit.


Gearing
Generally, you want spellpower, darkness damage and durability. Some more class specific things:
Thanks to the Necrosis tree, die_at is more valuable than increased life of the same amount.
On spell hit equipment is nice, but not mandatory, since most of the damage will come from your minions.
Even just 10% spell cooldown reduction will make Deathknell very spammable.


Last Notes
If you have any feedback or recommendations of your own, please post them.
I really cannot recommend this class enough, it feels incredibly fun.

[Mathnygard]

A bug for you.
Does not play nice with Hiveminder.
Not sure if I should be reporting this to you or MrFrog, but the error occurred while playing necromancer, so hopefully it belongs here.

Happens when I cast cast death knell on a hostile target. Casting it on the ground does not give an error.


ERROR:
Game version: tome-1.6.7
Addons: ashes-urhrok-1.6.7[O], items-vault-1.6.0[O], hiveminder_class-1.6.7[X], dreadnecromancer-1.6.4[X], possessors-1.6.6[O], orcs-1.6.7[O], cults-1.6.7[O]

Game version (character creation): tome-1.6.7
Lua Error: /engine/interface/GameTargeting.lua:137: /engine/interface/ActorTalents.lua:164: /engine/interface/ActorTemporaryEffects.lua:123: attempt to index local 'ed' (a nil value)
stack traceback:
/engine/interface/ActorTemporaryEffects.lua:123: in function 'setEffect'
/data-dreadnecromancer/damage_types.lua:68: in function 'projector'
/engine/interface/ActorProject.lua:259: in function 'project'
/data-dreadnecromancer/talents/spells/grave-raz.lua:42: in function </data-dreadnecromancer/talents/spells/grave-raz.lua:37>
[C]: in function 'xpcall'
/engine/interface/ActorTalents.lua:162: in function </engine/interface/ActorTalents.lua:151>
At [C]:-1
At [C]:-1 error
At /engine/interface/GameTargeting.lua:137 fct
At /engine/interface/GameTargeting.lua:143 targetMode
At /engine/interface/GameTargeting.lua:212
At /engine/KeyBind.lua:231


EDIT: Stuck this over in the hiveminder thread. If any mods feel like it, this post can probably be removed as redundant.

[Mr Frog]

A bug for you.
Does not play nice with Hiveminder.
Not sure if I should be reporting this to you or MrFrog, but the error occurred while playing necromancer, so hopefully it belongs here.

Happens when I cast cast death knell on a hostile target. Casting it on the ground does not give an error.


ERROR:
Game version: tome-1.6.7
Addons: ashes-urhrok-1.6.7[O], items-vault-1.6.0[O], hiveminder_class-1.6.7[X], dreadnecromancer-1.6.4[X], possessors-1.6.6[O], orcs-1.6.7[O], cults-1.6.7[O]

Game version (character creation): tome-1.6.7
Lua Error: /engine/interface/GameTargeting.lua:137: /engine/interface/ActorTalents.lua:164: /engine/interface/ActorTemporaryEffects.lua:123: attempt to index local 'ed' (a nil value)
stack traceback:
/engine/interface/ActorTemporaryEffects.lua:123: in function 'setEffect'
/data-dreadnecromancer/damage_types.lua:68: in function 'projector'
/engine/interface/ActorProject.lua:259: in function 'project'
/data-dreadnecromancer/talents/spells/grave-raz.lua:42: in function </data-dreadnecromancer/talents/spells/grave-raz.lua:37>
[C]: in function 'xpcall'
/engine/interface/ActorTalents.lua:162: in function </engine/interface/ActorTalents.lua:151>
At [C]:-1
At [C]:-1 error
At /engine/interface/GameTargeting.lua:137 fct
At /engine/interface/GameTargeting.lua:143 targetMode
At /engine/interface/GameTargeting.lua:212
At /engine/KeyBind.lua:231

Huh, guess there was a reason my froggy-sense told me to read this thread. I'm not 100% sure if this has anything specific to do with my mod but you should probably pop it over into the hiveminder thread too just in case.
(ty for downloading my addon btw!)

[HousePet]

I see nothing in the error trace to suggest it has anything to do with Hiveminder.

[Mr Frog]

I see nothing in the error trace to suggest it has anything to do with Hiveminder.

Hiveminder has a talent that can clone temp effects which in my experience testing can produce some pretty arcane error messages. It's probably nothing to do with my addon but it's better to also have in the HM thread for reference in case others experience similar issues.

[Razakai]

I couldn't replicate this error myself, even when using Hiveminder addon as well. What the error message means is that it can't find the EFF_NECROSIS_RAZ effect to apply from Deathknell - but that seems to be there as expected.

Does this occur every time you cast it?

[HousePet]

Hiveminder has a talent that can clone temp effects which in my experience testing can produce some pretty arcane error messages. It's probably nothing to do with my addon but it's better to also have in the HM thread for reference in case others experience similar issues.

If nobody has taught you the error of your ways in a day or two, remind me to check how you are doing it. You can mess stuff up quite badly with that.

[Mathnygard]

I assumed it had to do with a conflict between addons since the error occurred only with DN and HM active. With only DreadNecro active things work fine. Weird that it can't be replicated, though. Guess there's some shit with my installation specifically. I'll try to do do a clean install and report back.

EDIT: Yep, that did it. Emptied the folder, reinstalled. Works fine now. Ignore everything. Sorry for wasting everyone's time with this bullshit.

[Mr Frog]

I assumed it had to do with a conflict between addons since the error occurred only with DN and HM active. With only DreadNecro active things work fine. Weird that it can't be replicated, though. Guess there's some shit with my installation specifically. I'll try to do do a clean install and report back.

EDIT: Yep, that did it. Emptied the folder, reinstalled. Works fine now. Ignore everything. Sorry for wasting everyone's time with this bullshit.

What time was wasted? :p It's all good dood.

[PseudoLoneWolf]

As best I can tell, this happens when something tries to apply certain status effects to my Skeleton Guardian (most notably Pin).

Usually this only happens once every few turns, but I had one occasion where an enemy skirmisher's(?) Pinning Shot triggered the error, but didn't despawn the shot, so it triggered about 20 more of the errors all at once until my Guardian died on the same turn.

[Razakai]

Have just applied a fix for that in newest version, thanks for finding it.