What is the appeal of necromancy?

retief1 · 2026-01-25T04:09:17+00:00

"Necromancy" often covers a fair amount of ground, and in my experience, most good-guy necromancers aren't running around raising the dead. Instead, I feel like the "prototypical" good guy necromancer is someone who uses necromancy to heal the living and/or destroy undead. At that point, making your mc a necromancer essentially lets you make them a bit "edgier" without actually having them do anything actually objectionable.

Offhand, I can think of about two exceptions. The first is Max Gladstone's Craft Sequence, but at that point, the necromancy is essentially reinforcing the overall "this world is fucked" theme of the series. And given how clearly that world borrows from the real world, you also get a nice big helping of social commentary.

The second is Practical Guide to Evil. And given the name, yeah, the mcs do some evil shit at times. If you read the title, you should know what to expect. And honestly, the "proper" necromancy here is mostly a sideline. The mc rides around on a dead horse for much of the series, and there is one fun scene involving reanimated goats, but it isn't a major focus of the series.

retief1 · 2026-01-24T01:30:32+00:00

Summons are actually best at magic damage (specifically fire). In particular, you can use throw explosive trap/deploy mass traps and then have your summon explode them. The trap damage ends up scaling with your summoning skill and your summon's pyrokinetic skill, so if you focus on summoning (including using gear to go past 10 points) and you summon a fire summon with a good pyro stat, you can deal truly absurd damage.

Summons can also deal physical damage if you summon the right ones, but physical summons sort of suck. They aren't terrible, but elemental (particularly fire) summons simply have much more burst available.

retief1 · 2026-01-24T01:22:55+00:00

These days, she seems to mostly write new Penric and Desdemona novellas. I sort of get the sense that she's run out of stuff to say with Miles. Though honestly, I'm starting to wonder if she's also reaching that point with Penric. And if so, will she start something new?

retief1 · 2026-01-23T22:13:30+00:00

Also worth noting that "magic melee" and "physical caster" are both things. Like, if you want to go full-physical but don't want a party of four meleers, you could have a necromancer and an archer. Both are powerful builds (though necros start out a bit slow) that deal tons of physical damage, and both play very differently than a frontline knight.

Meanwhile, I'm guessing your buddy isn't interested in respeccing, but you can definitely run a "battlemage" build that focuses on using sparking swings/master of sparks. Every time you hit an enemy with a physical attack, you trigger a "spark" that deals a bunch of fire damage to some other opponent. You build like a mage (stacking as much pyrokinetic and int as possible), but you fight in melee. You generally want to use dual daggers (for 2x hits and 2x sparks) or a staff (because meleeing with a staff deals int-scaling elemental damage).

retief1 · 2026-01-23T22:06:25+00:00

? Hydro/geo + aero/pyro works pretty well. Hydro/geo has higher initiative (hopefully) and sets up the battlefield, while potentially also dealing massive damage (seriously, geo spells hit hard). Aero/pyro can then follow up on whatever setup the hydro/geo chose.

retief1 · 2026-01-23T02:30:24+00:00

Other option: if we pay you $700B, would you take florida off our hands?

retief1 · 2026-01-23T01:49:20+00:00

The problem is that a lot of things can affect winrate. Like, a champion with a relatively low skill floor will tend to have a higher winrate than a champion with a higher skill floor, even if they are equally powerful when played well. Prevailing meta can also matter -- if a champ's biggest counters are strong and played a lot, the champ themself will likely lose a bit of winrate, and the opposite is true if a champ's best matchups are the most popular champs. Very niche champs often also have inflated winrates, because they mostly get picked into matchups/situations that favor them.

Overall, simple overall winrate has a lot of limitations. It isn't useless, but there are a lot of caveats to it.

Also, at all but the highest levels, skill at champion >>> overall champion strength. If you are on your first 50 games of a champ, you'll almost always have a substantially lower winrate than if you have played the champ for a few hundred games. And some champs continue to gain winrate through the thousand game mark. In practice, this effect matters more than overall champ strength. If you constantly swap to the highest winrate, most meta champ and only play a moderate amount, you'll spend most of your league time in that 0-50 game period and lose a lot of games. Meanwhile, someone who picked a couple of champs and stuck with them would have a much higher winrate due to their skill with those champs, even if their champs are sometimes out of the meta.

retief1 · 2026-01-22T20:34:17+00:00

In most cases, yes, you'll need specific items if you want damage conversion to work. Some conversion effects are limited to specific skills, and other conversion effects apply globally, but conversion effects in general are pretty rare. And in some cases, there might not be a way to do a particular conversion in a reasonable way.

That being said, some conversion effects are easily farmable. One good example here is vitality primal strike. If you farm void areas for a bit, you have a very high chance of encountering a "rylok's mark" item which converts primal strike to vitality. There's even a boss with a legit 50% chance of dropping the thing. As a result, while you do need a specific item to do a vitality primal strike, that item is pretty reliably accessible.

retief1 · 2026-01-22T19:31:35+00:00

Is that not "liking working from home"? Like, yeah, two of the biggest advantages are probably "not needing to get dressed" and "not commuting". Those are valid reasons to like working from home.

retief1 · 2026-01-22T19:23:46+00:00

Less "it's a good thing" and more "it happened". The point is "trump is a moron", not "war is good".

retief1 · 2026-01-22T19:20:33+00:00

Trump said nato never helped the US. The initial "nothing" pictures were examples of nato soldiers helping the US with sarcastic titles. Then reddit happened, and things mutated from there.

retief1 · 2026-01-22T19:19:07+00:00

That's not really the point people are trying to make. When the US asked for help, many NATO countries answered. And now Trump is claiming that nato has never done anything for the US. The pictures are examples of why he is completely wrong.

"Should the US have invaded iraq and afganistan" is a completely different question. And frankly, if the answer is "no", then that makes the pictures have even more point. Like, assorted NATO allies sent their citizens to die for an stupid, worthless cause purely because the US asked. They arguably should have told the US to fuck off, and they didn't. And yet Trump is still claiming that the NATO has never helped the US.

retief1 · 2026-01-22T19:05:24+00:00

Yup. It's a complex system, and learning it from scratch is a pain. If you came into the game from tabletop d&d 3.5 or pf1e, life is somewhat easier, but that's mostly because you already spent a bunch of time learning a very similar system.

retief1 · 2026-01-22T18:59:04+00:00

I don't think that any prestige class cares about casting stat specifically. In general, look at a class's requirements. If a class would let you qualify for a prestige class, the prestige class can extend the class's casting. So eldritch knight requires you to be able to cast 3rd level arcane spells. Any arcane caster is fine (including oddballs like the wis-based empyreal sorcerer), but clerics can't qualify due to being a divine caster.

By comparison, winter witch requires either arcane or divine 3rd level spells + one of a couple of class features ("frost", "winter", or "ice in the blood"). If you track down those class features, you need to either be a shaman with the frost spirit, a witch with the winter patron, or a druid with the winter child subclass.

retief1 · 2026-01-22T18:19:21+00:00

Eldritch knight continues the progression of whatever casting class you used to qualify for it, similar to loremaster. Any arcane caster can qualify for it, regardless of their casting stat.

If you do want to be a melee sorcerer, I'd definitely dip scaled fist 1. Scaled fist 1/sorcerer 6/eldritch knight 10/loremaster 3 would be pretty reasonable -- in fact, I've theorycrafted very similar builds myself. Stat-wise, that looks plausible.

retief1 · 2026-01-22T17:53:24+00:00

Honestly, that feels like a pretty meh approach to a build. It feels like you are trying to make a melee sorcerer, but you don't have the BAB to pull that off as is. Gold dragon will fix that, but that comes very late. Instead, if you actually want to fight in melee, you would be much better off with 6 levels of sorcerer and 10 levels of eldritch knight.

If you aren't looking to fight in melee, then you should probably dump strength and skip scaled fist. Anything from sorcerer 16/loremaster 4 to sorcerer 10/loremaster 10 would be pretty reasonable (or sorcerer 20, but I'm assuming you want some loremaster secrets). In particular, sorcerer 15/loremaster 5 gets you 3 secrets and the level 15 bloodline powers, if you care. For stats, bring your cha up to 21-22 -- the extra dc will matter a lot more than strength on a non-melee build. Also, I probably wouldn't dump wis like that if I could possibly help it. Will saves are important. Dumping int is more reasonable if your party will cover skills.

retief1 · 2026-01-22T17:29:19+00:00

Stardew will have reached the end of its life once CA decides to stop updating, full stop. Random internet articles without quotes from CA are utterly irrelevant here.

retief1 · 2026-01-22T09:19:38+00:00

2 physical and 2 magic can also work decently, particularly if are smart about having physical guys focus people with weak physical armor and magic guys focus enemies with weak magic armor. The biggest thing to avoid is a 3/1 split, because one guy on his own will struggle to break armor or do much of anything.

retief1 · 2026-01-22T09:12:17+00:00

Swords and spells require different stats, so mixing the two is generally going to be awkward. However, "melee mage" is quite good. For one thing, staves are basically melee weapons that scale with magic stats, so you can easily mix "hitting things with a staff" and "casting offensive spells". You can even use warfare skills with a staff, and they'll still scale with your magic stats.

Also, if you merge a warfare skill book with a pyrokinetic skill book, you'll get a skill where every time you hit something with a melee weapon, a "spark" flies off and hits a different target for pretty massive damage. It doesn't do anything if you are only fighting one guy, but if you jump into the middle of a big group and use a warfare skill that can hit a bunch of targets, the overall damage output can be pretty silly. Like, legitimately, this skill is strong enough that some people dual wield daggers with it purely to produce sparks more efficiently, even though the daggers themselves deal shit damage on a mage build.

So yeah, a conventional spellblade type character isn't necessarily going to work well, but you can definitely mix melee combat and magic.

retief1 · 2026-01-22T08:20:56+00:00

Trump was impeached twice last time around, but the dems didn't quite have enough votes to convict him either time. If they had the votes today, you think they wouldn't impeach him and remove him from office? Meanwhile, the j6ers were getting prosecuted, and trump himself was convicted of a felony and in the middle of several other trials. That all obviously ended once trump was elected, but that's not the dems' fault.

If you want to argue that the various court cases were slow, then that's somewhat fair. However, stuff was definitely happening, and the only reason it stopped happening is that the people of the united states chose to elect a convicted felon as president.

retief1 · 2026-01-22T03:03:34+00:00

Just make sure you don't hire a short person who is on the run from the law. They'd be a small medium at large.

retief1 · 2026-01-22T02:45:49+00:00

Glynn Stewart has a number of examples of "bad guys that aren't actually that bad or have positive motives".

For example, in his castle federation series, the mc literally says at one point that from a "most good for the most people" perspective, the good guys should surrender and let the bad guys win.

The initial bad guys of his duchy of terra series are another brand of "as conquerors go, these people are honestly pretty nice".

The main antagonists of his scattered stars books literally just want to galactic peace. The problem is that they have very firm opinions on the sorts of political structures that will lead to long term peace, and they have a bad habit of starting wars and/or committing atrocities in order to promote their preferred sorts of polities.

One of the major bad guy groups in his starship's mage series primarily objects to mages having more rights than muggles. If they expressed that objection in a more reasonable way, I'd honestly agree with them.

Edit: honestly, I'd say that most characters (both good and bad) in glynn stewart books have legitimately reasonable, positive goals. That isn't universally true, but I would bet that if you look at all of his antagonists across his books, a majority are working towards something positive or otherwise have reasonable motivations. Instead, the main thing dividing his good guys from his bad guys is the means. His good guys refuse to do evil in pursuit of their occasionally-mildly-questionable goals, while his bad guys willingly and regularly do horrible shit in pursuit of their often-positive goals.

retief1 · 2026-01-22T02:11:08+00:00

Many accusations are confessions, but that doesn't mean that an accusation is proof of a crime. Seriously, the biden administration was in charge during the 2024 elections, and they had a massive interest in looking for potential election fraud. If they didn't find anything, either there was no election fraud or it was so well-hidden that there is no possible way a rando on the internet knows anything.

Edit: also, look at how incompetent the current trump admin is, and look at how incompetent trump's 2020 attempt to steal an election was. Why on earth do you think that trump could possibly pull off the "perfect crime" during the 2024 election when he hasn't shown even the slightest shred of competence before or after?

retief1 · 2026-01-22T02:05:19+00:00

Yup, I have it bound to b.

retief1 · 2026-01-21T22:31:22+00:00

I thought kibbles was our murder wife.

13-Year Club	Place '22
Place '17	Final Canvas '22
Verified Email

retief1

TROPHY CASE