Arkangel7th's page

I've always wanted to play an evil campaign but have never gotten the chance to and I have a few Character concepts.
1. A Drake Rider cavalier who believes the strong should rule the weak (using the shield gauntlet style feat chain)
2. a Gravewalker Witch who primarily focuses on skeletons as she believes undead minions superior to mortal ones.
3. Juju Oracle with a focus on necrocrafts and (obviously) juju zombies
4.A Tyrant Antipaladin of Asmodeus who is equally adept at subtle manipulation as well as martial combat. Based heavily upon Sauron from Lord of the Rings and he would use a Mace/shield, Halberd, or Two-handed hammer and would attempt to obtain the vampire or graveknight templates eventually, but I can easily omit this if you'd rather not bother with templates at all.

Before i started working on a backstory/drawing up of any of these characters i was wondering if you see any inherent problems with any of these, either in terms of story line or party-balance.

When it comes to having an undead horde, Caster Level is the key. Take the Signature Spell and Gifted Adept traits for Animate Dead. Take the Spell Specialization feat.

Does the bonus to caster level only apply to how many HD i can raise in a single casting of animate dead or does it also apply to the total number i can control?

Is this still open? I'd like to apply but it's past the deadline <_<

Recruitment is currently on hold as Mister Lurch and Night Saber refine and finalize the Bladesinger class.

How does the rest of your group view necromancy? My group seems to consider my witch evil just for casting Speak With Dead.

I really don't know, as the party isn't finalized in any way as of yet. It may cause conflict at some point but if i'm effective and doing mostly good deeds and am being effective in fights, i think they'd come around.

This is what makes the Undead Master fail so hard; the vanilla Cleric is already a awesome as a master of the undead, so you have no need of an archetype to get the abilities and flavor you're looking for.

That is valid point. I just have a stigma with vanilla classes, not cause they're terrible or anything, i just like utilizing archetypes because they feel more unique to me. However, i have yet to play just the base cleric so i might give it a try.

Healer is not a "Role"
In Pathfinder a good majority of Healing is done out of combat.

That's when i planned to do healing, it was just nobody else in the party really had spellcasting for healing.

That's fair. I just wanted to make sure that the OP understood the situation.

I appreciate that. As I said before, we never really were too rigid with alignment and i forgot a lot of other GMs are strict about it.

Undead Lord is a terrible archetype. I would strongly advise against it.

Yeah, i've read that in other threads. I just really liked the concept behind it and I lean towards concept over viability, which for min-maxing is terrible but is really fun for role-playing purposes. Cleric is also the spellcasting class that i understand the most and have the most experience with(i normally play barbarian or fighter types). That being said, the Gravewalker Witch or a juju oracle are definitely my next picks. The biggest problem with those was justifying the "necromancy is not evil, it's a tool" mentality with those classes as opposed to a cleric.

If you're DM isn't allowing evil characters, then being a necromancer is kind of out of the question.

Making undead is evil, it's so evil that after a few times it makes you evil.

Under rules as written, yes for sure. But we have some house rules that make it possible. Basically, i'll be committing acts of evil but my necromancer will have stipulations as to who he can raise. Some examples are he only raises active combatants who have died and he won't raise children. Also, the acts of evil i'm committing would be counter acted by the acts of good i'd be doing, which would be stopping the Ironfang legion and protecting innocents etc. We've always been sort of lax with alignment shifting as well.

If you let us know what class your wanting then we can post up some helpful suggestions or builds we have used to good effect.

The main class i was looking into was the Undead Lord Cleric archetype and i would like to try to build a neutral necromancer as my GM is not allowing evil alignments and it's being built for the Ironfang Invasion adventure. I was doing the cleric so that i could also take the roll of a healer with the Undeath domain's Death's Kiss power and inflict spells.

I've had a fascination with necromancy since i was a kid, i'm not sure why, but ever since i started playing pathfinder i wanted to try to build one. However, when looking at some other messageboards, almost all of the advice that was given was for a horde-style necromancer (i.e. playing a juju oracle for the extra HD you can control). Which is all well and good, and something i definitely want to try to play, but i can see how having that many minions could cause problems for the flow of the game as my turn would be exponentially longer with all the actions of my minions.

In that regard, i was wondering if anyone had any advice for going about building a necromancer to have a few (like 2-4 or maybe even just 1) powerful undead minions as opposed to a horde of 100+ HD worth.

Some of the classes and items i've looked into are the Gravewalker witch, the Undead Lord cleric, the Juju Oracle, and items such as bone razor and voidsticks.

Any advice is appreciated, thanks.