http://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/3rd-party-classes/super-genius-games/death- mage
This is a very flavourful class, but IMHO, badly designed.
It is a melee spellcaster with no ability to survive in melee nor deal melee damage. It cannot buff itself to do anything useful in melee, nor can it buff it's undead cohort or animal companion. It's a wizard with every school banned except necromancy, in exchange for two class abilities, 3/4th bab and light armor. It's only anti-undead ability is a weaker version of sneak attack, and it has THREE different stats required for some of it's class abilities (wis, int and cha).
In comparison to both the cleric and druid, both of whom are melee spellcasters, it simply cannot do any of it's roles. It doesn't have knowledge religion as a class skill, yet has knowledge local for finding the best brothel in town. Before 5th level, it's a necromancer with as much undead knowledge as the local town guard.
Anyone have any suggestions on how to make this worth taking compared to a cleric or druid? Because as it is, you can definately make a much better necromancer by taking either the cleric or wizard core classe. It's no contest really.
Here's what i've come up with so far :
-Give it medium armor proficiency and allow it to cast in medium armor without ASF
-Remove knowledge local, geography and planes as class skills, add knowledge religion
-Make all class abilities function based off Cha, for purposes of DCs and uses per day
-A class ability that lets the death mage target creatures of the unbreathing sub type with spells like enlarge person, combined with a reworking of the class spell list
-Some way for necromancy spells to affect undead (death mage, undead focused class, spell list with nothing but necromancy spells...unable to affect undead with said spells. Bad idea)
-Rebalance pale road/death bond, the two major class abilities. Some of these are vastly more useful than others.
-Give it some way to actually do damage in melee...cleric has buff spells, druids have wildshape and buff spells. Right now the death mage has almost nothing.
