So I've been wanting to make an alchemist with lots of alchemical zombies. I looked over Brewer's excellent necromancy guide, but without access to desecrate or reasonable access to animate dead (maybe a samsaran could work around that?) it seems really hard. Discoveries can get you a basic zombie, and boneshard bombs can create regular skeletons... but those aren't exactly all that impressive. That and the cost to implant bombs in your creations is absolutely absurd, on top of destroying your expensive pets. Am I missing something?
It's not the most efficient route, but you can take both the preservationist and reanimator archetypes (in Ultimate Magic), since they switch out different class features. Reanimator gives the alchemist lesser animate dead, create undead, and create greater undead at certain levels. Then, take the feats Planar Preservationist, Spell Focus (Necromancy), and Skeleton Summoner to create "undead in a bottle" via the preservationist Bottled Ally class feature.
That's an interesting approach. The bomb hit from reanimator really hurts, but I suppose that is a valid option, and it's definitely better than the discovery. Though the idea of animating bloody skeletons and implanting them with boneshard bombs is pretty awesome!
On the bomb damage, I hadn't actually thought about the utility side. Your status effect bombs and bombs that duplicate spells will still have those effects go off just fine!
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Hmm...Boneshard Bomb is legal in Organized Play (since they come from The Undead Slayer's Handbook, from which everything is legal) - yet it requires the Alchemical Zombie Discovery, which is illegal...so what gives? Maybe the Reanimator's reanimation formulae could be considered an acceptable substitute for the Alchemical Zombie Discovery in Organized Play?
I have a (nearly level-7) Reanimator/Chirurgeon Alchemist in Pathfinder Society myself, so this, as they say, is relevant to my interests.
Wait, necromancy is legal in society play? I didn't know that, that could make for fun times. How well does that work with alchemical zombies disallowed?
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Well, in the case of Alchemists, it means: Be a Reanimator: My Mad Doctor is just shy of perfecting his reanimation formula, so I have yet to see how well it will work, but I predict that he will brew 2-4 lesser reanimation infusions (i.e. every 3rd-level infusion he's capable of at 7th-level, perhaps minus one or two so he can do other things with them), and inject them into the corpses left from the first significant battle (while suggesting the rest of the party take a time-out to plan, loot, heal, and so forth - it will take an hour after injection for the zombies to get up; another possibility, if the party preferred it, would be to leave the corpses somewhere safe, keep going for an hour, then backtrack when soup's on - an extradimensional bag of one grade or another could also work). Once that's taken care of, it should be off to the races - contrary to the normal animate dead rules, Reanimators CAN make variant zombies (and only zombies - injecting a reanimation solution into dry bones isn't so easy), and happen to be some nice ones!
At higher levels, things get trickier, I hear, since create undead and create greater undead infusions do NOT automatically grant the reanimator control over these monsters - so the advice I've heard is to maintain a good Use Magic Device bonus and keep a wand of command undead on hand. The other difficulty is that, until the highest levels, all the undead presently recorded able to be created by create greater undead are incorporeal (aside from the Totenmaske, which requires a Cleric to create) - yet alchemical reanimation can only create corporeal undead, so I'm honestly not sure where the other shoe drops there.
OPEN QUESTION: Do Alchemical Reanimators have to abide by the same requirements in creating undead monsters that spellcasters do?
Pretty sure Alchemical Zombie is disallowed as much because it's borderline item creation as it is because of being evil.
Don't get this started again. If "Evil" had anything to do with it, Necromancy would be banned across the board - it isn't. Their choices of what they ban are consistently about perceived wealth/power balance issues, appropriateness to the Golarion campaign setting, and compatibility with/feasability in the context of the Pathfinder Society format (hence why they ban Druid and Summoner Archetypes that grant lots of companions - they aren't necessarily overpowered, but it can just wind up taking too much time, and Organized Play games are intended to have an upper limit on their duration).