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Two schools of thought:
1) Necromancy is all about animation of the dead and creation of the dead. Feats geared towards improving said creations.
2) Necromancy as in Death Magic or negative energy magic to weaken and kill. Ex: Horrid Wilting, Ray of Exhaustion, etc
When you look to optimize your Necromancer, where do you find the best bang for your buck? Only so many feats (especially if you VMC) to spread around.
What do you think?
dot
Depends on your class. Based on the class spell list, you'll get access to certain things earlier or later, and be able to better build towards them.
In general, I believe the divine classes excel at the creation, management, and deployment of the formerly living. Arcane classes tend to excel in draining the life force out of their foes via direct attack.
In one of my campaign, I play a cleric of Orcus with the undead lord archetype and let me tell you it's a lot of fun!
The only drawback of this build is that an undead lord must select the Death domain (and the Undead subdomain) and does not gain a second domain. But before you dismiss the idea of building a cleric without a second domain hear me out.
At 8th level, the undead lord’s spells, spell-like abilities, and supernatural abilities used to heal undead heal an extra 50% damage. At 16th level, these effects automatically heal the maximum possible damage for the effect + the extra 50%. The death domain also gives you Death kiss which allows you to heal your teammate as if they were undead.
Basically, during our game, I have an army of skeletons (animated dead/desecrate combo) that run toward our opponents, I also have one undead under my control (create undead) that is usually an NPC that I've raised in between fights to serve me in death! I buff my teammates with Blessing of fevor, freedom of movement and so on. I heal them when they take damage with empowered maximized channel negative energy...just the sound of that is pretty cool no? Finally, I get to play a shit ton of minions after my rounds so I never get bored.
And the best part is I can still do death spells like Destruction, enervation, ray, etc. since I have a lot of wisdom and my DC's are good.
If you want to taste the power of necromancy my suggestion would be to go Undead lord Cleric!
Witches make really good Necromancers. Take the Gravewalker Archetype and the Time, Shadow, Death or Deception Patrons - Gravewalker replaces your 4th, 6th, 12th, 14th, and 16th lvl Patron spells, so pick a Patron with a good 2nd, 8th, 10th and 18th spell that accentuates your playstyle well.
As a Gravewalker, you get a Bonethrall (same as Command Undead), and you get Animate Dead at 6th level (rather than 8th level). Once you get to 5th level spells, you can get Mass Bull's Strength to buff all your undead at once. Your familiar becomes a "voodoo" poppet that you hold in your hand, allowing you to make FREE ranged touch attacks vs anyone within your Aura of Desecration, so now any of your Touch spells like Touch of Idiocy automatically land and you don't have to put yourself in danger to do it.
Find yourself a cleric buddy with channel negative energy and you'll hardly ever lose your zombie/skelly army. Necromancy is really expensive, so take the spell Blood Money to offset the cost as much as possible.