Where's my create undead and animate dead spells?

[willuwontu]

How do undead exist as monsters without these spells, and why can't my necromancer know them?

[GreatCowGuru]

I'm thinking they might have cut them for the playtest as in pf1 at least they're treated as evil options. That being said I too am curious if this is just because its the playtest and not cutting them as player options because they couldnt find a way to "balance" them.

[Voss]

I suspect they'll end up as a ritual like planar ally, primal call, or planar binding. The ritual section is pretty thin

[RiverMesa]

It better be a Playtest-only omission - creating undead is something that's very iconic to (or indeed, the very basis of) necromancy in fiction, so it feels very jarring to not have as an option.

[Aviana]

I've no interest in creating undead, but I wondered about that as well. While I think it would make sense to be a playtest only omission, what I really want to know is if there's a list of what's playtest only omission and what's been flat out removed. That knowledge would be very helpful in evaluation.

[LordKailas]

What I find concerning is this blurb in the cleric section about controlling undead.

Controlling Undead wrote:

You can’t have more than four undead minions at a time.

It looks like they're putting a hard cap of 4 undead minions. I really hope that feats/spells break this limit otherwise even from a DM stance the only way an NPC necromancer can control an army of undead is for "reasons".

[JDLPF]

Also, aspiring necromancers should note this text from the Playtest rulebook:

Minion
A creature with this trait can use only 2 actions per turn and can’t use reactions. A minion acts on your turn in combat when you spend an action to issue it verbal commands (this action has the concentrate trait). If given no commands, minions use no actions except to defend themselves or to escape obvious harm. If left unattended for at least 1 minute, mindless minions don’t act, whereas intelligent ones act as they please.

So it's likely created undead require concentration and an action to issue it commands, meaning most times you'll be sacrificing one action each turn per undead.

So whilst you might be able to create four, you can actually only command three each round. Otherwise they don't act.

[chillblame]

So, no undead swarms, unless you have a lot of necromancers/clerics I guess.

[Baval]

The minion system feels so video-gamey and a ton of the limitations in the system in general feel like attempts to limit players from being able to break anything. It just feels like an attempt to make an MMO rather than an RPG

I love Pathfinder for its ability to make pretty much any concept I want because the rules (when I ignore the "erratas" like hands of effort) dont limit me in what I can do. This new system is trying to put restrictions on everything the developers dont like. Restricted multiclassing, restricted summoning, restricted minions, restricted everything.

Riding a horse while using a shield takes up all your actions in a round unless you have the ride feat, and then it only takes up most of your actions. These are things that are passive in real life! And unless i overlooked something its impossible to be mounted with a lance and a shield since the lance has no rules for being one handed while mounted.

And on topic if a necromancer wants to invade a town as currently written he needs 1 necromancer for every 2 undead he has (2 commands for the undead and 1 action to move with them) and they cant go to sleep ever (leave an undead alone for more than a minute and they regain free will if theyre intelligent).

Its incredibly ironic how much PF2 feels like 4E because of this crap.

[LordKailas]

JDLPF wrote:

Also, aspiring necromancers should note this text from the Playtest rulebook:

Minion
A creature with this trait can use only 2 actions per turn and can’t use reactions. A minion acts on your turn in combat when you spend an action to issue it verbal commands (this action has the concentrate trait). If given no commands, minions use no actions except to defend themselves or to escape obvious harm. If left unattended for at least 1 minute, mindless minions don’t act, whereas intelligent ones act as they please.

So it's likely created undead require concentration and an action to issue it commands, meaning most times you'll be sacrificing one action each turn per undead.

So whilst you might be able to create four, you can actually only command three each round. Otherwise they don't act.

I read that, but didn't fully appreciate the ramifications of it. I think I assumed that if I had 4 minions I could spend an action to issue a verbal command to all of them to attack. Not that I had to spend one action per minion per round to have them attack. Sounds like necromancers don't have servants so much as they do puppets.

Maybe minions need to have minions of their own. So they can spend one action attacking and another to order their own minion to attack. Then at least you could chain them together to get a dozen or so minions.

IMO, I would rather have a HD limit on minions instead of a cap on the quantity of minions I'm allowed to have.

The rule also introduces the oddity that the RAW indicates that when adventurer's encounter mindless undead. The undead should just stand around not doing anything unless there's a BEG there to control them and give them orders to attack.

[LordofBones]

It's not just the animate dead line. Necromancy has lost almost all its core iconic spells to other spell lists. We only get horrid wilting while bards get almost all of necromancy's old spells, including those on the arcane list, and clerics get finger of death.

Necromancy as a school has been utterly gutted.

[Horrida Messor]

LordofBones wrote:

Necromancy as a school has been utterly gutted.

We completed the first adventure in the playtest past Sunday and when our DM said that we must create a 4th level characters fir a second part of the adventure, my first choice was a Necromancer (I tend to play them whenever I can). Since one of our party members decided to roll a Palladin the Urgathoa Cleric wasn't an option (idiotic LG Palladins are idiotic). So I switched my attention to Wizard.

I was utterlly devasteted when I saw Necromancy spells - the Necromancy school and Necromancer archetype was plain out murdered by Paizo.
I'm a Necromancer enthusiast and I won't even pick a class that is capable of necromancy in this adventure. Well, looks like it's time to eother accpet that you have to play a "goody two-shoes" type of character or completely abandonign the idea to play this redaction of Pathfinder.