The animate dead permits you to take an appropriate target and turn it into either a skeleton or a Zombie. I'm wondering which choice is better for a given situation and what the factors are that determine the decision.
From what I can see, the obvious is to use a skeleton for something that already has a high Dex, as the bonuses go in that direction, and to give the zombie template to something that is more strength focused, but that's not really very in-depth. What else should be considered?
...And Go!
Repeat after me:
I will never make a vanilla zombie.
I will never make a vanilla zombie.
Now that we've established that vanilla zombies suck let's move on to step two:
Fast zombies are awesome.
Fast zombies are awesome.
On that topic, I haven't been able to find the reference about how exactly one changes away from vanilla to fast zombies. I know it involves casting haste or remove paralysis, but how specifically do you apply the spell? it is just added the round after animating the dead? is it before? can it be added after creation? is there an additional cost to cast it? what's the specific mechanic?
Fast zombies count as twice their HD for the purposes of animating them.
If you can animate 12 HD zombies, you can only animate 6 HD fast zombies (they don't count double toward your control limit, however).
Fast zombies count as twice their HD for the purposes of animating them.
If you can animate 12 HD zombies, you can only animate 6 HD fast zombies (they don't count double toward your control limit, however).
That's why you desecrate. That's why you always desecrate.
Druids need a line of plant-based summonings / animations so that we can play plants vs. zombies in Pathfinder.
Too bad we cannot have yellow musk creepers controled to get yellow musk zombies agianst regular zombies.
On that topic, I haven't been able to find the reference about how exactly one changes away from vanilla to fast zombies. I know it involves casting haste or remove paralysis, but how specifically do you apply the spell? it is just added the round after animating the dead? is it before? can it be added after creation? is there an additional cost to cast it? what's the specific mechanic?
I've always played it out as increasing the casting time of animate dead to 1 round and using both spells. Not sure what RAW is on this.
So what else is good?
Flaming Skeleton Squirrels.