Many of the necromancer's abilities result in widespread effects--which of course means it is terribly easy to accidentally destroy your own thralls.
A player will need to choose whether to have their thralls swarm targets (such as summoning them around a single target to limit mobility) or to spread them out so you can more easily use your line- or other area-effects without catching your thralls in the area (and have more angles of attack).
Some effects do void damage, and thus won't hurt your thralls. Others gain benefits if you destroy an extra thrall within the area. Those are certainly options, but I wonder if we will get a feat or similar ability that will let you ignore your thralls altogether (something resembling the cleric's Selective Energy feat perhaps)?
Please discuss how you might go about taking advantage of these abilities or what steps you might take to avoid unnecessarily wiping out your hoard.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
The Mastery of Life and Death class feature means you deal Vitality damage to your thralls with effects that do Void damage, with no option not to do so, doesn't it?
Yeesh!
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
The Mastery of Life and Death class feature means you deal Vitality damage to your thralls with effects that do Void damage, with no option not to do so, doesn't it?
Yes and no. Mastery of Life and Death (MoLaD) means you still deal void damage but use all targets' lesser resistance/immunity between void and vitality. But that's not all, many spells that deal void damage specifically to living creatures (e.g. void warp, grim tendrils), so they would not target the thralls which are specified as being undead. But you are right that MoLaD doesn't currently give you the choice to target the weaker resistance/immunity, so effects like necrotic bomb would destroy all of your thralls in the area of effect.
That said, MoLaD really needs some rewriting to even be executable in playtest material, since most spells and effects outside the playtest material make it obsolete by targeting parameters.
A 15th level Healer of the World exemplar can just spam that epithet every round to give the thralls 10 THP. Maybe someone will roll super low without static bonuses.