You can also zombify your own necromancers, allowing them to support themselves. I like to put Putrify on them rather than Meteor because it can run double-duty of damaging (living) enemies and healing your undead units.
Oh, ha, I left a similar comment. Zombie necromancers with life force, putrefy, and animate dead do a great job of keeping my zombie AI team healed and getting them on their feet before someone exorcises them. Though necromancers are a bit fragile, so I sometimes run two so they can get each other up. Also handy in PotD to have the banishes. My ghost witch, Marshmallow, tends to be... overzealous in her use of starfall, even giving her the minimum rank.
+10 points for having Rick the Necromancer from the MotBQ runs on the title card. For those keeping score at home, that puts Rick's total Charisma score at... 10.
Yeah, it's always a toss up. Liches can't be undead (ironically) and can't get animate dead/recruit dead, but they've got those heckpuppy summons. Necromancers don't get summons, but they can steal salvation/reflection with an ogre blade and sit there as a super fast zombie.
Turn 1 Life Force means free paradigm shifts for the rest of the fight. Use paradigm shift on your 4 casters+1 faerie and have faerie lingering kiss your necromancer. Infinite turns. Necromancer is better than lich at a job like this or debuffing due to better speed.
Putrefy makes Necromancers Red Alert Desolators. They just group up and fart in your general direction, not only immune to their aoe but even healing if they're zombie necros. But against actual zombies(ie. a large fraction of PotD), it's better to rely on your own zombies with a recruit here and there. Due to zombie revives having 0MP, the turn economy becomes a different ballgame that encourages a completely undead team to keep taking hits and charging spells. Curse lets you dogpile beefy targets with a ton of melee, Followed by splashing Putrefy to keep them topped up. Paired with regular debuffs like poison and their explosive MP gain, with a crazy low RT on a class that doesn't need heavy gear, and Necromancers sit comfy at the top of the damage per RT hierarchy. If poison takes stalling to deplete enemy resources, Necromancers actively sap in multiple different angles, enough to overwhelm any preparations aside from shooting the necro quick.
I really liked how One Vision gave them anti undead moves for that reason. Up to and including Silver Crossbows and their unique spells. That said, Recruit Phantom is a solid way to beat many kinds.
curse is always one of my favorite debuffs. dropping curse 3 with my lich and jacking up the receiving crit range on them is amazing, though it seemed pretty often that they'd get out of curse the moment they got their turn
It's odd like that ...and we'll know exact mechanics once Gibbed finished getting the calculations confirmed from the inside...but it should be rolling for duration based on Mind.
@@CoffeePotato i know this is a random thing to reply to but in my experience, the mind stat of the caster doesnt actually seem to matter. ive had casters with postgame levels upwards of 500 mind casting it for targets to break out of it the immediate next turn. but its not always like that. truly one of the most awkward debuffs in the game but i still love it
@@MVCx_xB Could just be one of those things, like how Stop seems to be capped at a turn. Could also be a range, a roll, kind of hard to test for certain. Especially since it seemed to be contextual back in the PSP version. Or, maybe it's all of the above. RT count based on a range scaled to maximum bonus possible, which used to be 100, and is now 999? No clue, just no one let Matsuno get his hands on the IRS at any point. "We have adjusted our numbers, and your tax due is now scaled to your credit score multiplied by your hidden karmic debt attribute, divided by how many eggs you are that year., but is guaranteed to only be $10 if you bought 3.5 copies of any Queen album. "
I always have a necromancer in my party (usually Cressida) because Life Force plus high mind and low RT equals poison and charm machine for the rest of the fight.
I used Consecrate Dead before getting Banish as a means of dealing with enemy undead. I know there's better options, but I wasn't a big fan of using items at the time.
Hello Coffee, great guide as always. Is there any way to recruit Sorcerers? Ramidos says some interesting stuff when you bring her down to critical health and Arycelle is in your party! I tried a bunch of different things with no luck. Chaos frame issue maybe?
A little off topic but do you know how the green cards work for luck exactly? Because I just did another PotD run before hanging gardens and i got to the point Denam was getting +0 luck from them and then i go out at the end got one sorta by accident and it gave me +4 luck. Does it just raise your minimum or have a cap? I'm just confused by the complexity of this game sometimes.
Luck cards are temporary in combat but provide random luck. So a +0 could mean that Denam was already at 100 luck... but you can get a +0 luck card, too. And unlike all other green cards where the gain is permanent, the luck card gains are temporary.
You missed out on the big things that make me use necromancers =] Well... okay, not everything. Curse 3 reducing the max health of some lv 55 dragon is like 2k-4k bonus damage. But these're why necromancers are a staple for my end game. The #1 reason why necromancer earns a place when liches exist is.... necromancers can be undead and liches can't. They slot perfectly into a zombie army. Not as a caster, but as a resurrection spamming infinite mana healer. Definitely set their AI to healing. Animate Dead: You mentioned that clerics, cenobites, necromancers, witch queens, pumpkinhead familiars, halloweens, and the Sargera heavenly general all wreak havoc with undead.... and you mentioned that the AI won't resurrect... but did you know the necromancer AI will use animate dead to get your KO'd undead back on their feet immediately before they can get exorcised? I usually toss life force on necromancers to force them to have a ton of spare mana. Animate dead is a skill, so if they use life force, they can then immediately use animate dead before ending their turn. For a weaker zombie army, use two so they raise each other. And they're great to use your first ogre blade on to make them a little beefier. Putrefy: huge AOE heal for undead (including your necromancer... and if you've ogre bladed reflection onto people, a reflected putrefy just heals the zombie caster). Also, it damages the living a lot. Basically, it's a fire-and-forget AoE that's healing huge swaths of your troops, healing the caster, and damage all enemies nearby. The healing part uses the healing formula, but the damage part uses the damage formula, so... good use of a first ogre blade. Life Force: You mentioned life force as giving them infinite mana (triply so with one ogre blade), but I'll add that you probably don't want word of pain or meteor strike IV on them. If all they've got is max rank petrify and life force, they'll always be there immediately resurrecting any units that get knocked down before the enemy team can exorcise them. Banish: You covered this, but just in general... zombie teams can't cast from the divine spell tab. That gives you two good options and one hilariously bad option. The hilariously bad option is max rank starfall so you can watch your ghost witch exorcise her allies by accident. The fine one is starfall rank 1, where it's less likely it'll be used for things other than exorcising enemies. But with a ton of other utility already for a zombie team, banish is safe and easy on a necromancer and will not cause Marshmallow the Friendly Ghost to accidentally send Skelly Tonne into the afterlife. --- Though speaking of ogre blades, there's one more use for zombify that gets overlooked by new players who got their first ogre blade. You go back to Mandalia Plains... er... Tynemouth Hill, I mean... with your lv 50s. You grab a lv 3 warrior. Vyce one-shots the boss. That lv 3 warriors gets 12 levels of exp or something ridiculous, wasting all of those on warrior stat gains. Not if you body snatch the lv 3, murder them, and raise them as a zombie. That prevents exp gain. Hop into training after, use an angel or charm of remission, leave training with zero exp, and then make them the class you want. So that's my build. Zombified necromancer set to healer AI with life force, raise dead, animate dead, banish, max rank putrefy, max rank curse (when not AI controlled), tossed onto a zombie AI team with one other necromancer and whatever other zombies you want. (Heck, 2 necros and 10 matriarchs is simple to get and beats all but the most dragon heavy matches. Though getting a zombie AI team to use dragonscale is a different matter... and actually one where a zombie necromancer with dragon wound via an ogre blade is handy since life force gives them infinite mana.)
Living cyclop have great passives for frontline but they aren't tanky. Their spell isn't as powerful as proper spellcaster so they seem like an oddball. But being a zombie solved the tankiness problem. Can I turn hoplite/jugg into undead too?
Yep! Humans, lamia, lizardmen, orcs, faeries, gremlins, dragons, and monsters can all be zombified. Juggernaut's intimidate is extremely useful for a zombie AI army because they struggle to deal with phalanx/gordian lock and get murdered by dragonscale. (Dragon's Wound has a lower priority, so a unit with it needs to be dripping with mana to cast it sometimes, which is frustrating. But intimidate just goes off at the start of a turn and juggernauts are in melee range pretty often.) Intimidate is one of those skills that's so good, I tend to ogre blade it onto a lot of my other zombie AI team troops, too, so they can keep peeling those dragon scales off automatically. For a PotD AI team, it's probably even more valuable than Lament of the Dead.
@@ValeVin people talk about cressida as early access to necromancy, but her requirement is annoying, other route can recruit generic necro in earth shrine quest before heim instead
They're plenty tanky with their high health. They don't hit hard with spells, but built in counter and lots of health mean they've got a medium amount of MP to spend on things like Spellcharge.
Autoskills seem to go off less often, but they do still go off. It's kinda like giving the cursed unit a -autoskill card and everyone fighting them a +crit card.
It's hard to tell exactly if it affects auto skills, but it doesn't lower their max odds. 100% is still 100%, but they can't naturally Crit or counter, and noticably eat crits like they're cinnamon toast crunch.
I would think the necromancer's Condemn skill can be useful in case of battle encounters with those special golden units in the Palace of the Dead. Are they a boss or a sub-boss? I don't know. They can be incapacitated and can auto-revive from incapacitation indefinitely unless they are the last enemy unit to fall on the battlefield. I've haven't tried it myself because my party is role-playing as holy crusaders. Necromancers? Get that blasphemy outta here! Backhand smack! Except Cressida under conditions that she will not recruit phantoms or practice necromantic arts such as transforming units to become zombie. Don't you think it's strange that Necromancers don't have access to tomes? I thought Nybeth taught them how to pursue knowledge. Now they are illiterate? You might want to question their class mark or certificate 😅.
Which golden units are you talking about in PotD? And is this Reborn? All the ones I killed just... die and drop a bag. The only exceptions might be Aloser and Habarim, but they're just zombies, so they follow zombie rules. (Exorcise or they need to be the last unit on the level. Though you want their loot, so you'd want to exorcise them after they die, not make them last.)
@@ValeVin It's the ones as you described in Tactics Ogre Reborn. It's been some time since I last fought one of them because they don't make themselves common to appear. I think I remember trying to cast exorcise with a cleric or use a holy spell, Judgement or something of similar name (the ones that can expel stilled units), and saw 0% success before executing action. So, I had to tough it out the hard way thinking in hindsight I should've deployed Cressida the necromancer apprentice. If you've recently tried exorcising and it worked, confirm for me. Maybe I had a really bad luck with a game bug on that one occasion.
To explain all of the above, given they're zombies with a huge stat dump, there's a solid chance they were actually just dodging the exorcism. Evasion still applies to spells when downed, which usually doesn't matter much, but an evasion built can dodge an exorcism.
@@CoffeePotato Sigh... I'll have to go check myself. I too would guess that there is an advantage given to certain enemy units considering the amount of modifier boosting. But, when trying to test the numbers myself in training mode, the numbers are inconsistent with how the enemy units produce their numbers. Like when Hobirym's legacy does an immaculate rock throw varying between 800 to well over 1000 damage depending on target choice.
![Hunxho - Ball Forever [Official Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/nki9ZTF9Uls/mqdefault.jpg)
You can also zombify your own necromancers, allowing them to support themselves. I like to put Putrify on them rather than Meteor because it can run double-duty of damaging (living) enemies and healing your undead units.
Wow that's a cool build. Revive undead with full hp only cost 50mp meanwhile ressurect cost 100 with only 25%hp.
Oh, ha, I left a similar comment. Zombie necromancers with life force, putrefy, and animate dead do a great job of keeping my zombie AI team healed and getting them on their feet before someone exorcises them. Though necromancers are a bit fragile, so I sometimes run two so they can get each other up. Also handy in PotD to have the banishes. My ghost witch, Marshmallow, tends to be... overzealous in her use of starfall, even giving her the minimum rank.
back in PSx era, Necromancer was an unique class belonged to Nybbas only hehe. along with Poisoner Falfadet.
my god... i miss my childhood era...
It was, but they have their own now.
+10 points for having Rick the Necromancer from the MotBQ runs on the title card. For those keeping score at home, that puts Rick's total Charisma score at... 10.
He's at least charming enough to get the fridge to open now.
Just what I needed today :D
Oddly specific, but glad to help!
@@CoffeePotato Mechanics and theory crafting feeds my soul. Your videos provide that in spades.
@@axettrose9709Glad to help, that stuff is fun!
Lich with necromancy spells is amazing. You can steal so much MP while damaging and spam summons, curse 3 and paradigm shift
Yeah, it's always a toss up. Liches can't be undead (ironically) and can't get animate dead/recruit dead, but they've got those heckpuppy summons. Necromancers don't get summons, but they can steal salvation/reflection with an ogre blade and sit there as a super fast zombie.
you'd think necros would have better defense. they wear masks, great with sticks... this guy played goalie at my school hockey game last week!
They're the fill in goalie from Florida that wanted the job more than deserved it, I suppose 😆
Turn 1 Life Force means free paradigm shifts for the rest of the fight. Use paradigm shift on your 4 casters+1 faerie and have faerie lingering kiss your necromancer. Infinite turns.
Necromancer is better than lich at a job like this or debuffing due to better speed.
Fair enough
Putrefy makes Necromancers Red Alert Desolators. They just group up and fart in your general direction, not only immune to their aoe but even healing if they're zombie necros.
But against actual zombies(ie. a large fraction of PotD), it's better to rely on your own zombies with a recruit here and there. Due to zombie revives having 0MP, the turn economy becomes a different ballgame that encourages a completely undead team to keep taking hits and charging spells. Curse lets you dogpile beefy targets with a ton of melee, Followed by splashing Putrefy to keep them topped up. Paired with regular debuffs like poison and their explosive MP gain, with a crazy low RT on a class that doesn't need heavy gear, and Necromancers sit comfy at the top of the damage per RT hierarchy.
If poison takes stalling to deplete enemy resources, Necromancers actively sap in multiple different angles, enough to overwhelm any preparations aside from shooting the necro quick.
I really liked how One Vision gave them anti undead moves for that reason. Up to and including Silver Crossbows and their unique spells. That said, Recruit Phantom is a solid way to beat many kinds.
curse is always one of my favorite debuffs. dropping curse 3 with my lich and jacking up the receiving crit range on them is amazing, though it seemed pretty often that they'd get out of curse the moment they got their turn
It's odd like that ...and we'll know exact mechanics once Gibbed finished getting the calculations confirmed from the inside...but it should be rolling for duration based on Mind.
@@CoffeePotato i know this is a random thing to reply to but in my experience, the mind stat of the caster doesnt actually seem to matter. ive had casters with postgame levels upwards of 500 mind casting it for targets to break out of it the immediate next turn. but its not always like that. truly one of the most awkward debuffs in the game but i still love it
@@MVCx_xB Could just be one of those things, like how Stop seems to be capped at a turn. Could also be a range, a roll, kind of hard to test for certain. Especially since it seemed to be contextual back in the PSP version. Or, maybe it's all of the above. RT count based on a range scaled to maximum bonus possible, which used to be 100, and is now 999?
No clue, just no one let Matsuno get his hands on the IRS at any point.
"We have adjusted our numbers, and your tax due is now scaled to your credit score multiplied by your hidden karmic debt attribute, divided by how many eggs you are that year., but is guaranteed to only be $10 if you bought 3.5 copies of any Queen album. "
Thank you C P!!
Glad to help!
@@CoffeePotato Could you do a "how to get book of the dead" guide please? I'm missing out! :D FOMO!!!!
I always have a necromancer in my party (usually Cressida) because Life Force plus high mind and low RT equals poison and charm machine for the rest of the fight.
True, though personally I love Enchantresses for that with Conserve RT
I used Consecrate Dead before getting Banish as a means of dealing with enemy undead. I know there's better options, but I wasn't a big fan of using items at the time.
Fair enough, it's just situational given their range.
I appreciate the video, but the background music was incredibly distracting. Thanks for all you've done with Reborn
It was a little loud, but glad to amuse!
Hello Coffee, great guide as always. Is there any way to recruit Sorcerers? Ramidos says some interesting stuff when you bring her down to critical health and Arycelle is in your party! I tried a bunch of different things with no luck. Chaos frame issue maybe?
No, it's an NPC only class, more or less just a stat boosted Witch.
A little off topic but do you know how the green cards work for luck exactly? Because I just did another PotD run before hanging gardens and i got to the point Denam was getting +0 luck from them and then i go out at the end got one sorta by accident and it gave me +4 luck. Does it just raise your minimum or have a cap? I'm just confused by the complexity of this game sometimes.
Luck cards are temporary in combat but provide random luck. So a +0 could mean that Denam was already at 100 luck... but you can get a +0 luck card, too. And unlike all other green cards where the gain is permanent, the luck card gains are temporary.
Just raises or lowers your daily luck randomly. Your luck changes on the day, the cards, and with gear.
You missed out on the big things that make me use necromancers =] Well... okay, not everything. Curse 3 reducing the max health of some lv 55 dragon is like 2k-4k bonus damage. But these're why necromancers are a staple for my end game.
The #1 reason why necromancer earns a place when liches exist is.... necromancers can be undead and liches can't. They slot perfectly into a zombie army. Not as a caster, but as a resurrection spamming infinite mana healer. Definitely set their AI to healing.
Animate Dead: You mentioned that clerics, cenobites, necromancers, witch queens, pumpkinhead familiars, halloweens, and the Sargera heavenly general all wreak havoc with undead.... and you mentioned that the AI won't resurrect... but did you know the necromancer AI will use animate dead to get your KO'd undead back on their feet immediately before they can get exorcised? I usually toss life force on necromancers to force them to have a ton of spare mana. Animate dead is a skill, so if they use life force, they can then immediately use animate dead before ending their turn. For a weaker zombie army, use two so they raise each other. And they're great to use your first ogre blade on to make them a little beefier.
Putrefy: huge AOE heal for undead (including your necromancer... and if you've ogre bladed reflection onto people, a reflected putrefy just heals the zombie caster). Also, it damages the living a lot. Basically, it's a fire-and-forget AoE that's healing huge swaths of your troops, healing the caster, and damage all enemies nearby. The healing part uses the healing formula, but the damage part uses the damage formula, so... good use of a first ogre blade.
Life Force: You mentioned life force as giving them infinite mana (triply so with one ogre blade), but I'll add that you probably don't want word of pain or meteor strike IV on them. If all they've got is max rank petrify and life force, they'll always be there immediately resurrecting any units that get knocked down before the enemy team can exorcise them.
Banish: You covered this, but just in general... zombie teams can't cast from the divine spell tab. That gives you two good options and one hilariously bad option. The hilariously bad option is max rank starfall so you can watch your ghost witch exorcise her allies by accident. The fine one is starfall rank 1, where it's less likely it'll be used for things other than exorcising enemies. But with a ton of other utility already for a zombie team, banish is safe and easy on a necromancer and will not cause Marshmallow the Friendly Ghost to accidentally send Skelly Tonne into the afterlife.
---
Though speaking of ogre blades, there's one more use for zombify that gets overlooked by new players who got their first ogre blade. You go back to Mandalia Plains... er... Tynemouth Hill, I mean... with your lv 50s. You grab a lv 3 warrior. Vyce one-shots the boss. That lv 3 warriors gets 12 levels of exp or something ridiculous, wasting all of those on warrior stat gains.
Not if you body snatch the lv 3, murder them, and raise them as a zombie. That prevents exp gain. Hop into training after, use an angel or charm of remission, leave training with zero exp, and then make them the class you want.
So that's my build. Zombified necromancer set to healer AI with life force, raise dead, animate dead, banish, max rank putrefy, max rank curse (when not AI controlled), tossed onto a zombie AI team with one other necromancer and whatever other zombies you want. (Heck, 2 necros and 10 matriarchs is simple to get and beats all but the most dragon heavy matches. Though getting a zombie AI team to use dragonscale is a different matter... and actually one where a zombie necromancer with dragon wound via an ogre blade is handy since life force gives them infinite mana.)
Definitely true, not many classes benefit a ton from being undead, but they definitely reap tons of benefits from being their own undercover boss.
Living cyclop have great passives for frontline but they aren't tanky. Their spell isn't as powerful as proper spellcaster so they seem like an oddball. But being a zombie solved the tankiness problem. Can I turn hoplite/jugg into undead too?
Yep! Humans, lamia, lizardmen, orcs, faeries, gremlins, dragons, and monsters can all be zombified. Juggernaut's intimidate is extremely useful for a zombie AI army because they struggle to deal with phalanx/gordian lock and get murdered by dragonscale. (Dragon's Wound has a lower priority, so a unit with it needs to be dripping with mana to cast it sometimes, which is frustrating. But intimidate just goes off at the start of a turn and juggernauts are in melee range pretty often.)
Intimidate is one of those skills that's so good, I tend to ogre blade it onto a lot of my other zombie AI team troops, too, so they can keep peeling those dragon scales off automatically. For a PotD AI team, it's probably even more valuable than Lament of the Dead.
@@ValeVin people talk about cressida as early access to necromancy, but her requirement is annoying, other route can recruit generic necro in earth shrine quest before heim instead
They're plenty tanky with their high health. They don't hit hard with spells, but built in counter and lots of health mean they've got a medium amount of MP to spend on things like Spellcharge.
Curse also drops target's luck to 0 (can be seen in the unit's portrait message)
More likely to get critted and I think auto skills stop working?
Autoskills seem to go off less often, but they do still go off. It's kinda like giving the cursed unit a -autoskill card and everyone fighting them a +crit card.
It's hard to tell exactly if it affects auto skills, but it doesn't lower their max odds. 100% is still 100%, but they can't naturally Crit or counter, and noticably eat crits like they're cinnamon toast crunch.
If a cursed unit cannot counter, is it safe to assume they can't parry either?
I would think the necromancer's Condemn skill can be useful in case of battle encounters with those special golden units in the Palace of the Dead. Are they a boss or a sub-boss? I don't know. They can be incapacitated and can auto-revive from incapacitation indefinitely unless they are the last enemy unit to fall on the battlefield. I've haven't tried it myself because my party is role-playing as holy crusaders. Necromancers? Get that blasphemy outta here! Backhand smack! Except Cressida under conditions that she will not recruit phantoms or practice necromantic arts such as transforming units to become zombie.
Don't you think it's strange that Necromancers don't have access to tomes? I thought Nybeth taught them how to pursue knowledge. Now they are illiterate? You might want to question their class mark or certificate 😅.
Which golden units are you talking about in PotD? And is this Reborn? All the ones I killed just... die and drop a bag. The only exceptions might be Aloser and Habarim, but they're just zombies, so they follow zombie rules. (Exorcise or they need to be the last unit on the level. Though you want their loot, so you'd want to exorcise them after they die, not make them last.)
@@ValeVin It's the ones as you described in Tactics Ogre Reborn. It's been some time since I last fought one of them because they don't make themselves common to appear. I think I remember trying to cast exorcise with a cleric or use a holy spell, Judgement or something of similar name (the ones that can expel stilled units), and saw 0% success before executing action. So, I had to tough it out the hard way thinking in hindsight I should've deployed Cressida the necromancer apprentice.
If you've recently tried exorcising and it worked, confirm for me. Maybe I had a really bad luck with a game bug on that one occasion.
To explain all of the above, given they're zombies with a huge stat dump, there's a solid chance they were actually just dodging the exorcism. Evasion still applies to spells when downed, which usually doesn't matter much, but an evasion built can dodge an exorcism.
@@CoffeePotato Sigh... I'll have to go check myself. I too would guess that there is an advantage given to certain enemy units considering the amount of modifier boosting. But, when trying to test the numbers myself in training mode, the numbers are inconsistent with how the enemy units produce their numbers. Like when Hobirym's legacy does an immaculate rock throw varying between 800 to well over 1000 damage depending on target choice.