That is a really obtuse way of looking at TES, period.

You want the ability to time travel via Elder Scroll I imagine too right? Sacrifice an entire race to create a God? Become a God and sacrifice yourself to create new planets and planes of existance?

Well come to think of it, that would be badass...

But somehow it fundamentally takes away from the experience. Its about overcoming odds, not becoming a God.

The lore should = the lore

The gameplay should = the gameplay

I'm pretty sure you wouldn't be a fan of necromancy if the attitudes towards it in the omnicient "lore" were duly represented.

If we go by the word:

Necromancy: Νεκρ?? (dead) + μαντε?α (divination). Necromancy practically means "to prophecise with the aid of the dead". So, the moment you actually raise their bodies from their grave, you're already pushing the boundaries of the term to their limits.
Also, there are practical reasons for not being able to reanimate skeletons: to sustain undead life, a body must be in a certain condition. If it's destroyed too much, even magic cannot reanimate it easily. That's why you are able to kill zombies by destroying their bodies, and why you can't re-reanimate them after they die as zombies.
Skeletons are probably to much destrioyed to be reanimated. The ones you find should probably be originally raised as zombies, and have turned to skeletons over the years. Their bones still hold together just slightly with the remnants of magic, but they are extremely frail.

Now, how do NPC necromancers do it?

- They have studied their trade much longer than you. Remember, you have a huge talent only in dragon language.
-They could have just specially preserved some skeletons for usage as undead.
-They cheat. After all, their magic scales with level - players' doesn't.


You technically can't have real necromancy unless you're dealing with the souls/ghosts/remains of the dead.

Summoning a corpse out of nowhere is not necromancy, it's just constructing a magic creature in the form of a human corpse. It could as well have been a butterfly or a dragon. It's not real, therefore it was not raised from the dead, therefore it was not summoned with necromancy.
Summoning a corpse from a graveyard 5 miles away is necromancy, but not pure - you also need translocation, unless you can wait for your zombie to walk those 5 miles (in the usual zombie speed)

THE LORE MAKES REFERENCE TO CLOUD WHALES!!!!! WHERE ARE MY CLOUD WHALES!!!!!!!!!

THE LORE MAKES REFERENCE TO 20 KINDS OF KHAJIT, WHERE ARE MY 20 KHAJIT!!1

SKYRIM IS BIGGER THAN 16 MILES IN THE LORE, I WANT MY SKYRIM THE SIZE OF NORWAY!!!!!!!

because its not viable, come on now, its a scale representation in a game

also, like I said, use the console and you CAN have an ARMY of undead, as many as your PC can draw, if your not on PC, you should be

Wrong post, disregard

Well here is... no I must not... well you can use your... Ah, I keep saying it all the time, I know I shouldn't say it...

Forget it. Might come out as flaming so will not say it.

If your a Mage you master your chosen form of Magic and learn at least i more for support , If your a Necro your chosen form of Magic is Conjuration in this case you really don't need anything but Conjuration it's one of the most powerful forms of Magic in the game. You will need to master all forms of Conjuration though not just reanimate corpse. Your going to need to put points into the first perk in one-handed as well to make wielding daggers viable. Or learn how to backstab.

For my first play through I tried to be a necromancer aswell, while I didnt intend to go pure necromancy I find myself not using it at all. for Conjuration Atronarchs and Demora lords are just better and easier to use.

Im not asking for necromancy spells to create a body out of thin air, although for gameplay purposes that would be fine, but rather when you cast the spell it brings them out of the ground. That seems like a fine alternative to me.

Some things that could help necromancy as is:
Bodies dont turn into an ashpile once the spell expires. Probably the biggest drawback, not only does it keep you searching for bodies but sometimes the ashpile does not contain the loot the body had on it, but if you take all their stuff before you raise them, the zombie is less effective.
Less restrictive level barrier to raise corpses. Most of the time you cant even raise bodies that would be worth it over an atronarch becuase theyre too high level.

It would be better if animated NPCs were a lot more physically durable compared to when they were alive. I would have made it so maintaining an animated NPC permanently lowers the magicka pool by an amount equal to the level of the NPC. Gets rid of the time limit and the number of animated NPCs limit, but it balances out because it stunts your magicka pool. And also they shouldn't turn to ash when beaten. It's super annoying when an animated NPC turns to ash and you are left with nothing to work with.

I've tried using Dead Thralls lately. Sebastien Lort, Ochendoor and even a Master Vampire. The upkeep to keep them alive is just a pain compared to summoning 2 dremora lords when needed. Dungeon traps are constantly killing the thralls too so I need to raise them again and again. arrrrgh.

Sure, they arguably could put in a whole necromancy tree/school, with stuff like Trap Black Soul, Transmute Black Soul Gem, Life Drain, the existing Necro options, Summon soul (using your Soul gems as ammo), and other such things.

They didn't though, and expecting to get by on one arbitrarily chosen path of one single skill isn't plausible.

Even some of the mentioned examples, I'm pretty sure a 1 handed guy is using potions (Alchemy), and some form of armor. A destruction mage is also using potions or heavy enchanting for 0 cost spells.

Even staying inside the loose theme, you can just summon a Ghostly Sword that eats peoples souls as an alternate option, which sounds Necro enough.

Okay: I will agree with you this far. I haven't played any sort of mage at all yet, much less a Necromancer, and so I can accept the idea that the way the rules work Necromancy is too cumbersome, particularly compared to Atromancy or other forms of magic. Given that you have a disadvantage compared to Atromancers - they can summon atronachs ex nihilo, while you have to have a body to work with - I can see the argument that you shouldn't have to look so hard to find bodies to work with. Probably bodies should still disintegrate at the end of the spell, but perhaps only randomly, after the second such spell, or perhaps they should degrade in quality over time, with no way to fix them. Certainly you have a valid argument that you should be able to collect skeletons you find lying around and reanimate those. Bonemeal not so much perhaps; somebody else had a good point that Necromancy should require at least a semi-intact body to reanimate, or at least a relatively intact skeleton. If even the skeleton has been reduced to powder, you don't have enough to work with for reanimation. I also don't think you should be able to simply call the undead out of the ground wherever you are; if you have to have a dead body to work with (as I think you should) well, there are lots of places where there simply are no dead bodies to reanimate. Perhaps in order to compensate for the relative difficulty Necromancers face in this regard compared to Atromancers, Necromancers' summon/reanimate spells should have much longer effective times. I.e., where a summon fire atronach spell lasts for 60 seconds, perhaps an equivalent Necromantic summon spell could last for a good solid ten minutes. Perhaps magic costs could also be adjusted to reflect this. In short, they could make it so that Necromancy was fairly magic-efficient compared to Atromancy, but required the Necromancer to be more prepared before combat by preparing a band of several skeletons, zombies and so forth to do his bidding. Also, for the Atromancer, it would be less magic-efficient but the Atromancer could get by with summoning his atronachs as needed - summoning them on the battlefield at a moment's notice for a higher magic cost, while the Necromancer had lower costs but had to expend magic over time, and prepare ahead of time.

But overall I think you have a solid case that they should have given people playing Necromancers more to work with. My beef primarily is with whoever (the OP, I think) said that a player should be able to play a Necromancer without bothering to do jack squat with other skills. As you agreed, there is no single skill in TES games that can be considered self-sufficient.

Crap. You know, I've never played a real stealth character like a thief or such, and I was thinking about making my next character a stealth-concentrated thief - but now this thread is making me consider a mage of some sort. DURNIT.

eh to hell with necromancer go straight death knight. Death is the ultimate state of everything show ultimate mercy by ending the suffering and torment that life brings.

Can you animate skeletons ?

That's what i did ;P

Heavy armor,two handed(mostly) and one handed(for when using spells and the universe is still after you),conjuration(necromancy tree),restoration,some destruction(ice-vampiric drain although it's crap crap crap!),and illusion for fear.



Nope :/ i wanted my perma-skellie.

That's just svcks Bathesda why can't i reanimate skeletons i could in Oblivion .

Yeah, I thought about doing this in the future too after seeing the Daedric armor. After seeing how much people complained about it, I was expecting something horrible and ridiculously anime-looking, but in fact while not at all having the somewhat realistic look of iron, leather, hide, steel and steel plate, and even Ebony, the Daedric armor looks really, really good if you're playing as somebody who wants to be Sauron, Darth Vader, The Grim Reaper and Satan all rolled into one package. Which could, admittedly, be quite fun.


Wait, I thought there was a high-level Conjuration perk that allowed you to summon permanent Atronachs and/or Undead?

Well, not really. You could summon them out of thin air, which I agree makes it hard to distinguish from non-Necromantic summoning. I explained earlier what I thought would be a good contrast between Atromancy and Necromancy: Atromancy would be good for summoning Atronachs for a minute or so out of thin air, in the middle of battle, and for a higher immediate magic cost, while Necromancy would be good at summoning larger numbers (five or so) of undead of varying sorts, for longer periods of time, for less up-front casting cost, but at the cost of (1) having to pay magic cost over time to maintain the undead, and (2) having to actually find dead bodies to reanimate. While I don't think you should be able to just summon them out of the ground, there should be a graveyard at every city, village, and hamlet in the game, as well as perhaps some ancient battlefields to use to find the dead bodies.

The OP is [censored], he keeps going off topic and jumping to conclusions all by himself.

/thread

I was pretty fixed on Ebony to be honest,but after seeing Daedric myself i kind of liked the look.I couldn't really understand what it looked like from pictures since it had so much detail up close.As for the build i'm pretty satisfied with it.You can dish out damage with your 2h,and if you are prepared,have a zombie-whatever to aid you.



You can have permanent undead bodies,it's just that in Skyrim you can't animate skeletons in particular for some reason(they always resist the spell).

That is close to my future build, but instead its.

heavy armor
necromancy side of the conj tree.
illusion for fear and frenzy spells.
two handed always enchanted with drain (more than likely health)
alchemy mostly for poisons
enchanting and smithing (and try and keep it toned down a bit.)

Yeah. Crap, this is all making my decision about my next character really difficult. I was all set to play a Bosmer thief, and now here I am thinking about starting either some sort of mage or else Sauron's Cousin Bob.


Oh, right, the bit about not being able to animate random skeletons you find. Yeah, that's a real oversight. Frankly, I would think it would be fairly easy for them to fix in an update. I'm sure that the random skeletons are currently just "props", but it shouldn't be too hard for them to write a script to replace all the skeleton props with dead skeleton "NPCs" complete with stats in the event that a mage with the appropriate skills found them.

tbh I think it has something to do with the way skeletons die.

They just tend to explode into a hundred pieces, probably making raising them a big undertaking... not to mention it would look like a hilarious bone blizzard.

Thats even forgetting the fact that bones/random objects laying around have a very nasty habit of becoming deadly projectiles.

Skeletons are also pretty effing weak. Summon Familiar is probably stronger than most skeletons, so I don't really think it would be worth it compared to a more sturdy raised corpse.

I'm all for options though, maybe next game.

Oh yeah,i forgot smithing-enchanting myself,did not mention them.


Bob for president i say


You know the funny part is that if you cast a reanimate spell on a non valid target nothing happens.

However with skeletons it's always "spell resisted".Which leads me to believe it is maybe a bug or something.

Well, see, if Conjuration worked like I'm suggesting, this would work well with the requirement that Necromancers be prepared ahead of time. They ,might literally have to reassemble a full (or nearly so) skeleton in order to reanimate it, which of course would be impossible in combat. So then what you'd have would be a good contrast between Atromancers, who simply summon their atronachs in-combat and out of thin air, but who pay a high magic cost to do so and can only maintain the spell for a relatively short period of time, versus the Necromancers, who pay less cost for raising the dead, can do so for longer periods of time, and who can maintain more reanimated followers (five or so, maybe) compared to the Atromancer's few (one or two) bound atronachs - but the Necromancers would have to prepare for this ahead of time by finding dead bodies to reanimate and perhaps even reassemble. It could make Necromancy and Atromancy very, very different. Atromancy would be easier to play by the seat of your pants - just run around, and when you hit combat, summon a frost atronach, no preparation necessary. Necromancy would be more involved and require a bit more forethought, but could well be quite powerful for the player who was willing to accept the downsides of his chosen form of magic.

Well, that's a possibility. If they really did intend for you to be able to reanimate random skeletons found in dungeons, then a bug shouldn't be too hard to fix.

Magic in general is gimped. Note that until you manage to reach 100 conjuration, you are also limited to just one zombie at a time. If you really want to only use conjuration and don't want to use atronochs, perk up the bound weapons branch as well. Use a bound bow to kill one enemy at range, then animate it.