Ah that's a pity. I was kind of looking forward to perhaps using the Ratway as my necromancer lair in a future play-through.

This.

The Necromancer I had just used the random Dark Brotherhood Assassins that always show up to the Sanctuary after you finish their quest line. These guys come with some of the better skill sets as far as NPC's go (IMHO), and thus make great Dead Thralls.

But like Llama said. Adapt. If you are really in the minority as you claim, then why would they change a game mechanic that will affect every game that everyone has? Your own argument defeats itself.

Just chill out and rethink how you are doing things. Even with the 1 day window, I'm sure that you could still tweak your design so that you can still keep your play style.

I heavily support this thread. All we really need is a week or so, not thirty days.

I think there should be about a three day setting on the bodies for them to disappear, that gives enough time to go store loot and come back and the corpses are still around.

I hope they fix the enemies respawns. As enemies respawning is definitely needed for a necromancer as you have corpses around everywhere but as it is areas outside of dungeons cose jot respawn in my game, thus it limits the amount of corpses I have to reanimate.

The problem with saying "adapt" or "just get used to it" is that the Thrall spell and necormancy isn't working the way it's supposed to work. A Thrall is suppose to be permanent, so if you are fast traveling or even traveling without fast traveling, you shouldn't have to worry about your Thrall just disappearing. As is right now, you can and will lose your Thrall. Thralls will get stuck in dungeons and/or just disappear.

Losing bodies while storing them in your home is an additional problem with necromancy and that one probably gets a little more dicey to fix, but I'm sure it can be done.

Well, if the game had been made this way from the beginning, you might have a point. Hell, I wouldn't have even registered this complaint if that was the case; I would have been bummed about it for a few days like so many other things I loved about Oblivion that either got omitted (spellmaking) or butchered (move-drag feature), but I would've moved on an accepted the game for what it is. However, sliding a change like this into the game under the vague pretenses of a patch isn't even in the same ballpark as releasing it that way initially.

And if this was something that equally affected both the majority and the minority, I wouldn't complain then either. But this is a change of very minor import to the majority and very severe import to the minority - I highly doubt you would've even noticed this issue, let alone the microsecond that the 'fix' saved you in load-screens, had I not brought it up. As I've said before, since I've been playing their games, they've never gone after corpse-refresh rates as a way of reducing lag / bloating, so this certainly isn't common practice for them.

As for 'adapting' to the 1-day refresh window, that's a pretty cheap excuse; your definition of 'adapt' is 'deal with the bad hand you've been dealt halfway through the game and like it.' There is no wiggle-room for the necromantic RP style as it was prior to this patch if it takes you over an in-game day to travel from Markarth to Riften, other than to cling to the precious few perma-corpses who are actually useful. I've spent the majority of my thousands of hours playing Bethesda games learning to 'adapt' to things within the framework of the game to play how I want (and subsequently passing that knowledge onto others), and for you to suggest that I should just continue to just blindly do so rather than for you to actually consider just how little you'd be giving up to put things back to the way they were is pretty asinine, honestly.

And you might be thinking to yourself right now 'well why don't you just quit *****ing and delete the patch?' That's sound advice that I've already followed up upon, save for one key thing: unless Beth has radically changed their programming methods, you can't play the DLC without the patch. So unless this change gets reversed back to the original state, I have to choose between playing the game the way I immensely enjoy it or playing the extra 50% of the game, which is a bummer either way it's sliced.

Not a good list, no. I've mentioned before that the irony of patch 1.3 is that it makes it easier than ever to test for permanent corpses - just kill 'em and leave 'em, and if they're still there after you've been gone for a day, they're almost assuredly permanent.

Ones I've found so far (in italics if they aren't 100% confirmed) are Orchendor, Vals Veran, Sild, Rigel Strong-Arm, Anise, and a number of Dark Brotherhood targets whose names escape me at the moment.

I don't think Anise is permanent. Just yesterday I killed her and The Caller and stored them in Breezehome. I left Whiterun and did a combination of quests and traveling around Skyrim without returning to Whiterun or Breezehome for 13 days. When I returned, both The Caller and Anise were gone. I was frustrated because I heard they were both permanent, but both disappeared.

Oh..gamefaqs svcks so hard. I've had an account there for awhile. But this board is almost as bad troll-wise.


On topic: I agree, I have a character dedicated to pure necromancy and would like a few more kicks for it, as it is pretty limited.

With my current Necromancer, I tried powerleveling (is that what it's called?) to get to level 100 in Conjuration as fast as possible. I just used the double soul trap method in combination with Highborn and/or waiting one hour then repeating over and over again until I got to 100. Sure, by the time I was at 100 in Conjuration it maybe bloated my character level to 20 right away, but at least I could essentially "start" the game with my Thralls.

Unfortunately, while trying to test out what is and isn't permanent Thralls and playing "Dead is Dead," my character got swarmed by 3 Frost Trolls and a Blood Dragon...he only had Alvor as a Thrall at the time and died.

Bump.

maybe itd be easier to fix the spell rather than body clean up?

Skjor, Silus Vesuius, Galmar Stonefist, Ulfric Stormcloak, and I can confirm Sild the Warlock is permanent as well.

Couldn't they just make the corpses you used thall on temprarily permanent? And If you desire to get rid of it, just turn it into and ash pile that will despawn when lower tier spell is used on them..
Or just make the last thrall you used semi permanent.

You can Thrall Ulfric? I thought people weren't able to do that. Also, what did you do to test it out? For the sake of all the Necros, it'd be nice to get a good long list of bodies (named if possible) for people to use.

just rely on your sword and let the dead stay dead

I don't think so, since said corpses are still linked to the cell they came from and will disappear after the 10-day waiting period*. The ones that actually are permanent are ones that, at some point, accompany you on some task, thus follow the rules for companions in this regard.

*Ten days is one of the two auto-respawn timers (the other is 30 days for Cleared interiors) and has priority over other refresh timers, which is why most stored thralls will still disappear even though you've bypassed the standard 1-day limit.

"Let the dead stay dead." Pssh! Next you're going to say that it would be wrong or immoral to turn my bride into a Thrall. I'm merely perserving her beauty.

So you're saying that if we really want to test a body to see if it's permanent, store it in our house for 30 days? I presume it shouldn't matter if we enter the house or not, if it's still dead in our house for 30 days it is for certain permanent.

Here is a list of bodies I'll try to accrue to put in a house and leave them for 30 days...

Orchendor
Vals Veran
Sild the Warlock
Rigel Strong-Arm
Skjor
Silus Vesuius
Galmar Stonefist
Ulfric Stormcloak
Vighar
Movarth

If you can find another named character to test out, let me know. I just started a new game so I'll work my way through to find them and Thrall them.

Also, I might try Thralling a couple Dremoras from inside Azura's Star. I saw a video of a person that did that, but not sure if they are permanent or not.

That's not what I was saying, although it's not a bad idea to test it...

To clarify: mobs are tied to the cells they spawn in, so when they die, regardless of where, when that cell resets so do they (where applicable). The Thrall process gets around this by using the companion code in some way (NOTE: this is an assumption, but it seems to be how the engine is behaving), so they are treated differently. Thralls, as you noted in a previous post, have their own 'expiration date', which was reduced from seven days to one in the last patch, at which point they are again bound by the 'cleanup' code and will disappear.

I don't know the wrinkle in the mechanics that allows you to bypass this to create perma-Thralls, but something about the way you're 'parking' them is causing it to lock into the companion code until the auto-reset is hit, thus how they didn't disappear for ten days. I do not know if getting them to remain past thirty days will make them permanent or not, but if it does work like that, then I would guess that pretty much anyone who is a potential follower of some sort could be made a permanent Thrall.

Note that by 'follower' I mean anyone who is either a companion or who gets foisted on you during a quest, however some of the latter are essential so testing would be required to determine eligibility.

I thought that's why they merged armor and greeves.

If it's in your House cell. They should NOT go anywhere. I love playing a Necro. And I am forced to attempt to locate NPCs that don't reset. Besides after the last patch, no cave or dungeon respawns enemies. They just reset the loot and chests. That is a LOT of NPCs to not have to keep up with.

Threads have been merged, please do not post multiple threads on the same topic.

Pretty sure they use a chunk of the horse code. They always show up at the stables near Shadowmere whenever I fast travel into a walled city, while a real follower is right beside me.

easy fix make a spell that allows u to keep a particular corpse forever

fixes all problems!!!

the 1 day corpse removal may have been an attempt to alleviate the bloated save file size.

dead thrall is perhaps my favorite spell and with chief yamarz and orchendor i have my own little army. I never consider actually storing away other thralls as they would be inferior to these 2 anyways.