ToME WikiReenenLaurie: My RohanKnight Demonologist got boring, so I wanted to try a Necromancer.
Could someone give me some pointers? Mine is dying a *lot*. I've made 3 or 4 now which has died when about level 7. (eish, my Demonologist is about level 40)
Something that I think is wrong (bug/not noticed) in 2.3 is that the necro's combat modifier is lower than a mage. Given weaponmastery is higher (+600 to +500), but combat is only +400, whilst a mage has +500. Maybe Necro's should wait for FF to boost combat for them. 
MassimilianoMarangio: Only the Mage and the Sorceror subclasses were changed in ToME 2.3 for some testing, the other are unchanged. See NeilStevens for details.
SoulWynd: I think there are two common settings you can pick. A necromancer that wants the touch of death (whatever it's called) ability or a necromancer who's in fact a summoner. The first one will need lots of combat while the second will be better off increasing corpse preservation and monster lore. The second one is actualy easier to play, use the horrify power to help your pets and turn the strongest ones in companions. They will kill and leave bodies which you can turn into undead minions, soon you will have a dungeon filled with your undeads and you can move on. Btw, Horrify dazes monsters which leaves them completly helpless, you can kill several uniques really easily with it.
ReenenLaurie: I was thinking of trying a combating necro. Because of the whole 2.3 system I thought that it would make for a interesting play (now). I've never really played a necro though, so I am sure it was interesting before too.
HappiestSadist: If you want a combat necromancer, I think dark priest is the way to go. I'm playing one right now and it works pretty well. A nice trick to beat the tough princess and lost swords quests is to continually generate necromantic teeth until you get one with the slays/brands you need. The Gondolin house quest is a lot easier with teeth of *slay dragon*.
KiTA: I tried a Maia Necromancer just now. Uh, yeah, as far as I can tell, that doesn't work. Every pet I create immediately turns on me and smushes my nose in. Or maybe that's just my low level. Interesting experiment, though.
JohnGilmore: Don't Maia have intrinsic aggrivate? If you're going to cast "raise dead" you need to be REALLY careful to not have that flag.
I've played a couple of 2.x necromancers, and the best hint I can give is "hack" - Use the 'H'ack command to hack kup a corpse, stand in a empty room and drop 1 piece at a time. Since they can't re-stack, they'll spread out around you, and you can raise them all at once. Since zombies can drop corpses, you can generate a literally infinate stream of undead from any given corpse. Provided that the corpse is heavy enough and your corpse preservation skill is high enough, of course.
NeilStevens: That's a bug, and probably shouldn't be exploited intentionally by the player.
Raised monsters are generated with items. Use the "allow pets to pickup objects" command (twice) to get them to drop them. Dismiss the Liches and Specters, kill the zombies, rinse and repeat. Keep in mind that certain monsters have certain types of drop, so a dark elf warlock for instance is a great way to scum for stat potions.
LordEstraven: Some of those sound kind of buggy, bordering on cheating really... The business with making summoned monsters drop the stuff they come with should probably be fixed, and you definitely shouldn't be able to get a whole zombie from a piece of meat.
(Actually, are you sure the undead-from-meat one isn't fixed? I wouldn't know, haven't played a necromancer in a long time.)
JohnGilmore: This works even in the latest 2.3.3. And you're right, you probably shouldn't be able to raise a chunk of meat as a zombie, and undead that you raise yourself probably should have an empty inventory. But you can and they don't. I honestly thought that the chunk of meat thing was intentional though. I remeber doing an improved necromancy patch for 2.3.2, but I can't find it at the moment. If I recall correctly it addressed both those issues, and improved the types of undead that you could raise in partial balance. It made the type of undead raised depend on the power of your spell. Or something.
NeilStevens: I'm pretty sure the meat is unintentional; this isn't the first time that hunks of meat have been an easy substitute for a corpse, in code that assumed TV_CORPSE only represented skeletons and corpses, rather than easily-multiplied derivative items.
LordEstraven: Perhaps meat should stack, and a couple dozen chunks of meat should net you an Undead Mass...
AgnostAngel : That would be cool. Or maybe raise less powerful derivatives, like a new ego that has far less health than the normal monster? Less damage too, probably, though I see that as hard to work in for spell damage. If you've ever played guild wars (I can't believe I just admitted that...) you'd get the idea. But a little control for necromancers over how to raise dead would be good. Especially in this case... just carry chunks of meat, drop them when needed, raise little undead mice to swarm the enemy. Feel free to morph this idea to your tastes... I'll eventually put it in the Ideas section...