Yasob wrote:I've been trying out Animate dead a bit. Those Zombies/Skeletons are awfully weak, aren't they? They haven't really been helpful. The Imps seem to be much more useful, if only because you can create a new one as soon as one dies. But perhaps I'm a bit too far into the game now for either to be really helpful.
On another note, Blowgun with poison needles rocks! At least in Spider, which is the only place I've used it yet. Hit anything that isn't poison resistant with two poison needles and just wait a few turns! Combined with Conjure flame and a narrow hallway it's pure slaughter! (I don't know how large a part of this is the fact that I have Slay+5, Archery +4, and my Blowgun is +4 too. It seems to be the poison that really does the killing, not hit damage.)
Actually skeletons and zombie are strong in any point of the game, because the monsters you raise are stronger the further you dive - after all they're the dead comrades of the others they're gonna fight. Animate dead is one of the broken spell of the game because it's very strong, it's easy to cast (at 30ish fail rate is already usable), has a tremendous mp cost/benefit ratio, don't care of spellpower and stay relevant until post-end game - when the corpse pretty much disappear unless being with kiku
Some things about:
1) Undead strength depends on the base stats of the monsters. So, a orc knight zombie in orc will be very strong and quite resilient, while a plain orc or even a sorcerer zombie will be almost useless.
2) Zombie like other summons work better when you tank for them - as long as the monster isn't immediately dangerous for you to tank - as the char has far higher defences\hp than almost any monster in the game.
3) Zombie like other summons work better when they are an horde. A single orc knight zombie is a good ally. 10 mixed orc zombi are better, when they surround the enemy and don't fight 1vs1
4) In spiders animate skeletons is awful because you can't animate nothing, in other places is good. However, animate zombi is always better than skeletons, the point of animate skeletons not always being outclass by the other is that is a lv.1 spells so castable pretty much by any not Troglodite char. With a Gn, you obviously don't have this question - animate skeleton is still useful in the remote case you have less than 3 mp, you need to separate from a monster and don't have sbutterflies.