Sunday, 5th February 2012, 06:18 by KoboldLord
Kiku is tailor-made for melee/caster hybrids, although pure casters can benefit too. Obviously, heavy armor characters should probably reconsider taking Yred, Makhleb, or Fedhas instead, or go Trog. Kiku gifts useful spellbooks starting remarkably early; you can typically get the book of necromancy by the end of the next floor cleared if you don't dawdle, and you'll probably have all her gifts except the last before you even dip your toe into Lair or Orc. She is ridiculously easy to please, accepting almost every kill except undead, so you can use her active abilities to your heart's content without any real worry that she's going to get impatient with you.
Necromancy is a highly versatile magic skill, but individual spells usually have some sort of drawback that you have to work around.
You get Pain and Agony for a basic ranged attack, plus Dispel Undead to cover the most common class of pain-resistant monsters. Pain deals some backlash damage, Agony can't be used to finish something off, and they both suffer against rN+ enemies, but they both deal respectable amounts of ranged damage if you are a melee-type that really doesn't want to get into melee with that jelly, hydra, ettin, etc. They're also a guaranteed-early workaround for elementally-oriented casters who need a way to deal with enemies that resist their main element. Training necromancy for Pain and Agony is cheaper for an early-game hybrid than training conjurations + fire/ice/earth for direct damage, although unlike elemental conjurations necromantic direct damage won't take you all the way to the end of the game by itself.
You get Animate Skeleton, Animate Dead for early disposable minions, plus Twisted Resurrection and Simulacrum later on. You also get Recall for your minions, guaranteed. Skeletons and zombies are permanent but completely disposable. Since you can't take them to the next level anyway, there's no frustration when they get wiped out. You can casually sacrifice a whole pack of yak zombies to finish off a wounded hydra, and be satisfied that it was totally worth it. Swapping places with a zombie is an escape option that works on nearly anything, separating you from the horrible monster that will absolutely slaughter you if you don't get away. Particularly nasty uniques like Erolcha and Nikolai can sometimes be dealt with by walking briskly in the opposite direction and waiting for the 'you feel more experienced' message, and if that message never comes you still have a head start.
You also get a grab bag of utility powers, like Regeneration, Vampiric Draining, Sublimation of Blood, and Corpse Rot, which don't really have equivalents in any other magic skills. These can be tricky and micromanagey to use effectively, but they make you much more efficient if you do.
Kiku's corpse drop ability has a trivial cost, so you can use it with casual abandon whenever you feel like you could use some spare zombies, or some chunks for Sublimation, or some food. You generally won't get great zombies, but any old piece of trash can be thrown to the death yaks to ensure your own escape, and it works the same. It also essentially shuts off the food clock, even for ogres and centaurs, as long as you remember to bother.
Invoke Torment is a tricky ability to use, but it does a whole lot of damage if you can set it up right. You'll usually resist most of the damage. It's usually best to lure your prey into your kill zone, where you've set up a gank squad of hydra or dragon simulacrae to hide behind, plus a couple corpses to power this invocation. Mennas isn't such a royal terror if he follows you into a mob of hydra simulacrae and suddenly gets knocked down to a quarter of his starting health.
The final gift should usually be the pain brand. The Necronomicon sounds awesome, but the spells in it all cost an enormous amount of xp to get online, and when you're in early Lair you need something that helps now, not something that could hypothetically help in late Vaults (Haunt) or never (Necromutation). Pain brand does a LOT of damage when used by a necromancy hybrid, and by the time the post-endgame rolls around you'll find a eudemon blade or elemental staff or something to upgrade to anyway. A pain weapon will immediately boost the damage of your skald or warper by a large margin, and free up your xp investments to go to other pursuits. Besides, you may end up with three or four copies of the Necronomicon littering the floor by the time you hit up Zot anyway.
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