Wednesday, 17th May 2017, 21:14 by Chicken
Animate Skeleton *is* a very powerful spell for the level (unless you follow Qazlal and they all just get burned up all the time, or Gozag and there's nothing to animate except the occasional thematic vault skeleton or freed slave).
I certainly wouldn't mind nerfing it by getting rid of the weapons. There's no obvious reason why mindless skeletons should be able to use weapons (or even armor, which might fall right through them if their bones occasionally disarticulate). And I reported a bug recently that the weapons/armor the skeletons take don't get tracked in Find properly - you can actually see them laying on the ground after the skeleton dies, but you can't Find them unless you step on that square first. And I spend most of my time with skeletons trying to make sure they don't get raised with anything good because they might end up in deep water and die and lose them. And, yes, it's way powerful also. So that's a no-brainer to fix.
After that change, making it a Level 2 would nerf the spell more than enough. Once you do that, the raise costs start to be significant, and mean you're wandering around with less magic and a more noticeable loss of points. Another alternative, even more severe, would be to give the corpse its standard magic resistance -- I mean, I pretty much don't bother memorizing spells that face magic resistance chances since they just fail if you actually need them at all, so that would put this on the list. (Unfortunately the spell info never warns you about this, so any new spells introduced face a real skeptical reaction until a character has so many scrolls of amnesia that he can just throw them away...) But it would be more iffy than most since a corpse gives you more chances to try, try again if you're really determined.