Snake Sneak
Posts: 111
Joined: Saturday, 10th March 2018, 18:00
What's the optimal way to use Animate Skeleton?
-I'm a melee fighter, who has dabbled into Necromancy to get access to Vampiric Drain and Animate Skeleton. Eventually I want to transition to Animate Dead but that's going to take a while, because I want to wear heavy armor and hit things with a big mace. Usually, I fight things in corridors, because that's how you don't die. So I lure a pack into a hallway, kill the thing in front, and I want to raise it - but I can't, because the enemy behind it has moved into the square that its corpse is on, and so on down the line until everything is dead before I have a chance to raise any of them. I raise all of those skeletons, explore to the next fight, and if I'm lucky, some of them still exist by the time I get there. More often than not, most of them are gone. I get nearly no benefit from any of my animated skeletons.
-This time I'm a dedicated spellslinger, started as Necromancer and I'm using Pain to kill most things. Maybe I have a couple other assorted conjurations for reliable damage - but regardless, I don't want to get into a melee brawl with an ogre, so I kill it from far away with spells. Unfortunately, I've got more enemies closing in on me and its corpse is 4-5 tiles away. I can chase it down and try to raise it, but that's a huge waste of turns that I should be using to deal damage or get into a better position, or in many cases, just run away.
Really, the only time I can see Animate Skeleton being a significant boon is if you've killed one enemy while it's in melee range, you have a corridor nearby, other enemies are already approaching from the opposite direction, and you need to leave. In that situation, you raise the skeleton and he holds the line (usually for 3-4 turns, at best) while you leg it down the hall, being... roughly equivalent to a janky Blink scroll that only works in hallways.
Animate Dead solves these issues pretty handily by raising multiple corpses within LOS. Animate Dead is a good spell. You don't have to be on top of the thing you want to animate, so you can actually make use of it when you kill something from range or when an enemy is parked on top of the corpse. Animate Skeleton does none of this, and I think that making Animate Skeleton a wide ranging AoE like Animate Dead is would probably make it way too strong for a level 1 spell. But as it currently exists I can't figure out how to actually get any sort of good use out of it. Personally, I'd argue for making it targeted rather than only the square you're standing on, but I want to get the opinions of people that use it more effectively than I do.
How do YOU make good use of Animate Skeleton?