I don't expect them to go with anything resembling a model of "you can take any corpse of anything that has stats and apply the undead minion template to it", because 4E has been moving away from that as being an established gamebreaker... I mean, the Shaman's spirit companion, the Druid's beast form, the Wizard's familiar, the summoneds of the Invoker and the Wizard, etc., are all abstractions where the underlying stats are based on the PC's, sometimes with the possibility of gaining bonuses or special abilities through the use of encounter and daily powers.
I'd expect a Necromancer to function along those lines. Perhaps the basic builds could be a spirit summoner and a corpse animator, with each one having a different form of servant that is a generic-in-stats personal-in-nature undead servitor that they can command in combat and channel powers through, with the Big Gun powers split between enhancing the main servitor or summoning others (which, to build on the examples of the Invoker, Shaman, or Wizard, could involve a conjuration, a zone, an actual summon, or even a fleeting effect: a laughing skull, dead hands reach up from the ground and claw at ankles, a wraith spirit, or a bunch of ooky spirits swarm through the target).
In keeping with the Necromantic flavor and the "everybody can attack every turn" model, the Big Gun powers would probably be phrased as "drain energy from your foe and give it to your servant".
That's just one way they could go with it, obviously... and in any event, there would have to be a number of necromantic rituals to fill in the gaps, just as there are for Wizards.
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ninetydegrees
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on 2009-05-14 05:12 pm (UTC)I'd expect a Necromancer to function along those lines. Perhaps the basic builds could be a spirit summoner and a corpse animator, with each one having a different form of servant that is a generic-in-stats personal-in-nature undead servitor that they can command in combat and channel powers through, with the Big Gun powers split between enhancing the main servitor or summoning others (which, to build on the examples of the Invoker, Shaman, or Wizard, could involve a conjuration, a zone, an actual summon, or even a fleeting effect: a laughing skull, dead hands reach up from the ground and claw at ankles, a wraith spirit, or a bunch of ooky spirits swarm through the target).
In keeping with the Necromantic flavor and the "everybody can attack every turn" model, the Big Gun powers would probably be phrased as "drain energy from your foe and give it to your servant".
That's just one way they could go with it, obviously... and in any event, there would have to be a number of necromantic rituals to fill in the gaps, just as there are for Wizards.