So I want to make a Death Knight type character (big bad warrior who raises the enemies he kills) and I was wondering what experiences you guys had as far as viability of the different spells. Most people seem to talk about the summons as being the best to cast in order to either tank or dish out damage and I don't hear a lot about the necromancy side of the perk tree.

Is one way overpowered compared to the other?

You can bring back an opponent that can summon

(I think it summoned, anyways..)

I prefer to use raise dead because I dont have to worry about them exploding a giant balll of fire everytime they die. But if I need a contant force tanking damage then i'll summon instead seen as I don't need a host or anything. I can't wait to get the high end raise dead spell. No time limit on them :drag:

The problem is twofold:

1) zombies needs corpses, so you have to kill someone BEFORE you can summon.

2) zombies and skelleton deal a lot less damage then the elementals, and yet are more fragile.

Regarding #2: Depends on what you are raising. If I raise a giant that I killed then it's definately more powerful than any summon.

well yeah, but its also not usefull because you most likely dont have a full dungeon of giants in front of you. What I mean is: most giants are either on their own or 1-2 of them together, and in the outside world. Kill one, rez it, and now you got nothing to use it on.

In dungeons and keeps, most ennemies will be, at worst, trolls. And even those are kinda rare (i have seen ONE cave with em, and even that had a grand total of three).

Well for how I am planning on playing I don't think getting a corpse is going to be a problem, I think I will mainly use the zombie as a distraction. For the type of character I am trying to build are there enough perks to go around so I can go down both the necromancy tree and the summon tree? Or will I do well enough with just the zombies?

If you're far to powerful and important to deal with your enemy, raise an atronach to quickly dispatch them. If your enemy is frustrating you and has the audacity to scratch you with their toy-like weapons, bring them in your service through undeath. Really boils down to my mood, and how spiteful I wish to be against these computer generated automatons.

Early on, yes. You can summon an atronach at any time, there's no need for a corpse. It's abilities, attack, defense, etc. are fixed so there's no worries about what it has equipped, or not equipped. Necromancy on the other hand requires a corpse, and if you've looted the corpse you now have a thrall running around trying to beat things to death with it's fists while getting pummeled with no armor. Later on when you can summon one permanently instead of one for 1-4 minutes and you can be more selective by raising the more useful and powerful enemies you come across before you loot them it's great.

I use double Dremora Lords(twin souls 4tw)... they tank, kill and just generally look badass. The thing I love about conjuration is that the summons scale for difficulty so they are useful on master unlike the entire destruction line -_-

That AOE when they died is one of the reason why I don't use undead, and since I don't do followers it works even better.

One thing I wanted to ask if when you raise a dead mob permanently, if you go through a door that leads into a different area ..do you lose the mob? Does it turn to ash?

I assume it;s the same as with the impermanent spells
they follow me out of rooms/dungeons and just turn to ash when time runs out

You can only raise undead once. Once the spell wears off, they distintegrate, which is a shame.

If you killed a giant, and used the Dead Thrall spell on it, you would have a permanent undead giant at your side, till he died again.

You could possibly have two undead giant, you can have two thralls at any one time. But you would not be able to summon anythign else, Daedra of other, without disintegrating your giants.

Is it possible to put items on corpses before raising them? Or putting items on them after? And after the spell wears off can you loot the bodies then or do they disappear?

So it seems the consensus is that summons are better than undead. Does that hold true for the Thrall's as well?

Dead Thralls don't turn to ash when they die, so you can keep them around pretty much forever (until they eventually get lost due to Skyrim being Skyrim) still, it's quite fun. But the thrall spells are ungodly expensive to Magicka.

Right now I'm running around with a Bandit Chief and a Master Necromancer, it's pretty awesome.

I think Dead Thrall is the best, I mean, if you ever run into any tough NPC or humanoid... it can be your pet. Zombies even have unique dialog (Stuff along the lines of: 'Must... kill...' in fights)

Only problem I've seen with undead (aside from Skyrim being Skyrim and making them not follow you through a zone for whatever reason) is that they don't equip armor, so never take the armor they're wearing, or you'll be stuck with a naked zombie. Weapons and shields are fine to take and give, though.

Dremora don't count as atronoch/undead do they?

I belive atronaches are far better then zombies the zombies AI is real bad and ya for me some reason my zombies turn to ash when going through a door but there still with me but invisible and enemies will fight them (glitch) and zombies raised don't equip there weapons (unless an extra was in there inv wich is most likely a dagger :/ ) so you have to wait for them to pick up there weapon of the floor wich takes a while. Dead thrall is actually good but who wants to wait all the way till lvl 100 that just svcks.

I and i belive the game groups dremora with atro because when you get atromancy or what ever its called there time doubles from 60 to 120 seconds but i don't belive he gets the 50% better perk could be wrong though.