This is for necromancer fans to share their experiences as a necromancer in skyrim( as in using ressurect spells) Enjoy!

I've been thinking of doing a Necro as my next playthrough. Any advice on race or what to focus my skills on?

Well, my current character is a Breton spellcaster.
Specialising in Conjuration, Alteration and Destrucion in that order he travels Skyrim.
I find that killing one bandit, only to resurrect him and watch him kill his friends is priceless.

One time I killed a chicken in Riverwood and everyone attacked me. Alvor charged me, so I stepped away and fried him. Then I resurrected him and watched him kill off the rest of the town, finishing with his wife Sigrid laying on the ground begging for mercy as "Arnand Riscels Alvor" brought his hammer down in her head.

The problem with Necromancers is you have your one at a time undead minion. And they aren't very good. I quickly switched from undead to Atronachs and they're much more satisfying and effective.

• And there's no spell to sap your opponent's strength (Ray of Enfeeblement). What if I could cut in half a warrior's stamina?
  
• You can't svck their life (Vampirism).
  
• There's no mana-burn spell to use against Mages.
  
• There's no spell to dispel buffs or destroy shields and other defensive items. I know magic bypasses armor, but I still want to make their shield explode and their sword be too hot to hold.
  
• As an aside, I saw a Draugr Deathlord do an attack that made Lydia drop her sword. Why don't I have a spell that can do that, to disarm melee attackers?
  
• You can't zap enemies with death spells (Rapture of Rupture, Inflect Wounds, etc). It's fire or nothing, and I don't want to be an elementalist.
  
• You can go down Illusion and get your enemies to fight one another, but there's no genuine "mind controlling" spell. You can't possess someone and act through them - becoming the ultimate spy.
  
• There's no real incapacitation spell(s) either. No damage-over-time spells to start a fight with.

I'm shocked that if I sneak up on someone (stealthy necromancer), I can't covertly kill someone with magic. There's no "magical assassination." Apparently, all that thought and study and they still can't replace a dagger?

• There's no aura of death spell, where nearby enemies are harmed by being in your presence.
  
• The lack of clothing options aside, there are no cosmetic spells to improve your appearance. You can't transform into a Daedra or a Dragon, even temporarily.
  
• There's no spell to protect you from arrows - pretty standard fair in the Wizard's spellbook.
  
• There's no spell to "push" your opponents back. Fus-Ro-Dah is a Shout - I can't believe that Wizards never figured out a magically derived simulacrum.
  
• There's no spell for skeletal hands to erupt out of the ground and hold affected enemies in place.
  
• There's no spell to create a disposal horde of skeletons or zombies.
  
• There's no spell to turn the player into a Lich - you can be a Werewolf via Questline - but not an undead?

I'm having a great time being a spellcaster in Skyrim, but this is because Skyrim is a great game and not because magic is performed well or explored in any depth. The mage experience is dissappointing, the war mage route is just a workaround to overcome the pure mage's obvious shortcomings.

Shortcomings that shouldn't have existed in the first place if only the right spells were in place. This isn't a multi-player game so who cares if one "class" is overpowered? Make the player feel like the goddamned hero, why don't ya. No one suffers if you loosen the reins and let the player experience some measure of power - real authority in the game world.

As a DM for my DnD group, the best decision I ever made was making my players into Kings and letting them decide what to do with my carefully crafted universe. Bethesda should do the same.

The problem with that mentality would be that shouts would be completely useless for mages and not only that but any half-ass mage in the wilderness could use dragonshout magic to destroy you. Keeping it the way it is makes sure that dragonshouts are something unique, not just spells coming out of your mouth.
And btw, you want some extremely specific things, Bethesda is not going to cater to all of the spells you want.

All of that would be amazing but you are asking for a lot. The only place I expect you can find all of that is in a DnD game or an MMO like Rift or WoW.

You do, it's a dragon shout you have to find and unlock. Draugrs are Nords who once served dragons in betrayal of man thousands of years ago when dragons and men fought a war against each other. The Draugrs were Nords cursed with undeath for their betrayal. That's why they can use shouts, before you ask.



Look at the Illusion perk tree. It's called "Silent Casting."



The closest to that is a Daedric artifact that is armor.



There never has been such an ability in TES.



That is a shield perk in the Block perk tree.



There is a Paralyze spell available, school of Alteration. But you have to be a high enough level in Alteration for the spell to be available for purchase, first.



Canonically, magic was never prominent in Skyrim. A bit of a departure from the previous entries, where a Mages Guild could be found in every city. In Skyrim, magic is highly regarded with suspicion and scorn, as the Nord culture champions the might of steel and brawn over fancy lightshows flashing out of one's hands. Thus, magic is less powerful as it was experienced in Morrowind and Oblivion.

Are you even playing this game? A lot of the stuff you mentioned you can do.
The Elder Scrolls is not D&D btw.

Anyway, Yeah just rerolled a Necro warrior earlier today. I can't wait to get a thrall!

@ EtraKurdaj

Frost spells damage Stamina and Lightning spells damage Magicka, and if you want to steal health then become a vampire, necromancers are not vampires tho vampires can be necromancers.

Unfortunately disarm and weakening effects were moved to shouts as disarm and marked for death, but disarm doesn't really seem to work that well anyway however you can still use shouts so...

This isn't D&D, TES has well defined schools of magic that doesn't try to include every random idea around, if you wanna do magical damage you need to be a destructive mage, the removal of pure/base magical damage from the school is annoying however. I would also note that Alteration does have Paralyze spells, including Mass Paralyze to temporarily incapacitate foes.

Also you can summon weapons, so that gets your sneak attack. Spells aren't really meant to be cast silently and so don't really mix with the whole stealth/assassin kill thing.

There is not a lack of aura spells, there is actually three of them (Flame/Frost/Lightning Cloak). If there was pure/base magical damage then there would be 4 of them, but I have no idea why elemental-less magic was removed in skyrim. With appropriate perks, Fire magic can make enemy flee if their health falls too low, this goes well with flame cloak but flame cloak itself does fairly week damage.

you can change into a werewolf with the companion guild but you can't be a werewolf and a vampire at the same time. Changing into a dragon wouldn't work too well either and deadric armour makes you look pretty/very demonic or dark knight like.

There are a couple of Alteration spells that increase armour and thus reduce damage received from arrows, evading arrows is down to personal skill rather then a computerized or random skill, again this isn't D&D.

Dual Cast spells with Impact have a high chance to cause knock back.

There are very few graveyards in skyrim and so skeletal hands from the ground doesn't really match. Most are buried in halls of the dead, where they're not actually buried but placed and the graveyards that do exist, are in towns/cities.

There is no way to recover from lichhood and technically it takes a long time to become a lich where werewolf and vampire infections are much quicker (only takes a couple of days/weeks for both, Lichism takes years, sometimes even decades), it doesn't fit into the time scale the game is set over.

Making a Master Necromancer my permanent dead thrall?

Win.

Uhhhhhhhh...

Always spoken at the best moments, too. XD

Chickens? Good to know... I'm gonna do that next time I load up the game lol

When I played my necro/conjuror I noticed my summons/zombies are quite weak once I got higher level. I had primarily high level conjuration and perks mainly in it so not sure what I am doing wrong.

@josh007cl

Thralls are only as strong as they were in life, so if you dispatch something quickly it is only that strong and the only real bonus you get in strength is +100HP... Also make sure not to loot the thralls equipped items until after they become ash.



You can raise pretty much everything except dungeon bosses and dragons. I've had a spider thrall before, tho it had fun when it came to doors, he/she had to kinda teleport through them. I'm assuming you could probably resurrect bears/wolves/foxes too but I haven't tried that yet.

In my last game I gave my mage follower a necro staff and he raised the bandit leader we just killed. I couldnt believe it!

Give your followers all sorts of crazy gear you dont use. You never know what tehy will do with it

:D

I like death thrall and have a minion follow me around wherever I go. It's even neater that you can equip them with good gear just like you can with a companion. I do like to use Summon Dremora Lord too. I just get a kick out of his warcries such as "I will feast on your heart!" or "I am serving my lord by destroying you!".

Hmm...... That gave me an idea. Perhaps... if they make use of a necro staff, what will they do with the... Wabbajack?! Must experiment with this!

Horker Thralls FTW.

You know, TES isn't some constant thing - the game grows and progresses and adopts new technologies, attitudes, and ways of thinking.

The future of the game is allowed to do more, to be more, than it's predecessors.

Half the criticisms to my suggestions amounted to: well, you can do something like what you want, but it requires special gear, a high level, or perks in trees that you wouldn't otherwise want to tech into.

• I don't want to do something like my idea, I want to do it. I don't care if Frost does stamina damage and Lightening does magick damage - I want to inflict weariness on enemy warriors and I want to feedback enemy wizards. Why not?
  
• You can't rapidly cycle between Shouts - those abilities really need a spell equivalent. Maybe those abilities shouldn't be Shouts, maybe they should be spells.
  
• I don't want to wear armor to look like something, why can't I change my form to become it?
  
• I don't want to only be an elementalist - I don't want cloak of fire/ice/thunder. I want a death shroud. I want plants to wither and die at my approach.

What I'm asking for, the game can perform in a half-assed fashion, but that's not good enough. Change the color and sound of a Lightening Bolt and you have your Death Ray spell. What I'm asking for should be easy for Bethesda to implement. Why are you arguing against more spells and more player options? Who cares if it's cosmetic and petty - I'm the player, this game is based on wandering about fooling around - let me do what I want.

The other half were along the lines of: That isn't what TES is about.

Listen, I was making the point that judging the game from the perspective of being the ultimate Wizard, Skyrim is lacking in a lot of spells and features that role-players and fantasy enthusiasts would consider "standard." The player is a Dragonborn and can Shout - but none of the Wizards in Skyrim or in Tamriel never wanted those same powers? None of them ever thought of the utility that Shouts provide and decided that figuring out a magical alternative was worth the effort? I imagined that these spells were absent in previous TES games because the technology wasn't there - computer games hadn't arrived there yet.

It would be foolish to think that any of my above ideas are beyond the means of Skyrim's game engine. And if they are, why? Other games are doing it. You have more magical latitude in Defense of the Ancients than you do in Skyrim - and that's a disgrace.

You can't believe that Skyrim is the only game on the block. Surely the Bethesda developers have played Dungeons and Dragons. Surely they know what players want to do and what they expect to do.

And even if Bethesda intended on holding firm on the idea of magic as some unexplored frontier, shunned and labeled taboo by mainstream Tamriel society, so what? The player will want to do it. It's silly to make a game where so much of the entertainment is premised on emergent gameplay if you're going to place down invisible walls on the game design.

Are you seriously arguing against choice?

TES is based on its lore, kind of like how traditional D&D has its own lore that dictates how its world is supposed to be understood.

Shouts don't "replace" magic because only a few characters in Skyrim can even perform shouts, and only through years of training. The Dovahkiin is an exception, because it's meant to be the blessing of Akatosh that endows him with the ability to use shouts as naturally as a guy can wake up in the morning to take a piss.

The magic system in Skyrim is rather reduced from the previous entries. In Morrowind and Oblivion, it was possible to create your own spells, and in Morrowind, the variety of spells available was much larger.

I only stated that in regards to canon, magic in Skyrim is shunned and much less prominent compared to other regions/timelines.

Nobody is arguing against choice.

Well, I'm asking for what I believe to be very standard fair when it comes to spell casting and you're giving me reasons why I can't have them. None of those reasons involve technical limitations or application of any kind of design philosophy.

The Dwarves are extinct but I had three full sets of Dwarven armor before I was level 23. So don't tell me that because Skyrim shuns magic, that it doesn't exist or isn't as good. The game has an entire civilization that has been robbed and plundered for centuries, yet their artifacts remain.

The game is about a civil war where both sides hate the Elves. The Empire tolerates them as a necessary evil for peace and the Stormcloaks are overtly belligerent. And yet, I can still collect a full set of Elven armor - even buying it from vendors in Stormcloak friendly cities. So don't tell me that the lore has any impact in game mechanics.

I don't know why Bethesda has downplayed magic. Maybe it will be part of a DLC. I can't say - just that how it is now in the game is very disappointing.

Hey guys I meant this to be a discussion for cool for experieneces not for arguments. And most Dwemer ruins have not been raided because of dangerous traps. And for the Elven armor everybody knows how to make it. Just because the stromcloaks don't like the Elve's doesnt mean they wouldnt use superior armor and the smiths would shun it while they could be making more money,

By the same token, just because the Nords don't like magic doesn't mean they wouldn't train sorcerers because magic is freaking powerful. Ulflric is outnumbered 10 to 1 and the Thalmor are providing the Empire with arcane artillery - and he wouldn't try and recruit the Winterhold Mage's College to his side?

It makes no sense, from either a story standpoint or a practical standpoint for any of the characters or factions in Skyrim to shun magic.