Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous – Necromancer Tips (Enhanced Edition)

Tips to Necromancer

General Tips

• Don’t neglect rays as a lich, and don’t over-estimate your ability to summon undead help. A lot has been said about sorcerer as lich because charisma replaces con for your HP bonus, but don’t sleep on cleric and oracle.
• Allow me to add that you’ll have a better time if you lean into being a controller/disbuffer as necromancer than trying to be summoner/damage dealer. In that vein, make sure you have plenty of ranged companions because unlike an enchanter type, your enemies are going to be running around everywhere.

Power Tips

• Arcanist, Sorcerer, Witch, and Wizard can “merge” their spellbook with the Lich spellbook to vastly increase the power of both. I would suggest going one of those four arcane casters.
• There will come a point in the story where, if you do everything RIGHT, you can make a choice to permanently give yourself a 20% miss chance with all attack rolls. That means melee attacks, and spells that roll like melee (touch attacks, ray attacks). Since Lich can do without both easily, I suggest avoiding them.
• IF you’re going pure caster, don’t waste your precious feats getting Spell Penetration. Almost all – no, I’m quite certain literally all – of the best Lich spells completely ignore spell resistance. If you absolutely need to cast a spell that does NOT ignore spell resistance, you can use Deadly Magic 3-5 times a day to ignore it. Which is more than enough.
• Necromancy starts VERY weak and ends up VERY strong. Don’t invest a lot of point into the early Necro spells.
• Corrupt Magic is the best single spell in the game. It can trivialize boss encounters before they begin. Absolute Death is a close second – and you can use both in a single turn late game. You can literally one-shot bosses with the end of Greater Rod of Quickening (turn Corrupt Magic into a swiftcast –> follow with Absolute Death.
• If you want to try something “cool” you can play as a plain Sorcerer, which uses Charisma instead of Intelligence to deal its spell damage. Later, when you become truly Undead, you won’t even have Constitution anymore; you’ll get all your HP from Charisma. So with Sorcerer you can actually dump a ton of points into Charisma and get massive amounts of HP and spell power, all with one stat.