Albeleo's Necro Guide

Albeleo's Guide to Raising and Powerplaying Necromancers

(with apologies to Lanstro/Dafeon for the gratuitous thievery of his guide formats!)

Introduction

Necromancers on Ancient Anguish are a nearly mythical class. Long regarded as one of the most powerful classes (if not THE most powerful class), necros also have a reputation for being one of the most incredibly difficult to play. Both reputations are well deserved. A high level necromancer + undead pet can take down just about any NPC in the entire game solo, and do with with brutal efficiency. However, in seeking out the power this class has to offer, many players often grow frustrated and find the process of raising a necromancer nearly impossible. They raise a few levels, have crap weapon skills, wander around with skeletons of bats, have no money, etc.

The purpose of this guide is to give players a helping hand towards managing the basic mechanics of the necromancer class with an eye towards powerleveling a new necromancer from level 1 to level 19. Following the tips in this guide, a player should be able to adjust to the somewhat unusual playing style required to properly play a necromancer, reach level 19 far faster than is even possible with any other class, and get there with a sufficient bankroll to do pretty much anything you want.

A few caveats to this guide

• This guide assumes that the new necromancer will receive absolutely no outside help from anyone. No one will get corpses for you, no one will give you money, no one will give you eq, etc. Everything you get, you'll kill for and/or otherwise earn yourself. Obviously, there is nothing prohibiting you from actually accepting outside help (in fact, it's greatly encouraged!), but I want to make clear that it is completely possible to do it all yourself. This guide would be meaningless if step one was "get 100,000 coins from someone and have them kill Yosra for you every time you login."

• Necromancers are a highly advanced class. If you want to be successful with a necromancer, perhaps more than any other class you have to already have a solid working knowledge of the layout of Ancient Anguish, where to go to find appropriate kills for your level, how to get there on your own, and the general alignment of the NPCs in that area. If you're brand new to Ancient Anguish, pick another class. If you made it to level 19 killing nothing but orcs in Dalair and around the Scythe Camp, this isn't going to end well for you. Playing as a necromancer will greatly improve your working knowledge of Ancient Anguish, but it won't make it magically appear. Figure out the MUD first, then come back later.

• This guide is written by a powerplayer with an eye towards powerplaying. If your goal is to use Ancient Anguish as a chatmud...you're not going to find much in here that is useful. If you want to raise a necro who doesn't hit level 19 until your character's age is 2 years, then this guide will not be of much assistance. If you want to see the possibilities that exist in the necromancer class for making things dead quickly and earning gobs of experience in a short amount of time, then keep reading.

• While I expect to go into a fair amount of detail, do not expect a complete hand-holding. I'm not giving directions to kills or areas, and there will be no step-by-step instructions for how to get particular pieces of equipment. This isn't "from x, go 16w, 4n, 2e, kill orc sentry, 2e, kill orc captain/lieutenant and keep their gloves/boots, then go back 4w and sell excess equipment...". It's gonna be "get gloves/boots from Dalair." If that's not clear enough for you, tough. My goal is to help YOU play, not to play for you.

• I have previously been a wizard on AA, but I have never reviewed the code for necromancers. There is no secret wizinfo in this guide; everything you will read is the sum total of my experiences as a mortal on Ancient Anguish over the last 10-15 years (off and on).

• I do not claim to be the official, end-all be-all authority on the necromancer class. If you disagree with something I've said in this guide and have found a better way that works for you, then feel free to keep doing what you're doing. That being said, I've done a crapload of testing, and I can tell you with certainty that my way does work.

• Don't expect this guide to turn you into Lunger or Sinister overnight. My way of raising a new necro isn't going to get you to #1 on the lifetime efficiency list, and you can't expect to be consistently pulling 400k/hr experience when you hit level 19. There are some crazy things you can do with a necromancer, like raising your painfully slow exotic skill to use orbs. That kind of off the wall stuff is way outside the scope of this guide. This guide will get you familiar with the necromancer class and give you a brief introduction to powerplaying. The rest is up to you and how far you want to expand your abilities.

• At the time of the posting of this guide, I have not played AA for nearly a year, and I do not presently expect to return to playing. It is therefore possible that this guide may contain some outdated information. Of course, given the snail's pace at which necros actually get changed in AA...that's probably unlikely.

Necro Rituals

It's no secret: necromancers have extremely limited physical combat abilities. They don't have a ton of strength or dex, they skill slower with weapons than any other class, and about the only weapons they use well are knives and staves. Eventually, with max stats and high staff skill, you can do some real serious damage with your staff. For much of your necro's life, though, the bulk of your ability to make things dead will come from your rituals.

Necros don't have study hours like mages do, and there's nobody around to teach you anything. Your new rituals simply become automagically available to you as you increase your stats. The stats that control your rituals are intelligence and wisdom. Add those two stats together, and that if that number is high enough you'll get a new ritual. Many of these rituals also require you to have the right "component" available to you in your inventory to cast them; each of the components can be purchased from the alchemist 1w of the necromancer hall. Here's a list of rituals, the int+wis they become available to you, and the components you'll need for each.

Int+Wis	Ritual name	Sps cost	Component
2	Detect Good	5	none
2	Skeleton	50	vial of unholy water + corpse
2	Nettle	5	none
3	Summon	20	none
3	Will o'Wisp	10	glowing phial + corpse
4	Lifedrain	Variable	dirt from a fresh grave
5	Renewal	Variable	vial of unholy water
6	Zombie	66	waxen doll + corpse
6	Preserve	25	flask of oily salve
7	Chill Touch	Variable	some ice
8	Hold Undead	10	none
9	Warts	78	none
10	Shade	82	black silk square + corpse
11	Feign Death	30	none
12	Lifesteal	Variable	dirt from a fresh grave
14	Pox	98	none
15	Weakness	102	none
16	Mummy	106	mummy wrapping + corpse
17	Darkness	10	none
18	Disease	114	none
20	Fetch	122	darkly clouded mirror + humanoid corpse
21	Empower	15	none
22	Rot	Variable	dried worms from a hanged man's corpse
24	Insect Plague	138	small scarab
26	Mindkiller	146	none
28	Revenant	154	runed breastplate + fresh humanoid corpse
30	Pestilence	162	none
32	Lich	170	steel crown + fresh humanoid corpse
32	Doom	170	yellow sign

Rituals in detail

Intro

UTTERLY USELESS RITUALS

All the disease/bug rituals (nettle, warts, pox, weakness, disease, insect plague, and pestilence) are more or less worthless. Insect plague has some application in PK, but not in regular play.

Mindkiller also may work in PK, but it's useless against NPCs.

Hold undead temporarily stops undead opponents from attacking you. Then they'll start again. Whee! If you're really in trouble in a fight with an undead...perhaps LEAVING THE ROOM would be a better idea than trying to cast this?

Feign death...see above.

Darkness makes the room dark. If you're wondering why that would benefit anyone, ever...so are the rest of us.

Will o' Wisp creates an undead pet! One that does nothing for you other than...provide a light source? You need a glowing phial (25 coins) and a corpse. If you really need a light that badly at low levels...drop 50 coins and buy a friggin' torch from the store in Hobbitat. At high levels, you don't need it because your wand glows when you're controlling an undead pet, providing you with light. You wand won't provide enough light for you in REALLY dark places, so you might want to carry around a fire gem or holy gem as backup. But don't waste your time on this one.

Misc

Detect Good

You start with this one. Prepare it, then wave your wand in a room with NPCs. If they are nice or better, you'll get a message about them "glowing." The brighter the glow, the higher the NPC's alignment. If you're not to sure about the alignment of various NPCs, and they're not listed on AA for Dummies, this will help. Not much use for the high level necro, but potentially helpful early on if you're not used to having to track your alignment.

Rating: 2/5.

Empower

Empower takes away 15 sps. Then, it coverts hps -> sps, taking away as many hps as are necessary to max out your sps. This is a curse and a blessing. On the one hand, you get a nice refill of your sps to continue using other rituals, and proper use of empower makes necromancers one of the most efficient classes in terms of using both your hps and sps to your advanage. On the other hand, you have absolutely no control over how many hps you transfer. Empower will take as many hps as it can, every single time, to either max out your sps or completely drain your hps down to 1. Needless to say, that can be quite dangerous.

Empower has two main uses. First, when you kill for a corpse to animate, when you're done you can empower to quickly get your sps back so you'll be able to animate. Empower, take a few heals if you're short a few sps, animate, and you're ready to go. Given that the final two undead (revenant and lich) both require a "fresh" corpse (e.g. not "somewhat decayed" or balmed), time is of the essence.

The other use is during combat. Toss out a ritual or two, empower to shoot over some hps and max your sps back out, toss a few more rituals. There is some dispute as to how smart this strategy is, given the complete lack of control you have over the spell. Empower down to low hps and you might trigger a wimpy (if you have one set, that is). Empower down to 1 hp and have the NPC you're fighting pick that particular round to switch to you...and say hello to Lars. That's exactly how I earned my first death as Albeleo down in Drak.

My personal take: I empower in battle CONSTANTLY. Next to rot, this is probably the ritual I use the most. If I have high hps and mid-ish sps, I empower to keep throwing rituals and save on pots. When my hps/sps even out a bit, I eat or drink. Then I might empower again and keep rotting. My wimpy is set at zero, and if I accidentally empower down too low I'll quickly eat/drink or lifesteal if I can. Others have advocated tanking for your undead for a couple of rounds; I think that's a total waste of hps. Empowering is much more efficient. Yes, it's also more dangerous, but you have to find a balance that works for you.

Rating: 5/5, I LOVE this ritual.

Combat

Lifedrain

The weaker of the two "vampire" spells. You drop some sps, take hps away from your enemy, and some of those hps come back to you! To an extent, you could say that this is like empower in reverse (you're transfering sps -> hps), and getting in some damage to boot. Two limitations: it has no effect on undead NPCs, and if your opponent is super low on hps it will again have no effect. This means that while you can use lifedrain to damage your opponent, you cannot use it to finish them off. I don't generally use lifedrain that often, because by the time I start seriously getting into combat I already have lifesteal. But, if you're itching to fight and you haven't unlocked lifesteal, lifedrain will be your best friend.

Rating: 3/5.

Chill Touch

The first "pure damage" ritual. Grab some ice, wave your wand, watch NPCs get hurt. Early on, the process of getting a corpse will likely involve a lot of lifedrain/lifesteal to get the NPC down to really low hps, and chill touch will come in as your finisher. Other than that...I really don't have a lot of use for chill touch, even early on. The ice you need to prepare it periodically melts as you carry it around (bleh), so you have to use it quickly or you're wasting money. Plus, lifesteal is just an all-around better spell for causing damage and staying alive.

Rating: 2/5.

Lifesteal

Consider this "lifedrain on steroids." It causes more damage and heals you more. Still no effect on undead NPCs and NPCs with virtually no hps left. Lifesteal power increases as you level up, as does the number of sps required to use it. Bonus: lifestealing is considered an "evil act", so using this ritual decreases your alignment. Useful from the very second you get it all the way through to the absolute highest levels.

Rating: 5/5, you'd better carry around a few graveyards full of dirt.

Rot

Prepare rot. Wave wand at opponent. Worms squirm. NPCs get hurt. BADLY. Rots can be cast every round and they never miss. Damage is determined based on your int+wis, then when you get to level 19 rot damage increases again for each new level you gain. Oh, and did I mention that rotting is an "evil act" that lowers your alignment? It has exactly one limitation: like lifesteal, it has no effect on undead NPCs (notice a trend here?).

Rating: 1 billion/5. ROTROTROTROTROTROTROT!

Undead pets

Skeleton

Buy a glowing phial, make something deadlike, and get yourself a skeleton. They're incredibly weak, and at the time you get them you'll have no rituals available to heal them or renew their life force. Considering you can do the Balan beast miniquest + one round of CX and have more than enough int+wis to get zombie...I really can't imagine why anyone would bother raising a skeleton.

Rating: 0/5.

Zombie

The next undead pet, their big selling point is "they're not skeletons." Certainly more useful than skeleton, but quite frankly you don't really have a compelling need to have a pet at the really early levels.

Rating: 1/5.

Shade

Better than zombie, but shades can't carry anything. If you're desperate for a basher, raise yourself a shade.

Rating: 2/5.

Mummy

Depending on your race, if you're maxing int/wis at every level you should get access to mummy somewhere in the level 5-7 range. Mummies are the first fairly solid undeads; they can wear armour and wield weapons, but they cannot block with a shield (so don't bother giving them one, it won't help). Spend a bit of time to kill for a corpse above your level, mummy it, and deck it out. Once you get access to mummy, your game play should begin morphing into the true necromancer combat experience: you, running around the MUD commanding your undead pet, it attacking your enemies for extra damage and you tossing out rituals.

Rating: 3/5.

Fetch

The first of the "Big 3" undead, the fetch is a highly respectable tank. They wear armour, wield weapons, and they use shields. Fetches cause respectable damage to your enemies and soak it up very, very well. You need a darkly clouded mirror and a humanoid corpse (no baby dragon fetches). While "help fetch" says you need a fresh corpse to make a fetch, you can actually make one just fine from a balmed corpse. This is immensely helpful, because high level players in various guilds will occassionally kill big 9k+ NPCs and drop the balmed corpses somewhere around their guildhalls. It also means that if you're trying to fetch before you have access to empower, you can carry some balm with you, balm the corpse after the kill, and then you have more time to regen your sps so you can animate your fetch.

Rating: 4/5.

Revenant

Revenants wield weapons and use defend parry, but they cannot wear any armour at all. From there...oh, where to begin? If you peruse around the necro board, you'll probably read stories about these awesome dual-wielding, parrying revenants with their dual arrows causing massive damage. These revenants certainly sound awesome, right?

Wrong. Dual arrows was a bug that got fixed. Old revenants dual wielding was nerfed when the two weapon skill came in. New revenant dual wielding was OK for a time, at least until revenant two weapon skill was reduced to zero. Revanant AC was then further downgraded and their ability to parry was raped. Since revenants can't wear any armour at all, that's a bit of a problem. Theryn saw fit to restore some two weapon skill a few years back (rumor has it your rev will get a random value of two weapon skill between 40 and 70), but the damage was already done.

Here's the reality: revenants suck. They cause more physical damage with their attacks than fetches or liches, but it's impossible for them to tank. Put the rev out front and you're gonna be preserving non-stop, which means you're not rotting and you'll have to fly through heals to keep up your sps. Stick the rev behind you and wear armour, and you'll have no room to carry the crapload of heals you'll need to keep yourself alive since you can't soak up damage very efficiently. Pick the way you want to play; neither of them work particularly well.

If you use a rev, almost all your sps will end up going to healing either you or your rev. If you stick with fetch, those sps go to rots. Fetch weapon + your rots will damage NPCs quite a bit more than your revenant will with its weapon. All these downgrades have resulted in an allegedly "high-end" undead that is really nothing of the sort. While you can make exp with a revenant, you'll make a lot more with a fetch or a lich.

Lament the total demise of the revenant. This has now become another completely useless ritual, and it's sad.

Rating: 0/5. *bspit*

Lich

Liches are as great as revenants are bad. They get weapon damage that is only slightly below revenants, cast occasional spells for extra damage, and wear big heavy armour while blocking with a shield. Hands down, liches are the best undead. Get the best fresh humanoid corpse you can find, arm it to the teeth, and prepare for total carnage.

Rating: 5/5.

Pet related

Summon

Find yourself somewhere, and your undead pet is nowhere to be around? Prepare summon, wave wand, and viola! You'll generally find yourself using this when you've taken non-standard exits like climbing ropes, fences, diving underwater, etc.

Rating: 5/5.

Renewal

Unlike rangers' bonded superwolves, your undead followers do not last forever. About every half hour or so, your pet will start telling you its time on this Oerthe is rapidly drawing to a close. If you ignore them too long, they'll collapse into a pile of ashes. If you'd prefer that they stick around for awhile longer (say, so you don't have to continue fighting Yosra all by your lonesome), fire off the ritual of renewal and buy yourself another half hour with them.

Renewals cannot be stacked (e.g. +30 mins each time you use it, so if you fired off 3 in a row you'd have 1 1/2 hours). Instead, using this ritual resets the timer on your undead to the maximum. So, if you just renewed and then you do it again...you really just wasted your sps.

Rating: 5/5.

Preserve

Your undead is damaged. Preserve it to heal it. This + medicinals is the only way to heal your undead...so I'd say it's a pretty useful ritual.

Rating: 5/5.

Race

Ah, the age old question: what race do I make my character?

Elves

Elf: There are two reasons to make an elf necromancer. One, you're like CalviN and you just absolutely HAVE to have one character of every race/class combination with 1 million+ exp. Two, you hate your life and enjoy severe, agonizing pain.

Elves get a pathetic 12 str and con, so they're really fragile and lack the strength to carry much of anything. They also can't wield high-end staves. They have one less int+wis than half elves. About all they have going for them is a lot of dexterity, which I guess means they can amuse Lars and Death with their cool dance moves. Avoid at all costs.

Dwarves

Dwarf: Dwarves have 16 str and 15 con, each the highest possible values for a necromancer, so they've got that going for them. This is balanced out by their 14 dex, the lowest in the class. Dwarves, unfortunately, only finish up with 30 int+wis...which leaves them sadly 2 short of lich. If you're a maxed dwarf and you want lich, you're either going to have to grab an int or wis booster (you only need one), or save up the massive 260 trait points it's going to take you to get Exceptional Int and Exceptional Wis. Otherwise, you're confined to fetch or, even worse, new and *cough* "improved" revenants. I also don't recommend this one.

Orcs

Orc: For many years, orcs were arguably the best necros around. The lifetime efficiency king, Sinister, was an orc necro. With their high str, dex, and con, orcs are the best melee necros and will bash the crap out of NPCs with their staves. Their 29 int+wis leaves them TWO int/wis boosters short of lich, but that didn't used to matter in the old days of revs. But, with revenants completely nerfed and no longer existing as a viable option for an undead pet...orcsies got left out in the cold. Orcs are even worse off than dwarves if they want liches. Either whore two int/wis boosters...or you're in for a long slog as you save up a whopping 650 trait points to snag Exceptional Int, Exceptional Wis, and then a second point in one of those two. Unless/until revs become useful again...I just can't recommend going orc, unless you're planning on being in SK.

Half-elf

Half Elf: Finally, a decent racial choice. Half elves get all the rituals, so no worries about having trouble getting lich. At 35, half elves also have the highest int+wis of any race, which translates to the most sps and the biggest rots. This also means you'll be able to take more int+wis advancements per level, so you'll unlock the big rituals like rot and lich that much faster. The biggest drawback is their low str (13), which leaves them unable to naturally wield big staves like tetsubo. They also share the elf's pathetically low con (12), making them rather fragile. Since they have elven blood, their also banned from joining the Scythe guild, so this isn't an option if you're a dedicated Scyther. Half elf remains a solid option for a necromancer, as most of the power of the class lies in its rituals. Since half elf rituals hit the hardest of all, they can certainly bring the pain.

Human

Human: Humans rock the house. Humans are generally a "middle of the road" race with balanced stats; none terribly high, but also none terribly low. With necromancers, it's no different. That's their one and only downside, if you want to call it that. On the upside, humans in all classes have the highest total stats of any race (they get 76 total stat points spread out across all 5 stats, while the other 4 races get 75). At 32 int+wis, maxed human necros will get lich/doom naturally. With 15 str, humans can wield tetsubo. They also get to join any of the three guilds that accept necros. Good in combat, good rituals...seriously, what's not to love? Hands down, humans make the best necromancers.

Guild

Only three guilds accept necromancers: The Scythe, The Eldar, and The Courts of Chaos. Each guild has its own benefits and drawbacks to someone playing as a necromancer. The single most important consideration in choosing a guild for your newbie necromancer, however, is NOT what benefits/powers the guild can give you. Instead, go where your friends are (assuming you have any; we all know everyone hates Sinister). You'll probably be asking a lot of questions as you raise your new necro; better to have easy access to a guild line with all your ebuddies on it than end up somewhere with a bunch of people you don't know, or may not even like.

Obviously, that's not going to work if your favorite guild doesn't take necros (e.g. Knights, Bears, Snowfolk, etc.). So, if you're gonna need a new guild, let's look at what they each have to offer.

The Courts of Chaos

Joining Chaos will get you access to some commands that will marginally help you with your alignment. For example, if you kill something and bring it to the Chaos Temple, you can consecrate corpses there and lower your alignment. Theoretically, you could also get corpse help, because members can donate corpses to the vaults for extra karma. In practice...hardly anyone in Chaos is ever online. Those who are on mostly idle. So don't expect the vaults to be packed tons of free corpses for you.

Another major drawback to the few number of players in Chaos is that you have to have a "mentor" (an existing member of Chaos) before you'll be allowed to join. If nobody's online, or if ony one or two are online and they're being jerks, joining could be a pain in the ass.

Also, the guild's karma system can be a pain. You have to build up karma just to get any access at all to some of the most basic commands (such as "crush", the guild's way of getting rid of trash items like empty tobacco pouches). While Chaos is the only guild of the three to have a guild-wide storage system, you'll again have to burn through karma to take stuff out. There is no personal storage system in the guild, so it's either in the vaults or just laying around. This makes it very difficult (if not impossible) for you to gather up eq for your lich and save it for playing later in the day. Pair this with the sad fact that, again, hardly anybody actually plays this guild...and there's really not a ton of benefit to joining.

The good news is that any race can join, so if you're a necro and want to go Chaos, you don't need to worry about your race holding you back.

The Eldar

The Eldar accepts anyone of elven or human blood, so you get no love here as an orc or dwarf necro. The Eldar, unlike Chaos, has no "guild-wide" secure storage system, but they do have a personal storage system that rocks. You can store your equipment in personal "lockers" using the guild NPC Haldar. Give Haldar whatever you want to keep around, and he'll hang onto it for you at no cost. I don't know if there's a maximum storage amount, but I've never had trouble storing more than enough eq for me and my lich. If you do run into a limit, remember you can always put eq inside containers so there are fewer items to store.

The Eldar also have access to a tavern that sells some nice heals. The tavern sells steaks (25/25 heal) for 320 coins, a quite respectable heal. The big one, though, is the tea. Eldar tea also heals 25/25, which is slightly lower than what you'll get for sunsets/chickers. However, Eldar tea doesn't make you drunk, so it doesn't interfere with your ability to bind wounds with medicinals. If you drink enough of it, you'll get "cross-legged" and not be able to drink any more for a little while, but you can still use potions/elixirs.

If you're new to the Eldar, be warned that a large number of trolls inhabit the Eldar guild line. Unless your idea of fun is reading: "<Oscarballs> SUCK MY BALLS BALLS BALLS FUCK BALLS BALLS OMFG I SED BALLS BALLS BALLS BALLS BALLS" every three seconds...best to run around with your line OFF.

Trolls aside, Eldar offers some great benefits for a necro.

The Scythe

The Scythe is off limits to anyone with a drop of elven blood, so don't expect to be parking your half elf necro over here. For humans, orcs, or dwarves, though, the Scythe will let you in if you can get "nasty" and give Boki the corpse of something stronger than yourself (or a level 19 if you're there or higher). The Scythe also has no guild-wide storage system, but they have quite possibly the best personal storage system. For a measely 15,000 coins, members of the Scythe can buy their own personal rooms. You only get one room, but really that's all you need. Just leave whatever you want to save laying around, and you're good to go. If you want to share eq with your friends, you can give them invitations into your room if you want. With 49 hour reboots, you can get a full set of non-unique equipment (uniques will reset from your room) for you and a lich, play all you want, then drop it in your room and it will be there for you to run again tomorrow. While growing your necro, you can also use your room to park several balmed corpses to use for fetches (saves you from having to kill for a new one without a pet the next time you need to gear up).

The Scythe guild hall has a bar selling good heals. Primarily, sunsets for drinks and knuggets/stew for takeaway food heals. The bar also will not "cut" you if you buy too many heals, so you can buy as much as you want. All are quite good at a reasonable price. Extra equipment, medicinals, hobbitat gold smokes, etc. are often left at the guild board for others to use. I've also recently noticed some Scythers leaving some balmed corpses of high level NPCs laying around the guild hall; that's a big help for a lowbie necro. The Scythe also generally dominates Geo, so you'll have very easy access to Geo knapsacks, the best non-unique containers in the game.

1w of the sboard is the Scythe equipment shop. Most of the purchases are useless, but one in particular bears mention: the bottlebag. Carrying around a bottlebag, you can "dump" empty bottles, jars, and flasks into it to get rid of them (instead of dropping/eating them). The bottlebag holds a maximum of 10 bottles. When you've got 5 or more bottles in it, you can "release" them and the bottlebag will give you around 1hp/sp per bottle. Sinister's been raving about this for years, and I have to say...I've recently started coming around on it. You'll likely have a bunch of extra bottles laying around from alcohol/potions/elixirs, and if you just eat/drop them they go to waste. Put them in the bottlebag and you can have a 10/10 heal waiting for you. It's not a ton, but every little bit helps. Even better, you can dump in your empty flasks from the salves you're using to heal your undead pet! So look into using a bottlebag.

Note from Sinister regarding bottlebags: they apparently increase your magical tolerance.

For the uninitiated, the Scythe is not a "newbie-friendly" guild, so expect a fair amount of ball-bashing, cursing, and general mockery on the guild line. Don't expect hand holding.

Weapons

Staff

What, you expected this section to be longer?

Alright, fine. Raise staff and ignore pretty much everything else. Necros gain weapon skill painfully slowly in all areas. Staff and knife raise...uh...at a somewhat less painful rate than other classes. You want high weapon skill as a necro? Yer gonna have to work for it, and it's going to take awhile. Consider this: at the time of the writing of this guide, my staff skill with Alebleo is 55, and according to the AA website's player tools I have the 7th highest staff skill among all necromancers. Only one necro has ever reached 100 staff (Lunger), and he's insane. The good news, though, is that staves can actually cause some decent damage down the road, so if you focus on staff you will get pretty mean with it.

Knife skill goes up faster than staff. Knives also suck as a primary weapon. One use for knife: raising longsword as a necro. Necro longsword skill goes up at a torturingly slow rate. But, if you get 1 skill with a longsword, you can raise knife skill and transfer it over to longsword using Carcera. It still ain't gonna raise quickly, so this is only for the truly hardcore players.

Everything else you'd only raise if: 1.) you're an obscene skill whore who just absolutely has to have a bunch of pretty numbers showing up in their skill command; or 2.) you're trying to prove a point. That point generally being that you have far too much time on your hands.