Hello, everybody. Welcome to a new video of Baldur’s Gate 3. In this episode, I’m gonna share my Necromancy Wizard build and some tips for this school of magic and what kind of fun you can have in and out of combat with such a character. Necromancy, the most discriminated school of magic, too often is considered as the evil school, because of all it has to do with death and undeath. It’s true that most necromancers you would find are evil characters. For example, the notorious Red Wizards of Thay. But that’s not the whole picture. The school of necromancy is not only about killing things and creating undead minions. What it really studies is the manipulation of life force itself. Actually, one of the holiest spells, the Revivify spell that clerics use to bring dead people back, is a necromancy spell. So, good or evil, it totally depends on who wields it. There is a very lovely character in the game who is a necromancer. And you can also find some undead creatures that are not hostile. The Necromancy School is a very versatile school. It has debuff spells. It has protection spells. It has summon spells. And it has both melee and ranged damage spells that focus on Necrotic damage. You have many options when building from this school. As a wizard specializing in the Necromancy School, you get extra abilities to manipulate life force and defend yourself against death. And you are better at summoning undead creatures and making use of them than other mages. At level 2, you get the ability Grim Harvest. Once per turn, if you kill a creature with a spell, you regain hit points equal to twice the Spell Slot level you used and thrice if it's a Necromancy spell. At level 6, you get 2 abilities that enhance your Animate Dead spell. First, you can raise 1 more corpse. Second, the undead creatures you summoned have additional hit points equal to your Wizard level. And your Intelligence modifier is added to their damage. At level 10, you get the ability Inured to Undeath which gives you resistance to Necrotic damage, and your hit point maximum cannot be reduced. So, this build I made is a mono-class vampiric tank that fights on the frontline along with its squad of undead minions and summoned creatures. The core spell it relies on is the level-3 Necromancy spell Vampiric Touch. It’s a melee spell that deals Necrotic damage and heals you for half the damage you dealt. It’s a pretty economical spell to fight with because once you activate it you can keep using it for 10 turns without further spending spell slots as long as you still maintain concentration on it. Most battles end within 10 turns. So, usually you only need 1 spell slot for your damages in that battle. And it’s a level-3 Necromancy spell. So, if you kill an enemy with it you heal yourself for another 9 hit points. With this spell, you are constantly regenerating, making you really tanky. And besides it, this build already has a nice effective AC. You don’t get hit very often. All these combined, you have an extraordinary survivability on the frontline that normal mages don’t have. And, though you don’t deal a lot of damage with Vampiric Touch, your squad of summoned creatures is doing that for you. With all these summed up, the total damage you deal is still considerable. Speaking of this, let’s talk about when to use Vampiric Touch in the battles. Usually, I don’t activate Vampiric Touch at the beginning of a battle. I only start using Vampiric Touch after I’ve taken damage. Before that, I use cantrips to deal some damage while inflicting negative effects when necessary. For example, use Poison Spray to deal poison damage, or use Bone Chill to deal necrotic damage and prevent enemies from healing. So, given all above, when sourcing equipments for this build, what you should be looking for are items that enhance your undead creatures or enhance your casting ability. When originally allocating ability scores, we give the major bonus to Intelligence and bring it all to way up to 17 which is the highest possible for now. We’ll eventually get it to 20. This is to maximize our chance to hit enemies with our spells and maximize the damage bonus we give to the undead creatures. Then, we give the minor bonus to Dexterity and bring it up to 16. This is your second most important ability. It increases your AC, making you less likely to be hit. It also increases your initiative roll making you more likely to act before your enemies. Then we forego 2 Strength and 2 Charisma to bring Constitution to 14 making you better at maintaining concentration when taking damage. We leave Wisdom unchanged at 10 to get as much mental protection we can get as possible. And because we are a wizard, we have proficiency bonus for Wisdom saving throws which is +2 for now and will eventually become +4 at level 9. So, our effective Wisdom is higher than 10 when making saving throws. For the cantrips, first, we choose Poison Spray. this will be our default attack throughout the game. It deals the highest damage among all the cantrips. Then, we choose Bone Chill. It’s a Necromancy cantrip that deals ranged necrotic damage and prevents enemies from healing. And then, we choose Shocking Grasp. This is a melee attack that has an advantage on enemies with metal armour. And if you land the hit, the enemy can no longer use reaction anymore and you can walk away safely without getting an opportunity attack. Then, for the starting spells first, we need Mage Armour a must-have for any wizard who doesn’t wear armour. It sets your AC to 13 which is already higher than most light armours. You only need to cast it once each day. And it doesn’t require concentration. It will last until long rest or until you equip an armour or until you remove it from your prepared spells. Then, the second: Shield. Another must-have for any wizard build. It’s a reaction that gives you another 5 AC when you need it making you harder to be hit. Remember to untoggle your opportunity attack in case you waste your reaction on that and can’t cast your protection reactions. Then, False Life. It’s a Necromancy spell that gives you extra hit points, boosting your survivability on the frontline. This effect lasts a whole day as long as you don’t take damage and lose some of the hit points. So, you only need to cast it at the beginning of the day. I don’t recommend recasting it in battles to heal those extra hit points, especially not in the early game, because you need to save your spell slots for Shield. OK, then, Longstrider which I think is a must-have for any party. It increases the target’s moving distance for the whole day without concentration as long as the spell is still prepared. And it’s a ritual spell, which means if you cast it outside of combat it doesn’t consume your spell slot it’s free. So, every morning you can cast it on yourself, on your whole party, and on all the creatures you summoned. And everybody moves faster that day. For the other 2 vacancies, we choose 2 utility spells. Enhance Leap and Feather Fall. Enhance Leap and Feather Fall combined give your party more freedom when exploring the map. They are ritual spells, too. And they are usually always used outside of combat. So, they are almost always free. OK, now let’s talk about the leveling strategy. When to learn what. And what you can do in different stages of the game. At level 2, we get to choose into the Necromancy School and get our 1st special school ability: Grim Harvest. Now you can heal yourself by killing enemies with a spell. And at level 2, you also get to learn another 2 spells. First, we choose Burning Hands. It deals nice AoE damage for a level-1 spell. In certain situations, you can deal a lot of damage with this. But still, don’t use it too often, because your lower-level slots should be saved for the Shield spell. Then, I highly recommend Find Familiar. This allows you to summon a creature into your party to help with combat and exploring. Once summoned, they’ll be there until their hit points get reduced to 0. It’s a ritual spell. And summon spells don’t need to stay prepared once the creature is summoned. Then, at level 3, you get to learn the spell See Invisibility. This is one of the best abilities of a wizard. It lasts a whole day and doesn’t need concentration. At this level, there is also the Blindness spell. It’s a nice debuff from the Necromancy school, blinding one enemy for 10 turns without concentration. Blind enemies can barely make ranged attacks and they have disadvantages in attacks and you have advantages in attacks against them. It’s a nice spell to cast on a boss or elite enemy. At level 4, you get to choose your 1st feat. Here we choose Resilient (Intelligence) to increase our Intelligence to 18 and thus increase your casting ability by 1. Then, at level 5, we get our core spell Vampiric Touch Now, we can start to regenerate. At this level, we also get to learn another powerful spell that every mage should learn: Counterspell This allows you to completely negate an enemy spell as a reaction. Counterspell can negate any spell whose level is not higher than the spell slot you spent. If the spell’s level is higher, you need to make an ability check. But, since you have high Intelligence, you are rather easy to succeed in that check. The Animate Dead spell also comes at this level. But we can get it from our class at the next level. So, it’s better to get Counterspell now instead. Then, at level 6, you get your 2nd special school ability: Undead Thralls We get the Animate Dead spell and it’s always prepared without using a prepare slot. We can summon one more undead with the spell. And our summoned undead are stronger than usual. There are two options when you cast this spell. You can summon 2 skeletons to deal ranged damage. Or you can summon 2 zombies that fight on the frontline and be your tanks and infect creatures that they kill. The summoned undead will stay with you until long rest, or until they get killed. This spell doesn’t have a very long casting distance, so, you need to make sure there are 2 corpses within the range to summon 2 creatures at once. And, the corpse can’t be too damaged. That is to say you can’t animate corpses that died from fire, lightning, acid, necrotic or radiance damage. It’s the same rule as the one for the Speak with Dead spell. So, your party should avoid killing enemies with those methods if you plan to use those corpses. Enemies killed by poison damage are still workable. And remember, you can only keep the summon of one cast at a time. If you cast it gain, the former summons will be destroyed. Then, at level 7, you can learn the spell Conjure Minor Elemental to summon another unit for your party, which is recommended for any mage build. At this level, you can also upcast the Animate Dead spell as a level-4 spell. When cast this way, you can summon 4 undead minions at once. But, of course, you need 4 corpses within the casting range to do this, but sometimes that’s not the situation. One solution for this is to throw the corpses together. But you need a Strength build character to do that. Otherwise, you need to drink an elixir that increases your strength, which you don’t always have. So, it’s better that you have a Strength character to do this. You don’t need to always bring this character in the party. You can store her in the camp and only bring her out when you need to do this. Team work. It takes a village to be a necromancer. Anyway, if a character is strong enough to throw a corpse they can also pick up the corpse. So, when you play a necromancer, it’s a good habit to pick up corpses along your way, and then, store them in the chest in your camp. This way you can never run out of corpses and can summon your whole squad every day right after you wake up. You don’t need to wait until you kill someone. Then, at level 8, you can choose your 2nd feat. Here we choose Ability Improvement to increase our Intelligence to 20 the cap maximizing our casting ability and the bonus damage of our undead minions. At level 9, you can learn the spell Conjure Elemental to summon the strongest unit you can summon for your party. At this level, you can also upcast Animate Dead as a level-5 spell summoning stronger undead creatures. You can summon 2 ghouls to fight as tanks on the frontline and paralyze enemies with their attacks. Or you can summon 2 flying ghouls that have better mobility but are more vulnerable than ground ghouls. Flying ghouls can paralyze enemies, too. All these ghouls can heal themselves by devouring enemies who are kocked out, prone or sleeping. And these ghouls have this non-lethal attack that you can toggle to help with devour. If they defeat someone using non-lethal attacks, the enemy doesn’t die, instead, they get knocked out. And then your ghoul can devour it and regenerate. By the way, all your characters have non-lethal attacks. And it is here, a little bit hard to find. This sometimes affect your story. Non-lethal attacks are shared by the whole team. You toggle one, you toggle all. Then, at level 10, you get your final special school ability Inured to Undeath Now, you have resistance to Necrotic damage. At level 11, you can learn another Necromancy summon spell Create Undead It summons a mummy that’s nice for melee battles and can frighten enemies. This is a level-6 spell and use a level-6 slot. You only have one level-6 slot. And your recharge ability cannot recharge level-6 slot. Normally, this slot is more useful to upcast Animate Dead to summon 4 ghouls because their paralyzing ability is more valuable. But, if you can find something in the game that allows you to recharge the level-6 slot, you can summon all 5 of them and have the ultimate squad. But remember to check if everybody is following. Sometimes they get stuck behind after you fast travel. And you need to manually move them closer a little for them to follow. Finally, at level 12, you get your final feat. Here, we choose Ability Improvement and increase our Dexterity to 18 further increase our AC and initiative rolls. OK, we have talked about how good this build is. Now, let’s talk about its weaknesses. The biggest weakness of a necromancer is that you rely too much on Necrotic and Poison damage. If you meet some enemies that are immune to these 2 types you’ll have some trouble. So, you need to prepare some way to deal with them but not spend too much on those methods. And you are not good at dealing a large amount of damage in a short time. Nor can you afford the spell slots to deal damage that way. Your style is to keep dealing moderate damage by spending the least resources. And that is everything about this Necromancy Wizard build. Hope you like it. And if you like this video, please click the like button and subscribe to my channel. Thank you for watching. I’ll see you in the next video. Bye bye.
