Why is necromancy always weak as shit in games?

Play strategy games. It tends to not be shit in strategy games.

Name one cool necromancer. You can't because all necromancers are pussy ass bitches who got bullied as a kid and now seek the cheapest way to power so they can shoot up their village or something.

Abhorsen

Nagash
Acererak
Vecna

Because games are a product and made to be sold to an audience as wide as possible. Most people are pretty simple and don't need any in-depth necromancy in their games.

necromancy

in-depth

Arantir

he didn't play Tribes of the East

Missing out on kino

Necro mechanics should be command based, forming ranks, charging, formations, etc, while also supporting with dark buffs and such. i wonder if any games do this.

Cause whenever it isn't it's easily OP as fuark.

its kinda amusing how weak he is in Dark Messiah, he summons 1 bone dragon and that's it.

Necro mechanics

Well, now I want a business management game where you staff a mechanic shop with reanimated corpses. You have to use powerful magic to keep them in servitude, purchase better tools or larger workshops, keep it hidden that all of your workers are actually dead men, and launch raids on competing businesses to kill and then ensnare their workers to add them to your growing horde of undead tradesmen.

We'll call it "Working Stiffs".

Diablo 2 necro.

Necromancy is almost always strong in games that have actual necromancy.
Skyrim and the like(without mods at least) don't have real necromancy.

You need to play RTS/strategy games.
The whole point of necromancy and why it is superior to other magic lies in the fact that necromancers can have numerical superiority and literally raise dead soldiers of your opponents. Sometimes even powerful undead.
Like for example in WH total war series markers are created on the map where a lot of troops die. For example I had 2 big battles in this region thus I have 2 grave markers where I can raise dead from. You can instantly raise armies from these places and even high tier undead to quickly overpower any faction you're up against and it doesn't matter who it is since none of them can do stuff like pic related its one of the more stronger faction mechanics in this game.
All you need is decent economy and a lot of corpses.

That's the gist of it and its hard for non-strategy games to really do necromancy justice. Or rather the best showcase of necromancy can only be done in these types of games.

Sure there's Pathfinder WOTR and Lich path also repurpose mechanic which is quite fun but other than that not many other games bother.

Even a naive approach that just keeps adding RTS elements would have plenty depth that anon is looking for. That's ignoring any necromancy-specific gimmicks like mix-and-matching bones from creatures or Shadow of Mordor-ish takeovers of powerful rivals (by reviving them instead of mindcontrolling them in this case). Arcanum and Babby's Gate 3 added a LOT of depth to the world just with the Speak With Dead spell that would nicely fit in the skillset of a necromancer MC.

I think there's plenty ways to explore that class in more depth.
I'd love a death march where I lose all my hecking quirky skelebros and I need to buy time by using up my last Urn Elemental so I can animate the nearest cemetery to rise as an angry bone-and-meatball of the damned.
And if that's too le random and forced-whismy for you, I'm sure we can engineer something more exotic and highbrow by sticking to exotic cultures and their flavors of the afterlife. Every culture has sick-ass myths about the dead. Often with specific rites you could probably gamify in interesting ways.

Conventional gameplay formulas translate badly to summoner style play unless you lean onto tactics and strategy more instead of grug smash.

All you need is decent economy and a lot of corpses.

decent economy

Why do you need an economy? It's not like you have to pay dead cunts a wage

I really like hadagan reanimator style but hate what mail did to necros as a whole, it actually fucking unbearable. Classic server is deader then and cybernized designs are nowhere is sight on official. Life is pain as allodfag

Abhurensohn

Many games call it dark energy and the like(in WH its dark magic) basically the resource you maintain your undead with.
In non strategy games they just take up your mana. But well it is basically mana/dark mana and you generate that with....well repression and killings.

Ah gotcha, so they've got a totally different set of resources to a faction that operates on like food and gold. I don't own total warhammer so thanks.

well sure people don't want to play anything like that as evidenced by the deluge of autobattlers in the recent years. You are so smart you knew Vampire Survivors would be a failure.

Play Wrath of the Righteous where Necromancy is super OP.

A necromancer is inherently a weak ass faggot or bitch. If you have to summon minions to fight for you what the hell do you think?

i liked necromancy in tales of majeyal
minions are your meat/bone wall you freeze dudes from behind

Good necromancy should have:

craftable and customizeable minions

There's a shitton of ways you can make even a simple skelly interesting from simple melee/ranged/magic loadout to special abilities like bone explosions or self-resurrection

permanent minions

No Skyrim shit of summoning a weak nigga for 60 seconds

multiple minions

If your game's necromancer can only summon a single "pet" because your game is a shitty MMO or somesuch (I'll give Guild Wars 1 a pass because it was great), don't call it necromancy; don't have to get 1000 units on screen like in Dominions 6 but at least multiple different undead niggas would be nice

Come to think of it, bannerlord probably has a fantasy mod by now with some kind of necromancy in it, that could be pretty cool

Spellforce Conquest of EO has a unique system for necromancy in terms of building various types of undead from different souls and components.
Although ironically I think its weakest spec in that game.

it's always either weak as fuck because the devs limit it too much or strong as fuck because of broken stuff like reviving units

100% agreed
I also think that auto-summoning minions are lame

If the undead were powerful fighters, there would be no need for armies of the living.

Strong is lore accurate for necromancy albeit, like all those zombie apocalypse movies?
If a necromancer raised a low tier zombie army it would lead to a similar result in RL unless immediately contained.
So yea they should be strong.

Yes goy, be a powerful fighter, your corpse will be a good addition to my army

Literally any of the fallen lords. They come within a cunt hair's breadth of destroying all life on earth with some pretty trivial necromancy. Most of their units suck shit but the numbers make them completely overwhelming.

I don't think zombies raised by a necromancer actually would work as in a zombie apocalypse movie because they shouldn't technically spread a "disease" or something, however when they killed someone that person could be revived by the necromancer, but technically that would need a fairly strong one to maintain an army that big

So yea they should be strong.

Yes, it's why some games makes necromancers as big villains, but it's worth mentioning how usually becoming a necromancer comes with many downsides and it's why it's considered black magic, like becoming a lich

The undead are the perfect robots, will do anything for free and will work in your stead for free, farming? No problem.
Hunting? Not an issue.
and so on they're the perfect slave replacements.
Now you see why (((they))) think necromancy is so dangerous.

one of the core aspects of necromancy is the plague, although it depends on the setting most necromancers can indeed engineer various plagues/diseases.
Considering they work with corpses I think its kinda obvious they would be able to artificially engineer various illnesses.