Magery, Necro, and SW

Dan

I'm thinking of converting my old swords/mage to a mage/necro/spellweaver. Could someone give me a simplistic explanation on the strategy of playing these 3 skills together?

Rock

First, consider what each spellbook brings to the table.  Since the character is already a mage, you know it offers a wide variety of capabilities -- healing, curing, directly damaging foes, various summons, and QoL (quality of life) capabilities such as Recall, Mark, and Invisibility.  To get decent damage, you'll need its accompanying spell, Eval Int.

Spellweaving adds an amalgam of other capabilities, some extending what you already have.  While it has no accompanying skill to get the maxumum out of it you need to form an Arcane Circle (AC) with other players at the beginning of your play session.  On low-population shards, it might be hard to find other spellweavers to form a circle, unless you play regularly with friends who also have Spellweaving.  Since it needs no reagents, the mana cost of its spells is particularly high. So Meditation, extra MR (mana regen), and LMC (Lower Mana Cost) will all be important. A particular nice capability early on is Natures Fury, up to 5 little poisonous tanks that can do significant damage, especially if the have been augmented by AC.  In addition to the damage, they are also a nice distraction.  Unlike some summons which seem slow to attack, these little swarms are vicious. Weaving also includes several survivability buffs such as healing pulses, damage absorption, or auto-rez.

Necromancy is sort of the odd-man in your template.  It, along with Chivalry, were introduced as magic-for-warriors skills more than for pure magic users.  You didn't say if you were planning on keeping Swordsmanship, but if you are Necro would be especially beneficial. The Sampire template is based on weapon damage, depending on sapping life and adding it to your own.  That is not so say it won't be useful for pure magic users.  It adds a number of curses to your arsenal, some more summons, including some that don't count toward your pet count, and Lich Form which grants a generous mana regen bonus (at the cost of reduced fire resistance and negative health regen).

I've never tried this particular combination of spell books, so I can't offer tested strategies.  I'm pretty sure, though, in cases where you can send in two or three Nature's Fury first you'll be glad you did.

Arroth_Thaiel

Honestly, I always thought of a mage/necro/weaver as a summoner and ran this template for a while. What follows is from memory, so things have probably changed.

1. You can have 2 ev's plus all your necro animates up at the same time.
2. One of the spellweaving spells gives a small buff to summons (and animated dead).
3. With high meditation and lich form, you almost always have mana available to blast away with in addition to your summons. (And, since you're in lich form -not mounted-, you can have 2 ev's and a weaving summon in addition to animate dead).
4. Spellweaving pixies have corpses which I believe you can animate???
5. With high level stuff, sometimes you run out of dead to animate, but Word of Death more than makes up for it.
6. If you take Spirit Speak (SS=Necro as Eval=Magery) you rarely have to cast heal.

I think my template was
120 Magery
120 Eval
120 Med
120 Necro
120 SS
120 Spellweaving

150 Intel.

20 mana regen, +13 mana regen from Lich Form (about 30 mana regen total). Lich Form can take you above 30, but there really isn't much return on going above 30.

It was actually a lot of fun for champ spawns and just normal dungeon running. However, your animate dead disappear quickly, and are not as powerful as you would hope. Anything without a constant supply of new corpses really reduces your power. But man, when you get rolling......

Be interesting to see what this plays like with Skeletal Dragons as pets, now that that's a thing.

Rock

You obviously already have a race, but there are quests to switch back and forth between elf and human.  Racial advantages for your template:

• human: +2 HPR (hit point regen), partially offsets the -5 HPR in lich form.  You don't need to heal self as often when not being attacked.  If you don't have Focus in your template, "Jack of all Trades" gives you 20 shadow points.  This is equivalent to 1 MR (mana regen) and 2 stamina regen.  (If you didn't already have Meditate, your 20 shadow Meditate would be equal to +2 MR.  Since you have it, the real Meditate is used instead of the shadow level.)
  
• elf: +20 mana, a bigger pool of mana than other races.  INT 120 would be 140 base mana compared to 120
• gargoyle: +2 MR, you regenerate mana slightly quicker than other races.  Never need to take up a pet slot with a mount.
  

I included gargoyle just for completeness.

Dan

Thanks for the posts. My skills look very similar to Arroth_Thaiel's. I'll play around with summoning and see if I can get the new summoned creatures to help. Also sounds like animate dead might help me.

Dan

I also thought I might try Vampiric Embrace with life and mana leech by stoning in swords some time and see if I could tale advantage of the necro skills that way. I've never really heard of anyone playing a mage sampire, not having chiv or parry, but I think I'll play around with it.