Yeah, I've got Necromancers on the mind. For one thing, I've been playing such a sweet and innocent Wizard for several years (though he does use Summon Undead as one of his frequent concentration spells) that I'd like to make a dark and sinister character. I went... pretty extensively into how I might approach one in a recent post.
But here we're going to narrow down to a battle plan. Wizard, it should be said, are a class that can do a massive number of different things. But I assume if we're going with the Necromancer subclass, we're going to try to command an army of the undead to face our foes.
So, to narrow this down, we'll look at feats, a concentration spell, and other spells we'll be using.
But let's start by addressing the elephant in the room:
Animate Dead doesn't have a hard limit on how many minions you can create/retain control over beyond how many 3rd or higher level spell slots you've got. While we do get a free casting of this once a day, meaning we should ideally be able to have three minions (from this spell) at any given time. Bu we can spend more spell slots on it to get more.
Let's assume for the sake of this model that we A: do get to have some undead minions that the DM hasn't contrived to get rid of (do talk with a DM before making a Necromancer. It's reasonable for the DM to limit how many minions a single player is controlling, but also, DMs, if you are going to let your player play a Necromancer, don't take away the thing their character concept is built around) and B: we're not going to spend all of our spell slots on it.
As these are done at level 10, we're going to have two 5th level spell slots. I think we'll be casting Animate Dead for free at 3rd level (which gets effectively upcast at 4th level from our Undead Thralls feature) and then again at 5th level (which gets upcast to 6th automatically). That means that we'll have a total of 10 from these two castings of the spell.
We will grab Skeletons - while Zombies to have their place, they got a little nerfed in terms of HP in 5.5, and didn't really get any compensation, while Skeletons now have a pretty healthy +5 to hit and can also attack at range (we'll assume that they've got, like, "bone bows," or screw it, maybe we just carry around a bunch of shortbows for them).
So, 10 Skeletons. But we also get a skeleton via our Find Familiar. We'll have to see if it's worth using our action to get this eleventh attack (I suspect no because of the lower hit chance).
We will need to use a bonus action to command our Animate Dead skeletons, but this command can be an ongoing directive like "kill wyverns you see." The DM might argue that this doesn't let you pick the targets, so you might be spreading your damage. But I'm going to guess that these guys are going to be dealing a lot of damage in total.
Ok, next, a concentration spell. And the one I want to use is... Danse Macabre. This is kind of a souped-up Animate Dead, but it's shorter term, takes concentration, and does also require that "general command" as a bonus action. I think we'll want to prioritize the Danse Macabre minions, even if they're going to be only have as many, because they will both hit harder and more accurately.
By turn two, though, we should have our action left over. If we want to conserve spell slots, we could just shoot a cantrip, and perhaps just Fire Bolt (while I like my Necromancers cold like the grave, we might get a little more "hellfire" theming here). Certainly we could cast other, more powerful spells, but again, Wizards are so versatile that we can just assume that we're doing things like fireballing groups of minions or helping friends out with Vortex Warps, Dispel Magics, and the like.
Ok, now: feats.
I mean, we really ought to grab War Caster. The question then, though, is if we want to just cap Intelligence at level 8, or grab another feat. There are a lot of quite-good feats in Arcana Unleashed. Here's a bit of a nutso option:
Healing spells now work on undead and constructs, even when they didn't in 5.0. If we grab Abjuration Savant, we can cast Mass Cure Wounds, potentially hitting a bunch of our minions. Undead Thralls doesn't grant Temp HP, but actually raises the HP of our minions (I had initially thought it was the other way around,) which gives them more of an opportunity to survive some damage and get healed up.
We'll assume we have a 19 Int by level 10, so a +4. Skeletons have 13 HP, but the ones we get via Animate Dead and Danse Macabre will get 9 extra (our familiar doesn't, as it's created via a Conjuration rather than Necromancy spell). So, 22 HP per skeletons, which means they... might survive long enough to benefit from healing (at 14 we can buff them with temp HP as well).
Ok, so, let's figure out damage:
Skeletons have a +5 to hit with both their shortswords and shortbows, and deal 1d6+3 with either by default. Each deals an additional 4 necrotic damage thanks to Undead Thralls, so the Animate Dead ones (of which there are 10) will have a +5 to hit and hit for 1d6+7 each.
The Danse Macabre ones, though, get additional bonuses from the spell itself, adding our Int mod (+4) to attack and damage rolls. This should stack with Undead Thralls, so these will get a +9 to hit and deal 1d6+11 on a hit. There are 5 of these.
Again, I suspect that, especially because of the better hit chance, we'll favor Danse Macabre minions first, but we'll do the math for each, of course. But we'll start with Danse.
Ok, so, against an AC of 14, we hit on a 5 or more, so that's an 80% hit chance. On a hit, we're doing 1d6+11, or 14.5, and then an extra 3.5 on a crit. So, 80%x14.5 is 11.6 and 3.5x5% is .175, so that's 11.775 on each of 5 attacks. Multiplying it together, we're getting 58.875 damage.
That's... a freaking lot.
Well damn, ok. Let's get the Animate Dead guys in.
These guys only have a +5 to hit, so they need to roll a 9 or higher to hit (60% hit chance). On a hit, they do 1d6+7, or 10.5 damage average, with that same crit damage of .175. 10.5x60% is 6.3, so we'll be getting 6.475. And then... well, there are ten of them. So... that's 64.75 damage. (Ok, I guess we actually command the Animate Dead ones first).
And I mean... do we even freaking care about what we're doing with our action on subsequent turns?
I mean, Fire Bolt with a +8 to hit is doing like 8.8 extra damage.
So, by turn two, our 15 minions are doing a total of 123.625 damage.
We're... yeah. We're good.
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