Ideas for a necromancy specalist wizard...

[Maho-Tsukai]

It's easier then people think. While most people think wizards make poor necromancers compaired to a cleric, and in many cases they do, you can actually have a darn good necromancer wizard via an ACF and the arcane disciple feat.

The ACF in question allows a wizard to swap his bonus feats for domain powers. usually, losing bonus feats is lousy. However, for a necromancy specalist who actually wants to compete with the cleric and DN, this ACF is almost nessicary, since it gives you the deathbound domain power. Arcane disciple is equally important. The reason? If you take arcane disciple and chose the undeath domain, you get desicrate added to your spell list as a level 2 spell and animate dead at level 3, meaning you finally are able to compete with a cleric as far as undead animation gose. However, while it's not that big of a flaw, you won't have rebuking unless you take a class that grants it...such as the crypt lord or the animator...most of these however are 3rd party, so they are not always avalible.

However, on a build like this, rebuking won't be that great anyway since your going to focus on int for your spellcasting and wis for arcane discple, leaving you little to spend on cha.

There is also the issue that you lose your bonus feats. However, that is easily mitagated by PrCing out early, since the only domain power you really want is deathbound. A good candidate for this is the master specalist class. It's a easy PrC to enter and it can be entered rather quickly. It gives you some nice abilites and it's a full CL progression class if I remember. After master specalist you can take whatever PrCs tickle your fancy. Some good candates include Red Wizard of Thay if you don't mind giving up ANOTER school, Runecaster if you are a dwarf and any other full CL progression class really.

However, if you want to "stay on flavor' you may have to go to third party sources since there are few PrCs focused on necromancy that are good other then master specalist. A personal favorite of mine is The Animator from hollowfaust, city of necromancers. If you decide to use that one you will have to talk about your DM changing some of the entry requirements since they include having ranks in skills exclusive to that book and knowldage of a certain spell which is also from that book.

But anyway, thoughts? Good ideas for a necromancy specalist wizard or do necro specalists still suck even with the deathbound domain, desicrate and level 3 animate dead?

(Also, please excuse my horrid spelling and gramer, this computer I am on has no spell check function nor dose it have Word installed.)