Optimization Showcase in the Playground: Army of Darkness

[Piggy Knowles]

INTRODUCTION
With more than a decade and a half of toying around with 3.5, I’ve accumulated a lot of spare builds and ideas. While I don’t have an active game going right now, I still like to pop open my builds folder and try to refine things. Recently I decided to make a dedicated effort to flesh out some of these builds into full write-ups, and reached out to some friends in the CO community who might be interested in doing the same. In the spirit of Tempest Stormwind’s Weekly Optimization Showcase (imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, right?), I thought I’d showcase the end results here.

The goal is (usually) not to show off any fancy new TO trick, but to showcase effective, playable builds and spur discussion. While each of us has a different build philosophy, in general the intent is to create something that can be played in most groups from level 1 to level 20. Again, the goal is discussion, so feel free to discuss the build, talk about other options, make suggestions or tear it all to shreds. Also, feel free to use anything showcased here in any of your campaigns—and let us know how they work out if you do!

Right now the group consists of myself, the Viscount, Akal Saris, Venger, WhamBamSam, Darrin and daremetoidareyou. Typically one of us writes up the build concept and possibly a stub, the others share feedback on Discord, and together we refine things until we’re happy with the final product.

For this showcase, we’ll be looking at a really ghoulish build: Army of Darkness!

Army of Darkness
This is what happens when the deadites get the boomstick...

BACKGROUND
We’ve had a wide variety of builds in these showcases, but one classic archetype we haven’t really touched is the necromancer. Sure, Cold World probably qualifies as a necromancer, but there’s nothing quite as satisfying as a good old-fashioned shambling army of zombies.

There are a lot of different ways to build a necromancer, but this was a great way to showcase one of my personal favorite classes: horned harbinger. Buried in the decidedly odd FR book Faiths & Pantheons, horned harbinger is a horned devotee of Myrkul, Lord of Bones, the angry necromancer who ascended to godhood before getting ignobly trapped in a hat. The class itself gets a few really interesting abilities, including several animate dead SLAs that can be used at range and the absolutely fantastic general of undeath capstone, which increases the total HD of undead you can control from an animate dead spell to a whopping ten times your caster level. And while the class does not progress casting, it provides a surprisingly high CL for animation spells and SLAs, and even stacks with any other class that can do so.

So, with horned harbinger to take care of the army, we started looking at the best way to really dial things up a notch with the remaining ten levels. We quickly settled on a Requiem Bardsader, using White Raven maneuvers/stances and Dragonfire Inspiration to really make that army of darkness into something worth being feared. The build came together quickly from there. I hope you enjoy.

THE BASICS

• Race: Silverbrow Human. Human for the feat, silverbrow for DFI.
• Build Stub: Divine Bard 4/Crusader 6/Horned Harbinger 10.
• Alignment: Any evil and non-lawful. You’re a crusader of the evil necromancer deity Myrkul; what did you expect?

Army of Darkness

Level	Class	Feats	Class Features	Spells/Maneuvers	Notes (Click to Expand)
1st	Divine Bard 1	Dragonfire Inspiration, Power Attack	Bardic music, bardic knowledge, countersong, fascinate, inspire courage +1	Detect magic, daze, prestidigitation, light	Spoiler: Build Notes Show This isn’t the first time we’ve used divine bard in a showcase. In my opinion it’s an underrated class, and often the better choice for classic builds such as Song of the White Raven bardsaders/bardblades. The primary drawback is the requirement of a passable Wisdom score to cast, but if you’re dipping out with only 2nd-level spells, all you need is a 12. Meanwhile, as a divine caster, you can actually cast in any armor - very nice for anyone taking warblade or crusader levels. Anyhow, you’ll open things up with Dragonfire Inspiration once per day, which means you’ll be absolutely amazing for one combat and spend the rest of the day whacking things with a longsword or longspear. Not too terrible, all things considered. Power Attack is useless at this level but it’s solid down the road and a requirement for Divine Might.
2nd	Divine Bard 2			Create water, inspirational boost, protection from good	Spoiler: Build Notes Show Ah, here we go. Another bardic music use means another encounter where you can turn your party into an orgy of flaming death, and with inspirational boost you can make that even better. Divine bards also get access to the protection from XXX line, which for my money is the best defensive buff in the game for its level… but let’s be real, unless you know you’re going up against something that spams compulsion magic or possesses, you’re always going to spend your one 1st-level spell per day on inspirational boost.
3rd	Divine Bard 3	Song of the Heart	Inspire competence	Message, grease	Spoiler: Build Notes Show With inspire competence you now qualify for Song of the Heart. (If your DM allows you to use the Eberron sub level to trade inspire competence for SotH even though one is a pre-req for the other, thank them profusely, take Extra Music at level 1 and move Power Attack to here.) That means you’ll be giving +3d6 fire damage to every attack twice a day and +2d6 once a day. Nothing new or exciting here, but it’s still important to keep track of.
4th	Divine Bard 4			Desecrate, glitterdust	Spoiler: Build Notes Show One last level of divine bard gives you 2nd-level spells. Desecrate is another gem that appears on the divine bard list (but not a standard bard) and will become very important to you in a few levels, but for now you’ll just have to settle for one of the best 2nd-level spells of all time in glitterdust.
5th	Crusader 1		Furious counterstrike, steely resolve	Charging minotaur, douse the flames, crusader’s strike, mountain hammer, battle leader’s charge, leading the chargestance	Spoiler: Build Notes Show Well, we wouldn’t have a bardsader without crusader, would we? Divine bard starts fully paying off here now that you can slap on heavy armor (and even a shield, if that’s what you’re into… in which case shield block isn’t a bad maneuver choice over douse the flames) without any penalty to your casting. Leading the charge will add on +3 damage at this level to all charge attacks, giving you a second “aura”-style effect. Open things up with a song, then charge with battle leader’s charge and leading the charge for +13+3d6 bonus damage. Not too shabby.
6th	Crusader 2	Extra Granted Maneuver	Indomitable soul	Martial spiritstance	Spoiler: Build Notes Show Ordinarily you’d take Song of the White Raven here, but I’m going to recommend you hold off. Inspirational boost means it’s not actually much of an advantage to start singing as a swift action, since you’ll almost always want to use your swift action for the spell instead. That also frees your feat up for EGM, which makes the crusader way more reliable in general.
7th	Horned Harbinger 1		Bone horns, rebuke undead, Death domain		Spoiler: Build Notes Show Horned harbinger is probably tied with master of shrouds as my absolute favorite undead-themed class. If you can scrape up the knowledge ranks (no sweat for a bard), it’s incredibly easy to qualify for, and has a lot of completely fantastic abilities. You start things out with a set of bone horns, giving you a secondary natural weapon attack on a full attack (and extra attacks on a DFI bard are super deadly). It also does double damage on a charge, so now the +14 damage you would do with battle leader’s charge plus your stance instead does +28. Not too shabby. You also get rebuke undead, which is always handy on a Charisma-focused character, and the death domain, which gives you a mostly useless ability and adds some spells to your spell list. Since you aren’t actually learning any new spells, the latter may not sound that useful, but it means your divine bard class is now capable of casting animate dead, which will soon be very relevant. It also opens up item use if you want to nab scrolls or wands of spells like death ward.
8th	Horned Harbinger 2		Deathwatch, animate dead		Spoiler: Build Notes Show An always-on deathwatch is way more useful than people give it credit for being: since you always have it running without requiring any sort of action, you can use it in tandem with glitterdust to suss out hidden creatures if you get pings for something you can’t see. The real money, though, is your animate dead SLA. You’ll have a caster level of your horned harbinger level plus your Charisma plus your levels in any other class capable of casting animate dead... which for you includes divine bard, thanks to the death domain. That means a CL of 6+Cha, putting you well above other undead specialists such as dread necromancer. Better still, this is an SLA, meaning you don’t need to dig into your WBL and cart around a wheelbarrow full of black onyx. Don’t forget that you can cast desecrate before using it, to really amp things up a notch.
9th	Crusader 3	Requiem	Zealous surge	White raven tactics	Spoiler: Build Notes Show Since you’re making sure to have a couple of big tough undead buddies with you in most every fight, it’s worth a quick hop back into crusader to get the incomparable white raven tactics. And with your feat, go ahead and grab Requiem, which allows your rapidly growing horde of undead to benefit from your singing as well.
10th	Horned Harbinger 3	Extra Turningb	Bonus feat		Spoiler: Build Notes Show Horned harbingers get a lot of bonus feats, though most of them aren’t that useful for you. Extra Turning, though, is always handy..
11th	Horned Harbinger 4	Extra Turningb	Bonus feat		Spoiler: Build Notes Show Yet another copy of Extra Turning. You’ve got rebuke attempts for days. More importantly, you get another daily use of your animate dead SLA.
12th	Horned Harbinger 5	Divine Might	Captain of undeath		Spoiler: Build Notes Show OK, let’s start putting all those rebuke attempts to good use with Divine Might, letting you trade them in for +Cha to damage for a round as a free action. You can pretty much spam this, since you currently have 11+Cha turn attempts per day. Meanwhile you get the absolutely fantastic captain of undeath ability, which ups the undead you can control to five times your caster level.
13th	Horned Harbinger 6		Create undead		Spoiler: Build Notes Show Create undead now comes along once per day, again as an SLA to avoid those annoying spell costs. You can always downgrade this to animate, netting you an extra use, but don’t forget that you already have a high enough CL on this ability to create mummies or mohrgs. Mummies are great in general, while mohrgs are mostly nice if you want to really drive home the whole “general of the undead” thing, since they can create and control zombies of their own.
14th	Horned Harbinger 7	Extra Turningb	Bonus feat, ranged animation		Spoiler: Build Notes Show Another use of Extra Turning (I said horned harbingers get a lot of bonus feats, didn’t I?), but the real money here is ranged animation, letting you use your animate dead SLA at medium range. That’s one of my absolute favorite abilities of the horned harbinger, and in practice it means animating corpses mid-combat becomes a perfectly viable tactic. The ability to turn any corpse into yet another soldier fighting under your flag with only a standard action is so thematic and perfect, and I love it.
15th	Horned Harbinger 8	Martial Study (flanking maneuver)	Create greater undead	Flanking maneuver	Spoiler: Build Notes Show With create greater undead you can now create several forms of incorporeal undead, as well as the devourer. Incorporeal undead are hardly an unstoppable force at this level but they’re still quite useful, with most of them able to dish out decent quantities of ability score or energy damage/drain, and many of them also quite effective in spying/infiltrating scenarios. As for the devourer, it isn’t that great as a combat form at this level but is handy if you need to eat someone’s soul to prevent them from being resurrected. As for your feat, you qualify for 5th-level manuevers at this point, so spend a feat to nab flanking maneuver, which is a great way to multiply damage by giving your army of deadites an extra attack.
16th	Horned Harbinger 9	Extra Turningb	Bonus feat		Spoiler: Build Notes Show More Extra Turning, bringing you now up to 19+Cha uses per day.
17th	Horned Harbinger 10		General of undeath		Spoiler: Build Notes Show The capstone of horned harbinger is a doozy: general of undeath gives you a whopping ten times your caster level for the purposes of controlling animated dead. I doubt I need to spend much time explaining why that’s so good.
18th	Crusader 4	Song of the White Raven	Steely resolve 10	Crusader’s strike -> order forged from chaos	Spoiler: Build Notes Show Finishing things out, you could go back to bard, which would have the benefit of continuing to improve your animate CL, but crusader means you get some very nice maneuvers for an undead general and close things out with a higher BAB. Case in point: order forged from chaos, a great way to position your army properly and get those slow moving zombies to the front-lines. Meanwhile with Song of the White Raven, you add another d6 of damage to all of their attacks.
19th	Crusader 5			War leader’s charge	Spoiler: Build Notes Show You haven’t forgotten about your crown of bones, have you? War leader’s charge gives you a charge with +35 bonus to damage. Combined with leading the charge and the doubling from your crown of bones, that’s +94 bonus damage on a charge, before adding things like your Strength and Charisma damage, weapon enhancements, etc. (many of which are also doubled).
20th	Crusader 6		Smite 1/day	Douse the flames -> clarion call	Spoiler: Build Notes Show A final level in crusader means you finish epic-ready with +16 BAB and lets you close things out with clarion call. Open combat up with inspirational boost and a song, followed by order forged from chaos to get everyone into position. Then next turn activate Divine Might, charge in with war leader’s charge and take someone out, allowing you to use clarion call to grant all of your undead baddies a free extra attack or movement.

Spoiler: Stat Suggestions

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Strength and Charisma are the name of the game. Keep both as high as possible, and make sure your Wisdom is at 12 so you can cast desecrate (though it never needs to be any higher than this). Dex and Int can safely be dumped, but if you’re starting in the lower levels and playing with a low point buy, you may want to consider bumping one of your crusader levels a bit earlier for the armor proficiency.

SAMPLE STAT ARRAYS:
28-point buy: Str 16/Dex 8/Con 12/Int 8/Wis 12/Cha 16
32-point buy: Str 16/Dex 10/Con 14/Int 8/Wis 12/Cha 16

Spoiler: Skills Notes

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This is pretty much up to you. You’ll need 8 ranks in knowledge (the planes) to qualify for horned harbinger, and of course you’ll want a few ranks in perform. Some knowledge (religion) probably wouldn’t go amiss just so you know a little bit about the unholy terrors you’re creating. But beyond that, you’re wide open, so take whatever best suits you.

Spoiler: Equipment Recommendations

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All of the usual accoutrements for an inspire courage user will be good here: a badge of valor and a vest of legends will really turn things up a notch for you. Your spellcasting is fairly minimal but can be easily expanded with wands. An amulet of natural attacks can be a nice way to stick some useful enchantments on that crown of horns. Beyond that, boost Strength and Charisma as much as possible and equip yourself like any crusader.

BUILD SUMMARY
Let’s see what we ended up with. You close things out with +16 BAB and 7th-level maneuvers, focusing on either charges or things that boost the party, such as leading the charge, white raven tactics, order forged from chaos and flanking maneuver. You have oodles of turn attempts and Divine Might, letting you put that excellent Charisma to good use in combat. In addition to your standard attacks, you have a set of horns as a secondary weapon or can use them in a charge for double damage, and with war leader’s charge and your stance, dishing out level-appropriate damage should be a breeze. You also have rather decent bardic music, able to add on +3d6 fire damage via dragonfire inspiration before items (and as much as +5d6 with items). This even affects the undead, thanks to Requiem…

...and speaking of undead, you’re actually one hell of a necromancer. That’s what we’re here for, right? Bardsaders are nothing new, but where you differ is that unlike the typical bardsader, you make your own friends. Assuming Charisma boosting items, you should have a CL of 25 on animate dead/create undead/create greater undead. You can use these as spell-like abilities up to 4 times per day, without dumping your whole WBL into cartloads of black onyx, and can even animate from over a hundred feet away. You get desecrate as well, just in case you wanted to boost things up a notch. And thanks to general of undeath, you can control ten times your caster level in undead this way, meaning a whopping 250 HD of shambling flesh.

That’s right: you can summon an army of deadites that would make your average dread necromancer or fell animate wizard bury their head in shame, wreath them all in dragonfire and then charge in alongside them in battle.

VARIANTS
We didn’t have a ton of variants on this one for once: this is one of the rare instances where the first draft and the final version of the build ended up remarkably similar. We talked about a version that uses a shield, with shield block and shield counter to up its defensive utility a bit, and that’s still an easy adjustment. You can also go for more divine or domain feats beyond just Divine Might; you’ll certainly have the turn attempts to power them. Basically, stick with the build’s basic structure and you can’t really go wrong with minor changes.

SOURCES

• Horned harbinger: Faiths and Pantheons
• Crusader, Song of the White Raven, Martial Study, Extra Granted Maneuver, maneuvers/stances: Tome of Battle
• Divine Might: Complete Warrior
• Divine Bard: Unearthed Arcana/SRD
• Dragonfire Inspiration, Silverbrow Human: Races of the Dragon
• Song of the Heart: Eberron Campaign Setting
• Requiem: Libris Mortis

***

And that’s that! Please let us know what you think in the comments, and what you’d like to see for future showcases!

[Piggy Knowles]

Click here for a list of all prior showcases!

[TheCount]

that sounds great for a Halloween/evil campaign, though, you might have trouble arming your forces/finding the right bodies.

[FauxKnee]

Thanks for sharing! I always look forward to these threads. They usually make excellent use of some obscure class or ability, which is a blast to see and think through. Horned Harbinger is pretty wacky.

[WhamBamSam]

that sounds great for a Halloween/evil campaign, though, you might have trouble arming your forces/finding the right bodies.

I played in a long-running campaign as a DFI bard in a party with a Death Master and an evil Cleric, and you'd be surprised. Even fighting mostly humanoid nations (as we were), and the capricious whimsy of fate/the DM capriciously destroying or just making difficult to retain a precious hydra skeleton or whatever, you can generally find a way to scrounge up something that you can use.

[Zanos]

General of Undeath was reprinted in spell compendium with a huge nerf. You can achieve similar sized pools with a rod of undead mastery, though.

[Piggy Knowles]

General of Undeath was reprinted in spell compendium with a huge nerf. You can achieve similar sized pools with a rod of undead mastery, though.

Though they share a name and have similar abilities, the "general of undeath" class feature you pick up as a horned harbinger isn't a spell-like ability and doesn't actually duplicate or reference the spell at all. It's an independent supernatural ability, so the SpC update shouldn't really impact it.

Also, if you're really concerned about finding sources for corpses and don't mind dipping even further into... morally dubious arenas, fitting on the Wild Cohort feat might be worth considering. An animal companion that dies can be replaced in 24 hours with no penalties, so you could continuously summon new animal companions, slay them and raise them. It seems pretty low, even for a necromancer, but hey, desperate times call for desperate measures.

[Malphegor]

Tbh with the sheer number you eventually raise, at a table it’s probably easier to just toss your big numbers of basic zombies at most problems rather than get creative with the undead. With the boosted damage and sheer mass of them a lot of basic threats aren’t a problem ever.

[Aegis013]

I do enjoy the idea of playing a death knight by mixing Crusader and Necromancy, and this one has some nice perks. At high levels its stronger than a gestalt build I came up with to do this very thing (abusing Share Soulmeld with a psicrystal, two familiars, and Necrocarnum Circlets).

The biggest drawback is having to reach level 8-9 for your shtick to take off, though that's unbearable given how many cool combos like this don't come online until 12+.

Very cool.

[Zaq]

Excellent work, as always. Love these showcases so much.

One thing that worries me: your effective cleric level for rebuking is just your HH level, right? Captain/General of Undeath raise the cap for HD you can hold at once but don't actually increase your ability to succeed on your rebuking checks in the first place. Do you actually have enough juice to get the beasties you make with create undead and create greater undead (which are, unlike animate dead, explicitly not under your control at time of creation)? That requires that your turning level (not turning damage, which at least scales with CHA, and not max cap of how many can be commanded at once, which is boosted by those class features) to be twice as high as the HD of the target. I don't see you having those numbers, to be honest. Can you delve into that a bit?

Though they share a name and have similar abilities, the "general of undeath" class feature you pick up as a horned harbinger isn't a spell-like ability and doesn't actually duplicate or reference the spell at all. It's an independent supernatural ability, so the SpC update shouldn't really impact it.

Also, if you're really concerned about finding sources for corpses and don't mind dipping even further into... morally dubious arenas, fitting on the Wild Cohort feat might be worth considering. An animal companion that dies can be replaced in 24 hours with no penalties, so you could continuously summon new animal companions, slay them and raise them. It seems pretty low, even for a necromancer, but hey, desperate times call for desperate measures.

I remember this being a major strategy in the Guild Wars PVP metagame around, like, 2006 or so...

[Zanos]

Though they share a name and have similar abilities, the "general of undeath" class feature you pick up as a horned harbinger isn't a spell-like ability and doesn't actually duplicate or reference the spell at all. It's an independent supernatural ability, so the SpC update shouldn't really impact it.

Also, if you're really concerned about finding sources for corpses and don't mind dipping even further into... morally dubious arenas, fitting on the Wild Cohort feat might be worth considering. An animal companion that dies can be replaced in 24 hours with no penalties, so you could continuously summon new animal companions, slay them and raise them. It seems pretty low, even for a necromancer, but hey, desperate times call for desperate measures.

You're right, it's a separate feature.

I have seen the animal companion thing done before to farm bears to reanimate; quite powerful, and very Evil. Conjuring up outsiders to reanimate with halasters fetch or planar binding works too, but maybe not for this build.

Tbh with the sheer number you eventually raise, at a table it’s probably easier to just toss your big numbers of basic zombies at most problems rather than get creative with the undead. With the boosted damage and sheer mass of them a lot of basic threats aren’t a problem ever.

I don't recommend packing in a horde unless your DM lets you turn it into some kind of swarm. A handful of very powerful undead will usually perform better and be easier to run for, since high level threats in 3.5 tend to be mostly invincible against much lower level enemies.

[TheCount]

at least, you can do the whole undead archers trick, launching volley after volley.

[ExLibrisMortis]

I really like this build. It combines two of my favourite concepts into one: the dread necromancer-with-Horned Harbinger-dip, and the divine bardsader-with-PrCs (always a good idea, since your IC can be advanced with feats/items). There's even synergy between the horns and White Raven maneuvers!

With a vest of legends, masterwork war horn, inspirational boost and a badge of valour, you could have IC +7, but at a high action cost.
If you took Chaos Music, you'd be one level short of full IC advancement, which is a bit annoying (that last level costs you +1 IC, which would take you up to +8) and probably not worth it.
Dark Speech doesn't let you double IC boosts, which always annoys me, because evil bardsaders should definitely exist (as this build shows!). But that's not a problem with the build, it's a problem with Dark Speech being stupid.

If you do have a vest and horn, and you have multiple strong minions (e.g. Large dragon skeletons), I would recommend using both IC and DFI. A basic version of your first turn would look like this:

Swift - activate IC
Move - Order Forged from Chaos
Standard - activate DFI

That gives you +5d6 DFI and +5 IC plus the positioning advantages.

You can increase your music further by adding a badge of valour, activated right after you end your turn. You can also combine a belt of battle with a pre-cast/use-activated harmonize (learned instead of glitterdust) to free up your standard or swift action. That lets you add inspirational boost, WRT, or a standard-action spell/maneuver (get a wand chamber and cast haste!). I think I'd rather use White Raven Tactics, haste, and Clarion Call than these small IC boosts, but with enough minions, more IC beats almost anything else.

Leaning into minionmancy a bit more, adding bard 5-7 gets you haste and Song of the Heart as bonus feat, freeing up a feat for Song of the White Raven early on, as well as extra uses of bardic music (useful when you're inspiring twice per encounter). Interestingly, crusader 4-6 adds so much to the build, that it keeps up with a bard's haste (in part due to low CL on the bard), but you might need Extra Music somewhere (either with a flaw, or replacing PA/Divine Might).

Alignment restrictions permitting (i.e. your DM doesn't mind reflavouring RKV and Lawful bards), you could replace HH 4-10 with RKV 7. That lets you use both musics on round one, and still get a charge off (or haste + Order Forged from Chaos, which is a lovely combination). If you don't mind losing HH 3 as well, you can throw in another level of bard and hit 20th-level IC with Chaos Music, or an 8th level of RKV to get IL 17 and War Master's Charge.

So many options. Bardsaders are the best thing.

[rrwoods]

but don’t forget that you already have a high enough CL on this ability to create mummies or mohrgs.

This appears at HH level 6 in reference to create undead; if I'm reading HH and the spell description correctly this implies your Charisma bonus is +12 at this point. I feel like I must be missing something.