Necrocarnate for a villain?

[hamishspence]

"Realistically" - and even that is a stretch - you're going to have access to Core dragons at most, and even with the Draconomicon there's a limit to what strong corpses you can use.

Maybe with Polymorph Any Object you can "cheat" your way into having better corpses to work with - polymorphing the corpse of a red great wyrm into a prismatic great wyrm, for example.

[danielxcutter]

Maybe with Polymorph Any Object you can "cheat" your way into having better corpses to work with - polymorphing the corpse of a red great wyrm into a prismatic great wyrm, for example.

I mean no sane DM would allow that and I think it'd be a fantastic way of shrinking your group if you had NPCs pull that off.

[hamishspence]

True. But even when it's a 5HD cleric as the boss and a 20 HD Zombie dragon as the minion (say, a Young Adult Gold) it can still be still a CR 8 monster - overpowered for a party of 5th level characters.

It just goes to show that Animate Dead scales too well when compared to Animate Necrocarnum Zombie.

[danielxcutter]

It's not a CR 15 monster though? It's half the base creature's CR and +1, so in that case it'd be a CR 8 creature. Which is actually about just right for a minion like that I'd say.

[hamishspence]

Fixed the error.

For a 5th level spellcaster a CR 8 minion is rather good. A caster with no access to Zombie Dragons would max out at CR 6 when creating zombies.

A midlevel cleric with Desecrate can be really scary, yes - though they'd only be able to manage one zombie at a time normally.

Casters with Gate can approach casters with Epic Zombie dragons in the degree of power the minion has compared to the caster, but not quite reach it.

Example - a 19HD caster with Gate can control a 38 HD, CR 27 Uvuudaum.

Not far off a 19HD cleric controlling a 75 HD, CR 30 Great Wyrm Force Dragon Zombie Dragon.

[danielxcutter]

CR =/= power though; while the zombie force dragon might do a lot of damage in one attack that's about it. It doesn't even have Power Attack without Awaken Undead.

[RSGA]

Hydrae are marginally less useful for incarnum zombies than they are normal zombies, as incarnum zombies don’t have the Slow quality. Of course it’s good for all the same reasons, it’s just not negating a big weakness like for normal zombies.



Don’t think zombified wyverns keep their poison sadly, and also wyverns have really bad maneuverability. Shame, really.



Also they don’t lose any to-hit and the lack of armor proficiencies is made up for by the natural armor and Dex boosts, so you could certainly do worse.

Two things I wanted to clarify. One is that the lack of poison was one of the ways I said that necrocarnum zombie made the wyvern's attack routine less good. The other one is that I was suggesting that with the increase in HD, the wyvern gets the Hover feat which only needs the creature to have a fly speed. In return it gets to hover in place, and if it starts a turn hovering then it can make the full sting-bite-claw-claw routine.

It also potentially kicks up a cloud of debris, so it's probably better at a choke point or as a defensive measure for the boss to be safer than normal unless it's in an area where this won't happen. Or if it's given some way of non-visual targeting or some extra reach.

[loky1109]

Thaaaaaaaaaat seems like an oversight or typo. I presume RAI is "can make 10 AoOs total, regardless of normal limits".

RAI - I don't know. RAW - definitely yes. AoO makes with "attack" line. Hydra has "5-12 bites" in attack line.
Plus:

A hydra’s Combat Reflexes feat allows it to use all its heads for attacks of opportunity.

It can be read in this way. If author has in mind "hydra can do as many AoO as it has heads" he should wrote this more obviously.

[RSGA]

It actually doesn't matter too much except for living hydrae. Hydras. Whichever you prefer.

Because it's a bonus feat for them (for some reason), and so gets lost with most kinds of undeadening that people talk about. On the gripping hand, if you have some way of shuffling feats around, it has a few that aren't of great value once undead (and Iron Will doubly so for the necrocarnate zombie) and Combat Reflexes has no real prerequisite. And for the necrocarnate zombie hydra that means being able to take four AoOs and once more being able to take them while flat footed. Time for a dorje and psion's eyes, I guess.


EDIT: The MM3.5 entry says that the hydra is supposed to reward having Improved Sunder and possibly teamworking using that, so that could be seen as a reason why it may be intended to hit lots of times with an AoO. Even if the guy up front doesn't have acid or fire damage, a head is gone for 1d4 rounds and AoE fires will cauterize. It even mentions readying an action to sunder when the thing tries to bite at you.