Dread Necromancer tank build?

[Falcii]

I keep feeling like the pieces are almost there, fear aura, DR, infinite self healing, a personal phalanx on a whim, but I'm having issues crossing the final hurdle to make a dread necromancer a convincing tank rather than someone who can summon a tank. Anybody got any bright ideas on how to make dread necro able to serve as a frontline fighter?

[Biffoniacus_Furiou]

The biggest thing a Dread Necromancer is lacking in is spells useful for tanking. You could use an adaptation of Rainbow Servant (Barghest or similar) to gain access to the Cleric spell list, but that doesn't help until very late in the build. You don't have the option of casting (Greater) Luminous Armor since you can't be good aligned. You could take a bloodline feat from Dragon Compendium to expand your spell list, but after looking through those I don't see any that offer spells that would help with this. You could go with some type of arcane gish build, but then you're taking the minimum number of levels in Dread Necromancer to qualify for your prestige classes. Leadership for someone who can cast defensive buffs on you may be worthwhile, but won't make up for the lack of personal-range buffs.

There's no drawback for using a mithral buckler without proficiency. Maybe dip something for proficiency in medium/heavy armor, and invest a feat in Battle Caster. Mithral full plate counts as medium armor, so you wouldn't need to take that feat a second time. You don't want to delay your spellcasting, but the poor BAB is prohibitive for dipping something like Dragonslayer for armor proficiency.

I'd say a high Dex, Mithral Breastplate, Mithral Buckler, and a cohort or party member casting (lesser rod of extended) Magic Vestment on both every day, would be the very minimum. You could do more item optimization, such as armor spikes or a gauntlet with +1 Displacement (OA) and plenty more, but any class could do that.

Get the Ghostly Visage familiar, have it always possessing you, and it can manifest over your face to use a paralyzing gaze attack. Maybe even get the feat Dreadful Wrath, or just read up on the Fear Handbook.

You could be undead and try to exploit effects that buff undead on creation. Say your creator was a Dread Necromancer 8+, had the Corpsecrafter line of feats in LM, and did so in the area of a Desecrate wtih Fell Energy Spell and an evil altar present. The Desecrate is normally +1 hp/hd, Fell Energy Spell gives it +2 so it's instead +3 hp/hd, and the evil altar doubles that to instead be +6 hp/hd. Dread Necro 8+ gives you a +4 Enhancement bonus to Str and Dex and another +2 hp/hd. Corpsecrafter and the feats that have it as a prerequisite gives another +2 hp/hd, +4 turn resistance, +1d6 cold damage with natural weapons, +2 natural armor, +4 initiative, and +10 ft. land speed. So your HP every level would be 1d12+10, effectively a Barbarian with Con 30. You could even have the Spellstitched template in CA, which costs gold instead of a LA and gives minor DR, minor SR, +2 turn resistance, +2 to all saving throws, and a few useful spell-like abilities from the conjuration, evocation, or necromancy schools depending on your Wis score.

[Inevitability]

Take Battle Caster (Complete Arcane) to get spellcasting in medium armor and wear some mithral full plate.

Take the Goad feat to use your high charisma to draw enemy attacks.

At this point your main issues are lowish HP and fortitude - boosting constitution is one way to fix that (gnomes are +2 con, -2 str, dragonborn gnomes are +4 con -2 str -2 dex) but spells Vampiric Touch can also help. The Bonded Familiar feat can also be useful to turn your familiar into a 1/day damage sponge.

Amulet of Tears from MIC is a nice source of temporary HP with very low cost attached.

[Inevitability]

Alternatively: Dread Necro 8 / Unarmed Swordsage 2 / Jade Phoenix Mage 10. 8th-level spells at CL 16, 8th-level maneuvers at IL 16, +17 BAB, some fun to be had in delivering said maneuvers via charnel touch. You can delay the final dread necro level to take Advanced Learning for higher-level spells. If you take Ascetic Mage, you can wear light armor and get your charisma modifier to AC on top of that, Mystic Phoenix Stance can further boost AC, and DR 4 isn't inconsiderable.

Boost tankiness with stances like Thicket of Blades and maneuvers like Shield Block. Law Bearer / Tide of Chaos are nice defense boosts (just be either LN or CN), use devoted spirit's healing maneuvers to keep HP high. You still get Undead Mastery as well, and if you can take Aura of Tyranny then you can use hordes of cheap undead to quickly heal HP in-combat (pack a ton of 1 HD skeletal toads within 10 feet of yourself, drain each of them for HP 3 times, and just fix them back up after combat - you don't even have to grab Tomb-Tainted Soul if you go this road). You can also cast a quickened empowered Vampiric Touch from time to time.

If you take Island of Blades during your swordsage levels, you can combine this with a ghostly visage familiar to automatically count as flanking adjacent opponents. And obviously, with how often martial initiators find themselves with a stray move action, Goad meshes extremely nicely with this concept as well.

[Fero]

I think the most often overlooked question to ask when building a tank is "what does the party get from me being tanky?" Many tank builds focus so much on survival that they fail to meaningfully impact the battlefield such that smart enemies simply avoid the tank. Similarly, many backbone and support characters provide fairly little benefit from being tankey (mostly just reducing the pressure on the party to protect said tank).

As such, I would start your build by deciding how you will force opponents to focus on you. In my experience, effective tanks generally fall into one of the following buckets:

#1 Big Threat: One way to force enemies to attack you is to simply be so threatening (i.e. able to kill/fully incapacitate opponents) that your foes must focus on you. DNs have many good offensive touch range spells that, if built around (Arcane Thesis, MM, etc.) can turn the class into a close range damage powerhouse. Vampiric Touch is particularly compelling as it gives HP. DNs can also learn some good close range blasting spells (Doom Scarabs) to fill this role. Similarly, some fear escellation strategies (intimidate, never outnumbered, Imperious, Dreadful Wrath, Aura of Terror, etc.) will force most opponents to deal with you.

#2 Heal Bot: good Healers can force enemies to focus on the Healer by undoing/mitigating enemy damage/status effects. A DN can be an effective out of combat healer if the party is undead/takes Tomb Tainted Soul. However, they cannot clear status effects and so are likely ill suited for this role.

#3 Aggro Master: Some classes (for example knights) can force an enemy to attack. However, I suspect trying to add such mechanics to a DN would slow progression and be ineffective.

#4 Zone Controller: Reach/Combat Reflexes builds force enemies to choose between attacking the tank or provoking attacks of opportunity. I could see a DN building around such tactics, likely by using advanced learning to get a weapon like spell (Blade of Pain and Fear?) or using MM to add damage/effects to Chill Touch.

[Biffoniacus_Furiou]

I think it could qualify as a zone controller if focused on fear effects/auras. Opponents would have their fear condition escalated to frightened/panicked, especially if approaching to within 5 ft. of the DN, and forced to run or cower and lose their actions. This would passively prevent opponents from moving past the DN, effectively protecting the rest of the party.

Plus the ghostly visage familiar can spend its action to focus its gaze on a target, forcing that target to save vs the gaze attack even if they're not looking and even if they've already rolled one that turn.

[Falcii]

I'm thinking about taking a level of trickster master spellthief to get shield at cl, and make use of the ghostly Visage auto flank, steal spells with charnel touches, then going into abjurant champ around 10 (probs retrain battle caster for arcane disciple- force for mage armor or something once that happens). From there I think I can try to focus fears. Dreadwitch maybe?

[Menzath]

I feel like doing a control build is the way to go, but I also agree with getting stances. I think the pick would be iron guards glare instead if you already have higher AC.

And I would add on to that another way to spend rebuke attempts, so a devotion or divine feat. If party healing is low maybe divine spirit or divine vigor.

For fear stacking the feat daunting presence might be useful.

[Inevitability]

I'm thinking about taking a level of trickster master spellthief to get shield at cl, and make use of the ghostly Visage auto flank, steal spells with charnel touches, then going into abjurant champ around 10 (probs retrain battle caster for arcane disciple- force for mage armor or something once that happens). From there I think I can try to focus fears. Dreadwitch maybe?

Ghostly visage won't automatically flank if it shares your space: you need Island of Blades for that. That'll take either a level of swordsage or two feats (martial study and martial stance).

[Falcii]

Ghostly visage won't automatically flank if it shares your space: you need Island of Blades for that. That'll take either a level of swordsage or two feats (martial study and martial stance).

Ahhh beans, I knew I was forgetting something lol. Well I'll still likely be flanking basically all the time with my posse of skelefriends.

I suppose it's worth stating, since posting this, the party comp has been more revealed to me and the party comp here is... kinda set up so i can do schwhatever and itll be pretty fine:

Summoner druid
Bard who is definitely taking requiem
"Probably a cleric or something"
Int based Blaster Caster (sounds like archivist atm)
And little old me.

Do we need a tank? No, probably not. We are gonna have so much meat on the field at any moment, its probs overkill. I'm mostly focused on having neat things to do rather than being 'good.' And I think debuff tank ripping spells out of people's souls seems neat. I'm going for a dread commander vibe at this point.

[Fero]

A few tidbits to add to the analysis:

1- Your character can fill the role of tank without being tanky by placing a large number of beefy undead between enemies and the party. A mid level DN can easily put 1,000s of HP onto the battlefield.

2- If you still want to tank yourself, remember that you can use Magic Jar (or if your DM allows dragon content you can learn the 4th level Bloodstones Frightful Joining from 348) to inhabit intelligent undead (Necrosis Carnex, awakened skelletons, etc.). That way, you can give your frontline DN a very beefy body.

3- The party composition has a lot of potential (assuming your DN and the Druid don't kill each other). If you can convince the Blaster to focus on cold and use the Lord of the Uttetcold feat, then the blasting will deal no damage to undead and will actually heal cod resistant/immune undead such as skelletons. This would be doubly effective if the summoner druid takes Rashemi Elemental Summoning to summon Orglash's that have Cone of Cold. In essence, use your skelletons to hold foes while the Blaster and summoner freeze your enemies to death.

4- If you decide to go heavily into minions, make sure you are organized so your turns go by reasonably quickly. This is doubly true since the party already includes a minionomancer.