It’s gonna be a long one, so let’s dive right in with some scene-setting…
The assumptions
This article is going to be indulging in some peak ‘white room’ modelling, in which our angry undead horde gets to fight on a perfectly flat empty field with no air resistance. We’ll dive into the limitations on that modelling below, but first let’s take a look at what assumptions we’re specifically making:
Our Wizard is spending all their Level 3+ slots on Animate Dead, and is also using Arcane Recovery at the start of the day to get more. They don’t have any issues finding sufficient bones, but also don’t have any skeletons hanging around from yesterday to reassert control over (which would let the horde grow to truly silly numbers). The skeletons get the shortbows and shortswords that are in their generic profile, but haven’t been armed with anything fancier like light crossbows.
All of the undead are sitting at the back firing their shortbows every turn. This requires them to be within 80’ of the enemy, not have any cover in the way, and not be taken out by one enormous fireball. Enemies also don’t have resistance or vulnerability to piercing damage.
The Wizard themself is issuing a direction to their minions to shoot the enemy, then taking a nap. Summoning all those undead is tiring work!
The undead are shooting at a CR-appropriate monster or collection of monsters, with the AC and HP that would entail.
The free cast of Animate Dead from the subclass is once per Long Rest, and benefits from the subclass’ other boosts to the spell (including increased damage output for the summoned skellies). This probably isn’t true RAW, but will hopefully be fixed before the subclass is printed, and would have been a lot of hassle to calculate for limited impact.
And conversely, I didn’t bother to calculate crits because they weren’t especially impactful.
Where I compare to a baseline Fighter, that’s a fairly standard Rune Knight fighter with Great Weapon Master, who BA Enlarges themself Turn 1 and then does standard Fighter things like Action Surge over a 3-turn combat. John Fighter picks up magical +1/+2/+3 weapons at level-appropriate points, and generally does his best to be a solid baseline for comparison.
The big numbers
First, how big is the horde? The answer is very, very big. Specifically, at Level 6 a Necromancer is opening with 15 minions, growing to 27 at Level 7, 48 by Level 9, 69 by Level 14, and a whopping 118 by Level 20.
Once this immense gunline opens up, the damage numbers are unsurprisingly crazy. Without any resource expenditure (beyond arrows, if your DM tracks those), the minions of a Level 6 Necromancer will put out over 78 damage per turn, increasing to a silly 142 at Level 7 and a comic 407 damage per turn at Level 20.
Putting this in terms of average encounter HP pools, at Level 6 it should take around two turns of shooting for the skeletons to clear a whole encounter (balanced for four players) by themselves. Even sillier, at all levels from 7 to 20 it’s likely that the skeleton horde should clear an entire encounter by themselves in a single round (or be a hair off, depending on dice variance).
And on the crackback, it’s not like the skeletons are glass cannons either. The horde starts out with 315HP at Level 6, growing rapidly to 570HP at Level 7 and cracking the 1000HP mark at Level 9. Short of some serious AoE attacks, that’s gonna take a lot of chewing.
Comparing all of this to our baseline GWM Fighter, the undead horde does anywhere from around twice the damage at Level 6 to more than four times as much damage at Level 9. John Fighter gradually pulls the comparison back as the party heads towards Level 20, but still ends up doing less than half as much damage per turn. And that’s while burning resources like Action Surge!
I haven’t calculated durability in any meaningful way, so the dramatically-superior AC of the Fighter doesn’t help him out here. But HP tells its own story, with the skellies able to sustain seven times as much damage at Level 7, thirteen times as much at Level 14 (where the Level 14 feature is giving out a little under 1000 Temporary Hit Points), and nearly twenty times as much at Level 20. AC, saving throws, reduced vulnerability to AoE attacks and not having his damage output degrade as he takes hits are all points in favour of the Fighter, but these factors have to work hard to overcome the massive disparity in raw HP.
The buffs behind the maths
So how do these silly numbers come to be? The key is basically the Level 6 feature Undead Thralls, coupled with the buffed scaling of Animate Dead with upcasting.
Beginning with the summoning of the horde, Undead Thralls allows Necromancers to cast a free Animate Dead (presumably once per long rest), as well as upcasting all casts by one level for free. So instead of getting four Level 3 casts of Animate Dead per day (counting Magical Recovery), they get five Level 4 casts. Moreover, Animate Dead now scales to allow for 2 extra skeletons/zombies per Level above 3. As such, the subclass here is boosting the total number of skeletons summoned from 4 to 15 with the same resources expended. And because Animate Dead now upcasts so efficiently, the horde absolutely swells at higher levels with only a few more spell slots added. Compared to the 2014 Necromancer, you end up with nearly twice as many skeletons on the field at every Level above 5, which is obviously a massive power boost to a subclass built around those skeletons.
Secondly, Undead Thralls also lets your minions add your Intelligence mod to their damage rolls, as well as increasing their hit points by anywhere from 8 to 14HP (depending on spell slot used and Intelligence mod). This translates to a roughly 60% increase in both the durability and damage output of these skeletons at Level 6, scaling somewhat over the character’s life.
Putting these features together, you are summoning around twice as many skeletons (a bigger increase at Levels 6-8 and a smaller one above that), all of which are hitting 60% harder and surviving 60% more. That translates to a vastly more effective swarm, changing Animate Dead from ‘kinda neat’ to ‘utterly terrifying’.
At least, in concept. In practice, there are some limitations…
The limitations
Working from the top, getting a reliable source of bones could theoretically be a challenge for this sort of build. In practice, I think the numbers required here aren’t really too crazy: the 15 piles of bones required at Level 6 is comfortably attainable in one raiding of a graveyard (I imagine, I’ve never personally engaged in that hobby), and is probably light enough that your undead Familiar and yourself could carry them. Those skeletons can then carry enough bones for the rest of the eventual horde.
The weaponry of these skeletons may be more complicated. RAW it appears that skeletons are animated with a shortbow and shortsword in their hands (possibly shaped out of bone?), given that those actions are innate to the profile. If your DM wants you to supply the weapons, then this adds an upfront expense but also an opportunity: why settle for shortbows when light crossbows or other weapons are available? Why settle for 13AC when armour and shields are options? This opens a right can of worms, and I expect most DMs would prefer to just stick to the bone shortbows instead.
Much more impactful are the social downsides of having an army of undead at your heels. Not only do NPCs often object to you making use of Aunt Jennifer’s old bones, they even seem to dislike the fact that you’re using someone else’s aunt’s bones already. Obviously this is a non-issue in a dungeon crawl, but may be a real impediment in civilised society. Depending on your DM and setting you may be able to get away with some (possibly disguised) minions following you into settlements, but chances are you’re going to need to go without your beloved horde in cities at the least. If a fight erupts in one of these locations then unfortunately you’ll ‘only’ be a Wizard (at least until the body count rises high enough for you to start casting Animate Dead in combat).
In terms of combat itself, a classic critique is that this many minions would get in the way and struggle to contribute. This is definitely true to some extent, as if the horde spills forward it’s absolutely gonna block out the rest of the party. But the 80’ short range of the skeleton bows is actually quite a long distance, and in all but the most cramped of encounters that can fit a significant number of skeletons. Just keep them plinking away at the back and they should be able to contribute on most turns.
At higher levels, one problem is the increased prevalence of resistance to non-magical piercing damage. There’s unfortunately no way around this, although mercifully by this point nearly half of the horde’s damage will be necrotic anyway. Higher AC is also a concern, given that the skeleton arrows will be capped at +5 to hit all the way to the end of the game. And indeed, by Level 20 only 30% of shots are connecting against an ‘average’ enemy, dramatically reducing the effectiveness of the volleys. However, this is already accounted for in the above numbers, and its effect is basically outweighed by sheer weight of dice: a Level 20 Necromancer could theoretically summon 118 skeletons in a day, without even getting too tricky with Signature Spell. Even with a 30% hit rate that’s still over 35 hits on average, dealing 175 necrotic damage and around 227 piercing damage (presumably halved against most foes). Even the necrotic damage alone is still more than our hypothetical Fighter is managing, so we can broadly dismiss this problem. Also, if you can access a source of advantage (Faerie Fire being an obvious one that’s available from Level 1 with even a little build/party planning) then all of these numbers shoot through the roof, with the effect being more pronounced the higher the opposing AC.
Next up is durability, which is a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand, 27 skeletons is a comically good target for a fireball or breath weapon if they’re all clumped up together. On the other hand, there’s rarely going to be a need to put the whole horde within range of one AoE attack, given that they’re aiming to snipe away from a distance anyway. Moreover, the tempting nature of the skeleton horde can itself be a benefit in this regard: if your DM gets fixated on smashing down your annoying skeletons, then that means the rest of the party is dodging any damage at all (if they’re smart enough not to stand too close). This is especially true against foes that don’t do AoE attacks: a group of Ogres or irate city guards will functionally never chop their way through the 1000+HP of skeletons you can drown them in at Level 9, and if they waste their time trying to then your party is getting to chip away freely.
One real downside to skellie-maxing is the opportunity cost of burning all your higher level spell slots doing so. At the Level 6-9 point I’ve primarily focussed on here, you probably won’t feel that too badly: after all, it’s not much of a critique that you can’t do many cool spellcaster things when your minions are doing more damage (resource-free) than the rest of the party combined. Certainly, it would have had to be a very good Fireball or Confusion to provide more value than the 3-5 super skeletons sniping away all day long.
In saying that, by Tier 4 most Wizards are basically gods, and if you truly burned all spell slots on your horde then you would be leaving a lot of power on the table. 13 minions from one Level 9 slot are pretty cool, but probably don’t quite live up to Wish or True Polymorph. As such, I would recommend capping out the undead horde somewhere around 20-25 (easily attainable at Level 7), and keeping your other spells slots for doing cool Wizard things. This also leaves you room to regrow your horde if it does get shredded: all it takes is one Level 4 slot to get 7 felled skeletons back on their feet, letting the horde soak up damage all day long.
Finally, perhaps the biggest impediment is time. Actually activating 27 individual skeletons would eat up an absurd amount of time at the gaming table, and quickly see DM feat applied to reduce their numbers. However, there are ways around this.
Running a Necromancer in a real game
Probably the easiest way to speed up the army’s turns is to have your DM houserule them to all activate immediately after you, and to roll all their dice together. As any player of tabletop wargames will tell you, rolling 27 dice to hit and damage needn’t take particularly long, as long as you aren’t being too fiddly about the details. Something like ‘I roll 10 shots at the lead bandit, everything above a 14 hits so that’s 6 hits, rolling my 6 dice that’s 58 damage’ probably only takes about 30 seconds, and that’s nearly half the horde already. Keep most of the figures pretty static at the back, prep your dice and roll quickly, and you could have your turn done in less time than the Monk player who was on their phone and didn’t realise they were up.
The key to all this is prep, and sensible conversations up front with your DM. In other words, some of the hallmarks of good DND generally.
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