[Madrados]

Just some rather random thoughts:

(It occurs to me that I might be stating the obvious here, especially the balance/pathing stuff. Also, I'm a sucker for converging theme. For that reason, I might be sticking to Retro a little too closely. Oh well.)

In the Retroverse, necromancy was invented by the Darklord in his quest to take over Welstar. It seems to be a mixture of his own biomantic experiments in creating chimeric monsters and Hekau, while using the Nameless One's power to do the "heavy lifting" of the animation of new, undead monsters. In my mind, this amply explains its similarities to biomancy while not actually involving any healing (other than maybe undead healing), as well as why it is generally considered evil (Nameless One's taint). Necromancers who animate undead would have to be secretive in societies hostile to the Nameless One (especially Welstar), while on Crypt (where undead labor is an important part of the economy) they could work and collaborate openly.

As far as necromancer's being valuable in parties, all that's really needed is a couple of the "right" spells. Prots like paralyze resist are prime candidates for party-focused (maybe thematically secondary) spells. These could be presented as a necromancer's ability to grant the qualities of the undead to the target (maybe through Hekau-style magic), while pets are used to do more active role in combat, through either melee or magic (A few other ideas for prots that come to mind are disease immunity, a reverse-iceblood (i.e. fire vuln, cold resist) prot, and those that Starstorm suggested, like temporary no uncon).

I'm in full agreement with the undead pet being an enhancement/focus of the necro powers idea... for necropets to be a viable path, they're going to have to be significantly different than the current in-game pets, and ideally necros that chose to make pets their focus would become rather dependant on them, while pets would offer abilities other potential necropaths wouldn't.

Status effects are, in my opinion, probably overdone in necro implementations. They also tend to be underpowered in retro, probably because it is hard to draw the line at which point they are overpowered. A few might be useful and appropriate, but I personally don't think they should be a focus of the guild.

There is definitely a balance that needs to be made between necro primary and it's secondaries and tert paths, as well as between necro and other guilds. I think one of the major hard-to-address problems in a number of retro's guilds is the lack of balance between the abilities granted in the primary and the actual enhancement of those abilities through pathing. If done right, you could build the foundation for some sort of blasting (maybe harm (attacking the life-force, i.e. Ka)?), prots, and pets in the primary, then pathing could allow an individual to specialize in one of those fields, or maybe a two of three approach, allowing individuals to go blast+prots or prots+undead or blast+undead paths. This would would hopefully allow necros to be well-rounded without being too unbalanced, especially if pathing requires some trade off. Also, those who want to play "good" necro to be a protter/blaster sorta in the strain of bard but without the tankish stuff.

In retrospect, taking the pets out of necro seems like it would make it just an improved Hekau. Maybe this is desirable. It would still be death/unlife related.

~ Madrados, Keeper of the Lore, Student of the Hermetic Arts, etc, etc.