HoMM IV Necromancer

[Dizine]

What are the best skill combinations to give a necromancer?

For example you can make a Demonologist by having death magic and nature magic, which is cool to summon a crap load of creatures.
But what other skills would be good to give such a hero to be the "best"

I hate giving a powerful hero wastefull skills.

Any other necro combinations?

[Corelanis]

Depends on things like is he the only hero where hes going to be and such. Im going to assume you mean your main hero with no other heros in the same army.
1 Combat obvioulsy
2 Death magic of course
3 Tactics
4/5 any 2 nature, chaos, or order magics or if you want easy xp/resources/artifacts scouting with stealth.
Nature is useful for 2 reasons 1 being the summoning spells and 2 being the summoning skill even better if you have equilibrius mod that way you could convert them to undead or just use water elementals. Chaos has some cool buffs and damage spells and order is just kinda there cuse you can learn order spells at your mage guild.

[Muszka]

I would say that the ideal is to have two heroes, one might, the other magic oriented.
Presumeably the Necromancer would be the magic hero.
Nature indee is good, but only if you can learn spells from somewhere. (A dragonstrengthed Vampire is great).
Order is has also great spells, and it can be found in your mageguild(as Corelanis said), in some manner it can complete the Necro's curse collection.
Chaos is also avalaible in your town, but I don't use that mach damaging spells with undead.
Life isn't present in mageguild. And some of his spell cannot be cast on undead.
So my vote would go for Order, and maybe Combat(inexperienced players should always take Combat).

If you play solo(only a hero or more of them), you might want to try the following combination. Death + Scouting (Ninja) + Combat (as a sidenote I would like to add, that ninjas are great only in Equilibris) or Death + Life (Dark Priest) + Combat
But it would be a fault to generalize. Many thing depends on the map, the size of it, the resourcefulness(shrines, additonal skill giving buildings, lvluptrees), the enemies, and ...
But one thing is sure, it's always better to have two or three skills fully mastered, than to have five skills on Expert.

[TheUndeadKing]

(Hire a Death Knight hero and concentrate on Tactics skills)

Tactics + Scouting = Field Marshal

Your hero will be fragile (unless he has enough defense or Combat), but your creatures will be powerful... VERY powerful.

[darknessfood]

And yeah powerfull creatures are the best,espacialy when you have a buttload of creatures.You can summon those with the necromancer . So just make sure you get demonology and a high skill in the magic tree and you are close to invincible...

[Muszka]

I had a hero once, who could summon 35 devils/turn, but I didn't played solo, so I never got to use summoning.

[Banedon]

It depends on what you're doing. If you're building a single superhero for a campaign then Combat takes priority before Death Magic. That's because a quickly-maxed out Combat allows you to fight stressless battles with no need for deep tactical planning (bring no creatures). After that take the other magics. They all have their own usefulness; Life Magic would be least useful if you're soloing and have access to Potions of Immortality.

If you're playing multiplayer then the priority is Death Magic - max that out, then some levels of Combat (= Assassin class, extremely useful when speed can decide battles), then Basic / Advanced levels of the other magics. I say Basic / Advanced levels because you won't generally have time for higher levels, yet some low-level spells are extremely good - Summon Leprechaun, for instance, or Wasp Swarm, or Song of Peace.

I would say that the ideal is to have two heroes, one might, the other magic oriented.

That's an outdated strategy. I used to think massing Might heroes was the best (it would certainly hold its own against one Might and one Magic hero) but now definitely not - the best armies consist of 4-5 heroes, most of them casting magic.

[MudElemental]

Life magic, because of healing spells and some wards. Combat, because of survivability. Tactics, to have 2in1 Death fraction hero. Scouting for mobility (Pathfinding). Order, because order is generally very good. I don't know about Chaos, but I guess Haste and Cat Reflexes are very good buffs. Still, each other magic school (apart from Nature-Death combo summons) means that your spellcaster would be using Death magic a bit less. But Death has very vague spells, so this might be a good thing, if you have your Necromancer for raising vampires only.