What undead should I use with animate dead

[willaayy]

Casting as a cleric, I have 36HD available with animate dead. Which minions should I use? I prefer big fighters.

[Endarire]

K's Revised Necromancer Handbook

[Efrate]

Dragons for zombie dragons, for skeletons fire giants. Hydra zombies are decent as well.

[Eldariel]

Dragons for zombie dragons, for skeletons fire giants. Hydra zombies are decent as well.

This, pretty much. Quick listing of some of the breath weapons you can get with Zombie Dragons. Any Giants are nice for skeletons as are many monstrous humanoids and magical beasts (and many animals too, for that matter). Hydras are nice Zombies as well since they have the natural ability to full attack always. Don't forget to equip your beatsticks. Giants with GMW:d weapons are suddenly a degree more dangerous and no reason not to dress them up in appropriate armor as well.


Also, OP, don't forget that if you go over your control limit, the creatures just become uncontrolled; you have a separate control limit for Animate Dead and Rebuke/Command Undead. If you have Divine Magician ACF [Complete Mage] or Spell-domain [Spell Compendium], you can further access Command Undead spell, which gives you an essentially infinite control pool for mindless dead (Rebuke Undead in particular is best left for intelligent things since they're really hard to control permanently and unquestioningly otherwise).

[Jack_Simth]

Casting as a cleric, I have 36HD available with animate dead. Which minions should I use? I prefer big fighters.

Dragons. The single creature HD limit for Animate Dead comes not from the Animate Dead spell, but the Zombie and Skeleton template. Draconomicon has alternate templates for similar on Dragons, that does NOT include the limit. And Dragons make much better minions anyway.

[Lorddenorstrus]

Not to hijack, but same question lower level. Making a 5th lvl character, just got animate dead and due to gestalt have a fairly high pool of controllable undead with the addition of Boneknight's Bonemarch. Just generic skeletons/zombies in the 1hd range I would think, dunno never done a necromancer before trying it out.

[Zanos]

Not sure if it's been mentioned, but Zombie Dragons also do not recalculate BAB or saves. If you can pick up Awaken Undead you can get power attack and metabreath feats as well, generally a good time.

A Necrosis Carnex is a good choice for an unlimited negative energy touch attack.

A Bloodhulk is a decent choice if your DM isn't in the mood to provide decent corpses, like in humanoid heavy campaigns.

[Eldariel]

Not to hijack, but same question lower level. Making a 5th lvl character, just got animate dead and due to gestalt have a fairly high pool of controllable undead with the addition of Boneknight's Bonemarch. Just generic skeletons/zombies in the 1hd range I would think, dunno never done a necromancer before trying it out.

Well, you aren't going to animate combat beasts with 1 HD on ECL 5 Gestalt game. The answer is basically identical. You'll want higher HD creatures (animals are a good, usually readily accessible option - though any magical beasts or giants or outsiders or dragons you kill or find dead are obviously great) or something that can animate things with class levels (Dread Warriors, Juju Zombies or similar, which aren't in the cards yet). 1 HD things are mostly for utility: Falontani's Skeletal Bombs for instance, or tireless indentured labour (need some taskmaster to buff their skills), or Aid Another bots or whatever. They aren't going to do meaningful combat damage.

You can always produce your own undead: go hunting for X, kill it, animate it. Of course, that requires for X to exist and it's easier once you have Scrying at any rate. Much easier once you have Teleport; at that point you can also Lesser Planar Bind stuff, kill it and animate it.

[Mr Adventurer]

The single creature HD limit for Animate Dead comes not from the Animate Dead spell, but the Zombie and Skeleton template.

Fake news.

Animate Dead
[...]
Regardless of the type of undead you create with this spell, you can’t create more HD of undead than twice your caster level with a single casting of animate dead. (The desecrate spell doubles this limit)
[...]

[Eldariel]

Fake news.

Uhm, that's not the limit he's talking about (4xCL is plenty generous), it's the 10 HD limit in Zombie template and the 20 HD limit in Skeleton template:
"Hit Dice

Drop any Hit Dice from class levels (to a minimum of 1), double the number of Hit Dice left, and raise them to d12s. If the base creature has more than 10 Hit Dice (not counting those gained with experience), it can’t be made into a zombie with the animate dead spell."

"Hit Dice

Drop any Hit Dice gained from class levels (to a minimum of 1) and raise remaining Hit Dice to d12s. If the creature has more than 20 Hit Dice, it can’t be made into a skeleton by the animate dead spell."

[Jack_Simth]

@Lorddenorstrus: You generally want the highest HD zombies and skeletons you can get for the Animate Dead control pool. Mostly because undead HD are trash. Half BAB means you need for the critter to have a lot of HD to actually hit anything; no Con bonus to HP means they're fragile; mindless means they'll never use good tactics (unless closely ordered) and don't have the benefits of feats; only having one good save (Will) means they'll usually soak the full effect of most spells. If you do low HD zombies/skeletons, you'll be able to swarm opponents, but you'll be replacing them: OFTEN. The expense builds up FAST. You want the biggest individual bruisers you can grab, as that way you'll be repairing them more often than replacing them.

As to specific creatures:
Hydras make great zombies, because of their standard-action full attack mechanic.
Dragons, as noted.

Fake news.

That would be the single casting limitation. I'm talking about the single creature limitation. Eldariel did a very nice job of quoting and linking, so I won't duplicate that effort.

[Mr Adventurer]

Ha ha, oh yeah!