Best Feats for Necromancy Wizard 5e
by Prince Phantom
This subclass plays like it was written for those of us who adore tactics games like Fire Emblem, Advance Wars, and XCOM and wish D&D was more like those games. If the idea of commanding a small army of very expendable troops, this subclass is definitely for you.
Our 2nd level ability is pretty underwhelming, but every other feature is a home run. We become the best caster of Animate Dead at level 6, buffing our undead’s durability and damage. Our 10th level ability seems mundane at first glance, but it allows us to mitigate the main drawback of Create Magen, an amazing spell normally held back by it permanently lowering your maximum HP. Our 14th level ability lets us take control of undead creatures we find, and it just so happens that Nightwalkers, a very deadly high CR undead, are perfect targets for this ability thanks to their poor save chance, lack of magic resistance, low intelligence, and lack of legendary resistance (there’s also a really cool, in-lore way that they are created that could totally be an awesome quest for you).
As the head of an undead army, your feat selection will be slightly different from a normal Wizard, though many of the old standbys are still great.
Best Feats for Necromancy Wizard 5e
War Caster (Lv 4): Your role in combat is to support your undead army. Granted, that army won’t start being built until 5th level, but there’s nothing wrong with planning ahead of time. The best spells to support your undead are controlling area of effect spells like Web and Hypnotic Pattern, spells that can slow and steal turns from your enemies, allowing our horde to pelt them with attacks from range (always create skeletons, they are almost universally better than zombies because they can attack at range). Holding concentration on these spells is very important, as we plan on using all of our remaining spell slots each day reanimating and reasserting control over our undead army. The less slots we expend today, the more skeletons we have tomorrow.
Inspiring Leader (Lv 8): A note that you have to have a Charisma of at least 13 to take this feat, but honestly I think the investment might be worth it. Ideally you’d have a Charisma based character take this to get the most out of it, or even have another source of temporary HP like a Twilight Cleric or Artillerist Artificer. Assuming you don’t have any of that in your party, take Inspiring Leader yourself and you’ll provide your entire army a huge boost to durability on top of what our 6th level ability provides. At this level, our skeletons would each have a total of 28 hp, definitely enough to take a few hits before going down and eating up a ton of enemy attacks.
Fey/Shadow Touched (Lv 8): Both of these feats are good for their usual reasons and even good enough for Wizards despite the fact that they get all the best spells from them on their spell list anyway. Instead of repeating myself for the tenth time, I’ll instead use this opportunity to inform you that skeletons can totally wear armor, use shields, use any weapon you give them (immediately upgrade them to heavy crossbows), attune to magic items, feed allies potions, trigger traps, scout ahead, and a whole myriad of other stuff besides just attacking. Get creative, and prepare to spend a lot of money on outfitting your cacophony of corpses.
Resilient Constitution (Lv 12): I feel like a necromancer should be good at constitution saves by nature, but this feat provides what we lack and desperately need to protect our concentration as we go into the high tiers of play. We can also potentially increase our maximum HP, making this a fantastic option all around.
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