My favorite thing to do with a necromancy-focused wizard is uttercold assault. You take Energy Substitution (Cold) and Lord of the Uttercold as your 3rd and 6th level feats. Since most undead you'll be making (skeletons) are immune to cold, all your damage spells will heal them. So you can send them into melee and cast an uttercold fireball that'll deal damage to whatever they're fighting and heal them for half.
Lord of the Uttercold is great but doesn't even become useful untill you get Animate Dead. Plus, animating wasn't going to be my
main focus. Only draining, incorporal undead because it fits into the crippling theme I want to get going. I'm using shadows for now, but I'll get greater shadows, wraiths/dread wraiths, and spectures eventually and/or others I can't think of right now.
Also, there is a Necromancer sub level in Unearthed Arcana that allows you to replace your familiar with a Human Warrior Skeleton of HD = your level and +1/3 levels Str/Dex and +1/2 levels natural AC. By strict RAW, that Skeleton also gets a stat boost every 4 HD, IIRC.
I had forgotten about this. I hadn't gotten a familiar yet and figured I would replace it with an alternate class feature. I like this, but I don't want to settle on this just yet so I can find other ACFs.
Are you already playing this necromancer? You want to go with a cleric instead.
LN Cleric 2/Dread Necromancer 1/Master of Shrouds 10/X 7 (something with full divine casting, or near it at least. I recommend Contemplative). This gives you a pool of turn and rebuke undead (get turn with cleric, rebuke comes with DN). Then pick up Quicken -> DMM(Quicken) or Extend -> Persist Spell -> DMM(Persist) depending on your play style. With contemplative grab undeath domain unless you worship a god that doesn't grant that domain. This gets you extra turn twice which is not +8 but +16 to your turn attempts. Just keep your wisdom high and your charisma kind of high and concentrate the rest on strength.
I thought about the early Master of Shrouds build, but the early entry is to much of a headache to my DM, so I didn't go that route. My DM is generous with some stuff, but not others. As 6th level characters, we only get 8,000 gold to start with (less than average incase you didn't know). One of the main problems I've been having is running out of spells, so I thought about taking theurge-like classes, hopefully with early entry to make up for that. What do you guys think?
The problem with crippling necromancy is that most of the really nice stuff are all level 4 spells or above.
Enervation, Shivering Touch, etc.
Shivering Touch is actually a 3
rd level spell and I already plan on using it.