Champion Spawn Success as a Necromancer Mage in Ultima Online

Necromancer mage is one of the best templates in Ultima Online for clearing champion spawn areas. In Ultima Online, champion spawns will only advance when monsters are rapidly killed. Necromancer mages can advance champion spawns very quickly and will be one of the most effective characters present right up until the champion itself spawns. Necromancer mages are also great for protecting champion spawns by creating a choke point that keeps enemy players away from the champion or harrower.

One of the most common templates for a necromancer mage is: Necromancy, Spirit Speak, Magery, Evaluate Intelligence, Magic Resist, and Meditation. The last skill could be poisoning, inscription, wrestling as you prefer. The benefit to having poisoning is that you have another powerful field spell that you can use to control spawn and create choke points. You must have a total of 200 points between magery and poisoning to create deadly poison fields, for example 80 poisoning and 120 magery, or 90 poisoning and 110 magery.

Inscription is useful in PVP (player vs. player) encounters because it raises the amount of damage your spells do by another 10%, which can make the difference between killing someone instead of allowing them just enough time to heal. Some necromancy mages like to have wrestling, parry or a weapon skill so that they have better survival in PVP but it's really a matter of preference. It's always advisable to try your template out on the test center to find out what works best for you as a player. Here are some examples of how you can create an equipment build to enhance your necromancer mage. Ultima Online Stratics has a complete discussion of templates on the UO Spellcaster forum.

The Ultra Expensive PVP DCI (Defense Chance Increase) Build:

Armor of Fortune, Inquisitor's Resolution Gauntlets, Crystalline Ring, Folded Steel Reading Glasses,Quiver of Infinity, Crimson Cincture and Totem of the Void with the rest being barbed kit crafted leather resist pieces.

The benefits of having this build is that you have maximum defense chance increase, maximum fast casting and recovery, high stats and can carry a -20 magery weapon and have the equivalent of 120 weapon skill as a legendary mage with a free hand to drink potions.

The combination of defense chance increase and 120 weapon skill will make your character harder for dex fighters to hit and increase your chances of survival. This is a build for the most elite necromancers and mages only due to the extreme cost of finding the required items.

The Ghetto Necro Build:

Totem of the Void, Quiver of Infinity, 100% LRC (lower reagent cost), 70 Resist Suit (crafted), 2 faster casting/6 faster cast recovery

This build can be done with a much smaller investment of time and money than the last one and requires only minor artifacts to complete. Most casual players that you encounter will likely have a build like this for spawning.

The Skill Strapped Necro Build:

Midnight Bracers +20 Necromancy, Bloodwood Spirit, Quiver of Infinity, 100% LRC (lower reagent cost), 70 Resist Suit ( barbed kit crafted), 2 faster casting/6 faster cast recovery

The benefit of this build is that you can save skill points and customize your character more by using the Midnight Bracers and Bloodwood Spirit artifacts.

How To Control The Monsters At A Champion Spawn

To quickly kill monsters and advance the spawn as a necromancer mage, you first need to gather the monsters together. The easiest way to do that is to use the Wraith Form spell and cast the Earthquake Spell. Earthquake will gather every monster on the screen and a few that may be slightly off screen but still in the area of effect.

When the monsters get within a few tiles of your necromancer, cast the Wither Spell over and over again, until the monsters are dead. Because your necromancer is in wraith form, each monster that you damage will return a significant amount of mana. As long as you are hitting vast numbers of monsters, you will not run out of mana and can continuously round them up and beat them down without needing to stop to regain your mana. If you have poisoning, you can also set out poison fields all over the altar and surrounding areas as the champion spawn to dps (damage per second) monsters down as quickly as they spawn and keep them coming to you so that you can use the Wither spell on them.

As the spawn advances, the monsters will become increasingly difficult. For example, at the Rikktor spawn, you obviously do not want to round up 50 dragons and attempt to kill them with the Wither spell. You will want to use energy vortex, direct damage spells with a slayer spell book at that point.

When the champion appears you will want to bombard it with damaging spells that you can cast quickly such as Energy Vortex, Fireball, Lightning and Energy Bolt, depending on the resistances that the champion has. If you are fighting the Abyss champion, Semidar, do not cast direct damage spells if your character is a male because the champion will reflect the spells back at you. Instead, polymorph into a female, and then you can cast spells at Semidar without them reflecting back at you.

How To Create A Choke Point At A Spawn

Choke points are a defense used by players in Felucca to prevent a rival group of players from raiding their spawn or harrower until the boss is down, loot collected and everyone safely out. One of the most important things to know is that if your character is blue or not a murderer, your field and area of effect spells such as Wither will only damage criminals, reds or murderers.

If you are a criminal, red or a murderer your area of effect spells will only damage blue players and not other murderers. When you are on Felucca, you will also lose stamina if you try to push through monsters or players, so it is easy to slow down or stop others and then kill them. As a necromancer you can use the Wither spell, to halt groups of advancing raiders. The Energy Field spell will bar attackers from moving ahead and help keep wounded players from retreating out of range.

Where To Spawn

If you spawn in Felucca, you can receive replicas, power scrolls, transcendence and stat scrolls. If you spawn in Ilshenar or Tokuno you will not receive power scrolls but you will find scrolls of transcendence, and replicas if you are lucky. Champion Spawns are the forte of the Necromancer Mage template which is strong in both PVP and PVM, no other skill set offers so much damage and can take out the trash as quickly, even tamers will have a hard time out performing you in PVM (player vs. monster) combat.

Resources

Uo Guide has an excellent write up about each of the champion spawns and the replicas that were recently added to Ultima Online.