To be fair, I lost patience with this class quickly. I'm going off of the tricks that necros have used on me and general game knowledge. At 23 and on, you shouldn't have too much trouble killing people provided sleep goes off and you don't get beat up too much prior.

If you have time, you should put a mob to sleep and count how many ticks it lasts, preferably by poisoning it. Then, in a real PK you can keep those ticks in mind that pass while you land things like crimson scourge and poison on an opponent. Crimson Scourge does the bulk of whittling your opponent down to halfish health (at half health there is a chance the damage from each tick will wake them up, surprising you and letting them simply walk off before you react, which means you should engage just before they drop to gushing with blood)... and then if they are cursed, you concentrate on doing more damage to them than they did to you. If you're successful, they will often either die right there trying to walk blind to a healer (which you can run ahead of them to if you have an idea where they are running and then finish them off that way instead of just try to catch up to them) or if they quaff a teleport potion, chances are you will be able to use gravesight to get to their corpse before they do unless they died to an aggro mob, in which case you'll be wanting to camp their pit provided no tribunal are around. Wraithform will allow you to summon people into locked rooms, which is devastatingly effective but on the other hand requires your opponent to be stupid, have no saves, and you need to be very lucky because it costs you a ton of mana before you even get your opponent to sleep.

You should keep in mind too that even if the occasional newb makes it to hero, skill scales with level and plenty of players can make simple mistakes that turn a fight to your advantage. For instance, you should be carrying flight potions all you can, so you don't simply get tripped to death by someone geared up for damage, and you also don't want to stupidly lose a fight to trip and someone's hand to hand skill due to poor luck because you forgot flight, bash will be bad enough from otherwise crippled foes, especially the ones wearing light weaponry. You should definitely keep carrying potions until you get word of recall.

Anyone who you suspect of having good spell saves is a difficult target to beat, and also it makes energy drain less appealing (when it works, it drains half mana and half moves, but it works rarely for this reason against anyone who has a tiny bit of saves or int, so you should only plan on attempting this once or twice). Luckily, at your level (25)ish, saves versus spell is usually the last of people's concerns. Usually.

Also anyone who resists poison/disease means that you should think twice about attacking duergar/svirfnebli/gnomes/dwarves, two of which are very popular races and one of which can see invisible inherently. They don't resist sleep, but it may cost you so much mana to apply your affects, and they will resist the damage to boot each tick, that you may not deal enough damage to actually kill them. There will be times you want to kill these races, but in those cases you may want to use zombies. There is explore gear people can wear to resist poison as well, and possibly disease.

Depending on the corpses you can safely produce using wands, zombies tend to be pretty strong. Even one or two can turn a fight, and they are handy if your tanks suck in levelling. They can pass through water, but can't fly or pass through doors. They sometimes fail to rescue, but the autoassist damage can give you quite a boost in an offensive push against an opponent. What zombies will NOT do is let you win a fight you're already losing, and if a paladin/shaman wants to harrass you or prep you to be killed by a goodie, they will very often try to summon the undead away from you.


"I have to admit I hate pretty much all of these ideas. " - Nepenthe, on New Ranger Skills