Why do familiars not seem to have any resistance to power word kill? I've had my familiar killed at least 3 times by various necromancers with this spell on the first try, every time. Is this a game mechanic that I should just try and avoid or is there something I can do to prevent it, other than just not walking around with my familiar?

Edit:

Familiars also do not yell if they're hit with this spell in Town. Seems like they'd at least let out a death knell.

Pwk, at least when perfected, is a guaranteed kill on anything that cons as easy match or below. That includes familiars.

Secret is not to let your familiar get jumped by necros. That's not hard.

It's just a weakness of a familiar.

At the same time, you have the tools to be a complete pain in the butt for necros.

>At the same time, you have the tools to be a complete pain in
>the butt for necros.

Absolutely. Conjurer would be the last thing I'd want to make enemies with as a necro.

Nothing too specific I guess.

Immunity to summon
Permanent resist negative
Autoattacking pets
Nightgaunt
Tesseract

PWK works REALLY well when there is a large level gap between the caster and the target.

Familiars are substantially lower level than their conjurer master.

Why would a familiar be lower level than the caster? Aren't all other conjured creatures at least the level of the conjurer?

I don't know the exact reason for why they are, but they are and always have been. You can use the consider command for a gauge of how drastic the level difference is.

All of your conjured creatures are extraplanar beings that you're summoning to this Plane, binding to do your will, and have a solid chance to kill you if you screw this up and/or piss them off enough after binding them.

Familiars are sort of the opposite. You're summoning a much weaker creature, not nearly as powerful for fighting, but one that won't even kill you or even attack you. Instead, most of them have grant perks to your character (extra detects, able to "sorta" be in two places at once) - and some even more perks when directly in your presence. In exchange, they themselves are often a vulnerability that you now have to protect when enjoying these perks. Power word kill, with that particular level difference, tends to become the most obvious vulnerability.

Probably buggy but its been reported. High level power word kill eats mobs pretty easily.