undead question

ghoul31 · #1 February 13th, 2011, 10:41 PM

Are undead units immune to death magic? Like drain life,bane fire,hand of death,disintigrate,cloud of death?

Doo · #2 February 13th, 2011, 10:47 PM

Not to this spell.

brxbrx · #3 February 13th, 2011, 10:58 PM

they still get decay, I don't know if it manages to kill them.

generally, a spell will say if it affects or doesn't affect lifeless, etc.

ghouls may well be subject to drain life, for example, because they aren't lifeless. idk. someone who knows more will come along soon enough

ghoul31 · #4 February 13th, 2011, 11:01 PM

Also, do any of those spells work on lifeless or mindless targets?

brxbrx · #5 February 13th, 2011, 11:27 PM

mindless, yes. lifeless, no.

Taqwus · #6 February 13th, 2011, 11:32 PM

Cloud of Death, Disintegrate, and Banefire are quite indiscriminate in terms of what units they can hurt.

Valerius · #7 February 14th, 2011, 02:15 AM

I ran some tests and, as mentioned, disintegrate and banefire seem to kill everything. Undead, lifeless - doesn't seem to matter. Same for hand of death (tough to use though because it requires such close proximity to the target).

However, I couldn't get cloud of death to cast against undead units and when I mixed normal units into the formation the undead units weren't effected so I don't believe cloud of death has any effect on undead. Actually, I think this spell is not infrequently used *with* undead troops since they won't be hit by friendly fire.

As mentioned, drain life will work on many undead - but not lifeless ones.

Dust to dust is a nice single target anti-undead spell. Wither bones does less damage but has a large AOE and can be devastating.

And of course if it's late game you could try undead mastery...

PS - Don't forget banishment, especially against undead that have low/average MR.

Taqwus · #8 February 14th, 2011, 05:38 AM

Hmm. Might be right on CoD; I'm not very heavy on death casters in my current game so I haven't seen it used for a while.

On a related note, undead will also ignore the disease effects from certain death magic (leprosy bombardment, say), generally can ignore decay (since they tend to have high maximum ages) and tend to be pretty resistant to fear effects (most being either mindless and completely immune, or good morale/good MR... ghouls might be an exception), and also perform perfectly fine under Darkness and Rigor Mortis. Poison is also an obvious complement, since undead tend to be completely immune.

brxbrx · #9 February 14th, 2011, 06:27 AM

speaking of decay, how does that work with the boots of youth, or the elixir of life?

Soyweiser · #10 February 14th, 2011, 07:45 AM

While Cloud of Death doesn't work on undead, a variant of it does. Leeching darkness.

http://dom3.servegame.com/wiki/Leeching_Darkness

The spells look rather identical, so I think that is where the confusion came from.