Mr11 said:

shnar said:

Can the Necromancer activate his Reanimate familiar at the start of his turn, voluntarily destroy it, spend an action during his turn to create a new Reanimate familiar, and then activate this new Reanimate at the end of his turn?

-shnar

We had this same question. I say based on the rules and how it talks about "each familiar" that a hero controls that this should be legal. I would like to know this as well.

Well, the only way to voluntarily destroy it would be to attack it (you can't unsummon it). Why you'd want to waste one of your actions doing that is beyond me.

I think the intention behind the rules are clear, your reanimate familiar is your reanimate familiar; regardless of how many times it is killed/summoned it is the same card/ability/creature. However even if your group agrees that the technical wording of this is in question and you want each summoning of the token to be a "new" familiar, I have a technicality for you to keep in mind when playing.

Pg. 17 Familiars (2nd paragraph) "A hero player may activate each familiar his hero controls once during his hero's turn (either before or after resolving ALL of his hero's actions)."

With this in mind you CANNOT [summon, Activate, Un-summon, Summon, Activate] Once you summon your token, you have spent an action and must wait until your second action is complete to activate him, thereby bypassing the first window of opportunity for you to activate him.

However, if your familiar is already summoned and alive at the start of your turn, you could then [Activate, Unsummon, <Hero Action, Summon>, Activate]. This way, even if the intention is to allow 2 activations , the OL has a chance to bash the skeleton on his turn to prevent it.

Hopefully this helps.

I don't think that is right simply because Fury of Undeath ability that lets you activate the Skeleton as an action. Why would they make an ability to activate the skeleton (that cost the same as summoning) if you could use it twice with the basic ability?

Maybe one of the game designers is a BIG skellie fan. With Fury of Undeath you could use the Reanimate three times a round if it started on the board: activate, discard, summon, FoU activate, end-of-turn activate. Fists of Undead Fury! The Chuck Norris of the undead.

Triu said:

maybe…

Yes, I reeeeally disagree with the idea of being able to activate the skeleton twice in one turn, does not feel correct at all. But there are those arguing for it in the official FAQ thread and I wanted to bring the discussion out of there.

The way we played it is that you may activate your familiar (with no extra skills) once a turn, either before or after the main character played. If you activate the familiar in the beginning of your turn before the character plays any actions, then that's it for the turn. Only with the FoU you can spend an additional Fatigue to activate him again. I mean it's powerful as is it is, let's not make it ubber!

I had always played it that you can't activate the minion without spending a fatigue point. So every turn, you have to spend fatigue…but upon closer inspection of the cards, I now see how it can be interpreted other ways as well.

schmoo34 said:

Where did you get that idea? The only fatigue cost is to summon the reanimate, unless I'm horribly missing something there is nothing that says it costs fatigue to activate it. It's not "interpreting it in another way" to not spend fatigue if nothing anywhere tells you to do so.

jjcole said:

Perhaps it is the part where it says to destroy it/dismiss it prior to end of turn that led me to believe so. I was also misled because there is a lady-mage from Dungeonquest when converted to D2E who also has a minion but her minion only provides +2 Pierce and does need to be cast every turn.

We were scratching our heads when we first came upon FoU, mainly because we were sure the application.

After referring to rules and FAQ, this is how a necro's turn could look.

<Player Turn>

Active Necro. Any two actions, one of which may be to use FoU. Lets say the first thing he uses is FoU…

-> Exhaust FoU : Activates Familiar. It gets one move and one attack, as per familiar rules and reanimate skill.

-> Necro's second action, let's say attack.

Activate Familiar. It gets one move, and one attack, as per FoU stating that "Your Reanimate skill activates this turn as normal"

<End Player Turn>

Doesn't really matter when you activate your minion or when you use the skill, other than scenario specific tactics.

This is an ok spell, but in no way broken. you're basically sacrificing an action to let your familiar attack twice. At best you'll get three attacks in a round from using this skill (which, barring los or other complications, you already can get with a necro), at the cost of one xp to buy the skill, and one fatigue every time you activate it.

Other than a little mobility for your familiar and giving a wider choice of combat options, I'd probably skip this ability myself. At least until I had buffed the familiar and made it worth the double attack

Page 17: "A hero player may activate each familiar his hero controls once during his heroes turn (either before or after resolving all of his heroe's actions)."

I interpret this as meaning he can activate all of his familiars once (just like when the OL activates a monster group), This would mean he could attack with his familiar first and then summon a new one, but not be able to activate the new one in his turn since he allready did "activate all of his familiars once".