Two Players Buy the Same Tower. One Gets an Army. The Other Gets Nothing.
Two players, same map, same difficulty. Player one grabs the Necromancer on wave 3, drops it near the spawn, and waits. Five waves pass. The tower sits there, mostly idle, while the Scout and the Militant do all the actual work. By wave 12 the player is muttering that the tower is bugged.
Player two doesn’t touch it until wave 18. By then the map has narrowed into one choke, a Sledger is holding enemies in place, and a Minigunner is shredding them. The moment the Necromancer goes down, corpses start rising. Within two waves there’s a pack of zombies walking the lane, chewing through whatever leaks past the Minigunner. Same tower. Completely different result.
The difference isn’t luck. It’s feeding. The Necromancer only works if enemies die inside its radius, and that almost never happens by accident. It has to be engineered. This guide covers how — the summon mechanic, the placement, the loadout, and the one mistake that makes everyone swear the tower is broken.
What the Necromancer Actually Does
Here’s the core loop. Everything else hangs off it.
When an enemy dies within the Necromancer’s range, the tower raises a zombie minion from that corpse. The zombie fights for your side — walks the lane, blocks, attacks — for a short window before it decays. The tower doesn’t shoot. It converts enemy deaths into a self-sustaining army.
Three things follow from that, and they explain every strength and weakness the tower has.
It needs kills to exist. A Necromancer with no deaths in its radius produces zero zombies and contributes zero damage. No baseline attack to fall back on. That’s why it’s dead weight early, when enemies are sparse and die to your other towers first.
It snowballs. The more enemies die in range, the more zombies you have at once. Once a lane turns into a killing floor, the army grows until it’s doing a real chunk of the work itself.
It’s range-gated. Enemies that die outside the radius don’t count. This is a positioning tower first and a damage tower second — which is why the tower placement guide matters more here than the stat sheet.
The upgrades push one of two dials: how fast the tower raises zombies, and how hard each one hits. The pattern to name now: you’re buying production rate, not burst damage.
The Upgrade Curve, and Why Maxing It Late Is Fine
The Necromancer is priced like a late-game tower, and the cost curve confirms it. Treat these numbers as a rough snapshot — balance patches move them, and I’ll flag what I can’t verify in the final section.
The base placement sits in the low thousands — think the $3,000 ballpark. That’s real DPS money, and it returns none of it until the kills start flowing.
From there the curve looks roughly like this:
| Level | Approx. cost | What it roughly buys | When it’s worth it |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 (place) | ~$3,000 | Basic summon on nearby deaths | Only after a kill lane exists |
| 1-2 | a few thousand | Faster summons, slightly tougher zombies | Fine to take early once you’re fed |
| 3-4 | mid-thousands | Stronger zombies, faster raise rate | The real power spike; take once your lane is hot |
| 5 (max) | tens of thousands | Max summon rate and minion strength | Only when your economy is already rolling |
The shape of the table is the point. Early levels are cheap-ish; the top end gets brutal, pushing past a late-game tower’s whole budget. You don’t max the Necromancer because it’s the plan — you max it because your Farm already made the money and the army is the best place to park it.
Compare that to the Minigunner, which pays back damage the moment it’s placed. The Necromancer’s value is back-loaded. The tier list puts it in context: S-tier late-game carry, D-tier early-game pick.
Where the Necromancer Fits: Modes and Maps
“Worth it” is a mode question, not a yes-or-no, so let’s be honest about each one.
Normal mode: Skip it. Enemies die too fast and too spread out to build an army, and the match ends before the snowball pays off. The tower idles the whole game.
Fallen mode: This is home. Fallen’s back half throws dense groups of high-HP enemies down predictable lanes — exactly the feed the Necromancer needs. If you farm Fallen, it earns its slot. Full walkthrough: the Fallen mode guide.
Hardcore mode: Situational but real. A fed Necromancer can hold a lane almost on its own. The catch: get your Hardcore fundamentals locked in first, because a mis-timed Necromancer leaves you with no cash and no army. See the Hardcore mode guide.
Golden mode: Niche. Golden punishes early leaks hard, and the Necromancer’s dead early game means you lean on the rest of the loadout until it ramps. It’s not carrying you.
Maps matter as much as modes. The Necromancer wants a single choke where everything funnels — one narrow corridor, a long straight kill lane, anywhere you can point every tower at one spot. On a wide, multi-lane map, the deaths scatter and the radius catches half of them. The best maps guide will point you at the funnel maps.
How to Feed It: The Slow-and-Funnel Combo
Here’s the single most important sentence: the Necromancer’s best friend is not another DPS tower. It’s a slow.
Here’s why, in concrete terms. Say a group of Fallen enemies walks toward your choke. If your Minigunner kills them the instant they enter range, the corpses drop at the edge of the Necromancer’s radius — or just outside it — and half the summons never trigger. Add a Sledger or Cryomancer holding them in the kill zone. They stay alive a second longer, they die inside the radius, and every corpse becomes a zombie. Same DPS, dramatically more army.
The full combo is a three-part machine:
- The slow — Sledger or Cryomancer — holds enemies in the kill zone.
- The killer — Minigunner, Engineer, or similar — turns them into corpses inside the radius.
- The Necromancer — converts those corpses into a standing army.
Then, if you’ve got a slot, add a Commander. Its fire-rate aura multiplies the army’s damage across every zombie at once — one of the few buffs that scales with your minion count. The synergy guide digs into this pairing, but the short version is: slow, killer, Necromancer, Commander, in that order.
Placement-wise, cover the center of the kill zone, not the entrance. You want deaths in the middle of the circle, where every corpse is safely inside range even as the slow drags enemies around the edge.
Failure Review — The Wave-Three Buy
Here’s the mistake I see in almost every lobby where someone calls the Necromancer useless, and it’s worth walking through the full loop.
The error. You place a Necromancer on wave 3, near the spawn, as your first real “big” purchase. You’ve got a Scout and maybe a Farm, and you’re expecting the tower to start paying out immediately.
The cause. The tower has nothing to feed on. Early enemies are weak, spread out, and die to your Scout before they reach the Necromancer’s range. Even when one dies nearby, a single weak zombie that decays in seconds does nothing to the wave. The tower’s whole mechanic — deaths into army — has zero inputs. You’ve parked a snowball machine at the top of a hill with no snow.
The recovery. Don’t sell it out of frustration — that locks in the loss. Build your early DPS first, hold the waves with Scout, Militant, and Minigunner, and only buy the Necromancer once you can drop it into a choke that’s already producing deaths. If you already spent the cash, treat it as dormant — it’ll wake up the moment a proper lane forms in front of it.
The takeaway isn’t “the tower is bad.” It’s “the tower is conditional.” A Minigunner earns its keep anywhere. The Necromancer earns its keep only where the kills are.
Decision Table: Necromancer, Accelerator, Minigunner, or Engineer?
New players ask which single DPS tower to commit to. Here’s the straight if-then table.
| If your situation is… | Then the right pick is… | Because… |
|---|---|---|
| Early game, no Farm online, waves 1-10 | Minigunner | Instant, reliable damage with no setup requirement |
| A single boss or high-HP enemy is the threat | Accelerator | Best single-target boss damage in the game |
| Mid-to-late Fallen, one hot choke, you already have a slow | Necromancer | The kill feed is live, so the army snowballs fast |
| Late game, money to burn, multiple lanes | Engineer | Strong, flexible late-game DPS that works anywhere |
| You’re still building fundamentals in Hardcore | Minigunner or Accelerator first | Necromancer needs a stable lane before it can shine |
The pattern: the Necromancer is a multiplier on an existing kill lane, not a lane-creator. No choke producing deaths? Accelerator or Minigunner serves you better. A hot choke? The Necromancer out-scales them, because every kill you’re already getting turns into bonus damage. It’s the difference between another gun and a factory that builds guns.
For what to fill the other four slots with, the loadout guide covers the full picture.
The Counterintuitive Part: Summon Rate Beats Zombie Damage
Everyone who reads the stat sheet wants to max zombie damage first. Bigger zombie, bigger number, feels obvious. It’s backwards.
The Necromancer’s real stat is summon rate — how fast it converts a death into a minion. A single zombie, even a strong one, gets body-blocked, tanks a few hits, and decays. Ten zombies is a wall. Ten zombies is what stops a leak, because the enemy has to chew through ten bodies instead of one, and each one is swinging while it does.
So the tower scales on volume, not per-hit damage. Summon rate first means every kill in the radius produces a zombie immediately. Damage first gives you a slightly bigger zombie that still decays before it matters. The rule: raise the dead faster before you make them stronger.
And the second counterintuitive bit: the best upgrade for your Necromancer is often a Sledger placed next to it. Money spent on a slow tower does more for your army than the same money on the Necromancer itself, because it multiplies the kill feed the whole machine runs on.
What’s Still Unconfirmed
Web research is down as I write this, so treat the exact numbers below as approximate and double-check before you commit.
- Exact base and max costs. The $3,000-ish placement and the tens-of-thousands max path are ballpark, not a patch-accurate table. Balance changes shift these.
- Placement limit. I couldn’t verify whether the Necromancer caps at a specific number of placements per player. If it has a cap, it’s likely low — plan your build assuming you’re placing one or two, not five.
- Zombie lifetime and cap. The exact decay timer on minions and any cap on how many can be out at once are unconfirmed. What’s stable is the shape: zombies persist briefly, then decay, so the army only stays big while the kills keep coming.
- Availability. Whether the Necromancer is a permanent shop tower or a limited event tower that rotates is worth checking in-game. If it’s event-gated, the unlock method will matter more than this guide’s strategy content.
None of that changes the strategy. Feed it kills in a choke, pair it with a slow, and buy it late. The numbers might move, but the mechanic won’t.
FAQ
What does the Necromancer do in Tower Defense Simulator?
When an enemy dies inside the Necromancer’s range, it raises a zombie minion from that corpse. Those zombies keep fighting on your side for a short window before they decay. The tower scales up how fast it summons and how strong the zombies are through its upgrades.
Is the Necromancer good for early game?
No. It needs kills to feed it, so early waves with weak, spread-out enemies give it almost nothing. Buy it from the mid-game onward once strong enemies start dying in a choke point. A Necromancer placed on wave 3 is an expensive paperweight.
Which towers pair best with the Necromancer?
Slow towers first — Sledger or Cryomancer — because they hold enemies inside the Necromancer’s radius long enough for your other DPS to kill them there. Commander multiplies the whole zombie army’s damage and is the strongest buffer to add on top.
Is the Necromancer worth it in Fallen mode?
Yes, usually. Fallen’s mid-to-late waves funnel big groups through choke points and drop high-HP enemies exactly where the Necromancer wants them. It’s weaker in Normal, where enemies die too fast and too spread out to build an army.
Why does my Necromancer do nothing all game?
Almost always, it has no kills happening in its radius. Check its placement: if enemies die before they reach it, or the lane leaks somewhere else, the tower never triggers a summon. Move it to a choke point, add a slow, and it will start producing.