u/EntireFriendship517

A while ago I was looking at archetypes and saw Soul Warden. You're basically an honorary psychopomp who serves Pharasma, which is a thematic and interesting idea to build a character around.

The big problem with the archetype is that it relies specifically on the presence of undead; them being nearby is what activates the spiral that lets you use your archetype feats, and you deal vitality damage, which is totally useless against anything that isn't undead. I don't know why the designers would take such a cool concept and give it a limited, situational use case, but that's why it's a Legacy archetype, I guess.

But I was reading over Necromancer and suddenly realized that it fixes all of Soul Warden's problems.

Being a Necromancer as a Soul Warden you don't need to happen to encounter an undead to make the spiral glow, you can just Create Thrall. It puts an undead creature within 100 feet of you, which your spiral detects. You can turn your spiral on and off at will by creating and destroying thralls, letting you use your archetype features whenever you want instead of only against certain enemies.

The dedication feat gives you Vitality Lash. At level 4 Cycle Spell can give you Disrupting Weapons or Heal, both of which are normally useless against living creatures and aren't even on the occult spell list. Necromancers really like to have vitality damage though, because Mastery of Life and Death means they can affect living creatures with spells that normally target undead. Vitality Lash is fairly strong, and you can affect anyone with it now. At lower levels and situationally at higher levels, you can turn any martial ally or even your thralls into threats with Disrupting Weapons, or heal all your allies and damage all your enemies at once with three action Heal.

The other archetype feats are good for Necromancer, too. Psychopomp Familiar lets you get a familiar as a class that doesn't normally have the option to, and its master abilities like Familiar Focus and Spell Battery are especially useful for a class with limited spells. The Pharasma domain spells are also useful if you like automatically gaining focus points as well as extra utility as you level up without having to invest too many Necromancer feats.

I'm just surprised I've never seen anyone bring this combo up before. It's hilarious how well the class and the archetype work together despite being thematic polar opposites, and I think there's a lot of character potential in justifying a Soul Warden being allowed to do temporary necromancy. I'd like to hear people's thoughts or if there's anything I'm missing.