Editing Dread Necromancer (section)

===Feats===
Since it takes a while to get up in level to actually do some useful stuff, you'll need to find some good bread-and-butter feats that will always be useful right off the bat.  Improved Initiative, Extra Turning (for your Rebuke ability), and even Profane Lifeleech (Libris Mortis, light area damage that heals you even if you're undead) are all great feats you can use your whole career.  Necromantic Presence and Necromantic Might (both in Libris Mortis) are really clutch: they work with the ''summon undead'' spells, or your regular minions, whatever you have near you, and on top of that the feats have no requirements to get them.  Versatile Spell (Races of the Dragon) is never bad, either; you can blow all your lower-level slots for your big killing spells more often.

Once you hit about level 9, you should be getting (or near to getting) ''animate dead'', meaning it's time to get serious about making minions.  Grab Corpsecrafter, Bolster Resistance, and Nimble Bones (all from Libris Mortis).  These three feats are really basic and good: more Str, more turn resistance, and more initiative and movement.  Your minions will just be better overall with these feats, and since not all your minions will benefit from them right away, don't hesitate to send them off to die as you get a new feat to improve your next batch.

If you're more interested in spellcasting, you can grab Divine Metamagic and turn your Rebukes into metamagic boosts.  Good options are Quicken, Rapid, Extend, Persistent, Repeat, Twin, Enlarge, Silent, and Still.  Note you can't really do all these things; pick either faster casting, making them last longer, doubling the spells you cast, or being stealthy with your spells.  In addition, you'll probably want to take more Extra Turning feats if you can, to have enough juice for these spells.

If you'd like to do more damage with your inflict spells, you'll probably wand Black Lore of Moil (Complete Arcane) which lets you spend money on things that permit you to boost those spells.  You can do this in advance and then decide later when you want the extra juice.  For more damage, Empower and Maximize Spell are good to use with Arcane Preparation to set up a few really strong spells for that crucial moment you become Uncle Bad Touch to the BBEG, and touch him in a bad place (i.e. his fucking soul).

If you want to be great at delivering touch spells, there's a few feats that can actually help a lot with that.  Arcane Strike (Complete Warrior) lets you sack spell slots for better attack and damage bonuses, and these will stack when delivering a touch spell as part of an unarmed strike. Improved Unarmed Strike allows you to not suffer AoOs when doing this, and Superior Unarmed Strike (Tome of Battle) lets you increase your unarmed damage.  These things all added together mean that, if you dump some high-level magic into the strike, you could deliver a pretty massive blow to most living things.  Note that Charnel Touch can't be used this way, due to it's status as a supernatural effect and the specific way it is used.  Mixed up with the damage boosting listed above, you could actually become a really fucked-up "Necro Fu" build that focuses on devastating attacks against living opponents.

As with duskblades, the Draconic Heritage feats are also very interesting for dumping spell slots into more useful attacks or abilities, for situations where necromancy simply can't get the job done.  However, these feats aren't quite as strictly useful to a Dread Necro as crafting stronger minions and doing more damage with spell attacks.  In general, you can find alternatives to deal with constructs, and undead aren't nearly as big a problem for you (''command undead'', ''halt undead'', ''undeath to death'', and ''control undeath'' all say "no", and if you find something that's really fun you can just Rebuke/Command it).

If you have [[Dragon Magazine|Dragon Compendium]] you can take bloodline feats since you're a spontaneous arcane caster. These give extra spells known at each level, and you can take multiple. Normally this comes at the cost of losing opposed spells, but so long as you don't select Fey or Plant, you won't have any to lose.