Summon Skeletons

I have started a new witch to get the new gems and summon skeleton is one if them.

Now i'm level 11 with 11 passives spend on minion support.
My build is this: My build

I can raise up to 7 skeletons right now.

To kill single monsters they are ok, but on greater clusters they die faste than i can summon them.
The result is a low level witch chaincasting this spell but nothing gets killed (besides my skeletons :P ).
One Goatmans(lvl12) jump is enough to kill all at once.

Now i use spark like befor.

Edit: I'm not done yet, i'll investigate this further.

After spending some time with my lvl 44 witch and playing around with and without supportgems.
My final battle was merveil in ruthless.
My Build: My 44 Summoner

Fight 1:
Skeletons with +colddmg, +lightningdmg, +miniondmg, +lightningaura (88 mana)
Phase1 was a close fight, needed all manaflask and the last 25% were carried by pure manaregen.
Phase2 was nerly the same, the spawned adds didnt fill all flask.

Fight 2:
Skeletons without any supportgem but with +ligthningaura (30mana)
Phase1 was easy as hell.
Phase2 too :p

Fight 3:
Spark with all support from Fight1 (41 mana)
A fast dead.

Finaly i have to say, they do their job in killing single targets. Its slow but mostly save(same aggro problems like all minions,need taunt or higher prio).
The best effort is without supportgems, they dont benefit from them enough to be the increased manacost worth.
For fast corpses spark is still better.
In heavy big fights they are like small bombs thrown into the cluster of enemys. They dont live long to do any dmg.

The mainarmy is still zombie/spectre
I cant imagine a build around them as mainspell or most used spell.

Befor i forgot about it, i cant see theirs stats. So i dont know if added lightningdmg is huge, small or nothing compared to theire base damage. Same problem like zombies.

Yeah, from what I've seen, skeletons don't seem to last long enough in battle to be worth using. Maybe they're supposed to be used in conjunction with auras/necromatic aegis?

Whatever the issue is, I'd like to see them be used strategically as opposed to be used to tank damage. Zombies already fulfill that role. Perhaps if the range/cast speed was increased, we can use them to juke enemies.

Im using the skellis with the standart 3 support gems for minions (life, speed, damage)
And thats rather disappointing so far.

Skellis do there job for me blocking enemys in a new area till i have corpses (as firestorm is my damage spell, skells help alot here) but besides that i barely use them.

Through my build i have up to 12 skelletons with 3 summoned at a time, but i do not have necro aegis yet.

Knowing there stats would be important to see which support gems are realy useful.



alltogether, they help me in a new zone, but fights like merveil where i could only rely on those where a real pain.

There sure is alot of room for improvements.
Since Zombies are the tanks, i would prefer to have those skellis more powerful dmg wise, maybe a bit more speed and/or ranged skellis added to the mix.

Not going to lie. They feel like a real waste of time at the moment. Much easier to kill things by other means. They don't seem to to much damage at all and die almost instantly. Keeping skeletons up is a full time job that pays minimum wage.

I'd rather just have better skeletons that also use corpses.

The point of the skeletons is so that pure summoners have something to use to make corpses for the good minion skills.

are skelletons suposed to work with minion instability?

best use for skelletons so far to me was to agro offscreen mobs, specially on archers, great to divert atention from the PC.

I don't use them for doing dmg, but for blocking other monster that would attack me. And also, they really look great.

Its a little boring to have max available 8 skeletons, but need to cast it 4 times to have that much number. Would it not be better to lower the number of max skeletons, but increase the number of min skeletons you can get per cast. For me best would be to be able to cast max number always (but lower the max number for 50% because of balance)

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AlienFromBeyond wrote:

The point of the skeletons is so that pure summoners have something to use to make corpses for the good minion skills.

The problem being that it is still much more effective to use other means.

Also, their ai is really silly. I think it's because minions block each other so it seems after an enemy is surrounded by 5 or 6 enemies, all the other minions just stand around and do nothing.

At the moment I am lvl 30, and this skill helps me a lot. I can spam a lot of skeletons so monsters dont atack my zombies or me, and from distance I spam fireballs. I don't know what better skill i can use for this purpose. The skill is a must for a summoner build.