Summon Skeletons

after playing with skeletons and testing out different gems setups.
I would suggest increasing the duration. Getting rid of the elemental damage penalty or cutting it down
I do think that the damage increase was a move in the right direction . If you don't want to get rid of the elemental damage penalty, then increase the overall damage.
Another thought is to change the way they summon. 1 at gem level 1 and have a increase as the gem levels. Like 4 at gem level 20.
Just some thoughts on improving Summon Skeletons.

Besides the discussion about efficiency using this skill i see a major gameplay problem in skeletons not following the player and the duration keyword of this skill. Since skeletons dont follow the player he cannot take them with him from one encounter to another. Duration time and it's modifications are rendered quite useless by the skeletons behaviour cause they only participate in one encounter anyway which exceeds seldom a fighting time of 20 seconds - skeletons base duration time. So i see an issue with the gameplay design here.

I hope you guys do a big summon skeleton re-work. As of right now in high maps they are just to weak. I would get rid of the " Minions deal 50% less Elemental Damage". add more natural resists. add a increase to the number of skeletons you at a time. like 4-5 at a level 20 gem.

I don't think a skill has to be able to handle every situation in order to be considered "working". Most people use this one as meatshield with MI anyway, or distraction for enemies which only deal single target damage. If someone wants to have durable or deadly skeletons there are definitely ways to realize that. And compared to skills like Animate weapon or SRS this one has definite advantages too. You can create it out of thin air and you can block enemies movement with it. It seems reasonable to me that skeletons might be a bit "weaker" cause they have great utility overall. However the flaw i remain to see is that players cannot make use of this skills duration and it's modifiers cause skeletons just don't follow around.

I like how summon skeletons works, but there definitely should be some improvements.

First of all you can't recall you skeleton army with Convocation which is in my opinion OK. Skeletons are here to take hits instead of anything else. But time you need to spend by deploying whole army is too long in situations when you encounter huge pack of mobs.
I suggest as many others here to increase amount of summoned skeletons at time from 2 to 4 as you level your gem. Spell echo will help as well but honestly I don't want to spend gem slot just to improve deploying. Skeletons already have so many drawbacks I want to utilise gem slots to improve my army itself!
Compare it with Raise Zombie + Convocation!

Next, one of huge skeletons drawback is their movement speed which can be improved or you can rely on re-summoning skeletons nearby enemies. But if I encounter some fast range kiting mobs my skeletons often can't hit it even one time before they run away. Even when I am using Flesh Offering. So I suggest to increase their base attack speed (let's say 1.1-1.2?). Skeletons already have lower damage with elemental damage penalty so this shouldn't be so big deal...

Anyway I like skeleton uniqueness forcing you to utilise physical or chaos damage instead of elemental damage as every other minions. I am pretty happy that Anger, Wrath of Hatered + generosity doesn't need to be oblivious choice for auras.

I don't mind the elemental penalty, skeletons hit faster than zombies so if they didn't have the penalty you would outstrip their dps with auras.

When I play minion builds my major issue with skeletons is melee bloat, if you can summon a lot of skeletons you can also summon a lot of zombies, in most cases a lot of them are running around not doing much at all.

I would prefer to see summon skeleton result in summoning skeleton archers, which put out a fair bit of damage but are flimsy, this would ease the melee bloat and you should be able to utilise ranged attack support gems rather than melee ones.

I think Decoy Totem should be better tweaked to be the meat shield for non-minion builds rather than relying on skeletons being an underwhelming skill for anything other than a chaff firing spell totem.

Why does this skill still have a 1.0 second cast time. Makes it even harder to use.

I like the change to summon skele but it's horrible slow cast time + only summon 2 at a time is meh. I know you can improve that using spell echo, but you've just lost a gem slot to make the damn thing useable.

right now, their only purpose is being meatshields

popcorn bombs via minion instability :D, which mind you was buffed when they edited thier elemental damage penalty to "bonus damage" penalty, meaning full damage but harder to boost.