I know there are blizzard employees here, this is my petition for summon necromancer.
Summon Necro vs Summon Druid
I recently tested both summoning classes in the game, in my series of making builds I never played before.
These findings can be found on my streaming videos. my last 3 builds tested were throw barb, summoning druid, then summoning necro.
Summon druid is by far the only pure summoning class, as everyone relies on Corpse Explosion for Necro. I however did not use corpse explosion on necro and still with aura stacking and using CE found summoning necro to be too nerfed to be fun.
Summon Druid Pros
-You can summon without corpses
-Your summon gear has survivability + bo w/ oaksage makes max block not needed. high survivability.
-Your pets take hits while you teleport around.
-your pets actually do good damage. bear and ravens do 5k+ while wolves do 1.5k+ each as well.
-your pets survive the majority of games, especially with decrep cast merc.
-your pets are not time limited and infinite until they die, outside of ravens that still last much longer than necro 180 second revive timer. More reliable summons overall.
-your pets dont block each other when pathing down a map. You do not need to constantly telestomp to get your minions to hit a mob or get them out of blocked pathing of each other.
-Ravens fly so pathing is always available and no issues whatsoever.
-Spirit wolves are your weakest summon, but you can just recast them as needed. on a boss fight for instance, no corpse is needed. On necro you will need to leave the boss to go get more minions if your revive timer ends... way more hassle.
-Pets ias increases fully with fanat aura. Necro summons have internal ias delays built in.
-Pets get attack rating bonuses, so they do not need infinity for lowering defense on mobs.
Summon Druid Cons
-Cannot cast curses, need to put a curse on attack with merc.
-Cannot use insight due to decrep cast being more important.
-In order to maximize damage you need to wear beast on switch, so summons are made with cta+spirit and not at full skill level potential. Unless you stash switch hoto+spirit for summoning, which Im not going to do.
-Lightning res was an issue, but I figured out a build to help lower this con. Still resists are a con on both summoner builds, just less of a con on druid.
-Oak sage dies all the time. Blizzard really gave this bish no hp.
-Wolverine has more hp than oak and also dies all the time.
-Wolves AI is not always attacking mobs, sometimes one walks away while the others are fighting lol. Maybe due to finding corpses and suspected to be dire wolves AI but not removing spirit wolves from possible suspects.
-Druid cannot cast teleport while transformed, so I ultimately decided to stop transforming and not help kill so ... just went pure summoning to teleport whenever I wanted.
-Nothing else to put skill points in once you max the build out with +20 main summons. Can't help killing.
Overall the cons are not a big deal as the build was very fun and can handle P8 games, while survivability is not a big issue at all. Highly sleeper build, 10/10 highly Recommended build from me.
Summoning Necro Pros
-Number of minions jumps from 16 on druid to over 60.
-Telestomping is fun when it works.
-Can cast amp or decrep on demand. Does not need Reapers merc.
-Skellys are great tanks.
-Revives are only beneficial if unique pack, but purely on number of revives makes them good to have.
-Iron golem never dies once you max out golem mastery and only needs 1 skill point to be a free aura holder.
-Easy to max out summoning build early, high level character not needed. +20 skellys, skelly mastery, golem mastery, revives can max build at lvl80.
-Minions provide high tanking ability, but you have to step behind them first.
-Strong in normal and nightmare for leveling.
-Bash revives are the strongest minion and perfect for boss killing, but still useless if you dont have infinity.
-My conclusion is that Summon necro minions are only helpful for tanking and applying curses, since they do no damage. Making you reliant on party members to do damage.
I literally cannot think of more pro's, it was not fun xD
Summon Necro Cons
-While teleporting minions become inactive and the necromancer takes every hit from mobs.
-While teleporting minions become inactive until the necromancer walks in any direction to "re-activate them".
-Survivability is poor with necro summoning gear. Max block easily attained with homonculus 40% = 2dex per block chance, but still does not make it viable. No resists or pdr at all on summon gear.
-While survivability is glass cannon status, the dmg your minions do does not make up for this. Poor damage, even when tele stomping.
-Minions dont do enough damage on their own unless in a party with all damage auras and telestomping.
-Even with amp damage, minions are still not doing enough damage.
-Minions block each others pathing, leaving melee minions just standing there.
-Even with +400% damage to revive skill tooltip, revives still hit like a wet noodle.
-Skeleton damage is only increased by a low number +200 or some shit, while at lvl45 they only do 700 damage with included ias internal nerfs.
-Minions miss all the time, infinity aura is required to lower defense of mobs. No attacking Rating bonus.
-Lets say your killing a boss and your revives run out of active time. They die. Your screwed because you need corpses to get minions, you have to leave the boss to gather.
-Revives have a 180 second timer, I cant tell you how frustrating this is.
-Revives cannot be used on champions, unique pack leaders, last wave of baal minions. If the 180 second active timer wasnt a big enough nerf...
-Fanatacism aura does not fully work on skellys since they have an internal ias nerf.
-Golems do no damage, no matter what level they are. On top of this golems attack super slow, ias nerfed to hell.
-Curses are pov or in line of sight only. Where mobs in the game lock curses onto your character.
-Necro summons would not be viable until an unobtainable level as the damage is too low per level, thus everyone uses and recommends corpse explosion. However you cannot use Corpse explosion on bosses, making you reliant on your summons low damage.
-Once you get to hell, minions become useless outside of tanking.
-It is a mundane chore to find corpses for minions everytime you join a game and then revives only last 180 seconds ... and you can't purely rely on melee skellys since they do no damage lol its a lose/lose situation.
-Mage skellys are so weak that no amount of points would make them good.
As we can see here, Summon necromancer has been tuned/nerfed and fun policed hard by blizzard into the ground. There is mostly negatives only, while the Druid Summoner is a night and day difference in survivability + damage capability.
I would like to petition for a Summon Necromancer buff.
-Remove the timer on revives or make all corpses available to revive, why cant we get champions or unique pack leaders if we are still restricted to 180 seconds active time?
-While necromancer also has a lot more minions, that does not mean you make them inactive during teleporting. They should take the hits before the necro while teleporting, like druid pets do.
-Blizzard explain to me how you can give necro 60 minions with AMP DAMAGE and they still do shit damage? lol
Blizzard has totally ruined Summon Necro, I will be streaming today and reseting to pure bone.
Summoner Necro gets a 1/10 rating from me. Not Recommended.
This post was edited by Josiah on May 1 2026 11:11am