ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

The way I see it, my regular necrotic minions have a much higher level than the bone golems they produce, more hitpoints, and more interesting special abilities. I don't really see the point in using this ability, and TBH the category point I sank into ANM feels like a waste now (should have gone for shadow, but wanted to try ANM, and thought the point was recoverable). Am I missing something?

The way I'm seeing it now, I plan to leave it without points invested until I have 5 or so, and then invest to gain the special summons from the tier 5 of the talent tree.

If you find assemble useless, you clearly have never seen a Runed Bone Giant.

The advanced minion tree would be worth it if the more advanced minions didn't have downisdes to using them, I'm looking at you Mr. Wight.

I haven't gotten the talent to that level, no. But is there a significant difference? The gist of the matter is that my bone giants are spawning at level 8, while the skellies I get are twice that level. I dont get how, if my giants are going to be so shitty, they will ever rival my regular summons

The level of the bone giants is on the same arc as the summon minions skill. At level 5, they'll generate at the same level as anything created with the other skill, and they're a much more powerful unit.

Honestly though, the difference between the level 4 bone giant and level 5 bone giant isn't that much. The chance that your giant becomes somewhat stronger doesn't really mean anything because the giants are there as improved cannon fodder; and all the special giant does is...not tank as well because it tries to use ranged abilities. Other summons do more damage from the same or greater range, and at a high enough level even regular skeleton warriors can get attack runes and controlled phase door runes. So basically, giants are shields for you, the other summons can do other roles.

I think the scaling of Necromancer talents could use some attention. Many of them seem to be designed around encouraging 5/5 investment, which is inconsistent with other classes and the availability of class points. Further, some of the talents like Assemble negate any benefit of other talents in the same category.

Also, many Necromancer talents seem probability-based. It's hard to justifiably spend a talent point which might amount to an increase of a few percentage points of possibly surviving longer.

I've always found Runed Bone Giants to be among my most favoured minions. I haven't seen anything that hits harder other than like, Liches.

Well, I also ran 5/5 duskfrost, or is it frostdusk? Either way, I had that and 1-3 artifacts with chance to cast on them. Basically I did so much of the dps that my minions were eventually relegated entirely to meatshielding.