ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

The stats of your minions are determined by the time you summon them, and you can boost your stats to make them more powerful:

1. Most of them deals physical dam, and your skeleton mage has Meteoric Crash. So boost your physical dam as much as possible.

2. Your minions naturally inherit your movement speed, and you can use movement infusion before summon. Be care, they will run extremely fast.

3. Your minions naturally inherit your global speed, try to get faster, take mindstar of flames, ring of speed, Eden's Guile, your racial abilities...

4. To make your minions tougher, Aura of Undeath makes them inherit 40% of your resist. Note that all your raw resistances will count, not just capped at 70. There, you may stack resist in so
many ways: wild infusion, ethereal rune, after-teleport effect, thick skin...

5. If you want your minions become even toucher, try Blighted Summoning.

6. Optional: Aura of Undeath makes your minion inherit 40% of your immunities, the most important is stun immunity. You can stack stun immunity above 100% to give them more. Use movement infusion, Halfling's Indomitable, Temporal Form...

7. Optional: Find ways to lower monster's resistance. Your minions DO NOT inherit resistance penetration. Learn Curse of Vulnerability, or if you're lucky, use imbued staff with Curse of Vulnerability instead. You may need some spell power to apply the debuff. Do not use Temporal Form's Flawed Design, it will easily rip off your own minion.

Then you'll have tough, rampaging skeleton warriors, dealing heavy physical damage and killing everything on your way.

thank you! very helpful information

(after winning insane/rl)All until prides, it's a steam rolling train of death, building it's tracks from the bones of anything that is hostile. 200% global speed minions with 120+% phys dmg and 40%+all ress
MVP is the boneyard+to the grave combo (I'd pre-emptively cast boneyard outside of enemy vision---->blink to enemy+use 'to the grave', which would send any hostile in range to the boneyard WHICH(boneyard) DOES NOT NEED TO BE IN RANGE. It could be 2 rooms away, where my surged minions await with a night sphere on top. Swift killer.
First try I went higher for dmg/free souls, had eden's guile for speed (died in a pride vault to 3x archmage bosses)
Second was shalore for speed to make space for undeterred boot (shalore racial/eden's guile boots/blinding speed ringmod don't stack with each other) and have timeless for cd reduction

-Soul management in this summoner build is NOT a problem, 1 point in torture souls sufficed all until very late game. With sustains online had 9 souls max, enough to unlock Reaping bonus
-Mana is NOT a problem
-healing after a lichform IS a problem, as our minions don't seem to proc lifesteal from eternal light's life leech below 1%. Vitality is huge, bloodcaller maybe?, have to try.
-with just a few floating points, my darkness dmg was decent. I'd prioritise minion buffing/boneyard+TTG, then banes/healing reduction/rigor mortis(used primary as a slowing tool, 2/5 'nuff)
-Dreadmaster/glacial waste categories are not used as, 1. dreadmaster has useful spells, but it's not reliable and dies fast 2. hiermal shield hits and freezes our minions
-Grave maybe for the 1st spell? It lasting for 3 seconds is a bit weak, but as summoner we don't have that many spells to use and in a longer fight the lack of cooldowns was severe (that's why I've opted for shalore with timeless, which did prove crucial, together with some cdr from zemekkys neck.
-With Lichform commanding presence, I'd 'double dip' on SP bonus to my summons by precasting several spells (costing only mana, no souls), that would proc the racial and 'spellpower on crit' mods.

Itemisation makes this build super cool, as it's mostly about sp/phys dmg/life mods. Movement/heroism infusions are OP all until Lich and tbf I'd imagine a non-lich build easly, as its benefits are not that good for minioning as it is for a pure caster/hybryd builds. I've had over 120 sp on LoSkull'ed mage.
Starting from prides, my lovely Murder Machines would start dying too, nothing that re-engaging wouldn't fix. Vaults are not recommended at this point, as lack of space+huge dmg will inevitably cast doom upon us.

Worst enemies? archmages/necromancers, killing all of our minions while being fairly tanky; dissipation+mindblast torque(silence based on our mindpower to enemy mental save)
Worthy items? Staffs with multi-dmg mod (so instead of +40phys on staff, +30phys and +30%darkness), undeterred, mindblast torque, black pedant(zemekkys if drops), light absorbing lite (that demonic one with -1000 light radius), untouchable, lifemodded rings with immunities/all dmg

It's worth pointing out that you lose some transferrable bonuses when you use Lord of Skulls (LoS) unless you prime everything up again. Consequently, using LoS in battle might not be a great idea as it actually makes one skeleton significantly less durable.

Higher is an excellent choice as well because Wrath of the Highborn gives +20% all damage and +20% resist all. Combine that with stacking resistance after teleport and it's fairly easy to max out your minion's resistances. Unfortunately, they appear to cap at 70% (though the Bone Giant might not), which is deeply unfortunate.

A good combo before lich is any gear abilities + wild infusion + Wrath + teleport + movement (in that order so the movement isn't cancelled) and then summon skeletons.

After lich, blink + ethereal is a reasonable replacement.