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I've written a number of times about how playing one Diablo 2 character inspires me to start planning for more future characters down the road. The inspiration for this new build was born when this item dropped during Usain Bolter's run, the unique Tomb Wand known as the Arm of King Leoric. This is about the best possible wand for a summoning Necromancer, barring some super-rare elite runeword, with +2 to all summoning skills along with another +3 to Raise Skeleton, +3 to Skeleton Mastery, and +2 to Raise Skeletal Mage. I couldn't bring myself to sell the item and immediately thought about designing another summoning Necromancer with the intention of using this item. The summoning Necromancer is my single favorite non-Sorceress build in Diablo 2 and it had been more than a decade since I had last played one of those characters. However, as longtime readers of this site may know, I've already played and written about several of those characters between Skulla and Kell, not to mention having done multiple summoning Druids as well. Was there anything that I could do to put a fresh spin on this potential character setup?
I thought about this for a while and then suddenly it hit me out of the blue: what if I created a SUMMONING-ONLY version of the Necromancer class? This would superficially look a lot like my earlier character Skulla but would actually play out quite differently given the utter lack of curse support. That would mean no Iron Maiden, no Dim Vision, no Lower Resist, none of the crowd control provided by Terror or Decrepify and so on. As someone who has played several of these Necromancers before, I can assure readers that giving up all access to the Curses skill tree is a very big deal indeed! It could be particularly tough getting started at the beginning of each session without the standard Golem + Iron Maiden combo that I've used many times previously. And of course this character would have absolutely no direct damage capabilities, no using Corse Explosion or Bone Spear or whatever you'll see everywhere online if you happen to run into Necromancers on Battle.net.
There is one advantage to giving up the Curses and Poison/Bone skill trees: more skill points available to dump directly into the summons themselves. Without having to allocate skill points to Iron Maiden or Dim Vision, this character can spend the full 20 skill points into Raise Skeleton, Skeleton Mastery, and Raise Skeletal Mage, plus a Golem of my choice, while still having some extra points left over. Then add in all of the extra +skills from that Arm of King Leoric wand, plus an eventual Spirit shield runeword, and maybe as many as +3 Necro summoning from the amulet and circlet slots... Well, you get the idea. In an ideal world, that could be something like SLVL 33 or 34 for the skeleton summons even though it's unlikely I would be able to get any +skills in the armor slot. (The Necromancer-exclusive Bone runeword requires two Um runes which is theoretically possible but not too likely to happen.) With relatively decent luck and that awesome unique wand, I should be able to have an absolutely massive army with absurdly high stats which sounded like a ton of fun.
Speaking of which, Diablo 2 Resurrected has tinkered with the stats on the various Necromancer summoned units and they're actually a lot stronger now. I can recall playing Skulla back in I think patch 1.07 and the melee skeletons were quite fragile at the time, having only a few hundred HP and needing to be replaced constantly as they died. That is absolutely not the case anymore due to various patch changes over the years, as the melee skeletons can have thousands upon thousands of health when maxed out and deal tremendous damage in the process. Here's a link where the reader can play around with various skill point allocations and see what stats the Necromancer summons will have; I'm estimating that the melee skeletons should be able to reach 4000 HP apiece while the skeletal mages should be in the hundreds of damage per shot. And I should be able to have something like 12-13 of each type of skeleton out on the field at once! 
As for the golem, well, no one ever really tries to run high-level golems so this should be a fun learning exercise. The obvious golem choice between the four options is the Fire Golem, which does the most damage and has the significant advantage of being castable anywhere on screen (unlike the skeleton summons). I will need some kind of way to produce the initial bodies for skeleton raising plus kill bosses when there are no corpses available, and the Fire Golem will have to fill that all-important role. I really wanted to use Iron Golems instead because that's such a neat skill and I've never had a chance to use it in the past, however unfortunately Iron Golem was eviscerated in D2R when its Thorns damage was inexplicably changed from being percentage-based to a flat damage amount returned. This made the skill infinitely worse and it's no longer viable as anything beyond serious variant material. My one concern here is dealing with the Fire Immune Talic during the Ancients quest but I should be able to swap over to Iron Golem in a true emergency there - I'm sure I'll be able to come up with a solution if needed.
I did need a name for this character and I decided to take a page out of the game Hades by going with Skelly. The extremely talkative training dummy from that game proved to be one of its most memorable characters and I'm looking forward to Hades 2 when it comes out of early access sometime next year. As usual for my characters, I intend to do a single pass through the game while full clearing each area one time through. I'll have to make use of what I find along the way without repeating areas or trading/twinking/sharing gear (outside of the aforementioned Arm of King Leoric wand). I've always felt that Diablo 2 is much more interesting when each character has to come up with their own stuff rather than pooling it all together and god-moding new characters past every challenge. I'll also be able to play in offline Single Player mode which should reduce issues that can pop up from lag and disconnects when running online characters on the Blizzard servers. I still don't trust Diablo 2 Resurrected enough to create a Hardcore character but I'll do my best to clear the whole game deathless and let readers know if I fall short of that goal (as I've done with several previous characters). I plan to complete the whole game without a mercenary as Skelly should have plenty of minions to protect him. Time to let the skeleton army loose on the world once more!
