The Summonmancer is also known as Overlord, Zookeeper, Skeletor, Summoner, Skelemancer or Lord of Mages. It’s a Necromancer buildthat has the ability to summon numerous minions to deal damage and overwhelm its enemies.
Your role as a Summonmancer is to support your army of skeletons. In order to do so, you need to weaken the opponents by casting curses, using Corpse Explosion on their corpses and replacing your fallen minions.
In multiplayer games, you can boost the damage of your allies by casting curses on the enemies. In addition, your army of minions will distract the groups of enemies, protecting you and your party from receiving damage.
Your core skills that you need to max out are the following:
In addition, you need to spend at least a point in the skills below:
The Summonmancers are quite independent and versatile in the terms of gear. Many players often stack items with +skills effect to summon their army. Then, they swap to magic find gear for better loot. This way you’ll lose some of your minions because your Magic Find items will probably allow a lower maximum number of minions. However, your minions left should be powerful enough to deal with almost any monster in the game.
Strength: Invest enough points in order to equip your endgame gear.
Dexterity: Spend points in this attribute until you reach max block using Homunculus.
Vitality: Place your remaining points in your life pool.
Energy: The Summonmancer doesn’t need to spend any points on his Energy. Don’t forget to carry some mana potions with you though.
Your skeleton army can become quite powerful with the Might Aura, given by an Act 2 (Nightmare) offensive hireling. This way, your minions are able to last even in Hell mode’s Act V.