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.

Summonmancer Build Skills

Your core skills that you need to max out are the following:

• Raise Skeleton: Your primary summoning skill. If you use items that boost your maximum number of minions, you can have about 13 skeletons at the same time.

• Skeleton Mastery: This skill will greatly boost the abilities of your skeletons.

• Raise Skeletal Mage: Max out this skill in order to add a mix of elemental damage. This includes a very long duration poison to prevent regeneration on tougher monsters. Also, the cold magi are very helpful versus Act Bosses because they slow them down.

• Corpse Explosion: Invest 20 points into this skill to maximize its range of effect. This way, you will maximize the build’s potential damage output as well. Also, the explosions deal half physical and half fire damage.

• Max out a Golem of your preference. If you want to be a pure Summoner, max out Golem Mastery as well. However, this will reduce your damage output.

• Dim Vision: Invest a few points here. Dim Vision has a massive radius and can disable ranged attackers.

• Lower resist: Spend a few points here if your party members rely on their elemental damage.

In addition, you need to spend at least a point in the skills below:

• Clay Golem
• Blood Golem
• Iron Golem
• Golem Mastery
• Summon Resist
• Revive
• Amplify Damage
• Terror
• Decrepify
• Teeth

Summonmancer Build Equipment

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.

Weapon

• Carin Shard

• A Wand with the Golemlord prefix

• Heart of the Oak

• Arm of King Leoric

• Spirit

• Switch: Call to Arms (for the Barbarian’s buffs), Beast

Shield

• Spirit

• Homunculus

• Darkforce Spawn

• Boneflame

Armor

• Enigma

• Trang-Oul’s Scales

Helm

• Andariel’s Visage

• Harlequin Crest

Boots

• Sandstorm Trek

• Marrowwalk

Belt

• Arachnid Mesh

Gloves

• Magefist

• Trang-Oul’s Claws

Rings

• Bul-Kathos’ Wedding Band

• 2x Stone of Jordan

Amulet

• Mara’s Kaleidoscope

Charm

• Annihilus

• Hellfire Torch

• Any Grand Charm that provides +1 to your Summon Skills

Summonmancer Build Stats

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.

Mercenary

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.