Pure Summoner

[Brother Laz]

MAX mastery
MAX skeleton mage
MAX skeleton (after you max the other two, silly goose. Not strictly needed, it has pathetic AR, but if you want to stay in theme [& flood the screen with 100+ minions] they do make good tanks due to their number. Enemies spread out their attacks over them, and they have 200+ HP in Hell. Else just use only revives to tank)
Level 1 revive (and +skills items) to help protect the mages, more so if you don't use skeletons
Level 1 lower resist (+all skills from SoJs and hopefully a wand/totem/Claws bonus to boost it)
Or no lower resist at all, if you have it on a wand/totem. Saves you 7 skill points.
Level 1 terror to control the battle [unless variant rules prohibit it]
Level 1 fire golem + mastery (+skills)

If you want to be ONLY summoning, you can do so, but IMO lower resist is acceptable. It is basically a second mastery, and something that only adds to damage (and not much either) and doesn't change strategy but makes it actually POSSIBLE to get past Hell difficulty is OK in my view. They have 3000 HP... you do 40 damage per fire shot... some LR to boost it is mighty handy. :)

Terror OTOH is very handy, but it does change the strategy somewhat. Leave it out if you want to go Sirian. I personally don't adhere to the teachings of Lord Sirian, but whatever.

Rich man's equipment: As many +skills as possible (I have +21 to all summoning, +24 to skeleton mage, adding up to 109 minions if I can get all 22 revives up). Especially +to summoning (doh). +3 summoning wand/totem/ammy/circlet is already +12, more if you get +1-3 to skeleton mage on the wand/totem (I don't think you can get mastery anymore after level 24, since it is a level 1 skill), add Scales for another +2 summoning, Claws for +2 curses (helps with LR), 2 SoJs, and as many charms as possible. And when 1.10 comes out, find a Marrowwalk for +2 mastery on the boot slot. :)

Poor man's equipment: Lots and lots of +summoning; buy a wand with +3 summoning +3 skeleton mage, gamble on ammies and circlets and ID every totem, hoping to get +10-15 summoning from there. If you have any armor that adds +1 such as Shroud/SotV/Garb (!) use it. You'll need ALL the +skills you can get.

Teleportation ammy/circlet preferred, else consider a staff on weapon switch to telekill enemies with (you take all your skeletons with you when you teleport, and 80 minions teleporting on top of a boss usually ends its day). Else use town portal next to the mob to collect your forces.

Strategy: run in with skeleton army in tow, if skeletons start dropping faster than you can raise them see where the problem is and terror it away [if you can], or feed it a fire golem. If it's weak you may even be able to stunlock it with spammed fire golem death explosions, at low level, if you can pay the mana cost. If the skeletons are getting themselves killed three screens away, or you want to move them all to a specific spot (ie. on top of Nihlathak) town portal to town and back and all skeletons are gathered around you.

UNSUMMON all poison mages; they do like 600 damage over 600 seconds. (yay) HOTKEY unsummon (!). I prefer to keep only fire and cold (if you have the bodies); fire gets a double damage boost from mastery and does twice as much damage as all the others, while cold freezes them down and makes it harder for them to kill your forces. Lightning is pointless as it does about 3 points more damage than cold, and doesn't chill, and has a shorter range than the other two attacks. Unless they're fire/cold immune (don't even THINK of using poison).

Merc: either holy freeze, prayer or thorns. Prayer helps revitalize near dead skeletons, but IMO freeze is more useful. Problem is that he doesn't often get to attack anything himself due to the skeleton wall in the way, and enemies may end up out of the radius of holy freeze (if he even turns it on in the first place). Thorns is when you realize you suck badly and can't kill anything, then at least you can buy a thorns merc and mock people using revive/thorns because you don't get the 50% resist and kill twice as fast. :) But as I said, it's only a way to salvage a failed character. It defeats the purpose. ;) I use an act 3 lightning mage. He sucks. But I like it. If I wanted to powerplay, I'd use revives instead of mass warriors, or else stay in 1 area without any resists and bone spirit + CE [cow explosion]. ;)

Bane: The Ancients. They will pwn your skeletons, and golems can't kill all three - Sirian killed D with iron golem, but the thrower isn't affected. :angry: Only way to kill him at all is with a good +p&b +spirit wand (keep any totem you find along the way that gives a bonus to p&b or bone spirit, for this one fight). Level 3 spirit can do it in Normal and NM. Level 6-10 spirit in Hell. The other way to kill him is by fire golem nuke. FG blows up when killed or otherwise removed from the game, and does 50 fire 50 physical damage in a radius. Remove all +skill items (to keep mana costs low) and just spam FG on him. It may kill him.

(Edit: can it kill in Hell? Yes it can. It just takes a bit more time. But IMO, having 100+ minions of which 40+ do 30-60 damage per hit (cold-fire) or an average of 1.8K per second isn't weak. Heck, inferno sorcs do way less than that. CHAIN LIGHTNING does less than that with max mastery, if you only hit one target. Armageddon does way less. Bone spear? Tornado? Volcano? Bone spirit? Poison nova? Even Blizzard? Rotflmao. :) )