Recently started a necro focusing on pets, i really like the skeletons, but the fact that i can t choose which one i get is very frustrating, why does it work that way? it makes absolutely no sense, if we could get a transmuter that spawns only archers or mages or revenants would be very good, as for the blight beast, that thing looks totally out of place,that is an aetherial abomination in the hands of a necro…makes no sense…and the model is horrible, if i’m gonna play a pet build i will not use it for sure.
The skeleton thing might be for balance reasons. The kind you get also changes based on the skill level.
Blight Fiends are reused assets, yes. But that applies to alot of the content. And other than that, it doesn’t really look out of place or anything imo. Just think of it as a bloated flesh golem thing. Besides, it looks 100x better than the dumb looking Manticore model we have for what is supposed to be the strongest pet ingame.
This is a common feeling when first playing a pet build, but you soon realise that as your char develops you find that due to the time taken to summon each batch of 3 skellies (3 summons to get 9 up), the speed they can be killed and the range of different mobs means that having a mixed bunch actually works really well and saves the skellies being overpowered or far slower slower gameplay with everyone being forced to have to select the optimum skellies for each enounter to keep it balanced between select or random skellies.
For maxximum effect for a Necro you need to use Pet Attack, not only can you have all your army constantly running along in front and not behind you, so they meet the mobs first, but when approaching a mob that summons other mobs themselves, or a hero, yoiu can hold Pet Attack down on the summoner or hero and all your summons will ignore all other targets to concentrate all their damage on the one dangerous target taking it down quickly.
Skeletons aren’t pets. You can’t assign Aggro on them. If anything I wish they would at least put their icon up in the top left with the pets. Currently having to look in four locations while playing is really annoying with my ritualist build.
Level 52 (with epic tome that summons a skeleton). Have a briarthorn pet, the flesh fiend and tome Skelton icons in top left; regular skeletons tiny icon above hotbar; watching hot bar to know when my wind devils and storm totem is off cool down and don’t forget watching the actual game!!! It’s annoying.
The fact that you can’t choose which skellington to summon did bother me a bit at first too, but once you get to 6 skellies or more there’s usually a good mix of ranged and melee out, and if not, well they are pretty squishy so you have to resummon them constantly anyway.
9 more icons in the top left would be a bit too much I think. But 1 icon with the number of skellies right next to it could be nice for the sake of clarity. Then again, when you have to constantly resummon the skellies anyway, better visibility for the icon doesn’t do much I guess. I ended up hitting the summon button every few seconds without really paying attention to the skellie count, it’s just too much going on at the same time.
And that is probably what annoyed me the most. When I tried making a Necro pet build for the first time, I was thinking it’s gonna be a walk in the park. Like, I just get some buffs up and use pet attack. Turned out it’s actually really exhausting, so many buttons to press for resummons and devotion procs while trying to keep up with what’s going on on the battlefield, the sheer amount of pets doesn’t really help. In the end I respecced my Necro into melee, skelemancer wasn’t as fun as I had expected (or maybe I just suck at playing it).
I started a Fire Swarmling/Hellhound build instead, for me a much better experience than skellingtons since the swarmlings pretty much automatically respawn so you don’t have to pay attention to them at all, they are barely noticable in the fray anyway. But that build got nerfed at one time, so my 3rd attempt at a pet build was a Double Familiar conjurer and that turned out to be really fun. Just 4 (big) pets plus those tiny swarmlings, and Ravager dies in under 15 minutes 
At least before the 1.1 patch, Will of Bysmiel got nerfed in favor of that new set from FG.