Hi guys, so I have raise the dead devotion for personal tastes. Current lvl 10. Its my only summon. The problem I’m having with it is the majority of time they contribute zero to battles. I have 135% run speed and once they are summoned they just fall behind too easily (I’m a melee char). Then time is up, they disappear. Having followers completely disappear from your side is really annoying and I would love to see this work better for us melee chars.
Pet bonuses don’t apply only char dmg modifiers. So I just wanted to suggest if they could have the same movement speed as your character so my small army can contribute and look cool by my side? 
I thought about making a build that used them as a boost to my melee, but I was having the same problem, naturally I thought they’d inherit at least a fraction of your speed but it seems they do not.
It’s going to be hard to use them on a non-aether/vitality character regardless, since that’s the only damage they do.
Even on vitality/aether casters though (AoE spam so they spawn all the time) they’re really mostly around for one, and rarely two fights at a time, and that’s in crowded areas. Maybe it would be better if their duration was based on the number of attacks they make, like they unsummon after 15 attacks or so at max level (so they stick around even out of combat).
This has been suggested before. No action on it; it’s probably a technical limitation.
It’s a bit different. We’re talking about minions with a trickier summoning condition than Wind Devils or totems, which usually are ready to be recast as soon as you begin your next fight.
Having these minions disappear after a number of attacks makes more sense, after all a similar mechanic already exists in the game (number of attacks causes an affect, which is basically how charge level skills like Savagery work).
Raise the dead has been Crate’s most ridiculous decision making in this game…
Everytime they touch this devotion, they screw it up
The change to player scaling made skeletons even slower, since:
- They no longer benefit from the myriad sources of pet-based speed bonuses; and
- Their new charge skill has negligible effect.
Solution: replace their charge with Spectral Strike (from Alkamos’ Warsword) to be used only at long range, and watch them pop into battle. 
And given their terrible base damage, at least this will give them a single (somewhat) decent hit every fight without also amping their sustained DPS.
It was actually a potentially great constellation on hybrids, but with the change from pet bonus to player bonus it needs some tweaking. They badly need some kind of skill other than their damage attacks to make up for all they’ve lost (the dead were once comparable to mastery pets damage-wise) and to make up for the tricky summoning condition. Perhaps a resistance or OA/DA debuff on attack?
It’s kind of sad because playstyle-wise I liked the change - many of my new builds use the constellation. Summoners generally have a lot of extra +%whatever damage, and skills like these give them the opportunity to get some use out of those wasted stats.
Gameplay performance aside, I think the original intent behind the recent changes to the constellation is questionable - it’s weird for people who have absolutely no previous interest/investment in summoning to suddenly gain competent minions when hybrids have to work so hard at balancing personal and pet DPS. If they want competent DPS minions, they have to work at it. BUT there’s a flipside - surely overstacking a truly ridiculous amount of player buffs just to make skills like these more useful (given the way they work atm, you’d need a LOT more than a +1000% damage bonus to see good results) is a lot harder to do than just using a few pieces of hybrid +%pet bonus gear?
I’m really not sure where this skill is going intent-wise.
I can understand this if the newly patched dead DID have some valuable buff/debuff that a non-summoner might find useful, but DPS is really all they do atm (the slow is negligible when you actually need it). On my hybrids, at least, they make great roadblocks working in tandem with my other pets.
I should also point out that this seems to be a general problem among devotion-granted player scaling summoned pets though (eg. Living Shadow). At least you can attach useful debuff/nuke devotion skills to the the mastery versions (eg. Wind Devils) to grant them versatility.
I was asking myself the same thing.
I tried Raise the Dead before the change and my biggest problem with it was not the summons themselves, but how to summon them. You need to be way too precise to kill an guy with that one skill, unlike Necromancer’s Deathgrips that can summon if you kill them with any attack as long as you are the one doing the killing. And the most ironic part? The ghosts from the glove are 30% chance on enemy death and still are more easy to summon compared to the skeletons that have 100%.
So how changing it to Player Damage is going to change anything? Raise the Dead is unpopular because it’s convoluted to trigger, not because hybrids didn’t wanted it. If it was appliable to an Aura/Defensive skill instead and worked similar to Necromancer’s Deathgrips as a passive bonus to all attacks then it would be more attractive. (also there’s the fact that it’s not that useful to trigger on bosses, but that can be a minor issue)
I think the initial intention was something to go with Dying God, since it’s another pet devotion that also require Chaos and it’s Tier 3, and Revenant also gives 1 Primordial (another requirement for Dying God). But it’s too risky to use due to it’s health cost (even though it’s thematicaly fitting), and in the end became just as unrealiable as Revenant.
Raise Dead is actually easy to trigger if you use burst damage skills like Devastation or spammable, persistent effect skills like the Sigil of Consumption. A hybrid should have no trouble spawning skeletons with these if you used them on non-uniques, and most fights involve non-unique mobs.
I never really had a problem causing Raise Dead to proc and before the change they were definitely worth it results-wise.
These days their damage is a lot lower, though it’s nice to finally see buffs like Possession finally being passed on (at least indirectly) to some of my summoned units. The mechanic feels like one of the things that in the future (with tweaking) can be used as one to keep a hybrid summoner build together, along with party-wide buffs and debuffs.
To add insult to injury, the ghosts are really fast, they outrun the hellhound easily