Question about Minion scaling:

Hi all,
i am new to this game (almost level 20 templar) and until now it looks very promising to me.
I hope that PoE will be the "better diablo 3", like so many of other PoE players.

I loved to play D2 (and all other RPGs where it was possible) as a "dark" summoner or you might say on the "deathknightish" way.

So may choice for PoE was the Templar with a focus on some melee, heavy frost damage and a horde of undead minions.
At least this is the "masterplan".

But looking at all those other games i have played until today, most (if not all) summoner had the same problems at the very first beginning of the game. Their minions seemd to be good at first, but sucked really hard on higher difficulty levels because of lacking scaling, etc etc.
(look at Diablo 2 before 10000 patches, look at diablo 3 before the zombiedog patch, look at world of warcraft and the hunter/warlock pets, etc etc, i think you all got the picture :D).

So my questions are:

Do those minons in PoE scale in any way but Skillgemlevel/support gem level?
Do they benefit from the gear the player wears? (will they get resis, health, what ever?)
Do those minon builds work on higher difficulty levels?

I noticed that my minions die almost instantly as soon as they face a non normal monster like champions, rares, bosses, etc which made some bossfights almost impossible for me (because there are no corpses to resummon zombies and the skeletons died during their "raising animation" rendering them useless, etc).

Looking forward for any informations about this matter!


Oh and i am NOT asking for "the best build". I tinker around with the skilltree my self ;). Just needing some more informations about if and how those minions work/scale in detail.

Right now i do something like this:
engaging combat using "Cold Snap", moving in to draw the enemy attention on my character, spamming frostnova or glacial hammer depending on the situation whily my minions do the rest and/or distract other adds.
So like i said, my focus is on magic (ca 2/3 or 3/4 of all skillpoints) with some minor points in strength-perks.
This works great on trash, good on rare/champs but is REALLY HARD against bosses.

Especially Merveil was a true pain in the ... you know what i mean.