Minion Feedback

I've been playing a minion build and I find it lacking. Mainly, it's too slow and too weak, and I can't properly utilize my reviving minions or create enough disposable ones even when I have the resources.

- Infernal legion: This support does all of it's damage as an ignite, which means it competes for damage with all of your other fire skills. In effect, the more fire damage you do with other skills the less effective dps this support has, since the actual difference between using or not using it is the difference between its own ignite and the next strongest one. In particular it conflicts with the infernal hound which has the exact same effect, meaning only one can do damage.
Aside from that the damage feels rather lackluster in general, and doesn't seem to benefit from anything other than minion health, so it doesn't scale very well regardless.

Having it be it's own effect that can stack with more minions applying it(probably with reduced effects for each additional minion applying it), or having the minions release periodic pulses of fire rather than making it a DoT would feel a lot better.

- Unstable Minions: The damage just feels way too low. The utter majority of nodes I took in the tree were minion damage and minion health yet my exploding zombies each deal less damage than a single explosion of my skeleton's gas arrows(of which they shoot 3 at a time) despite costing more mana and a corpse. The empowered zombies do a bit more damage than a single explosions, but cost a power charge.
Burning heads do even less damage due to being far squishier, and while they are less costly in theory, spawning new ones doesn't explode the old ones, so you need to refrain from casting spells until they all finish exploding to get the most out of them.

I think just buffing the damage would make it feel a lot better. It currently seems to only be viable on zombies, and these take too much time and resources to make, so the mediocre damage translates to very poor dps.

- Zombies: Having a use time of 0.6 seconds that isn't even affected by cast time feels very unresponsive and slow, especially when you can only use it once you have killed some mobs. The skill is only useful if you kill monsters slowly to begin with, so you feel punished for doing large amounts of damage with other abilities.
In boss fights it's impossible to cast without power charge generation that you don't have until the later stages of the game, and the cast time feels especially costly due to the more limited time you have for casting during the fight.

They need a much shorter cast time and an alternative to corpses that you can use earlier. Making sacrifice a keystone instead of an aura would be a nice way to fix it, though simply making it available earlier would also be nice.
I don't think they need any extra duration, as that's what permanent minions are for. They just need to be more immediately available so they don't become a time investment you could otherwise use to just wipe a monster pack outright or immediately damage a boss that could kill or avoid the zombies with one of it's attacks or abilities by the time you finished summoning them.

- Commands: These have a cast time longer than casting the skill yourself, with the added restriction of only being available while the corresponding minions are alive, having an additional cooldown and requiring reserved spirit. The only advantage you get is the minion's auto attacks, but those don't compensate for what is otherwise just a far worse version of a skill you could use better yourself.

Being able to command all minions of the same type at once would feel a lot better. This could be balanced by scaling the mana cost of command with the amount of active minions, or by increasing the spirit reservation of consecutive minions of the same type.

- Passive Tree: There's little to no nuance in the offensive options minions get form the passive tree. There's minion damage, minion crit, minion accuracy, and minion life if you're going infernal legion or unstable minions. It's boring and weak, and makes using the minion skills just plain worse than casting those spells yourself even without considering command's slower cast time.

It would be nice if there was a keystone that allowed you to share or transfer bonuses like ignite magnitude, fire exposure effect and other types of modifiers that aren't just "minion damage" to your minions rather than having them apply just to yourself. Maybe even have the option of going with a martial weapon and giving them it's stats for their auto attacks. Just some way to make an interesting powerful build that would apply to your minions instead of yourself

After trying unearth for a bit, making zombies an AOE rather than single target would instantly make the skill feel good. Doesn't need to be very big, but just being able to raise multiple corpses at once would be nice. Make it use all power charges at once as well.
The current mana, corpse/charge and time costs just aren't justified when all you get is one minion that is so slow it barely has enough time to go from one pack to the next.