I tried to came up with ideas in order to improve Revive, but wasn’t able to produce something cool.
Revive damage seems to be unreliable
Is that skill impossible to balance ?
Are Thorns the only way ?
Rathma set made them better by making them last forever unless over-summoned.
The next big thing to help improve them is to treat them like skeletons so effects like Jesseth and Bone Ringer apply. Also, if using Kill Command, they should explode. Maybe this is how they work now…
Another option would be to have revive minions produce a corpse every 6 (or 10) seconds, but this has problems as it may be possible to revive the free corpses and it minimizes the Golem.
A new item could be introduced that revives on kill, the minion dealing a percentage of the death blow (let’s say 10-25% so if you did 50 million, the minion does 5 million - 12.5 million), snapshot so the damage is still somewhat variable but becomes predictable. Of course, issues exist there as well, like if you had Sever. Also, it should probably reduce your damage so the minions are “preferred.”
Wow, very creative suggestions ! 
If the minions did real damage or gave you thornes, or consumed corpses or something clever. I just use it to get stacks in rathma basically.