1 - Do Revives hit like a wet noodle?
2 - Is the Revive AI bad?
If talking about Rathmas,
1.No
2.NO
This video is from the 1st week of PTR by Whitelocks. looks amazing!
Wasn’t the vast majority of the damage in the first round of the PTR coming from Undead Army?
Yes and sort of. In all iterations of the Rathma rework and in any context of a minion based LoD build, the minions from Revive are just utility, not a damage dealing skill. In the first ptr patch, the Rathma set had no cap on minions so you could easily have 27 minions active and all of them would easily proc the cool down on AotD and that skill was your damage dealer while making you invincible with Rathma’s Shield passive. With the 2nd ptr patch, they limited it to 17 active minions so 7 skeletons and 10 Revives and also dramatically reduced the multipliers to AotD (basically rendering it useless) and forcing the build into a Bone Spirit build (since it still has all the multipliers) and removing the invincibility from Rathma’s Shield (news flash, there is still a form of invincibility via LotD Invigoration and permanent LotD plays VERY well with Bone Spirit).
As far as the Revive AI, that is more systemic with the nature of pets across Diablo 3 as a whole. The only pets that are reliable are the Skeletons since they can be actively commanded to a target. The Mages can be sort of targeted if you cast a new Mage (or 2 or 4) on a target, they will attack it but they do not ALWAYS retarget to a new enemy reliably.