Totally agree.
TLDR: increase base minion damage (with paragons and glyphs to not unbalance low lvl), slight nerf AotD and mendeln procs, merge some aspects and update useless passive skills/nodes.
Minion damage is very weak outside mendeln, and even mendeln procs isnt good enough doing pit 95-100 (comparing non minion builds).
Its important to mention, to be able run pit 100, you need invest too much on damage, sacrificing alot survivibility.
If you compare with non minion build, like bloodsurge or blood lance, these can tank alot (pratically imortal), while doing way better consistent damage. You also can do defensive variants in your build, without lose alot of damage…
AotD is in the right direction, but its too disproportionate… They need to buff alot base minion damage in high end, while doing some ajust (tune down) in mendeln and AotD to prevent overpower too much the build.
I will point some suggestions i already did in necro forum, as a effort to Blizzard change their mind.
1 - Best way to improve base minion damage without buff too much low lvl experience, are paragons and glyphs:
A) Warrior glyph: its outdated… Need to put + 20(x)% summoning damage (all minions) and keep the armor buff as secondary effect (for those that have hope with thorns).
*Legendary effect (lvl 46), increase summoning damage by “x”% up to +20(x)% at lvl 100.
B) Mage glyph: keep resist plus increase skeleton mage damage by (x) 20% (only mages this one). Legendary glyph increase mage damage up to 20% on lvl 100.
C) Golem glyph: keep same damage % (golem only), but put a aditional extra thorn %. Legendary glyph +(x) 20% golem damage on lvl 100.
D) Paragons: since skeleton warrior take low % from weapon damage, they need to improve alot the additive damage to warrior which do almost no damage in any highlvl content.
The defensive nodes need to have some sinergy with the necro, giving a small portion of the stats to necro.
E) Passive Skill “Death defense”: This passive is totally outdated and useless. Since is a high lvl passive, it need to be good (some will say its good to thorns, i disagree…).
Suggestion “Assemble the army” (or whatever you want): increase the total skeleton warrior/mages by 1 (3 ranks).
F) Aspects: some aspect need to be merged, i cant find a build (no matters the class) which require so many aspects to work…
G) Shields: this could be our best defensive gear, but it decrease too much overall damage. It need to grant us at least 90-95% main hand damage to be competitive with focus. It already cant use offensive aspect, no reason gimp even more the damage.
Percentages can be changed to balance to a reasonable lvls.