I was thinking about the Skeleton commander that used to exist as a part of the summon skeleton skill, and thought why not make it its own ability?
Default ability summons a skeleton commander that provides an AOE buff to other minions, and should be fairly high along the Necromancer tree. What sets this summon apart from other Acolyte summons though is that it behaves more like a Primalist summon, and activating its ability allows you to strategically control your other minions.
Default active: something simple like increases skeleton warrior and mage attack speed for 10 seconds.
Talent tree examples:
Testudo: Causes your skeleton warriors and death knights to form a wall at your cursor’s location when activating your ability, blocking all projectiles and blocking enemies from passing. The more skeleton warriors and death knights, the wider and more effective the wall.
Archer bank (passive): Your skeleton archers will stand in formation and instead of firing independently all fire at the same time (still separate targets). Increases archer damage and range by 25%.
Summon Vanguard: Every 15 seconds, the skeleton commander summons a skeleton vanguard. This skill will be a prerequisite for other passive bonuses to the skeleton vanguard, and provides bonuses to any summoned vanguard.
Personal guard: Causes skeletal vanguard to stand in a circle around the acolyte instead of running to engage targets, but will attack anything nearby the Acolyte. Additionally, 30% of damage taken by the Acolyte is split among the vanguard.
Coven ritual: All skeleton mages combine their energies to cast a meteor at the target location. This scales based on the number of mages participating in the ritual.
Obviously, any of the numbers are up in the air, but I thought it would be a neat concept to have a summon that helps you focus and manage your other summons. Other ideas for passive nodes include tweaks to the minion AI such as causing them to take agro if the Acolyte pulls threat, or causing ranged minions to focus on targets with less HP.