Vaal Summon Skeletons

Do Vaal Summon Skelletons also suffer from the -50% minion damage as regular skeletons?

Hi,

I have been playing summoners for a long time now. Came back to the game after a time.

Been using Queen's Decree for the "+1 to Max Spectres".
It also has "180% increased duration on Skeletons", and I have approx 90% increased duration from the tree.

Now I find that, by design, the skeletons will not follow you and will die if you move too far away.

This means that the added duration (a nice 75 seconds) from the unique + the tree is actually of no use.

I would like to recommend that uniques actually have a use - for people who bother to equip it. As well people who take "Increased Skill Duration" should get benefit.

You need to let the skeletons follow you, like regular ones.

The community has found via testing that Femurs of the Saints, which ostensibly provides 2% attack/cast speed bonus, does not provide this bonus for skeletons summoned by Vaal Summon Skeletons
(RE: https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/3zmprj/psafemurs_of_the_saints_does_not_grant_attackcast/). I hope this is not an intended mechanic, as the combination of Femurs of the Saints and Vaal Summon Skeletons would provide an interesting alternative to Vaal Haste for summoners.

I have tested this, and it seems to be working fine. Bonuses from number of minions is both applied to and provided by the skeletons summoned by Vaal Summon Skeletons.

Edit: Never mind, the reason it's working (on development build) is because someone else already fixed it. Should be patched in soon!

I think after new update the game is crashing constanttly if you have more than 25 summons and then use vaal skeletons. Im using AMD GPU 7900 series with an i7. I tried it couple of times and crashes every time. I even lowered the settings from the config file still crashes.

Please make skeletons follow the player or work with convocation. Why would already bad minions ALSO have this deficiency?

I wanted to make quirky Vaal Summon Skeletons build but my idea got destroyed by GGG's philosophy of crushing weak things into the ground and empowering already overpowered stuff to insane levels of power.

*Sigh*

When would be the be the ideal time to use a vaal on this gem? I currently have a 0% level 17 SS. I'm guessing get it to level 20, raise it to 20%, then vaal it?

Worse case scenario will be the % drops and I may have to relevel it, right?

Currently this skill is one of the strongest skills a summoner has, and it is able to clear bosses within seconds. As summoners otherwise have a much slower clear speed than other builds, I think it is ok if this gem makes them at least shine at the boss.

The problem with this gem however is the effect it has on lower-end spec PCs, as the new engine will turn everything into mush if you hit this spell.

I'd suggest to cut the amount of minions summoned by this spell in half, but double the strength/hp of those minions. Effectively the gem would have the exact same dps, but several issues could be solved by having only half the amount of minions. FPS is one, and then twice the hp would also solve the issue that most skeletons currently almost instantly die with 3.0 damage values.