Echo MM?

Back to the original question. I use arcane echo on my necro effectively occasionally. It is especially good if you have a battery and boosted cast/recharge speed.

I usually have offering of blood to compensate if needed and arcane echo copies any spell i want so its a necessity imo.

need corpses fast? arcane echo, deathly swarm - get two deathly swarms and fire em off.

need minions fast? arcane echo, animate *, spam between the two using offering of blood to keep you at a decent energy level.

Do not feel bad about using taste of death, it is REALLY helpful, trust me.

as for dark bond... USE IT. PERIOD. Best spell next to V sacrifice. Good points all, except maybe for Dark Bond. You shouldn't be close enough to the enemies to take any damage, so most of the time it will be pointless. When I brought it out to farm in the Furnace, I think I only got hit twice - and one of those times I had no minions to redirect the damage to anyway.

Ah yes but for doing solo runs like rune farming and basically anything solo it is awesome. Furnace u dont have to worry cause everything is on thewar. Well, if you're concerned with personal protection, consider Aura of the Lich instead. Its cooldown is shorter than duration, so you can keep it up continuously while receiving the healing from one of the castings ending every so often. While it doesn't reduce enemy damage in % considerations (both life and damage are halved), its greatest effect is reducing sacrifice damage by 4 (half for lower life, half again for Aura of the Lich effect). This synergizes well with all the undead-healing sacrifice spells, as well as Blood Renewal. The only downside, of course, is that you have to use Arcane Echo instead of Echo

i personally use tainted flesh as an elite. kinda nice doing poison at helping kill ppl and then later i go and sumon some horrors. dark bond is not really needed. i sometimes prefer to die cause it sets of a death nova and with the disease and now the poison on them gives them a big degen and usually once i die they die with me. then a smart person resses me and i start with the horrors. But the problem with the MM dying is that all the undead become neutral/hostile. Their dots on the radar turn red, and while they continue to attack the thing they were attacking when you died (which is probably keeping their aggro by attacking back) they can accidentally attack the party if aggroed.

Tainted Flesh is nice, but too many things are immune to poison as is, and if you want to make sure the enemy is poisoned you have to keep spamming it on all your minions Death Nova is a very good spell, but it's very hard to place it on the right undead unless you plan to blow them up with Taste of Death immediately. The reason I prefer Aura of the Lich is that while it halves healing to you, it does not affect regeneration, so Blood Renewal or Healing Breeze is all that's required to offset sacrifice skills which do 1/4 of the original damage anyway.