The Necromancer is Underpowered Reason 10: Unncessary diminishing returns on skill investments

This is another one I've touched on in previous posts, but that stands on its own as a glaring weakness. Only a few of the necromancer's skills have diminishing returns on skill point investments and the necromancer is not the only class that has skills with this problem, but the necromancer is probably the most adversely affected by it.

I should note that this mechanic annoys me in general. It makes sense that not all skills can be equal. By their nature, some skills will be prioritized over others. Some skills are one-point wonders and some skills simply must be maxed because they're that good. That's fine. But where skills have diminishing returns on point investment, it's almost always problematic. Skills that could be useful are forced into roles as one-point skills because further investment isn't worth it. In principle, it could be the case that designing these skills to scale without diminishing returns would be difficult. In reality, it seems that these skills are usually underpowered anyway, and switching to linear scaling on everything wouldn't really make any of these skills overpowered.

The necromancer has diminishing returns on several skills. Golem Mastery gets diminishing returns on running speed, but no one could realistically be worried about a golem that runs too quickly. Raise Skeleton has diminishing returns on the damage that the skeletons do, which is a bit silly considering how much more damage a real melee character can do. Even fully synergized and enhanced with runeword auras and assisted with Amplify Damage, skeletons can't compare to a Barbarian's Concentrate. But the worst offender in the summoning tree is probably Summon Resist. This skill gets diminishing returns so hard that putting more than one point into it would be a complete waste, especially because summoners use a ton of +skills anyway.

Curses are generally not afflicted with diminishing returns, although only a few of them get magnitude gains from skill points in the first place. The one curse that does unfortunately employ a diminishing returns system is Lower Resist. This is particularly irksome considering that Lower Resist only reaches -62% at level 20. The paladin's Conviction goes all the way to -125% at level 20. As usual paladins get better skills.