The Necromancer is Underpowered Reason 13: Golems are weak

I could have made a whole post about how one of the biggest problems with the necromancer is his inability to have multiple primary skills because of the large point investments necessary to make his skills viable. My bow amazon, for example, was able to max Guided Arrow and Strafe, dump points into passive and magic skills for utility and a powerful Valkyrie, and still have some left over for the elemental arrow skills as secondary damage. Poison necromancers are stuck with poison and not much else, bone necromancers are stuck with magic damage and almost nothing else, and summoners get their skeletons, but can't invest in other skills enough for them to count. A post on this deficiency would be a bit redundant because I've already said as much when I covered each of those skillsets.

Without further elaborating on why skeletons are problematic, I'll note that as pets, they're different from what other classes can get. Pets in Diablo II are generally one of a kind. They can divide the attention of monsters and, if points are invested to make them more powerful, they can act as tanks for the player and as a secondary damage source. Or perhaps that should be tertiary damage source, since a properly equipped mercenary does more damage than a pet. The necromancer's pets are different. The druid is the only other character that can really have multiple pets at the same time, but even for a druid using wolves, the pets are more of a complement to the druid's other skills. Compared to other pets, skeletons are incredibly fragile without devoted skill investment.

The necromancer does have another pet option other than skeletons (and the even more problematic Revives). Golems are much closer to the Valkyrie, Shadow Master, and Grizzly Bear than they are to skeletons. The necromancer can only have one at a time and can instantly summon a golem without requiring a corpse. At first glance, golems might seem to be better than the pets other classes get. Necromancers have four different golems to choose from, two more skills, Golem Mastery and Summon Resist, that improve golems, and each golem acts as a synergy for the other three. And with sufficient skill investment golems can be better tanks than other pets. But they are not a damage source. They attack too slowly and do too little damage. Even against the most pathetic monsters, golems do negligible damage.

Even Iron Golem, which can take on the properties of items, just doesn't do significant damage. Golems might as well just not do damage at all. This is inexplicable. It's not as though making golems do more damage than the pets of other classes would break necromancers. This flaw is very easily corrected and very stupid.