Are the Necromancer's Golems of any use whatsoever in Diablo 2?

The Clay Golem is useful, as it slows down the attacker which allows you to interrupt their abilities (especially useful against bosses). You mentioned this yourself.

All it takes is one point. Resummoning is cheap, so there is no need to buff its health. Besides, +summoning skills will bring it acceptable levels anyway.

The cheap resummoning is also nice against bosses, as it allows you to summon an endless stream of new targets. Just buy enough mana potions beforehand.

So my advice: just invest that one point and resummon it when required.

Higher golems are not worth it. They die too quickly against bosses and don't do enough damage against normal mobs.

However, revived monsters are also useful in some cases. Again, just 1 point is enough as +summoning skill items will bring it to acceptable levels. And 1 point in all prerequisites, of course (I believe this includes some of the golems).

Around level 80, you'll have run out of other places to spend your points anyway.

I'm very surprised no one has talked about the hidden features of Iron Golem. If you have enough to invest in a (metal) weapon/armor with decent attributes or runewords, the golem will inherit most of the attributes (very useful especially for runewords that give auras such as Insight).

The only real downside with Iron Golem is that you lose the armor/weapon you use to make it. It won't disappear when you log out,unlike the other golems. The Iron Golem even becomes ethereal if you use an ethereal item to create it.

Stacking Summon Resist (helps buff your skellies too) and Golem Mastery can help to keep your golem alive against bosses and mobs later on in the game (at the higher difficulties).

If you have time and money to invest in your Necromancer (+summon GCs, gear, etc), you can equip yourself with Beast (or Faith, if you want to forgo an offhand), an Act II Merc with Might with Infinity, and an Iron Golem made with an item with Pride or Insight (a very good and cheap runeword to start with), once you have you army (all the auras stack and will benefit your summons immensely) summoned you'll be nearly unstoppable!

If you can't afford a good runeword, any item with Crushing Blow can help a lot (especially against the Act bosses).

this will give you a little enlightment on how golems are useful in hardcore games

You can't kill Diablo on Hell difficulty in hardcore without a Clay Golem, this will be a pain in butt on killing Duriel too, and on Baal he will never have time to summon Image or cast spell if you have clay Golem on your side.

Clay Golem will act as an element of slow in your army of summons and this strategy need you have invest skeleton army to Max+iron maiden and clay Golem in your hand, while boss are slow to zero act per 5-6 sec you cast Iron Maiden on them so if they could attack by any chance they will damage themselves, stay back and be alert on re-casting iron maiden Or on dodging spells like Diablo flame and shock, because of slow effect you will clearly see them coming and you shall have the plenty of time to dodge them easily.

If you want to judge clay Golem vs any other, I have to say Clay Golem is the cheapest and easiest way you can use Golem.

Back in the day when I was playing this a lot, I ran a Necromancer with Blood Golem + Iron Maiden that seemed to work pretty well. Pumping points into Iron Maiden was especially useful once you got to Act 3. Those annoying natives would throw themselves at the Blood Golem and quite literally fall down dead.

Of course, it became a little bit of a problem when I got to Big D, with several of his moves causing me to die via proxy (stupid golem) instantaneously.

Hum interesting post. You guys need a guide to summon necros.

K the aura thing;

Make your iron golem out of eth beast. Put a pride on your act 2 nm offencive merc.

You now have all 3 group-damage-adding paly auras (fanat, might, conc) - good to go (and you can still hold your gfg white or leoric - whichever is better)

You need spend all 110 allocated point on a summon necro and more points would be better, whoever said you run out of places to put them is completely lost - no offence.

Your curses need only be amplify damage and decrep - and pre-reqs - that's it. Mobs/Bosses

Curses = 4 pts

One point in bone armor - one in CE

Pnb = 2 pts

Summon skills require the remaining 104 points (77 more could be used with ease on just the summoning skills - pfft run out of places to put them what planet are you....)

Skellies = 20 Mastery = 20 Magi = 1 Revive = 20 Clay golem = 1 Blood golem = 20 Iron golem = 1 Golem mastery = 20 Summon resist = 1

Summon = 104

Golem explained.

The goal here is to have the highest possible life on an iron golem (points in the skill itself just boost the things defence - not what we are looking for)

Blood golem gives a 5% life per level bonus to all other golems. That combined with golem mastery and 10-15 + to all skills will leave your eth beast iron golem with 12-18k hp BEFORE bo. If he dies (with that caliber of health), he dies due to your negligence, and in that case you deserve your (expensive) lesson in army management :P.

Happy playing.