Wait, so if your Bone minions die, you can use THEIR corpses?

Also, if you use a teammate's corpse, can they be revived? Yes if you use a team mates corpse, it just leaves it black looking, and can still be revived. Minions on the other hand just fade into ground and are corpseless, BUT when they die you still gain the energy from your soul reaping skill, which rocks, because once you get a bunch, they die sometimes, but you can constantly make more as long as you are killing stuff because you gain tons of energy back.

Then how the heck do minion builds work if the minions drop like flies with their incredibly crappy degen? =/ I'd hardly say they drop like flies. Not if you have high points in Death Magic. Do some more reading and you'll see that they can be used for other things. Death Nova turns them into bombs, Taste of Death can give huge heals. If you get a good mob of them going, they do a lot of damage even in their short life span, especially with things like Barbs and Mark of Pain from the Curses line.

It's a mistake to think that minions are SUPPOSED to be kept alive. They do need a boost here and there, but they are not meant to be long lived. You take advantage of their short lives.

Minion Master - the one class that gets stronger when a party starts to die! Meh, I know this wasn't meant to be taken literally, but there are a lot of classes that get stronger as the party starts to die, and not all of them are necromancers. A noteable example would be an IWAY Warrior.