Lacking Necromancer Ascendancies

I was really looking forward to getting my ascendancy since I knew that would power me up.

However, when I completed the Trial of the Sekhema I found myself gravely disappointed (that is not a pun) by the fact that my only real option is to take this passive that gives my minions some extra chaos damage, Necromantic Conduit... yay.

Can you maybe understand how this might feel HORRIFYINGLY underwhelming? I'm just so let down right now.

This entire playstyle has felt pretty miserable, and I'll explain why. The reason why is that, in trying to make Necromancer, or Summoner or whatever you want to call it, feel more active by giving you more control over your minions with the tilde key, and by giving you abilities that your MINIONS use, i.e. the Command series of skills, you've taken away from the class fantasy of a person who summons skeletons to fight.

Because now it feels like, I'm a bad sorceress with extra steps to get to a Fireball or whatever, and that my abilities aren't even always available since sometimes my Fireball carrier dies and I can't cast it, or I don't have any minions on low enough life to cast Arsonist's Explosive Demise anyway, and then there's the fact this is also mixed elemental damage which I don't know how to feel about but I am sure is probably not useful in the long run when I am trying to scale my damage!

What I was looking for, when I went to pick up my ascendancy, was more Spirit, or more minions, or heck even just some big fat bonuses to minion stats, I want more Spirit so I can summon more minions, I want a LEGION of minions that I can call upon and watch them butcher my enemies, and I want them to kill things by hitting them with magic or their swords or whatever.

As it is, it feels more like I am playing host to a tactical skeleton black ops team where I have The Archer, The Bomber, and the Ice Mage Guy who each have their one skill I can tell them to use... and it just doesn't work for me, I'm not having fun and I hoped my ascendancy would change that. It hasn't. All I got was this stupid Unholy Might buff.

An invisible, HIGHLY CONDITIONAL BUFF that requires me to just constantly be sipping mana flasks, and also, Presence. PRESENCE, very specifically it notes, can't be increased by Skill Area modifiers, but can be by Presence Area modifiers. This disambiguation is a giant pain because I can't say I have ever seen anything yet that even increases 'Presence' at all so far. So that's just great. Not that I am sure I could increase the radius much anyway - so what is that, like +100% increased Presence area size for like 8 meters radius? Oh joy.

Is it REALLY necessary for me to basically be within kissing distance of ALL MY MINIONS 100% OF THE TIME? Like why is it like this and why is it, on top of this already very conditional buff, also a constant source of mana drain? Like I'm not already being punished enough by playing a terrible, sub-optimal build that will never see high end content?

The upside/downside thing is something I know you guys are aware of and it's completely unreasonable here.

By the way, I hate Sanctum, I do not play Sanctum. Even when I played Sanctum League, I avoided the league mechanic for the entire duration of the league because it JUST was NOT fun, because I was playing a flicker build and it meant that any concept of 'dodging' just didn't work for me at all. And now it's mandatory, so... I'm not thrilled by the trial itself either! Labyrinth was significantly more fun!