Are there any viable Witch skeleton-only minion builds?

So bear with me on this, this is my build and its kinda convoluted and I can't be bothered to actually get screenshots so I'll just give you the theory (You will probably build it better than me anyway ha)

So the basic scepter skeletons are amazing. They cost less the higher level they are and you get the first two free and as such you can have a lot of them even when using other buff spirit abilities.

Their health is even fairly decent for how cheap they are, which is what brings us to the actual build that I have been using.

Minion Instability will cause your minions to explode upon reaching 15% life and deal a % of their max health as fire damage to anything around them. Infernal Army Ignites nearby enemies and deals damage to your minions, which will cause them to blow up.

I have gone through the tree and enhanced my minion's health and revive speed a great deal, and I also have a unique chestplate that makes them revive faster. All told, it takes them about 3s to respawn and 4s to die.

I have the buff support that causes my dying reviving minions to drop death remnants upon death so that I can revive them faster, but ultimately I use this because it means that every minion that dies gives me remnants that due to picking the remants restory 3% passive nodes, means they each give me 3% of my max health and mana.

I am running blackflame covenant and specced into higher chaos damage, have lich ascendancy for more chaos damage, and have on minion death casting tornado and the despair curse with the support gem that makes rune-type spells leave fire behind. I am also using MoM, so when I recover mana its basically just more health.

My skeletons are also equipped with the supports that make them return mana to me, so each one gives me like 8% max mana regen in addition when they die.

In the end this means that my skeletons spawn, run at enemy, ignite them and then explode for hundreds of damage leaving behind 27% (9 total skeletons atm) of my health and mana worth of remnants, and recoups 72% of my max mana over 8s, then in 3s they respawn again. After their death, a tornado spawns which is automatically enhanced by the fire from the curse's rune support, and due to blackflame covenant all these instances of fire actually deal chaos damage. I have the 'energy shield recharge starts when minions respawn' so that starts up when they do, and a necklace unique that applies my life regen to ES just for extra speed there. I use the vine fissures to help slow down enemy movement so that my skeletons can deal with them faster, but pretty much anything below magic gets instantly killed in the explosion, and rares of my level tend to lose a good chunk at a time.

It's been good to me, but I can't totally recommend it as I have it because I can see a few different collapse scenarios coming in my future as things get harder (I'm just about level 70 now) but overall its been a very fun and actually pretty powerful build. The main idea is that you just get as much spirit as possible and use a shield and as many chaos DOTs as possible to support the minions as they bomb rush the enemy, healing and recovering you in the process. (Half the mana goes towards paying for the cast on minion death though, as the spells are being cast 9 times over lol that is one of the many inefficiencies in my current setup)

I too am a skelly boy enjoyer. I gotta say IMO your best bet is lich witch, unholy might and rupture the soul are just so good. You can go reavers and still stack rage. This can actually get some crazy damage stacked if you maintain the rage. I’ve had them hit over 85k dps, which since they have 2 weapons is x2 and have 15 of them running around. Bosses melt. Not cheap though, uul-netols embrace is pretty important. Wither magnitude helps here too.

Next is probably Brutes. Cheapest option to get a +3 prism of belief, and their aoe slam works well with rupture the soul. Currently trying to mana stack with my build to see how much damage unholy might can get up to.

I think there’s a world where storm mages can work with stormfire to help scale the damage, problem is you still need a decent frontline of melee minions and the best bet there is usually specters. You could hp stack basic warriors with meat shield, infernal legion, enhanced ignite and elemental army just to save some points on the tree. This could be okay, I haven’t tried it though but I was gonna try it some time this week to see if I can make them work.

One thing I will say though having wolf pack helps in all of these scenarios so that might be worth a compromise! They are a great supporting unit. Also sorry for my bad formatting/typing I’m on mobile.

Of course you can. Skeletal snipers are OP. Build into their command skill.