Originally posted by SlevinSnouh:

It is irrelevant to say that you have to level up blood magic for the skeletons to be useful. Time to level up the skill, the game is already over. I did the greydwarf spawner technique. I let the skeletons kill them for almost two hours. I'm barely past level 20 in blood magic. And the skeletons aren't much stronger...

The skeletons, as they are, are useless, indeed. Summoning them consumes too much eitr and health. The best in my opinion is to mount the blood magic with the greydwarf spawner technique for the shield and drop the skeletons...

There are 2 more biomes, so the game isn't over, and if you play after beating the queen, its not over.
However, yes, it takes a long time to level the blood staff skills. I wish that went a bit faster. I am not keen on getting it maxed out, but by design, once its pretty high level, most of your 'issues' prove to not be real problems**. I guess you can call it a meta-issue that it takes too long to level up AND its ineffective until you do, but that appears to all be by-design. Its an ongoing problem with the whole ML design that everything useful from it is available about 5 min before you are ready for the queen. Not just the staves and skills for them, but all the gear, the whole zone, really.

** I did not grind the magic, I started a new game and cheated in the staves, foods, and repair station for a 0-mistlands run using magic. In the process I got my blood magic a little over 40 and it was fine as long as you don't assume the pets do all the fighting. If you tank for them and support them, or let them get aggro and do backstab bow shots, or whatever, its a good team setup and effective. If you expect them to murder everything while you pick flowers, not so much, even at 40ish.