Has anyone here played with a good amount of the necromancy stuff in SkyRe?
I'm screwing around with that a lot right now, with my Imperial 'ARMIES EFF YEAH' mage.
If you can get hold of a lot of dead bodies, you can use the soul gems you've picked up to create skeletons. (I've only got the first rank, so I only know there's Skeleton Warriors and 2nd rank Skeleton Archers.) They're much stronger than a vanilla skeleton, and are quite useful. It's simply hilarious to see seven different skeletons gang up on a Master Vampire and shred him to pieces.
It is balanced, however, as every perk spent on Skeletons (as well as those spent on Dwemer machinery from the Alteration branch, which are much harder to obtain but are far more useful due to the ability to put both live and dead self-made machines into containers to be used again) means you haven't spent a perk on exploding your enemies with magic and doom. Stamina or Enchanting is also a must-have, as the default carry weight simply won't do for carrying an unmade skeleton army when you just can't get hold of any hands. Don't worry about using up your Grand, Black or Greater soul gems (or any charged ones), though, as Skeletons only use the lower three, and the dwarven machines take a lot of effort putting together.
For the dwarven machines, you'll probably get fairly attached to them. I've only got three of them, as they take (for spiders) two Dwarven Metal Ingots, a Dwarven Cog and a Dwemer Gyro, plus a lesser soul gem. Fortunately, the spiders only way as much as one of those cogs, and there's a perk to make them even lighter. The top-tier machines are the Sphere and the Ballista, which are more expensive. Still, they don't need replacing unless you lose them, and it's quite hard to lose a machine.
So yeah. These guys are all very useful, but you'll probably become quite squishy in the process of getting everything required for them. It's well worth it, though.