A couple patches ago, ZoS buffed them by reducing the cost of summons which greatly helped them with their sustain and now they can focus a little more on defence or damage. Before this buff, there were some that used the Harmony Bomb build which was great even at that time they were considered the lowest tier in PVP. In PVE, the class can struggle as rotations can be ruined by unreliable skills like blastbone's tracking, and by how fixed siphon can be in real fights.

Like all magicka classes, they're naturally great for group play. For solo play PVP, they use vampire drain, or anything with a clunky animation stun on the enemy and use a harmony bomb build to melt their HPs with very little time to react once Graveyard AOE Synergy is under them. Note: For the Greymoor DLC/Expansion they'll be changing up vampire drain to stun at the end, so we don't know how effective this combo will be unless we get news from a PTS player.

Colossus ulti is one of the best ultis in the game for both PVE, and PVP because of the unique debuff they put on the target. They're not that great for solo play PVP but they remain naturally tanky in both PVE, & PVP.

Also, they're not bad for a healer as they are the only class with access to an instant revive but still fall in comparison to warden, sorceress, and templar healing output. Their burst heal is one of the strongest in the game and they have situational aoe heals.


So to answer your question, pet damage still sucks (mage has trash damage, ghost only heals, & blastbones is unreliable) and they nerfed the skeletal mage's damage when they reduced the cost of summons after the DoT Era. Overall still a great class in other fields.

It's fun, but there are a few issues with the class that the devs appear to be addressing (corpse issues, Blastbones problems, etc).

Personally instead of Blastbones I'd rather have a melee skeleton or a zombie, but I'm happy that they're at least fixing the issue with bomber bones.