Bone Spear or Bone Spirit

[baal's-uncle]

since i'm going to have a lot of skill points left over for my summon necro, i want to get one of these to help kill stuff when i don't have an army raised yet, so which one would be better?

[Myrakh-2]

Without a sizeable investment, neither will do more than tickle monsters.

[Evrae Altana]

Use your merc to kill something to get your army started.

[Humphrey]

Max mages and CE if you haven't already, much more worth it than BSpear or BSpirit.

[krischan]

Use your merc to kill something to get your army started.
If you have the portal to Pindle, you can raise your army in Pindle's garden for free.

[Elgar]

Im gonna go with the rest of the people here and say "neither"

[AnimeCraze]

If you for sure want a secondary killing spell, I would go with Pnova.

[Myrakh-2]

Yes, merc is the way to get started. Just take him to some reasonable area --- I almost always used some A1 waypoint, either the one I wanted to go to anyway, or cold plains.

As a skelemancer, you can use Gumby to distract and slow monsters (which is the same as speeding up the merc...), help him with amp damage, or protect him even more with decrepify. I never had to use obscure curses like lifetap to help him recruit my army.

For skills, CE is a must (although not everyone will max it), and mages are a useful addition.

[Freezing Rain]

Unsynergized bone/poison spells really don't do much, and with the demise of the marrow walk bug, bone necro's damage dropped by 1000+.

I'm going to have to go with the others and say, MERC KILL PLZ.

[jiansonz]

Note that baal´s-uncle didn´t specify where in the game they were going to use it...

Bone Spirit does more damage per shot, but Bone Spear has a more effective 'damage per unit of mana spent' value. So it largely depends on much you want to drink mana potions...
Like others said, the damage isn´t high in the late game, so be prepared to spam it. It could still be useful if for some reason your forces leave an annoying monster almost dead and attack something else.

Someone mentioned mages. I would advise against that, because mages may start to fire when they see an enemy and they can clog up narrow passages and block your skeleton warriors. A big difference in 1.10 compared to earlier versions is that you can´t force a skeleton mage to move with you if they are occupied in a fight (unless you have Teleport). Mages work best together with just a few tanks, but that´s a completely different build. ;)

[AnimeCraze]

Someone mentioned mages. I would advise against that, because mages may start to fire when they see an enemy and they can clog up narrow passages and block your skeleton warriors. A big difference in 1.10 compared to earlier versions is that you can´t force a skeleton mage to move with you if they are occupied in a fight (unless you have Teleport). Mages work best together with just a few tanks, but that´s a completely different build. ;)

It's not that hard to get teleport, is it? Spellsteel, Naj staff, or tele ammy is not that hard to find. There is also the famous teleing on spot skill: Town Portal. If you have 40 points, you can try Pnova as I have said earlier. If 20, then just go for mages or strengthen your curses.