Animate Ally

Notes on usage
Animate Ally succeeds 100% of the time, and takes effect immediately.

The animated ally will return with 100% of their HP. However, they will immediately start incurring rotting damage. Initially, this damage is around 5-10 HP every 3 seconds (estimated). This will ramp up over time. After about 4 minutes, the animated ally will be incurring about 120-150 damage (estimated) every few seconds.

The animated ally can be healed by Death Aura. (If the ally is a Pale Master he can likely do this himself.) However, after a few minutes a single Death Aura won't be able to keep you alive because of the increasing damage. (Try Negative Energy Burst instead.)

If you have been animated, the damage you incur will cause interruptions to some tasks. Most notably, you can't use a rest shrine since the damage will interrupt you. Searching and disabling of devices seems to work okay.

If you are an animated Pale Master, you will keep your other forms (Vampire, Wraith, or Lich), which means you'll have the upsides and downsides of 2 forms.

Tips

 * This is not a replacement for Raise Dead due to the fact that the animated ally will most likely die within 5 minutes
 * This is good during a boss fight, since you come back with full HP
 * This is good if you haven't reached a resurrection shrine yet: the animated ally will be able to contribute fighting your way to that shrine
 * If you are a Pale Master group, a hireling who has been animated now enjoys healing from your collective death auras

Updates and Bugs
Animate ally was introduced as part of Update 19. Initially, there was a bug when using it where the ally being animated was simply resurrected, and they would not incur the rotting damage.

As of Update 19 Patch 2, this has been fixed, and Animate Ally now works as intended.