First off glad you guys enjoy the Thaum build
With Thaum you can even go a bit higher on SPR since its gonna help your other spells do a bit more damage and account for the missing INT.
Linker is fine once you get pass your old experience with it, i said Linker should not affect Linker + Necro builds, i did not say it was the same, you cant have the silly damage multiplier 100% uptime any more, but it does work for CC and it does last long enough dish out multiplied damage.
Even if by chance, all your minions hit a linked mob at the same time, 5 Archers, 5 Skeletons, 1 Shoggoth, 1 Corpse Tower, thats only 12 hits out of 16, Archers have attack speed and your Corpse Tower is only up wen you really need it.
So with all of that in mind, even if everything bad happens and your minions eat as much as they can off the Joint Penalty, you would still have enough time to either cast a spell or to use Hangmans Knot to CC a pack of monsters.
Final argument, considering the above, should only your minions benefit from Joint Penalty before breaking, each doing 1.000 damage each, that would be 12.000 damage being multiplied, if you linked 5 monsters, that would be 60.000 damage being done to each monster, in total would be 300.000 damage, i think that is some pretty fair damage dont you think?
Very last argumentā¦ Joint Penalty 20sec Cooldown.