I respecced a bit after posting that. I've got corpse explosion now too, and just got corpse tendrils, haven't messed with it yet. If I remember right corpse explosion in the beta was super OP, they brought the dmg down a ton, but its still good.
Also back to having my boney boys around. Maybe at higher level sacrifice will be worth it, but I think it's better atm to have them.
I also switched my core skill from blood surge to sever. Sever is cool. Shadow darting to the target and back, twirling scythe. I'm doing a lot more damage which is nice, but I did lose all that healing from the blood spells. Will see how it goes.