I love this spell. I'd love to see it being used more often. I think there's something glaringly wrong when you consider only sorcerers who have a soulstone wand walking around with animates all the time. While a few spells in the game have items associated to make the better and more useful, none of them are quite on this level and with the rarity of the soulstone wand.
My problem with 730 as it stands is the duration and how its able to be refreshed. While I think it's a good concept, I think in practice it falls very short. There are often times where you are unable to get to a critter to sacrifice it, sacrifice is very finicky and hard to get off at times and many creatures shake stuns. I would like to see a way to be able to hold some charges of sacrificed things to refresh the duration of an animate later. My ideas on this are as follows.
1. A more widely available item, such as a phylactery where you can go out and store up some charges from stuff you've sacrificed to use later. Even it this puts your sacrifice into cool down when it's used. I think 2 to 3 charges being able to be stored would go a long way when you are put into a spot where its not super easy to run away to kill a monster for this.
2. At breakpoints, using necromancy lore allow us to do the above idea without the item and store these charges on our person.
