Yeah, it can be a bit tricky to lure them out one or two at a time. But there are ways for each build to do so. My ES/Orber freezes the normal Minions in place while lister just gets chilled so keeps moving towards me. Or, if you want to risk it, although without teleport its dangerous, you could try to bottle neck them by going up the stairs where Baal is at, and have them come up 1 or 2 at a time. But without teleport (or Leap or something) you can get trapped.
Also, a source of life tap anywhere helps a lot, I keep a tap wand on switch specially to keep my merc alive, since I depend on his level 17 med and prayer aura to keep me alive and well. If he dies, I could soon follow, and that ain't an option. If you got high enough defense, then may not even hit you much, so you could maybe take a few of the regulars minions without a problem, but again, life tap helps that.
The oak helps, my sorc uses one as well, having a merc with ~3k life means he wont get put in hit recovery as often, and will be able to tank well (even more so with tap). One thing to note, the oak likes to wonder off, sometimes right into the pack, proceeding to get itself killed in one shot, so don't count on it to much, I mostly use for teleporting. ~950 life to ~1400 makes a nice difference.
About the fade, while the fades 15% DR helps, along with the venom, its to much of a hassle to have to stand in a fire or something till it triggers. Killing them should not be a problem to you, the only thing that should be is the FE. Just be careful of FE LE even more, my 4k+ singer barb with max res got knocked down to about half life in 2 or so hits, I don't know how, but it got the heart beating. That was before the death explosion.
Well, I typed a lot, but it would be a shame to see someone lose all that nice gear to a completely stupid game feature. Seriously, it should do like 1/10 of your life or something, thats workable.
Oh, and yeah, watch out for Dolls to if you are Baaling, I hate those little suckers.....
