I have a feeling this could be a lengthy post and I apologize.
Some background. I bought this game just after it came on gog never having played it before but having heard good things from my friends that played it back when it was first released. I have been craving a good arpg, something like Diablo, very engaging with a good story. So far this game seems to fit what I want except I can't seem to get into it, and I think its my character class selection. I have read and reread the "Which is your favorite Sacred Char" thread on these forums and I am still having issues being able to understand what some of these characters are like. With the limited time I have for gaming I will not be able to play each one to see if I like them so I am trying to weed out the char classes I don't care so much for. Please forgive me for trying to compare similarities between the Sacred classes and the Diablo 2 classes but I played way too much Diablo 2 in college and know those classes very well and thats the best refrence point I can get. So for starters I really liked the Necro class in Diablo 2 (a straight up summoning necro) so for my first play through for Sacred I thought I would try the Vampire as she seemed to be the closest match. She was ok to play, not super fun but not too bad either. If I remember right I got her to about lvl 20 and then got to a spot in the Main story where I kept dieing a lot and stopped playing the game. So is there any other Sacred character classes that would be similar to a summoning Necro from Diablo 2? How about for the Daiblo 2 Assasin or Druid classes? Any thoughts or opinions would be welcome I really what to get into this game but I need some help. Thanks.

You can break down Sacred characters to D2 characters for the following roles:
Dark Elf = Assassin
Wood Elf = Amazon
Battle Mage = Sorceress
Gladiator = Barbarian
The Vampire does have some summoning capabilities, but they are limited to when you are in the Vampire form. A trick to the Vampire is that you want the Turn Into Vampire to stay as low as possible to reduce damage when using it when the sun is out.
The Daemon does have a combat art like Corpse Explosion with Tentacles.

Thank you both for your replies. I rather liked the Assassin from Diablo 2 so I started up a Dark Elf. I am having a much more fun play through this time around. I almost never use his combat arts though. I don't know if its just that the regular attacks do so much damage and I don't have time to use the combat arts or if being limited to 4 shortcut keys for them is the problem. Thanks for the replies and I am going to have to mark Ralackks as the answer as he posted first.