How I Wish Summoning Builds Worked

If I could change one thing about summoning skills it would be how they encourage you to maximize as many as you can. Instead I'd use a mechanic that permits you to use a variety of summons, if you want, but also allows you to do a single summon skill really well. What I mean is, instead of a big army of spectres, zombies and skeletons, you could have a huge army of skeletons or spectres or zombies or any combination thereof.

The first thing I would do is remove all the arbitrary caps and duration mechanics on summons and replace them with a mechanic like mana drain or reservation per summon. Please don't freak out because I said reservation. I know auras are "crazy", this could still work with fixed (not percent) reservation. Or if auras change, then a reservation might make more sense than mana drain. If we're worried about balancing drain vs regeneration we could also do a % drain or % of regen drain.

What would be good about a mana drain or reservation mechanic is that it would allow summoners to mix and match their army, or not, while keeping the total summon power consistent, regardless of how many different types there are. Sure some summons might cost more mana than others because they're more powerful (spectres), but overall you're still using the same amount of mana for your army.

What would be cool about that system is that you could change your army make-up depending on the situation, instead of just making sure all summons are at their cap. And that frees us up to add more specialized summon types, as opposed to merely different mechanics of summoning, meaning we could add Skeletal Archers and Mages. And because we're getting rid of duration mechanics, we wouldn't have to deal with tedious recasting. Instead we'd be doing strategic recasting.

That does mean we'd have to drop the +1 skeleton/zombie/spectre stuff. But we'd have summoning benefits from more general mana nodes, depending on what mechanic we choose. And if we still want specialized nodes and uniques we can do that with % less mana drained/reserved for skeletons/spectres/zombies/weapons/etc.

Admittedly, caps still make sense on some special summon types. But I think that should be reserved for stuff like guardians, liches and golems which are more than soldiers of an army. And sure, I'd love summoning UI features like passive/aggressive stances or maybe the ability to select and move summons but that's not as a big priority for me as what I described above.

Thanks for reading.

TL;DR
How about a summon mechanic that lets us pick and choose the make-up of our army, instead of maximizing each summon type.

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I think a big hindrance in PoE for Summoner is just that this game limits you to to few active abilities. A real summoning class to me is one that has many many different tools in an expansive kit for tailoring just the right army for the situation. Ranging from summon types, to support spells and curses. Really very few if any game has approached this.


I will admit though, from an RP perspective - even if it didn't really change anything mechanically, it would be nice if you could specialize in one type of summon. Be it army of ghosts, army of skeletons/zombies/demons or what have you. It would be a neat bit of flair to make your character a bit more distinct.

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I think a big hindrance in PoE for Summoner is just that this game limits you to to few active abilities. A real summoning class to me is one that has many many different tools in an expansive kit for tailoring just the right army for the situation. Ranging from summon types, to support spells and curses. Really very few if any game has approached this.

I will admit though, from an RP perspective - even if it didn't really change anything mechanically, it would be nice if you could specialize in one type of summon. Be it army of ghosts, army of skeletons/zombies/demons or what have you. It would be a neat bit of flair to make your character a bit more distinct.

I agree, very much. What I tried to get at in the OP was that, the way summoning works right now, we are encouraged to use as many of each as possible, instead of tailoring the army to suit the situation or our preferences. If we had unlimited skill gems that wouldn't change, it'd just be more tedious.

One solution I've heard to the skill limit for summoners is uniques that give access to many curses. There's a risk that they become mandatory for summoners but I think they could be balanced in a fashion similar to the existing summoning uniques and in the same item slots as to create a proper trade off. Alternatively some uniques could give access to summon skills which would also save slots.

Don't change anything. Summoners are completely broken in HC leagues. I like being overpowered for a change.

OPs suggestion should have no affect on that x).

Lets buff spark and bring back RF with a 200% more mult while you're at it.

There is a unique that does that, kind of, for the beginning :P

http://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Mon%27tregul%27s_Grasp

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Spysong192 wrote:

There is a unique that does that, kind of, for the beginning :P

http://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Mon%27tregul%27s_Grasp

Yeah, and only the ultra-rich can afford it. That item costs multiple exalts. Well, I've been playing for over a year and have never had 1 exalt drop for me; all my items combined are probably worth less than 1 exalt. So how can I use items like this? Simple: I can't.

Awesome uniques are simply out of most people's league, which is a crying shame, because many of these uniques make the game a lot more fun.

Drop rates in PoE need a serious buff, and that goes for orb drops too.