How I Wish Summoning Builds Worked

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Zedda wrote:

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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.

more like multiple chaos, bought an unid when anarchy ended for 10 chaos.

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CrimsonMidget wrote:

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Zedda wrote:

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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.

more like multiple chaos, bought an unid when anarchy ended for 10 chaos.

Yeah, good like finding one in Nemesis/Domination for that price.

Nice idea
+1

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PolarisOrbit wrote:

Nice idea
+1

Thanks.

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

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

So that's not exactly what I'm talking about. While that is a cool unique and it allows further specialization of Zombies, I'm really talking about changing how summons work in general. For example, instead of summoning all your summons to their cap, and now having stronger Zombies, I mean spawning more Zombies but no Spectres or Skeletons. Or maybe spawning a few zombies but spawning more Specters and Skeletons.

The idea is for summons to have the same, fungible, limiting factor so that you can mix and match your army, or not, depending on the situation and your specialization. What that limiting factor is can be a function of balance but in the OP I suggest mana drain or mana reservation. If you use a fixed (non-percent) mana drain then increasing your regeneration rate would increase your total capacity to summon, regardless of what type you use. Conversely you could use a percent of regeneration drain and put a fixed but shared cap on all summons. Instead of specialized nodes like +1 Skeleton, you could have something like -20% Skeleton Mana Drain.

bump

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Veta321 wrote:

The idea is for summons to have the same, fungible, limiting factor so that you can mix and match your army, or not, depending on the situation and your specialization. What that limiting factor is can be a function of balance but in the OP I suggest mana drain or mana reservation. If you use a fixed (non-percent) mana drain then increasing your regeneration rate would increase your total capacity to summon, regardless of what type you use. Conversely you could use a percent of regeneration drain and put a fixed but shared cap on all summons. Instead of specialized nodes like +1 Skeleton, you could have something like -20% Skeleton Mana Drain.

Ok, I DO like the concept here. Instead of Max 5 zombies @ X mana per raising, there is NO maximum @ Y mana reserved. Makes Eldritch Battery seem appealing (if not broken/required), certainly. The minion nodes/items could be more flavorful instead of damage/hp/quantity. When a minion dies, the reservation for that minion is removed.

This would fundamentally change gameplay of minions, however. Currently, if a minion survives longer, you have more access to your mana for other things like performing your own attacks. Some people play the bo-bomb model of minions, or are forced to, where the reservation idea makes it very difficult to manage, as the mana does not regen until the reservation is removed. What about fights like Kole where the minions simply evaporate on seemingly each hit? Skeletons could not be used this way, certainly.

Mana drain per summon is a much better idea, because it solves the aforementioned issues with mana reservations, and because I personally think it is thematically in line.

While I do agree that focusing on Spectres, Zombies, or Skeletons (and now animated objects) is a good idea generally, Summoner is already a specialization. The specialization within the summoner role is managed through gem slots, and not really the passive tree. As cool as the idea sounds, it's not a "main" stat like a magic element or weapons, as it requires a skill gem to be used in the first place, whereas the others can be solely equipment based.

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While I do agree that focusing on Spectres, Zombies, or Skeletons (and now animated objects) is a good idea generally, Summoner is already a specialization. The specialization within the summoner role is managed through gem slots, and not really the passive tree. As cool as the idea sounds, it's not a "main" stat like a magic element or weapons, as it requires a skill gem to be used in the first place, whereas the others can be solely equipment based.

That's a fair point. As it currently is, summons are a specialization in their own right. But I don't think they have to be. Applying a system similar to the one discussed in this thread would allow summons to be used in a support capacity. And that could spawn various builds which do not use summoning exclusively but as a secondary focus. The Druid from Diablo 2 would be an example of just that, a melee focused character with some summon pedigree.

To address the point of specialization within summoners, I would like summoning skills to be like any other class of skills, not a group that must be used in tandem, but each valuable in its own right. That is to say, you could specialize in a particular summon like you do with a particular melee skill or bow skill or you could master many for greater versatility. I think both options should have merit. And I don't think summoners should necessarily require more skill slots than any other type of build.

I once created a suggestion for Necromancer Class for World of Warcraft.
I never got developer feedback on it, but funny enough, a little over a year later Death Knight was introduced with some of my concepts in it (in particular Diseases).

What I believe a Summoner gameplay should be like, is giving part of your personal power away in order to produce minions that fight for you.
A soft, gradual Ancestral Bond, so to speak.

I did suggest it in the form of a reservation of sorts, but it wasn't Mana - let's call it Dark Pact.
It worked something like this:
- Each Summon you bring forth grants you X stacks of Dark Pact.
- Each stack of Dark Pact reduces your personal DAMAGE by Y%, but also weaken your defenses somehow, perhaps by also lowering your maximum Life by Z% (or a flat amount).
- Instead of capping how many summons you can have, the cap would be placed on how many Dark Pact Stacks you can have - it would be up to you to decide how to use those stacks, and how many you want at any given time.
- There could be passives to reduce the penalty and/or passives to increase the max Dark Pact Stacks
- There would be summons that occupy a very small amount of Dark Pact Stacks, but there would also be those that occupy (at least nearly) ALL your Stacks, and everything in between.
- In terms of Path of Exile, the Dark Pact stacks could be visible as a black/dark overlay on your Life Orb IF it reserves Life (besides lowering personal damage).

This allows any developer - in this case GGG - to make an extremely balanced and deep Summoning system - allowing players to build around multiple themes, from masters of an endless army of weak skeletons to lords of a single monstruosity.

It would also work for Natural Summons, from a single powerful Bear to a Pack of Wolves to a Murder of Ravens, although under a different name, such as Nature Oath, and either:
a) sharing the same total cap as Dark Pact, such that the total stacks of the two combine doesn't exceed that cap
b) mutually exclusive, such that summoning a minion that adds Dark Pact removes all minions & stacks associated to Nature Oath, and vice-versa.

Interesting idea. The take away for me is that a common fungible summoning resource can make summoning builds more dynamic and increase build diversity.

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