The Summoner Compendium

I'm liking the idea of the Templar build you have up and I want to be a little more upfront with my minions instead of shouting orders from the rear. What sort of attack skills/spells/weapons should I be looking at? I don't have the game yet but this guide has helped tremendously to prepare me. Thank you!

Do "+X% Defences from equipped Shield" passives apply to Minions with N.Aegis ?

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iiDeadSeriousii wrote:

I'm liking the idea of the Templar build you have up and I want to be a little more upfront with my minions instead of shouting orders from the rear. What sort of attack skills/spells/weapons should I be looking at? I don't have the game yet but this guide has helped tremendously to prepare me. Thank you!

Well weapon doesn't really matter, you should probably use spells however since attacks will rely on weapons and passives you won't take like attack speed and what not. I'd recommend something like wand+shield or dagger+shield or wand+wand for more damage. Then for spells it's really up to you, I touch on the offensive options you can pick, what element and stuff. I think I'll go with EK but that might depend on how much dex I need with the new changes, so I'll probably grab Firestorm too and level that in parallel in case I have to switch, mostly because I like it a lot and not really because it's the best(it's not really).

I don't really know how the stats change will affect my planned stuff, I was planning on EK+Faster Proj+Added Fire+Mana Leech/Life Leech/Fork(not really sure yet on that last one) and using Vuln+Temporal but Temporal, EK, Faster Proj and Fork might require way too much dex to be easily usable so I'd replace them with Firestorm+Concentrated+Fire Pen+Faster Casting and Flammability+Enfeeble(eventually replace flam by vuln when I get all the minions I think).

Edit: Shield defense nodes should apply to Aegis because they change the stats on your shield directly and that's what's transferred. I haven't tested it however.

^^^Thank you Pyros. I'll keep that in mind.

Cheers for an awesome guide. Really helped me to narrow down my class & build choise for OB.

Couple questions however;
I was thinking about going with something similiar with your original CI witch build, then expand to dual curses and possibly dual totems from there. Dual curses mainly so I could run both conductivity (with wrath aura) and vulnerability (which would benefit both my summons and the friends I plan to party with).
What I am wondering is how effective those dual totems would be as an additional damage source? I mean the build would be about 80-90 points total with your original core build + additional mana shield runes they added next to CI in new tree + dual curse & totem and finally couple personal preferences like aegis and additional spectre, so it leaves pretty little space for passives that increase the spell damage.

Now obviously majority of the damage comes from the summons and is amplified by the auras & curses, but would those dual totems (lets say sporks for now) still deal enough damage to make investing on them worth it? If the damage really isn't noticeable enough I think it would be more worth it to just invest on survivability after the core + dual hexes, if not even going so far that I would drop CI for eldritch battery for additional auras.

TL;DR - how solid the actual spell damage is in a build like this? Good enough to make dual totem worth investing in?

I'd be wary about the CI build until we see values and stuff, but if you group it could be more viable I think. On and softcore would be more permissive to test it out.

Anyway on dual totems, the question is how many spells you use and how many linked sockets you have left in your build. Dual totem advantage is you need a 3-4L with spell totem+nuke+ best support for the nuke and maybe faster casting if 4L. Then your 2 totems use that. If you want to run single totem+nuke however, you need the same 3-4L for your totem AND a 3-4L for your main nuke. That limits your possibilities for the rest(auras+rmc, curses+whatever and obviously minions). However assuming it's doable, it's more damage to single totem+nuke yourself than dual totems. On the other hand, your own damage is lost if you have to spam skeletons in certain "hot" situations.

So it's a tradeoff, in certain situations dual totems will be better, in others it won't. You can also run a mine+nuke or trap+nuke in a dual totem setup but that's again more links so yeah that's complicated.

As for spellcasting in general as a summoner, assuming you grab dual curses, innerforce, all minion nodes and a lot of defensive nodes(which will probably be a good idea in OB especially HC), that doesn't leave a lot of room for nuking. If you want to do good nuking dmg, you have to give up something in return. You can absolutely do good nuking damage while a summoner, but it'll cost you either minion nodes, the 2 curses or a bunch of defensive nodes. A couple pages back I link an hybrid nuker summoner that has A LOT of offensive power yet still has 6 decent zombies. But you can't get it all ^^.

I've been reading a lot on the forums, but still have a question.

I plan to go full summoner/support, with spells/auras/curses to support my minion army and teammates.

Since I do not plan to stand in front of my minions.
Do I need CI at all? If not do I need to invest in energy shield or just the minimum amount of energy shield in order to get the skills I want in the skilltree?
(I mean without investing in life)

That would safe points for more utility skills.
I will play softcore.

You can avoid all life and all ES nodes sure but that sounds not such a great idea even for softcore, deaths at -15% xp in Merciless, that's a lot to give up. But yeah I already said you don't have to take CI or ES related stuff at all. I would recommend getting some health though, not that much but some, so you don't get one shot by everything.

Thanks for the guide... very helpfull^^

Thank you for your answer PyrosEien.
guess there is no clear answer and I will just have to adjust as I go.

Should work out fine.

Also that skill in the skilltree that makes it so your minions get the benefit of all stats on your shield sounds really interesting.
I would like to read more on that.