The Summoner Compendium

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PyrosEien wrote:

Alright so my summoner died in Cruel on Act3 final boss on HC, so probably not gonna play it anymore.

I'll say this version is rough for summoners. The nerf to zombie life kinda hurt but I couldn't really tell how much it was so I don't think it's too big, most of the issues came from Discipline being horrible now(so you don't get a 400-500ES buffer on your zombies at all times) and from act3 being a complete summoner anti-fun area with multiple type of mobs that can kill your entire army in one or two abilities, generally on every single map. Only a couple of areas that don't have those mobs.

It makes the build feels pretty inadequate for all of act3. Now I kinda expected this on normal since minions still tend to suck quite a bit even at the end of act2 normal, but on Cruel it was arguably even worse and the only thing that made me able to progress was skeleton totem. Spectres were also very useful in increasing my terrible DPS since they're very strong in Act3, but zombies were all but useful in pretty much all of it. And they were useless in the usual parts of cruel like firedogs/goatmen areas in act1 or western forest in act2.

Overall I'd say the spec is quite nerfed, mostly indirectly via the addition of Act3 which is both pretty hard and full of powerful aoes. I was playing a standard summoner, had all the minion health nodes as well as a good amount of defensive nodes and had to use enfeeble quite a few times but it still didn't help against rare mobs that had aoe like rare curtains of doom casting those forking lmp fireballs, those would instantly wipe my whole army even in Purity's range.

Anyway I'll make a few updates to the guide for builds and such. Another thing is as far as I'm concerned, CI is dead. Might be worth respecing to it eventually but you pretty much do not want to spec CI directly and skip health nodes until then, it's just not viable. You need way too much ES gear to support CI so that you cannot consider it before a high lvl enough, and even then the gain seems mediocre at best when as a summoner(or a witch really) you can grab +32%chaos resist for 3points in the tree and easily get a +20-25% on a shield which will for the most part cancel out Merciless penalty and put you in a good spot vs the slightly nerfed chaos damage the mobs do.

With the amount of ES you're gonna need to make it safe you'll have to spend just as many points into ES nodes as you would into health nodes I feel, but you lose the option to flask. Maybe with Ghost Reaver, with Lifeleech support(at least 5L nuke which isn't quite optimal for a summoner) and even then. It seems extremely niche and extremely high lvl now. Which is fine I guess but I wouldn't recommend using CI until you have at least 3k ES, and I'd say good luck with that for now.

"

PyrosEien wrote:

Alright so my summoner died in Cruel on Act3 final boss on HC, so probably not gonna play it anymore.

I'll say this version is rough for summoners. The nerf to zombie life kinda hurt but I couldn't really tell how much it was so I don't think it's too big, most of the issues came from Discipline being horrible now(so you don't get a 400-500ES buffer on your zombies at all times) and from act3 being a complete summoner anti-fun area with multiple type of mobs that can kill your entire army in one or two abilities, generally on every single map. Only a couple of areas that don't have those mobs.

It makes the build feels pretty inadequate for all of act3. Now I kinda expected this on normal since minions still tend to suck quite a bit even at the end of act2 normal, but on Cruel it was arguably even worse and the only thing that made me able to progress was skeleton totem. Spectres were also very useful in increasing my terrible DPS since they're very strong in Act3, but zombies were all but useful in pretty much all of it. And they were useless in the usual parts of cruel like firedogs/goatmen areas in act1 or western forest in act2.

Overall I'd say the spec is quite nerfed, mostly indirectly via the addition of Act3 which is both pretty hard and full of powerful aoes. I was playing a standard summoner, had all the minion health nodes as well as a good amount of defensive nodes and had to use enfeeble quite a few times but it still didn't help against rare mobs that had aoe like rare curtains of doom casting those forking lmp fireballs, those would instantly wipe my whole army even in Purity's range.

Anyway I'll make a few updates to the guide for builds and such. Another thing is as far as I'm concerned, CI is dead. Might be worth respecing to it eventually but you pretty much do not want to spec CI directly and skip health nodes until then, it's just not viable. You need way too much ES gear to support CI so that you cannot consider it before a high lvl enough, and even then the gain seems mediocre at best when as a summoner(or a witch really) you can grab +32%chaos resist for 3points in the tree and easily get a +20-25% on a shield which will for the most part cancel out Merciless penalty and put you in a good spot vs the slightly nerfed chaos damage the mobs do.

With the amount of ES you're gonna need to make it safe you'll have to spend just as many points into ES nodes as you would into health nodes I feel, but you lose the option to flask. Maybe with Ghost Reaver, with Lifeleech support(at least 5L nuke which isn't quite optimal for a summoner) and even then. It seems extremely niche and extremely high lvl now. Which is fine I guess but I wouldn't recommend using CI until you have at least 3k ES, and I'd say good luck with that for now.