The Summoner Compendium

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FeelThePowah wrote:

Gloves/Boots: Spell totem, skellies, dmg, faster casting

Assuming you are using Minion Instability, Faster Casting is bad on a Skeleton Totem. The Totem will overwrite existing Skellies before they can explode. Replace it with Minion Life and thank me later. My Skeletons' performance went through the roof once I made this switch. You will hear the improved effect immediately. Cast your Totem into a busy room and there will be much more of the "popping" sounds than usual.

Me again. Still enjoying my LVL 75 Shadow Necro.

Decided to start a new Necro Shadow, this time on HC. He's lvl 32 as of now.

Here's the Planned Setup. Tried a different route to go to Minion Instability, since I figured this would solve my mana issues.



Probably subject to change though... Not 100% Sure i'll go Eldrich Battery either... Unless I get a comfortable HP pool... My LVL 75 SC necro did die quite a few times, so I'll have to work in even more survivability for this hardcore dude... Thinking of getting as much Passive Resists as I can so I can focus on gear with Defense and HP... And since I plan on using the new necro unique shield that was released, I'll lose all the resists on a sheild, which will need some work.

First of all, I'm still playing the guy as a meleemancer for Normal and perhaps Cruel. He's using two Life on Hit Claws and so far he has had very few close call, even though I have hardly invested in HP nodes yet. So far, I've laid the groundwork for the build in terms of pathing, meaning I spend most of my early levels building the road that will allow me to get the nodes I need later down the road. I figure it's the best course of action , as the early levels are faster to aquire and nothing sucks more than having to spend 10 levels worth of skill points on building a road from point a to point B in Cruel or Merciless, when leveling gets tedious... At least i'll be able to adapt on the fly , getting HP nodes or resists when needed, etc...

Here's my current progression.


I had a much easyer time with him than my first necro, even though I have less pts invested in necro skills overall. It's because I got my Skeletons, Spectres and Zombie gems , plus minion support gems as fast as I could possibly use them, and I use a +1 Minion Level helm... This gives my summons better survivability that they used to on my first necro. It's a real shame I have no "rich" HC character that could buy him Quality Summon gems and better gear, meaning i'm leveling sub-optimal skill gems... But hey, I need at least one High-Level HC char before I can outfit my new HC builds properly.

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GhostlightX wrote:

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FeelThePowah wrote:

Gloves/Boots: Spell totem, skellies, dmg, faster casting

Assuming you are using Minion Instability, Faster Casting is bad on a Skeleton Totem. The Totem will overwrite existing Skellies before they can explode. Replace it with Minion Life and thank me later. My Skeletons' performance went through the roof once I made this switch. You will hear the improved effect immediately. Cast your Totem into a busy room and there will be much more of the "popping" sounds than usual.

While faster casting is great when you first get spell totem, once you have a full army it's largely a waste. It doesn't take that much longer to get to full skeles then with it. Once your full it's a complete waste imo. Instead of ML i would throw an Item Quantity on there. While skeles are more of a distraction then anything else, they still do some killing. The point of this game is leveling and item hunting at the end of the day. Maps being a drop, and the sole source of endgame content, means you have to do everything to can to keep yourself in the upper end of the map game.

The point of faster casting on a totem isn't only for the totem to cast faster, it's also so you cast the totem faster. For skeletotem it's mostly that aspect that is important, wether or not you care I guess depends on people but being able to drop your totem quickly is pretty useful imo unless you pick up a good amount of cast speed via passives or gear, which is a pretty good idea in itself and removes the need of that faster casting almost entirely.

Hey all, I'm new to the game.

I was wondering whether it is possible to have quality minions over quantity, where minions can tank bosses.

E.g, using Necromancer Aegis, and taking the shield boosting passive skills to strengthen the defensive stats and pass them to your minions.

Basically minions like from Diablo 3, where it is possible to strengthen them and keep them alive through high defenses and life regen.

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Klaz48 wrote:

Hello, im fairly new to this game (just started yesterday)
I want to go a witch summoner build, but i see the only link in the OP is a Health Summoner build.
I personally want to go for Chaos Inoc. Is there a build for that? Much appreciated.
(as i see the ops build included Health %.)

I'm using a CI build, imho its quite strong.
Some disadvantages over the health build (eg no bargain), but the immunity to chaos is very convenient. As I late game decided to go for vitality to keep my spectres alive as long as possible I picked up ZO, which was a good choice. The constant regen helps to soften the most dangerous damage for ES chars: Puncture/Bleeding and other DoT.

I didn't go for a spectre-specific build. Though an extra (or two) spectre is very tempting, I decided I want to be as versatile as possible, so recently (endgame) I took AB (I don't have the mana to continuously cast a damage spell (eg arc or sparks), but I do have spare time in battles as I mostly curse, watch and keep my army up and running). Now I can cast double skelly-totems to "break open" heavily filled chambers (guickly spawn skellies to the max), but many times my zombies/spectres dont need backup from the skellies so I often use 2 arc-totems to deliver some shock debuffs (which really helps cleaning up mobs).

Also, note that I use 30% movement-speed boots. I find movement speed very usefull to have in general, as it greatly benefits playability (just count how often you run to the merchant to sell things). Its also very handy to be able to outrun almost any monster, there will be times all goes wrong and suddenly you are standing alone between very nasty monsters. I'm not ready to trade that speed for another spectre (Ullr), but that may change.

Curses are invaluable imho; Temporal Chains is just awesome (it's just amazing how a mob-boiling room cools down after cursing them). Vulnerability makes mobs melt away to my minions considerably faster. Of course, I carry enfeeble for some bosses, but I didn't need it yet (don't underestimate Temp Chains).

My build is not very gear dependent, I use no expensive unique items (the Sidhebreath is cheap) and I have only 4L gear:

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original182 wrote:

Hey all, I'm new to the game.

I was wondering whether it is possible to have quality minions over quantity, where minions can tank bosses.

E.g, using Necromancer Aegis, and taking the shield boosting passive skills to strengthen the defensive stats and pass them to your minions.

Basically minions like from Diablo 3, where it is possible to strengthen them and keep them alive through high defenses and life regen.

You can boost minions greatly, but don't expect them never to die. Minions will die, but I noticed that when I started running vitality and purity the survivability of my minions increased quite a lot.

In the end, its the spectres you want to keep alive, with MI minion deaths are really usefull (Piety managed to kill 3 zombies, which killed her... boomboomboom). Zombies are cheap and quickly replaced.

I dropped NA around level 40, as I found I need the shield for my own survivability (in a ES build the shield is a huge source of ES, and don't forget the block-chance, ~ 25% incoming damaged reduced to 0 is quite a lot). You don't need NA in endgame as the minions grow very strong and you're able to stack up to 3 aura's at that time (or up to 6-7 in a life-build with EB). Eg, a shield can give my minions around 6 health regen p/s, with vitality I get ~ 1.3% regen (> 100 p/s) on my minions. My shield has 202 ES, I have around 300% extra ES from the passive tree, so with NA I would lose around 800 ES, which is ~ 20-25% of my total (currently 4269 ES when running discipline). My zombies have around 13800 health, what will 202 ES add to that?

Just concentrate on your own survivability, get as much life/ES as you can and max your resistances at at least 75%. Take all the minion passives (including MI) from the passive tree and your minions will do fine in late game.

Edit: Btw, you can't boost defenses of your minions via NA and passives to increase ES because that passives only apply to you and not to your minions. That's why I dropped NA: I loose around 800 ES (202 + ~ 300% ES from passives) to give 202 to my minions.

saving thread for posterity

hi, i know this is not the right thread for the marauders, but then i searched and i search and yet to found a "SUMMONER" MARA build, so id like to ask, anybody knows a good guide on a "SUMMONER" marauder ? or atleast link me... thanks and sorry...

I don't think there are many summoner marauders builds that exist, if any...

The marauder starting class is quite far from most of the summoner nodes, making him pretty sub-optimal as a summoner... A templar or shadow makes a great summoner because they are only a couple of nodes away from the witch's tree, but Marauder, Hunter and especially Duelists are pretty far. Unless you want to spend half your points getting somewhere else and end up being sub optimal, I would not recommend it.

Overally, if you want a melee/survival hybrid , I would go for Templar or Shadow as a starter... Probably templar since shadow doesn't have much survavibility nodes in it's starting area.

That said, you could always build a somewhat tanky marauder and give him a couple of summoning gems... Many Classes use a Summon Skeleton Totem, which gives them a pretty good amount of skeleton that might not be as tanky or do as much dmg as a pure summoner, but are okay enough... But I doubt it would be very efficient to go all the way trough the grid to grab as much summoning nodes... You would end up with a Marauder that can't tank much and with summons that get destroyed easyly.