The Summoner Compendium

Nice read, always liked Necro in D2.

Have to say the summons could use some Love early game. These dogs that leave a flame patch on kill(?) just obliterate all my Zombies in seconds, Skeletons are just dead when a Mob looks at them (that gem lvls so slowely?).
I just tend to Fireball all the way or try and freeze the mobs.

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Royalairfarce wrote:

Nice read, always liked Necro in D2.

Have to say the summons could use some Love early game. These dogs that leave a flame patch on kill(?) just obliterate all my Zombies in seconds, Skeletons are just dead when a Mob looks at them (that gem lvls so slowely?).
I just tend to Fireball all the way or try and freeze the mobs.

Early on minions are really weak, they get a lot stronger when they lvl up (plus you get more and more minion related nodes).

But those fire patches will always kill minions pretty fast - at least that's what I'm experiencing. I never ran Purity, though. Maybe that helps a little.

Has anyone specified optimized builds for purely offensive summoners? Something that is more risky to play but has more rewards if you are alert enough to avoid death? Something a more ideal pure PvE farmer / speed-clearer?

I'm guessing it would involve Necromantic Aegis. I'm preferable to using fire (fireball/firestorm).

It seems like a lot of the builds are for people thinking about hardcore and having some survivability in case they are half asleep.

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Sepelion wrote:

Has anyone specified optimized builds for purely offensive summoners? Something that is more risky to play but has more rewards if you are alert enough to avoid death? Something a more ideal pure PvE farmer / speed-clearer?

I'm guessing it would involve Necromantic Aegis. I'm preferable to using fire (fireball/firestorm).

It seems like a lot of the builds are for people thinking about hardcore and having some survivability in case they are half asleep.

Let's be clear, if you want to mow down through mobs quickly and efficiently, the summoner isn't going to be it. It's decently fast, but the minion AI and movespeed(even with the support) is such that you can't just run into a pack, clear it in 2 shots, move on like you can with chain splitarrow/lightning arrow/lightning strike. Also I have no idea how taking Necro Aegis would speed up the clears since shields don't provide any useful damage stat to minions(the only remotely offensive one is damage reflect, which is fairly bad as a stat).

I posted on last page a lightning offensive summoner build. Replace the lightning nodes with the appropriate fire nodes next to them, and replace some health with more damage if you play softcore and don't care about dying(you lose 15% xp on death though, as a reminder). Stuff like the casting speed% nodes or spell damage nodes I couldn't take, or more crit%.

PyrosEien and other experienced players, please give me advice about this kind of build:

Summoner with Blood Magic

The main ideas of build:

1) first of all - it's summoner with curses.
2) HUGE amount of life and life regen. (half of passives are +% to maximum life). It's like +200% to max life and +3.1% life regen only from passive tree skills.
3) Blood Magic.


The question is - will these build be effective and viable, or it's much better to use mana instead of blood magic, and spend 30+ life perks on something else?

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PyrosEien wrote:

I posted on last page a lightning offensive summoner build. Replace the lightning nodes with the appropriate fire nodes next to them, and replace some health with more damage if you play softcore and don't care about dying(you lose 15% xp on death though, as a reminder). Stuff like the casting speed% nodes or spell damage nodes I couldn't take, or more crit%.

Thanks. I will try the build you posted on the last page for a softcore farming summoner. It seems like the strengths in comparison with the more pure AOE farmers - come endgame - will be soloability and a bit more survivability to avoid xp loss / death downtime.

Would like to see other softcore builds if anyone has any they think would be ideal.

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BlackCorsair wrote:

PyrosEien and other experienced players, please give me advice about this kind of build:

Summoner with Blood Magic

The main ideas of build:

1) first of all - it's summoner with curses.
2) HUGE amount of life and life regen. (half of passives are +% to maximum life). It's like +200% to max life and +3.1% life regen only from passive tree skills.
3) Blood Magic.


The question is - will these build be effective and viable, or it's much better to use mana instead of blood magic, and spend 30+ life perks on something else?

Well my main question is, why do you take Blood Magic? You don't seem to take any damage oriented passives, so it's not to spam an expensive strong spell like a 6L Arc, so I don't really understand it. Specifically, playing a summoner isn't that mana intensive, and you get a lot of int plus usually some mana regen when you start as a witch or even a templar, so you rarely need potions even to do summoning/cursing. Maybe when you're spamming skeletons assuming you don't use a totem, and even then it's a rare case that a single mana potion will fix. So why Blood magic?

The idea isn't necessarily bad, if there was a point to it. Also assuming you want to do a build similar to what you posted, why start Templar? You don't take any of the health nodes in the templar area(and you really should they're very good). If you're gonna build like this just make a marauder and it'll save you a bunch of points at the start including a useless melee damage.

I'd do

But to be honest there isn't really a point to doing that. You could just grab the health and not blood magic and still be fine. Also if you take Blood Magic, you can't run % based auras. Purity is a fairly powerful aura as a summoner as it provides a massive damage reduction to your summons and it's also extremely good to use on yourself.

I have always loved the necro from d2 (one shot at lvl 84 HC.....RIP).....

I have played several only HC chars since i started really playing about a month ago.

I lvled a HC witch pure summoner until mid 40's before i got owned by.....another NECRO in the chamber of sins (ironic).

It's all good, i had a blast, with all my zombies, skeles, a spell totem casting LMP ice spear and casting Arc myself.

With OB so soon, i have been pondering Witch, pure summoner with double totems.

Ill be sitting in the background, commanding my loyal minions, doin curses, spamming skeles, placing totems (don't know if they will be sporks with the nerf), maybe even incorporating traps (kripp tested it - states that u can use traps alongside double totems, im not sure if this is a bug?!)

I have been watching kripp stream some alpha and he keeps saying it is VERY hard, therefore i am looking for a viable "safer" build.

What do you guys think? is it viable?

It's viable but pure summoner is going to be kinda slow. Safe but slow. A good starting character for HC imo.

As for traps working it's not a bug, that's exactly how it's supposed to work. The dual totems states that you cannot do damage YOURSELF, but traps and mines aren't yourself, they are the ones casting the spells, same reason your minions can also do damage. They'd need to add a specific rule to remove traps and mines because basically traps and mines are the same as totem. And if totems did no damage when you took the dual totem keystone it'd be...disapointing ^^. It forces you into an entirely new playstyle where you only rely on those proxy skills instead of your direct skills, but it's not meant to cripple you so you can't do anything but cast totems, it's quite a great change in my opinion.

PyrosEien, thx for your answer about blood magic summoner!
It helped me a lot in understanding the possibilities and disadvantages of this build.

Maybe you can suggest some variants how to make use of Blood Magic. What skills will be better even if completely instead of summons then?