Which summoner offended GGG?

I've played a summoner as my opener char this time and it was indeed sketchy in normal-early cruel, zombies would die at almost every box but guardian and golems would usually survive. By end cruel zombies would still die sometimes but guardian and golems get tanky enough to take the beating easily. As your build gets finished in merciless and zombies level up you slowly stop losing them too and in maps it takes a double box with uniques to kill a few. Spectres are a mixed bag all the way, they usually hang back so it depends on how far the pack stretched, usually you don't lose any except when unlucky.

It's the usual deal with summoners, crappy start and solid enough later on if you set it up properly.

This thread is fucking funny.

Let's make a comparison:

a) cast on crit - barely functional at level 60, starts to somewhat work around 75, quite good with solid gear after 80, godly with godly gear after 85

- everyone loses their mind about it

b) summoner - difficult to level to merciless, it's easier to level with an alternative caster build, starts getting its shit together and becomes fucking strong after 70, fucking cheap, safe, you can use it as a league starter build and magicfind, later do Uber or anything else

- 'GGG hates summoners'

Try single target melee against Perandus mobs. Loads of fun.

Perandus mobs favour AoE greatly, coc blade vortex and spamming flasks works, but there's a giant disconnect between the Perandus mob difficulty and the rest of the difficulties

ok things got better :3

https://youtu.be/CAWI9ZGLM7Y

Looks like I haven't missed much. Back too dark souls . keep the struggle fellow summoners !

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Bars wrote:

a) cast on crit - barely functional at level 60, starts to somewhat work around 75, quite good with solid gear after 80, godly with godly gear after 85

True enough, however, you don't even try to level with CoC because it obviously has too many missing pieces to work, same with CI builds and a few others. On the other hand, summoner gains nothing crucial in late game, his gems just level up, you get more links on your items and incorporate a summoner unique or two which give you an extra minion in most cases. On those grounds it should have a similar power curve to a regular caster, however it doesn't, they did tinker with the gem progression to make pets tougher in early game, but it's still not quite on the money.

Besides that, maybe it would help if zombies had some natural regen.

Summoner is one of two mainstream builds I'm aware of which tend to use "escalating returns" scaling from passives, rather than the more typical diminishing returns scaling.

Getting 4% reduced reservation cost is more effective the more of it you have (because let's get real, most summoners are aurabots). Getting 2% additional block chance is more effective the more of it you have.

However, blocking survivability builds are considerably less meta than spamming Minions. Also, block builds have a lot of tools now for temporary large boosts to Block Chances.

So yeah. Playing an aurabot (usually in summoner form) means you're going to to feel the effects of escalating return progression, which means that if lategame is balanced then early/mid game should feel underpowered.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

So yeah. Playing an aurabot (usually in summoner form) means you're going to to feel the effects of escalating return progression, which means that if lategame is balanced then early/mid game should feel underpowered.

That's true enough, but I wasn't really talking about the overall playstyle effectiveness. It's just that a single zombie can take a beating from ten white enemies in late game and in early game it will die almost instantly. It doesn't really have much to do with endgame synergies, the scaling in early game is just too weak and that can be tweaked without affecting endgame.

Well, if you're taking A1N, there is no significant passive or gear commitment at that point, so the game should assume you're supplementing your Zombies with some self-cast. You'd be a fool not to.

I've been running a SRS/Spectre/Zombie build with Scion and it's been great so far, except for those goddamn boxes.

It's mostly the spectres. As a Scion, without the 100% HP buff on spectres in Witch, they have been constantly dying to the boxes in chokepoints. My zombies and earth elemental that are gemmed with life and resistance rarely ever die, but the spectres which are gemmed offensively get wiped out a lot.

I eventually dealt with it by taking life flask passives and spamming double animation potion to keep them up while constantly using Convocation to reposition. But they still die from time to time and then I get to pull my hair out as I try to hunt down monsters worth turning into spectres. If I gem them to be tanky, then it defeats the entire purpose of using them. If I gem them to be offensive, then they are badass and survive just fine up until I encounter a box.

Have the same issue with SRS to some extent. They just get wiped out by the massive AOE shotgun spam, doing a fraction of their total damage.

I haven't found a box I can't beat, because with SRS to fall back on, you eventually win by attrition. But losing all your spectres is just a rage inducing experience, because of how shitty the QoL is on that skill.