Quick and Dirty Summoner Build

There always seems to be a lot of chatter in General Chat concerning the Summoner Build, and I guess for good reason. For a starting character seeking to get used to the game mechanics as well as the Passive Tree, the Summoner is probably the easiest of the starter builds is probably the least gear dependent.

The first thing I should probably get out of the way is that while the Summoner is a "relaxing" build in that you'll find rarely find yourself in a situation you can't get out of, it's not an "I WIN!" button. By that I mean you're not going to summon a mess of zombies and skeletons and just sit back while they clear the map for you. Your minions are basically tanks, and rather weak ones at that, who will hold the enemies' attention while you hang back and safely nuke at a distance. This means, of course, that you're going to have to choose which nuke to toss in. Pretty much anything will work so go for whatever best fits your playing style. I use Firestorm with a Chance to Ignite support gem which works well for me.

Most people seem to have the opinion that the Summoner Build doesn't become workable until level 35, but truthfully if you treat it right it starts to come into its own much earlier. Now as you can tell by the title, my example is a "Quick ad Dirty" build with no frills and only a few requirements in regards to gear.

Build at Level 25:



As you can see, you don't have to go to level 35 to get an idea how the build progresses. At level 25 you're pretty much done as far as the "Quick and Dirty" part goes. From this point you're basically going to be refining the character to fit your play style, and you'll be very well established in your Passive Tree for wherever you want to go. You are only a couple nodes from Chaos Inoculation, you're right at most of the "Minion Buff" nodes which also give you more zombies and skeletons to play with, and you're even well established to begin boosting your own spell power if you're looking at being a Nuke specialist with minions giving you the time and space you need. Completely up to you.

RUNDOWN

Now for the rundown on the early gameplay of this build. As you can see, you'll have the "Lord of the Dead" node enabled almost immediately (4 passive skill points) which will give you 4 Zombies to play with and once you open the glyph door in the Mud Flats you'll have 6 zombies to go along with them. Trust me, this is plenty for now. Gameplay is simple:

Step 1: Summon 4 zombies.
Step 2: Let your zombies charge enemy and hold them while you nuke away.
Step 3: Summon new zombies as needed.
Step 4: Repeat.

What about the skeletons? The skeletons are your "Ace in the Hole." They are SLOW so you're not going to cast them and let them follow you around like you do the zombies. They have two basic uses:

1) For emergency situations when there aren't any corpses strategically placed to raise as zombies.
2) Boss fights.

By "Boss Fights" I mean you're going to stand well back and cast Summon Skeletons right on top of the boss. The 6 skeletons will surround the Boss, keeping him pinned while you nuke. This works amazingly well for bosses that don't have a "Movement Skill" such as Oak's "Leap Slam". For those bosses that do have a "Movement Skill" you'll have to change tactics to deal with them.

Now for the bad news. Minions are weak and do little in the way of damage. This can be helped a great deal with Auras. Personally I prefer the "Wrath" aura because it uses little in the way of mana compared to other auras and the Lightening Damage compliments my Firestorm nuke well. Since you're going to be standing back from your minions, you'll need the three "Aura Range" nodes you notice I have activated in the Passive Tree.

GEAR

As I stated previously, the Summoner Build is not very gear dependent. Sure, there is equipment that will boost your minions a level or two, but frankly that's just icing. In fact, early in the game you're not even really worried about sockets and links much at all because your minions will work just fine unmodified and you only need one "nuke" spell.

Weapons:

Wands and Spirit Shields, obviously. Sure, there are some excellent staves out there, but frankly the + Spell Damage % is much more useful than the + Block % since finding yourself in melee range of monsters is a very rare event. Don't worry about the level of the Wands and Spirit Shields, just the + Spell Damage % (which can easily reach +30% early with two wands or a Wand and Shield.)

Sockets and Links:

You'll be looking for two things to start off with. A 2L and a 3L blue. The 2L will be for your nuke coupled with a booster support gem (such as Firestorm and Chance to Ignite) and the 3L will be for your zombies and the dream that you'll be able to find/beg/borrow/buy the two best Minion Support Gems; Minion Speed and Minion Life. If you don't have them already and can't get them, don't worry. They help quite a bit, but not having them won't break your build.

Other Gear:

For the rest of your gear you'll probably be focusing on three things.

1: Mana Pool. Believe it or not, Summoners don't burn through mana nearly as much as other builds because they smmon well before the fights, but they still need it... A bigger Mana Pool is always a good thing, but remember that usually +Int is better than +Mana. +Int not only increases your Mana Pool but your Energy Shield as well.

2: Farmer Gear. That's right, Summoners are great farmers because minions take care of most of the things other builds have to worry about. That means you can concentrate on boosting your +Item Rarity and +Item Quantity as high as you can get them. Later in the game you may run into the Item Rarity and Item Quantity support gems you can attach to your nuke.

3: Mana Regeneration.


QUESTIONS:

Q. You talk about Firestorm, are other nukes viable.

A. Yes. I prefer Firestorm because of its ability to be cast around corners, but other nukes are certainly viable. In fact, there are a multitude of people who will argue THEIR nukes are more viable for a Summoner build than Firestorm, and make very good arguments too. Firestorm is merely my personal choice.

Q. Why didn't you talk about the Spectre?

A. Spectres are just plain too controversial. Let's say I did bring up Spectres and gave my opinion that monsters that Flickerstrike or Poison Arrow make the best Spectres, can you imagine the arguments that would follow?

Q. Your Passive Tree ignored all the Minion Buff nodes, why?

A. Because I am focusing on the "Quick and Dirty" Summoner Build. In other words, a passive tree that builds quickly and gets people into position to easily go for a variety of different Summmoner sub-Builds. If they wish to go "pure" summoner they're already at several "branches" that boost their minions. If they want to go elemental, they're close to those nodes as well. Even if they want to experiment with CI they're not only almost there, but they're at the both sides of the "Energy Shield Circle" as well.

Q. Why did you detour to Minion Instability?

A. It's only a 5 node detour, and the benefits of Minion Instability far outweigh any inconvenience of waiting 5 more levels to boost your auras.

Q. What about totems?

A. What about them? I love totems... However, the Spell Totem is level 31 and by that time you'll be building to your own specialty Summoner Build and beyond the scope of thos post.

Q. Where do I go from here?

A. Entirely up to your playing style. If you find you need your nukes to burn through enemies faster, build up the respective spell powers. If you find your minions are dropping too fast for comfort, go for "Minion Swarm" by activating all the +1 Zombie/+1 Skeleton nodes you're already next to (which will give you 7 zombies and 9 Skeletons to play with.) You can head for CI and the "Energy Shield Wheel" to make your character more survivable in Cruel and Merciless, or even start stacking Life nodes to get ready for Righteous Fire.

Q. What about the rumored "desync" issues of Summoners.

A. Truthfully, I've had more problems with my Marauder's "Physical Build" than with my Summoner. Try a Marauder with Heavy Strike linked to Life Leech and Attack Speed along with a stacked Attack Speed gear (otherwise known as "Stunlock Marauder" or "Boss Killer") and you'll see what I mean. As far as Summoners go, I've never really had a desync issue with the 4 Zombie / 6 Skelly combo, but I've heard it becomes an issue with Summoners that use "Minion Swarm". I've never seen the need to have 18+ minions active at once, so I really couldn't confirm or deny that.

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The link in the original post didn't take. Let's try that again.

Passive skill tree build

This will truely work better if this is your first toon you have no good life/Chaos gear set out for yourself from a differnt toon then the only truely smart thing to do is start out life/shields and change up to CI at least till you farm some good life/Chaos gear.

MI is your main boss nuke and it helps a ton but you truely dont need it the end of act 2 or the begining of act 3 piety.

So with that in mind I personly feel that this down and not so dirty spec is much better.

Interesting. I think I see where you're going with that.

My only issue with that particular starting path is that it appears to be a bit limiting while what I was going for was to have as many possible options open for people as possible. I'm not really trying to explain any "endgame" specialty builds, but didn't want to show a starting path that would take people too far out of the way of anything either.

Don't get me wrong, I like where you've started. You've set it up so that a player will get Whispers of Doom at 29 PP (around level 25) without really sacrificing viability (the curses more than make up for the lack of aura range). The only real problem I have is that you've traded in a bit of flexibility to get there.

As far as the lack of "Life/Shield" nodes in my build go, it isn't nearly as much of an issue as you might think. I recently started a "Test Char" Summoner and took her to 25 because I had that very thought. With nothing but blue gear (and a single yellow piece... what can I say, a nice spirit shield dropped) I found it quite workable all the way through Act 2. In fact, the only times I actually died was starting out (before Mud Flats when the char was "naked" and running around with just Fireball) and when I tried to rush things in the Open Field maps and accidently pulled half the map at once (what can I say, I got impatient sometimes.) Granted, Oak and Vaal got a little hairy, but both went down with the standard "Skel and Run" tactics you develop instinctively with a Summoner char.

I will admit that I found this build a bit slow to start with. My other Witch is a "Pure Elemental / Electrical" build which burns through maps so fast it seems like my Summoner is crawling through them on her knees. Still, even though the Summoner is slower so far, she definitely has an advantage in survivability over my Elemental build... Enough so that I've modified my Elemental Witch a bit to incorporate her Summon abilities more efficiently and boost HER survivabiity.

Taking my test-case "Quick and Dirty" summoner a bit farther, I figured I might as well post where I've found myself at this point.

Level 45 in Cruel Act II, I'm still trying to keep her as generic as possible. No really decent gear has dropped, although all four Minion Support Gems have made an appearance. Unfortunately, keeping with my lousy luck with equipment, I have nothing over 3-Link. Zombies have Speed and Life linked, and Skeletons are linked to a Spell Totem and Damage. The Resistance gem is sitting by itself collecting experience against the time when some decent gear with good sockets / links finally drops for me.

Generic 45 Summoner

As you can see, I'm still keeping it as generic as possible. I've activated 2 more "Minion Branches" which gives me 6 zombies to play with and a Spell Totem that summons 10 Skeletons (although I've notices sometimes the game hiccups and I end up with 12). Basically, I have the zombies holding the enemies attention long enough for the Totem to summon a full cadre of Skeletons while I still sit back and nuke.

I have also activated the entire Energy Shield wheel which gives me a respectable 1k Energy Shield even with my crappy gear. My life is an anemic 350 or so,which hasn't really been an issue as rarely do my minions drop aggro. However, from this point it looks like it would be a hell of a lot easier to go CI rather than try to activate enough Life Nodes to be viable in Malicious.

I've begun activating Fire nodes because they were easy to get to and my main nuke is still Firestorm, but I haven't gotten too carried away with them. Truthfully, it's just more mana efficient to drop a totem than try to nuke my way through (not to mention safer.)

Mana has become an issue and my belt now has 1 Life potion and 4 Mana potions, which is necessary to keep me from running out of mana in an extended boss fight. In normal "dungeon clearing" I rarely find myself using more than 2 mana potions and almost never use the health potion. Still, I've begun targeting "mana regeneration" nodes, as you can see, because I foresee this becoming an issue later if I ignore it too much longer.

@Teucer357

I dont know what offencive spells your casting but +fire dmg do's not inc MI's dmg.

You can inc MI's dmg by linking support gems to the summoning spell and or Geting a shield with +fire dmg +life on it and using Necro Aegis as well as curesing.

Your looking more like a hybird spell caster/summoner reather then a summoner.




This would work much better. Here you would be using Arc linked to Elemental Proliferation for spreading/stacking shock.

I stoped at 52 points becouse here is about the time you need to start geting finding out what kind of Summoner you want to be and what kind of def's you want to run.

i.e. Am I going CI/Am I going to be using EB with Hybird armor/es gear/Am I going life/es./Am i going to do double cures with passive points or unq-iteams or not at all. Would I reath play double totems. Or do I want to stay pure hardcore summoner and inc Aura's radius.

Also this would work better for you if you already know your not going to be usine EB or CI but you do want ether Leadership or Necro Aegis.

I would says this is more of a generic start:



It then depends if you are going hp nodes, or ES.

btw, summoners will burn through the mana pool VERY fast, as many creatures can wipe out your army, and it cost alot to summon them back.

Spark or freezing pulse would be your best choices for damage.

Early on in Normal/Cruel FP is the best leveler.

Later on Arc/Elemental Proliferation stacking shock for your minions will net you more dps.

Your last build is not bad at all. In fact I built my second summoner some what like that starting out.

The buy back points are not bad at all for when you find out what kind of summoner you want to run end game.

Here is the one I started out as for my second summoner. You will notice there's realy not much differnt.

Is this build still valid for 0.11.0c patch?