[2.0]Rathik's NEWBIE FRIENDLY FUN&CHEAP FARMER, DPS Summoner. High AOE DMG, SURVIVAL."The Matriarch"

"

polygone wrote:

Thank you Rathik2 for putting this guide together. I've been playing my summoner for many months now and I've found the guide super useful, and wanted to share a few thoughts and some anecdotal experience playing as a summoner.

I followed the guide the best I could until level 84, but due to gear limitations (maximizing IIQ subject to availability/affordability), I ended up deviating quite a bit. Using what I could get a hold of which was originally mostly self-found, but, then ended up buying after the removal of IIQ, I had trouble keeping up with elemental resistances. This is in part due to my insistence of running with reaper's pursuit as my main weapon and finding it difficult to use the divination distillate flasks being CI, thus spec'ing into more mana reserve nodes.

I made a few changes to the passives tree to suit my gear better; I dropped all of the curse nodes and took the mana reserve nodes near the scion/marauder starts. This allows me to run all three purity of fire/ice/lightning auras and discipline. I can also run another 40% aura such as purity of elements for elemental weakness maps, but this drops my mana down to about 40 which is troublesome for casting anything else.

There are a three obvious missing minion health nodes that I intend to fill in which are priority for the next few levels. I might also grab the 12% mana/health node at the witch start just to have a slightly larger mana pool (more tolerance for running divination distillate flasks) and a few more ES nodes.

I hate to say it, but, having once been very against snapshotting, I've now succumbed to doing so it as well. I actually started doing this yesterday, and coincidentally, yesterday I also ran my first few level 77 maps (successfully!). Prior, I had significant trouble with level 72 maps and even some maps below level 70 with difficult certain mods. Of course, this speaks more towards the fact that I am utter shit at not walking into obviously horrible situations, having logged over 150 deaths (the vast majority were between the levels of 80-85 due to maps). I am, however, aware others have been successful without resorting to these cheap gimmicks.

That said, this is what I've been rolling with:
- Passive tree at 105 points, level 85 <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
- Maximum MF of 120 IIQ/ 390 IIR with flasks and culling. This can go higher once I get 20/20 IIQ/IIR gems.
- 6L zombies: culling strike, multistrike, melee splash, IIQ, IIR
- 5L (snapshotted) evangelist: minion damage, increased area of effect, remote mine, (depending on what I'm feeling)
- 7600 ES
- Added bonus: 42% movement speed (not sure if this matters to anyone else, but I previously felt super slow in groups)






Here's my gear:

And snapshotting items:

Some notes:

Because I'm using reaper's pursuit as my main weapon for the increased IIR, I lose over 2000 ES and block chance which probably contributes to me getting killed as often as I do. However, this usually happens when 1) my entire group and minions have already been wiped out anyways where it wouldn't be a bad idea for me to run away, or 2) user error.

The perplexing reaper's pursuit is due to the impossibility of rolling blue sockets (originally, I thought I might want to use this to raise 6L specters and skip some of the snapshotting. I ended up with this color combination, and it works well enough for utility spells: desecrate, bone offering and having a really expensive curse to spam in order to allow divination distillate to run.

I would really like to be able to run hatred as well, but this is almost entirely not feasible at the moment.

I hope I didn't entirely bastardize your build! Just wanted to share and hear your thoughts or suggestions if you had any.