My Fire Summoner - Critiques Appreciated ^.^ (updated for OB)

This is my rough outline for a low-level build (50 Skill Points):

I would be using Firestorm as a main attack, a Skeleton totem and Zombies for distraction. The Strength and Dexterity nodes are for gear usability, I plan on using Armour/ES hybrid armour; a wand and shield as my main weapon.

With 20 more skill points:

This will give me more mana regen, higher cast speed for Firestorm, and a good boost in overall life. The shield nodes are for the extra block and elemental resists which I think will come in very handy in the situation that my zombies/skeletons die too quickly and I have to flee – block chance is a static increase (no diminishing returns), so I think that makes it pretty powerful.

With 20 more skill points:

This will reallocate the two Strength nodes from earlier into more useful nodes, i.e. the increased area/area damage nodes. These are to boost the damage output of Firestorm. The other major increase is to my heath pool via the Templar tree, as well as my Armour and ES. I also fix the pathing to the more efficient across-the-top route, rather than the lower-loop route.

With 10 more skill points:

This will increase my damage from Firestorm by a lot (60% additive increase)

With 10 more skill points:

This is the point where EXP gain will be really slow (and to an extent the previous section as well), so here I focused on getting a little more DPS with crit chance, burning damage, and cast speed.

Gear:

Armour/ES hybrid armour, with a focus on HP, ES, ES%, Mana, Resists. Survivability is key, so I want stacked effective life and resists, the Mana is a quality of life thing, since I’ll be cursing/summoning/Firestorming a lot.

Possible skill combinations:

Firestorm – Fire Penetration – Increased Area of Effect/Concentrated Effect* – Faster Casting

Spell Totem – Summon Skeletons – Increased Minion Life* – Fire Penetration* (they are bombs, after all)

Raise Zombie – Increased Minion Health – Increased Minion Damage – Increased Physical Damage – Added Fire Damage – XXXXX (listed in order of importance for 4-5-6L gear, respectively)

Enfeeble – Elemental Weakness/Flammability – Faster Casting

*Purity - *Clarity - *Discipline - *Reduced Mana

This is just a rough outline of my Fire Witch build. Any constructive criticism/suggestions are greatly appreciated; I know it’s probably not a greatly unique build, but it’s one I pieced together on my own, so I’m thinking I’ll brute it out to the bitter end on Hardcore ^.^

Edit: changed Added Physical Damage to Fire Penetration on Skeletons, added the auras.
Edit2: changed Increased Minion Damage to Increased Minion Life on Skeletons.
Edit3: reworked the builds to incorporate fire damage instead of block chance and elemental adaptation/totem passives
Edit4: Updated builds for Open Beta Changes

Not sure why you have Melee Physical Damage on skeletons totem, they won't attack a whole lot. If you plan on using them as Minion Instability bombs, you want to use Fire Penetration instead, MI damage is a fire spell(cast by the minions so your fire dmg% etc does nothing to increase it).

Other than that looks good, I'd probably try to grab that 18%fire node at some point if using Fire storm, and maybe the 12%one with 15%fire resist just because it's a good deal on the way for 2points, but that's not really a big deal.

I was considering the two big fire nodes, but I'm unsure what I would get rid of to accommodate them, as well as when to do so. I figure I need as much HP as possible for the Chaos damage mobs, so I could possibly reduce the ES a little. Perhaps my build is a little too tanky for a summoner - since the whole point of summons is to not ever get hit.

Edit: Should I get rid of added minion damage in favor of life for the skeletons?

"

RulerofAsgard wrote:

Edit: Should I get rid of added minion damage in favor of life for the skeletons?

Well they're both adding about the same amount of damage kinda(depends on how much you have already but it's never very far unless you have an extreme build with lots of dmg% and no life% or the contrary), but I prefer health because it increases the amount of damage they can take without dying in one hit. If a skeleton dies in one hit, they just die. If they can tank that big hit and go low hp instead, they blow up. So the more health they have the better in general and since health gives about the same amount as dmg as dmg% if the stats are balanced, it's definitely the better support for skeletons.

And I was just suggesting it but you're right that you don't really waste points so it'd be a choice between being more tanky or doing more dmg, and for HC generally it wouldn't be worth it. You could maybe drop the 8% block though(the Bulwark node without the resists), while that's a lot of block, it only affects stuff that can be blocked anyway which isn't everything at all.

That's a good point about the block nodes (Bulwark) though that only frees up 3 points, and it would take either 4 or 5 (8 total) for either (or both) of the fire node(s), so I would still have to fiddle around with the more survival-oriented points. Do the 15% damage nodes for minions add a lot of MI damage, or if I got rid of them (2 for 30%) and got the 18% Fire node (30% Fire for 5 points) would the damage equal out/be greater? It seems (just based on the numbers) that it would be a push for MI, but a boon for Firestorm, so that might be worth it in the long-run.

And yeah, more HP for the minions will be beneficial overall for damage output, so I'll certainly change that.

"

RulerofAsgard wrote:

That's a good point about the block nodes (Bulwark) though that only frees up 3 points, and it would take either 4 or 5 (8 total) for either (or both) of the fire node(s), so I would still have to fiddle around with the more survival-oriented points. Do the 15% damage nodes for minions add a lot of MI damage, or if I got rid of them (2 for 30%) and got the 18% Fire node (30% Fire for 5 points) would the damage equal out/be greater? It seems (just based on the numbers) that it would be a push for MI, but a boon for Firestorm, so that might be worth it in the long-run.

And yeah, more HP for the minions will be beneficial overall for damage output, so I'll certainly change that.

It's hard to quantify the difference between the minion dmg and fire dmg since we don't actually know the damage of minions, as for MI it's hard to quantify too because not everything is going to proc MI. In general if you're just trying to compare MI, in lategame MI is large bursts of damage but fairly rare. Zombies almost never die and Skeletons are only useful against larger packs. Firestorm on the other hand you'd use on everything all the time, so that's "guaranteed" damage. It's also further increased by concentrated effect.

All in all it's very small tweaks that I don't think would have a large effect either way. I'd probably drop the totems points though, base duration on spell totem is good enough and tankability is fairly irrelevant since mobs will tend to focus skeletons almost all the time unlike other direct damage totems. That frees a bunch of points down there and with the block ones, you could grab the big 6 6 18% fire.

"

PyrosEien wrote:

It's hard to quantify the difference between the minion dmg and fire dmg since we don't actually know the damage of minions, as for MI it's hard to quantify too because not everything is going to proc MI. In general if you're just trying to compare MI, in lategame MI is large bursts of damage but fairly rare. Zombies almost never die and Skeletons are only useful against larger packs. Firestorm on the other hand you'd use on everything all the time, so that's "guaranteed" damage. It's also further increased by concentrated effect.

All in all it's very small tweaks that I don't think would have a large effect either way. I'd probably drop the totems points though, base duration on spell totem is good enough and tankability is fairly irrelevant since mobs will tend to focus skeletons almost all the time unlike other direct damage totems. That frees a bunch of points down there and with the block ones, you could grab the big 6 6 18% fire.

I mostly travel down near the totems for Elemental Adaptation for the end game, though again that's more because I'm very paranoid and +5 Max Resists is really nice. Though if I free up those 6 nodes to get there (2 totem, 3 travel, 1 EA), plus the three for Bulwark, I can get both Fire nodes for 48% increased fire, which is quite nice, plus have one more point to fritter away, probably on an 8% heath node or maybe another 6% fire.

Thank you for your suggestions, I think I was focusing a little too much on survivability, when in fact the minions are how I survive, and I need to be able to damage mobs to clear faster/more efficiently.

I'll fiddle with the builds and update them.

Edit: updated the builds to reflect fire damage passive exchange.

what are you guys opinions about staffs for summoners, to me they seems very good because:

1) they can having 6 sockets, which indirectly empowers your minions:
- spectres and skeletons + 3-4 support in weapon and zombi + 4-5 support in armor
2) they can block
3) above the spectra sphere there is 3 skills that gives:
- 40% global crit chance, 40% global crit multiplier and 30% crit chance, if I understand that correct that translates to 70% increased crit chance and 40% increased crit multiplier with spells

because of the energy shield nerf I expect my speck to be something along the lines of:

I know I have 104 skill points but as fare as I can understand you get 12 (3x4) extra skill points from new quests in act 3.
I am very open to critique, I am aware that I should probably drop some of my templar passives and take the 5 life nodes I have not taken... :)

so how viable are staffs as a summoner?

DISCLAIMER:
while I have researched the game a lot (wached all Kripps and ZiggyDStarcraft videos, and lurked the forum a lot, I have yet to play the game :).

@Corril

The Staff build looks fine, since as a summoner you don't really have to focus on defense as much. The 6L Staff option is mostly personal preference, since you could also go into the Shadow tree and get Bow passives for pretty much the same thing.

I like having a shield because it's twice the innate block chance as a staff, it comes with 24 all resist as an inherent mod (kite shields), and there are some beastly shield node changes upcoming (you saw Kripp's stream - those two All resist with shield nodes are become +15 each)

The one thing I noticed was you're going to have really low Dex (14) which will limit you to only red and blue gems - so you're missing out on some really good ones you could incorporate, like LMP/GMP, Chain, Traps, etc

The only real problem with staffs is how hard it is to roll a good one. They have a high combination of prefixes and suffixes available to them, so getting only good mods is difficult.

What spells would you use with your build to actually attack things (and I think it's 21 overall extra skill points instead of 16)

And as always, it's a beta, there's no such thing as a nerf, it's called balancing :p

Big fan of Fire Summoner. I didn't even read about builds and just went ahead and come up with this up to lvl 44:



Entire mobs obliterated in a flash and minions do the tanking. But with the basic health and flasks I can do it without them.

There are only 2 bosses I can't currently solo just yet with my build and those are Vaal and Merviel. Eveything else is just mega easy although I do plan to put more points into Energy shield later.


My only concern is that the spells, gems for fire are lacking, there are far too many cold and electric spells and support gems and very little in the way of Fire becuase most require strength and that sucks.

I'm basically obliterating the game by mashing the firestorm button.