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

I played a fire/necro in closed. I used chance to burn and elemental proliferation supports on Firestorm, then pyro passives and fire damage. Also you need Necromantic Aegis. Minions are fragile to elemental damage and a kite shield with some resist can help their survivability.

This is a mid-level build similar to what I played, though I had CI. There are plenty of points left for health and ES depending on how non-CI plays. There is a nice cluster of minion nodes near Minion Instability, Fitness at the left, and you're set up to take the 8% ES nodes in the center of the tree if necessary.

Do you find Aegis to be necessary? I agree that my minions are really weak, but I was hoping they would get stronger later game, and that staves would be better than going 1h+Shield, but I'm only level 30.

My build focuses on fire/burning/summoning and stacking life. I'm not particularly fond of ES, but if you guys think its more effective to mix/match let me know. This is my first playthrough of PoE so any critiques and comments are really appreciated.

http://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAAAgMBBUIHYwj0EJcSaRZvFxwZhRpsHwIkqij6Ko0qmCycMYg2xTbYNulBlkQESOdJG025VcZXK1qRYqxqrGvbcXlzU3kDfIN9GIIQgseFYIdliBuIQI9GkDOXhZuhnC2drqFtpqynCKh9qsSus6-3uJPAVMy8zfrPZdDQ0_vWndgk2QvfsONq6-7sVeyK74XxbPfX-oA=

i like it o.o i just started a witch so thanks for this.

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Darkendsouls wrote:

i like it o.o i just started a witch so thanks for this.

You are welcome, I hope it works out for you.

Update: I died at level 35 in Lunaris Temple 3, here was my gear:

And here was my build:

(I might have missed a point or two - doesn't really matter, I'll keep refining it)

I got assaulted by about 10 of those spike-shooting naked chicks and they just melted all my minions and me. I got stuck next to a wall while summoning some skeletons and they all just opened fire on me. I crammed my pots and tried to run, but they killed me in literally under 1 second.

Edit: I've recreated my character and intend to try again tomorrow - if anyone wants to level with me, add me in-game: EvangelineAKMcDowell - I'll probably start playing around 12 hours from when this is posted.

Thanks for all of this information. I'm trying to roll a hardcore version of this right now. Is it better to go CI, or to get health?

I also died earlier today at level 30 in the Warehouses district. A fast rare pretty much just destroyed all my summons and three-shotted me.

My build followed a similar pathway but I opted for the early increased cast speed nodes and fire damage nodes instead of getting the extra additional minions, though I was quickly headed that way. This was my first character post-closed beta, and thanks to some lucky drops I got Flammability and Chance to Ignite. Otherwise, I don't think I would have made it this far.

As long as the zombies stayed up and I had space to spam Firestorm, everything worked out well enough. However, if the zombies got brutalized, I was running for my life as witches are pretty paper-thin at this point in the game.

I may give this build a shot again soon, but I did find a lot of sweet Ranger gear, so I'm going to run that route for a little while.

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Cr3ated wrote:

Thanks for all of this information. I'm trying to roll a hardcore version of this right now. Is it better to go CI, or to get health?

Very-very late game (probably level 65+) it -might- be better to go CI - but only if you have amazing ES gear (I would say at least 3-4k ES). Stack HP until then though - chaos damage hurts a lot.

I just added this to my new witch (level 32 - Marketplace normal) and it's really handy against those super-fast snakes.

Just dinged 55 earlier today, Fire Summoner is working quite well. There are a few situations along the way where things were tough, but i'm handling my own in Merciless right now.

Few things to note:

Minion life isn't as valuable later on. Most of the time my Zombies rarely die, and in situations where they die rapidly, it's often due to powerful AoE mechanics. Minion Life gems in particular drop in value rapidly, but most of the passives themselves are worth grabbing, since you need to increase your minion count anyhow. (I'm only missing 1x Additional Minions and 2x Minion Life passives in my build)

I'm pretty much convinced that Minion Damage gems are the way to go, so much that the first 5L and 6L I get, im just running Summon Zombie + 4x/5x Minion Damage. It increases MI damage more than Minion Life, and increases their melee as well. I'm not sure anything else boosts their damage by that degree later on. Faster attacks might be worthwhile playing around with on the last spot, but I'm not at that point yet. I can see the + to minion gem levels attribute being insanely good for summoners in general, given my plans so far - haven't found any though.

I'm really more of a straight summoner since I haven't filled out all my Fire passives yet, but Fireball + LMP has been doing me good, although in definite need of improvement in Merciless. I'd expect that having not invested too many passives so far.

Oh, and:

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battlecrow wrote:

I also died earlier today at level 30 in the Warehouses district. A fast rare pretty much just destroyed all my summons and three-shotted me.

My build followed a similar pathway but I opted for the early increased cast speed nodes and fire damage nodes instead of getting the extra additional minions, though I was quickly headed that way. This was my first character post-closed beta, and thanks to some lucky drops I got Flammability and Chance to Ignite. Otherwise, I don't think I would have made it this far.

As long as the zombies stayed up and I had space to spam Firestorm, everything worked out well enough. However, if the zombies got brutalized, I was running for my life as witches are pretty paper-thin at this point in the game.

I may give this build a shot again soon, but I did find a lot of sweet Ranger gear, so I'm going to run that route for a little while.

Yeah, I was pretty bummed because I died about 5-10 minutes away from the final boss of act 3, whom I haven't faced ever. Also, I had some nice quality on my summons/etc, so losing those sucked, too.

Currently I'm running an Ice Nova/Cold Snap Crit-Frost Witch w/ minions to eat some damage for me - it's working pretty well (have 13.5% chance to crit, 320% multiplier).

I got so I'm wanting to roll a sweep Templar sometime soon ^.^ (this will be good because I'll need Reduced Mana gems)