Increase summoner variety by adding more minion nodes.

I have a soft spot for summoners in ARPG's, but summoners in PoE make me sad for a few reasons. We all know they're notoriously bad to level with, some summon skills are underpowered, and some game content seems especially harsh to summoners with the amount of AoE damage they spam.

The worst thing about summoners, though, is a severe lack of build diversity. I know GGG is already trying to address this by adding golems and some other uniques we've seen in Awakening, but so far I haven't seen any changes to minion nodes on the passive tree, which I think is the biggest problem.

Right now, there are relatively few minion clusters, and they are all located in the Intelligence portion of the passive tree. This means that every summoner character will have almost identical passive tree pathing, defined by visiting all of the minion clusters, whispers of doom, and the Templar and Shadow aura clusters. It doesnt matter if you're using SRS, zombies, spectres, skeletons, or animated weapons, the passive pathing is almost always identical because all summoners are forced to use all of the same minion passives.

With Bows, by contrast, there is an abundance of bow related passives spread across the passive tree, meaning a bow-using Ranger can travel in any direction from her starting area in order to create radically different builds, and always have access to enough bow nodes. She can travel to the duelist/marauder area for iron grip, mind over matter, and iron relexes. She can travel up to the Shadow and Witch area for elemental and projectile passives for a Lightning Arrow build while grabbing EB and using AA. Or she can just exhaust all of the bow and crit passives native to the Ranger area and still have enough dps.

We need there to be enough minion nodes so that no summoner build can realistically take all, or even most of them. Instead of being forced to travel to all the same passive clusters as every other summoner, summoners should have to choose between pursuing minion passives in different parts of the tree, just as any weapon or spell user.

And no, the Selfless Leadership jewel is not the solution. The ability to create original summoner builds should be available to everyone, not just rich players.