SSF HC summoner feedback

Hello, here's some feedback from my first 15 ish hours playing over the last few days. Note: there is a lot of positive I have to say, and I'll definitely be playing more, but this post is focused on my pain points.

Background on me, the player:
playing since poe 1 closed beta
20,000+ hours in poe 1
play almost exclusively ssf hc ruthless
play almost exclusively summoners

In poe2 so far I've made it about half way through act 2, so any or all of these complaints have potential to change in the late game, but they're all valid complaints for early game. I've specced mostly minion damage/ minion life/ and the only minion resist/revive node I could get this early.

General gameplay:

1) The volatile crystals affix still exists??? This is the sole reason I quit poe 1. Does anyone encounter this affix and walk away thinking it made the game more enjoyable? In hardcore this affix means you can never ever glance away from the game or your projectiles / minions / dots might kill something offscreen and 1shot you. No interesting gameplay, no building your character to negate it unless you want to force every character into CI, you don't even get to look at the monsters on the edges of the screen. If you aren't staring at your characters feet 100% of the time for the entire game, at some point you just lose. This is far worse than old fashioned volatile orbs 1 shotting you.


2) The animation that plays on your health orb when you're shocked makes it impossible to tell how much hp you have out of the corner of your eye, and seeing movement there makes me think I'm taking crazy damage out of nowhere. I would like an option to turn that off personally.


3) I think I was shotgunned by the fire breath attack on the mini boss right before the act 1 boss, I was hit for over 600 damage in less than 1 second and was 1shot. I had probably zero fire res, so maybe this is just a matter of me being expected to gear for the boss like merveil, but at that point in the game I had probably encountered a grand total of 15% fire res across all gear, so there wasn't much opportunity to stack any resistance anyway without grinding. Seems excessive for act 1. The rest of the bosses are remarkably well designed as far as telegraphing and not being random 1-shots though, so kudos.


4) Pausing the game with sparks in the air repeatedly loops the spark noise until your ears bleed


Summoner specific:

5) Minions die if you walk 1 screen away from them.
Why? I can't tell you how many times I was clearing my way through a zone and encountered a fork, decided to go left and my minions decided to go right because they saw a stray enemy. I Get slightly too far away from them, Boom, army dead. wait 6 seconds to enjoy the game again and hopefully there wasn't a pack of monsters on the left side because now you're fighting 2 packs and your whole army is gone. Some boss fight arenas are big enough that if my minions are standing in one corner and I run to the other corner they die.
I hope you weren't ever planning to leave a monster behind and keep clearing through a zone because your minions aren't coming with you. You WILL kill EVERY enemy you see.
Sometimes your minions aggro on enemies behind a wall or something and the pathfinding takes them slightly off screen and they just repeatedly spawn next to you, run to edge of screen, die, wait 6 seconds, repeat.
This problem is even worse with raise zombie, which actively incentivizes you to move from pack to pack quickly, but if you move 1 second before ALL the previous monsters are dead, all the zombies you just spent 10 seconds raising are instantly dead and you're running alone face first into the next pack.
Please just make them teleport to you like poe 1.


6) Minion damage is garbage early game.
I expected this to be slightly better than poe 1, but currently it looks like the meta for leveling a summoner will be the same as it always was in poe 1. Play literally ANYTHING other than summoner for the first half of the game.

The default attack damage on all the minions I've tried so far ( unearth, skeletons, archers, mages, zombies) is pathetic. With an army of 6 minions, fighting 3 white mobs takes about 10-15 seconds if you don't use your active abilities. They don't feel like minions at all, they feel like self-casting with much worse QOL. I'm really hoping that this changes significantly by the time we reach endgame, because if the vast majority of their damage is going to come from active skills I'm pressing, that defeats the purpose of playing a summoner in the first place. I want an army of friends running around killing shit, I don't want a convoluted way to be a self-cast mage doing damage with my own button presses.

I was hyped to get my first arsonist gem and swapped out an archer for an arsonist just to find out that the damage from the arsonists doesn't justify losing a single archer and I had the same very quick realization when I got my first frost mage gem. The only minion that does any amount of damage is the gas cloud from the archers, and that's not really the minion doing the damage because I have to target the location and press the button myself, it's just a terribly janky way of self-casting a spell that sometimes becomes unusable for 6 seconds because the minion died. So far I have 65% minion damage in the tree and this hasn't improved, but I'm dearly hoping it will eventually.
Right as I started act 2 I got sick of trying to make the minion thing work and swapped in a spark gem with no support gems, no spell damage gear, and no skill points allocated to any kind of damage and my clearspeed went up significantly. Early game minions could probably have their auto attack damages buffed by 400% ish and not even come close to being overpowered. I really hope the summoner meta doesn't continue where you aren't allowed to use summons at all until the mid-to-late game

I tried making the gas cloud/fire combo work, and occasionally when fighting a rare mob that stands completely still and doesn't choose to kill your archers, the single target burst is absurdly strong, but I've never once been able to achieve this in a boss fight. The combo is actually often a significant damage loss because your archers are constantly being 1shot every 8-10 seconds for every single boss fight, so you'd much rather have the dot cloud out doing consistent damage than the one burst of fire damage every 6 seconds. The only reliable way I found to proc the combo is to drop a couple clouds on the enemy then use the lava orb spell, and occasionally this feels very strong, but it's incredibly inconsistent. You'd never want to actually use the arsonist for this purpose in its current state, which just feels bad.

There is no way I've found to generate corpses on your own early game, so you can't use raise zombie in boss fights. Even if there is an add phase to refill your flask charges and you raise those corpses the zombies will be dead in seconds.

7) Minion move command does literally nothing.
If any enemy is on the screen, your minions will run to go hit it. If you tell them to move away from the monsters, they will spend approximately 1 frame moving to where you told them to go, then immediately spin around and run face first into the boss slam. Even spamming the move command button won't save them from standing in the fire

8) I assume ascendancies are very much a work in progress, so I wasn't going to put too much emphasis on this but... what? Both of the witch ascendancies actively greif hardcore players making your character less survivable, and neither of them have anything to do with minions. The infernalist has 3 nodes dedicated to reserving 25% of your life pool, no thanks, as well as 6 other nodes that emphasize doing damage to yourself for high-risk high-damage gameplay. Also no thanks. If I pick infernalist on a summoner I would pick loyal hellhound, then altered flesh, then just not get any more ascendancy points because the rest are griefing.

If I go blood mage I get 2 ascendancy points in act 2, and I only use 1 of them to get 3% max hp and I don't even want to use the second point until mid-to-late game when I can sustain my life regen without risking my character. I might not even set foot in the trials until I can get 6 points all at once for crimson power, because I have a hard time imagining the health loss on cast being justified until then.


9) I guess I don't care that much about this one because my archetype involves consuming all my spirit to get as many minions as I can, but it was very weird to get my first spirit gem and open up the list of all the auras I could craft and find not a single one that was useful to my build. I'm just stashing all the spirit gems I find. I dunno, maybe that's fine it just felt weird.


10) Some bossfight arenas are small enough that your minions can get locked outside and you can't walk away far enough to kill them and get them to respawn inside. Namely the little ring of thorns for the last phase of the bell-pig. My archers got locked out of that phase and I had to kill the boss with just 2 melee skeletons and unearth. It took minutes.

11) Maybe just bad rng but summoner scepters completely stopped dropping as soon as I hit act 2. I haven't seen a single one of any rarity. Been getting them off the vendors exclusively.

Thank you for anyone that read this far, and I do want to reiterate that there is so much I love about the game and I will continue to play and enjoy the game at least until volatile crystals kills me offscreen again, at which point I may uninstall again.

Minions are garbage early game yeah, that's why you start with Contagion and Essence Drain. Then eventually you get Raging Spirits with Flame Wall and things start to take off. It's the same as in PoE 1. Summoner feels garbage early game until you get SRS.

Hey, that spirit gem. Click down to elemental, and get Raging Spirits. You're welcome.

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Shmizz#4129 wrote:

I'm really hoping that this changes significantly by the time we reach endgame, because if the vast majority of their damage is going to come from active skills I'm pressing, that defeats the purpose of playing a summoner in the first place. I want an army of friends running around killing shit, I don't want a convoluted way to be a self-cast mage doing damage with my own button presses.

Very much this! I'm feeling like I'm pressing WAY to many buttons now at the end of Act 2 >.<;