Summoner builds need to be rethought

Not every summoner hybrid works, but for example a spell/wand/spell-totem hybrid witch/templar has way more damage and scales way better with items than a summoner. Also the hybrid has a good synergy as some passive points are near some minion nodes. I played a pure summoner and after that an ice spear crit hybrid and the hybrid did way more damage and was way safer.

People play summoner because most dont like to do crazy builds and don't think much about what could work and what not. Summoner is an easy build and you can't do much wrong, with hybrids you have to plan and decide what is more important (damage, minions or def). With hybrids its usually better to go full damage low life builds - most of the people dont like that.

I played with a tanksummoner in the last race and his killspeed and damage (even with really good gear - he finished 3.) was really bad. (My summoner damage was bad too, its not just my build ...)

You argue that you don't need many points to maximize a summoner, thats true. But if you spend the same amount of passive points into a totem/wand/caster build you deal more damage than a summoner AND you have the possibility to even increase your damage with passive points / items.

You want the shadow to get minion nodes (the other hybrid, templar already has enough). Why?
I played a totem fp-crit shadow with 3 zombies and no points in minion passives - worked really well. I did enough damage to kill almost everything instantly - if not there were 3 minions as decoy there. Shadow is in comparison to the templar/(witch) about damage in my opinion, not survival.

In every ARPG the summoner doesn't need strategy. Why should you need strategy for a low damage low killspeed build? Do a hybrid and you will need strategy.

In my opinion pure summoners should always be about defense. As i said before, offensive summoners deal less damage than hybrids or are OP - in both cases useless. The amount of points you spend and the position is ok atm - be creative and you'll get way better and safer builds.

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In every ARPG

GGG has attempted to make POE stand out with its systems. It does borrow heavily from many ARPGs, but it also has established unconventional systems and mechanics which they feel lead to a better game.

I am not convinced there should be a build in this game that inherently is not strategic because this is inherently problematic:

A) Build is not strategic - players abuse it because it is "easy" to maximize
B) Build is not strategic - players cannot abuse it because it is too weak when maximized

Either A or B will result from a "non-strategic" design.

While I suppose we might want builds to exist that are not heavily item-dependent, that seems at odds with a game which is about items, as GGG has explicitly stated. This isn't the item forums, but you're right in that GGG may wish to address the lack of summoner mods on items, because uniques make a minion bulid rather simple - it's not as though there are comparable rare items for minion builds, just stack minion uniques.

So far, POE's passive skill tree's purpose has been implied because people liked Diablo 2's range of character customization and that GGG feels their game should be a step forward from that perspective - that POE should support even more diversity than D2. If we allow non-strategic viable builds to exist, this seems to contradict with that gameplan, as GGG ALSO wants POE to be competitive.

I think the current minion passive arrangement and stat-allotment is non-strategic and too effective for the amount of item-investment required. There are many ways to address these issues, but I think breaking up the highway I linked in the original post would be beneficial to both minion-users and non-minion users. I'm not suggesting we make minion builds not work, but I'm confused why you're basically saying, "Minion builds are easy and some people like easy builds." Okay, yes, it's easy to raise minions, but they're a bit too good. I'm not convinced they're worse off than a powerful ground slam build, or something, given their prevalence as highly ranked on the ladder, alongside ground slam marauders and freezing pulse builds (which are both only 10-20% "less easy" to execute and plan as minion builds and at least can be made with every class and at least can be heavily diverse between players, focusing on different statistics and effects and items and defenses and focuses when utilizing FP or GS; there is no "FP" build, there isn't even a "GS" build because Templars and even Witches can execute it beautifully, [though perhaps not in a 3 hour race like a marauder]).

I think if GGG were to survey the top 100 minion users, they would find very little differences between their items, active skills and passive skills. I think this would be a symptom of their design choices being violated - that builds should be relatively unique even if they are designed to accomplish similar things with similar skills.

What I'm proposing is not a dismantling of minion-users or making them inferior or ineffective, I'm just asking them to make more choices and put more thought into what they're doing - and the end result can be more fun. What I'm talking about is asking minion-users to decide between speedy zombies that attack two or three times a second, to slow hulking zombies that have gorrilion health and explode for tons of fire damage on death. I'm asking them to choose between dominating blow and summon zombie. I'm asking them to chose between being a glasscannon and being just as tanky as their minions, who might scale off your defensive stats, promoting defensive investment on your part. I'm asking for minion-users to specialize and define their builds so that they accomplish something specific that they sought out to do. Any of these ideas should probably be supported by items and/or the passive tree and any of these ideas could be fun for all involved, as well as just as effective as minions are currently.

Perhaps it's hard to distill my points, but the heart of it is - it's too easy to min/max summons. This isn't the case for FP or GS or any other "Flavor of the month" build that I know of. You can't get your cake and eat it too with any other build, but you CAN get every summon node on the tree and you can completely maximize your summon potential without any sacrifice, provided you always play a Witch.

A more eleborate fix would be to have a series of potions that increases the effectiveness of your minions in various ways; Potion of Viciousness for move speed and attack power by 50% for 10 seconds, and Potion of Cold Skin to increase durability of your minions by 100% for 20 seconds. This way minions over all can be more powerful whenever they are under the effects of the potions, however, in order to keep them powered up you must managed your potion charges effectively, because without the potion effects they will be weaker than they are currently.

This way you can say that you are not only a minion master but also a potions master

I already got your point i think anubite.

The summoner has 2 main problems (mainly you don't need any "skill")
1. You don't have to hit skillshots
2. Your positioning doesn't matter

Because of that the summoner will always be easier to play than any other build. And because of that (even if you implement a strategic component / item scaling as you suggest) the summoner will stay an easier build. Yes, it's kind of sad but theres no way around that (at least i haven't seen one).

The conclusion is that the pure summoner doesn't really fit in competitive play (as for example seen in League of Legends).

Because of that i like the idea to make summoner an easy to plan/play build with limited potential. With hybrid builds you still have a lot of strategic and strong possibilitys that don't have the problems described above.

By the way, my last 5 builds used minions and just one was a summoner. I would even say hybrid summoners are the "best builds" at the moment (for HC).

Well, it's not hard to be a hybrid/low-investment summoner. I had a totem with summon skeles on it and with just that alone you can distract enemies ad infinitum. No skeleton upgrades at all, just good cast speed.

And yes, summoners will probably always have inherently less skill-involved, but we could at least make these builds less "samey" and more strategic.

And don't use LoL as a frame of reference for balance. Riot has no idea how to balance that game - it's a total mess. DotA has heroes with summons and they're fairly well balanced. In any case, AoS clones aren't Diablo clones, can't compare their balance that easily, though I agree summon builds will probably always be easy to execute.

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Mark_GGG wrote:

Personally I fully agree with you on the ghosts - I don't think they should leave corpses behind at all, but that would be tricky to implement, and isn't a high-priority thing.

I'm curious, how would this be tricky to implement, just replicate (if not a copy/paste with some modifications as needed) what was done for those water elemental mobs that don't leave corpses when killed?

I do think something needs to be done for summoners, at least listing the damage Skeletons and Zombies do in the skill, but preferablly a way to trade quantity of minions for quality of minions, maybe a keystone that halves the number of minions for each type (round up fractions or else Spectre's might become unusable) but strengthens each minion summoned (such as more life and damage, possibly more speed, resistances, or even an energy shield), while possibly doubling the duration for the Skeletons.

I'm not sure what's being asked actually. For a moment, I thought Mark was remarking about spectres you raise leaving corpses when they die.

In that case - ghosts probably aren't unique? The skill probably resurrects a monster, gives it to you, and changes its alpha channel to be transparent. To change that they no longer leave corpses behind would require that the game check to see if it's a spectre, which could be low level code looking at high level code for an answer, a fundamental change of some kind? Dunno. We don't know how corpse creation is programmed so it could be complex, though it might not seem that way at first.

In the case of 'ghost mariners' and th elike not leaving corpses behind... are we sure water elementals don't leave corpses? I don't play a summoner mainly, so I don't recall whether they really do or not. If water elementals don't, then I don't see why normal mariners couldn't. However, spectres summoned by players probably would still leave corpses behidn when they die, if they do that currently.

Ah I thought it was about ghosts not leaving corpses but I may have been mistaken as it seems like two things are being asked about, however if spectres leave corpses what would prevent those corpses from being 're-raised' to bring the spectre back? Wouldn't that defeat the purpose of having to kill a mob to get a spectre of it?

Then again if the same was done to zombies a summoner would be able to recycle zombie corpses and once the summoner got going nothing could really stop it as long as the summoner had the mana to summon new zombies before someone else used the corpse with the only exceptions being deaths that won't leave a corpse due to the body exploding into ice chunks or whatever it is infernal blow does to the body. And that would be an issue for player balance.

Yeah, spectres must not leave corpses behind (though, I don't use the skill personally). So there should be a mechanic for making anything not leave a corpse behind? I dunno.