Explain summoner witch to me?

How do your summoned minions scale with your stats / what gives them more damage?

With builds heavy into summoning, what active spells would you be using?

can somebody link me with a solid passive tree for witch summoners?

the summoner's path is a bit boring to most, though it is also quite intensive to others.

i personally like the summoner's path, and it keeps me on my toes.

the way it works is that you have 3 different summons, skeletons, zombies, and specters. the amount of them you can summon is very small at the beginning, but once you get passive nodes that improve them, you'll get a huge army.

in terms of scaling, minions do not scale at all with any of the caster's stats. absolutely nothing. the only exception is if you get the necromantic ageis but then you end up losing your shield and the minions end up getting all the stats of the shield instead. but since shields are fairly weak stats for a caster, and most of the mods on those shields are weak for a melee, this isnt very advisable. though if you were a shadow, with enough int and dex, this could be strong with a thorns shield, giving your minion army all thorns. or if you were a templar with good amount of str and int, you can give them a kite shield which will increase their resistance, and could potentially give better offensive stats as well.

another way you can improve your minions is through auras, they will apply to your minions and they will be enhanced through that. you could also use curses to weaken the enemy.

spell damage, attack damage, speed, elemental damage, all those nodes wont apply to your minions, only if it says minion specific will it apply to them.

you can also get some unique gear that can affect minions and their stats so it might be worth it to check those out.

so for yourself, you'd want to focus on defense, mana and magic find. you dont need to go all out on defense, since majority of your army will take the damage, but there is always the chance of a stray shot hitting you. so i would suggest to get enough defenses such that you can take 2-3 hits without dying, and also allowing you to use your pots to regenrate your health. or to wait for your ES to replenish.

but will the minions you have keep up with damage as you level up?

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Madbeats wrote:

but will the minions you have keep up with damage as you level up?

minion damage scales with skill level and passive minion damage nodes

Most of your damage from a summoner will be from your minions exploding from minion instability.

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VoidMoon wrote:

Most of your damage from a summoner will be from your minions exploding from minion instability.

Oh... is that the only way to take advantage of summons?

And does that mean you would spec into fire related nodes as well as summmon nodes in the passive tree?

minions dont scale with you at all, anything that applies to you does not apply to them

since minion instability is considered the minion's spell, non of the mods or passives that increase fire damage will apply to them, but a curse like flamability will increase their damage cuz you reduced the target's fire resistance.

what they dont do in damage, they make up in numbers, by the time you get all the nodes, you'll have an army of 2 specters, 8 zombies, 10 skeletons and you can increase these numbers by 1 more if you can find some unique weapons/gear that have that special mod in it

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VoidMoon wrote:

Most of your damage from a summoner will be from your minions exploding from minion instability.

Thats not true, at least not for the endgame, Zombies deal decent damage at high levels. I need Minion instabillity only against Aoe Mobs.