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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Summoners; what is the goal of this archetype?
Honshu
Member
Have the devs given an idea on what the core design principle is behind the summoner is? Based on information available from the wiki and interviews, it seems like they want it to be the jack of all trades class that can fill in for more specialized classes, comparable to how a world of warcraft druid can essentially fulfill every role (ranged dps, melee dps, tanking, and healing), but how far do the developers intend to allow summoners to go in fulfilling these roles?
For example, suppose I had a summoner primary and became a Brood Warden (tank secondary) and focused all my skill points and gear and whatever other moving parts I have on augmenting my tanky summon to make it the best I possibly could. Can I replace a tank primary in high end raids? If a percentage were to be put to it, where 100% means I can fully replace a class in all circumstances, 50% means I can fulfill the role in "casual" content but not in any "hardcore," "difficult," or "serious" content, and 0% means I lack the basic tools to possibly fulfill a role in the trinity system at all (trying to be a healer, but lacking any heal spells whatsoever for example), roughly what percentage of the trinity roles can a default summoner fulfill? What about a summoner that tries to specialize?
For example, suppose I had a summoner primary and became a Brood Warden (tank secondary) and focused all my skill points and gear and whatever other moving parts I have on augmenting my tanky summon to make it the best I possibly could. Can I replace a tank primary in high end raids? If a percentage were to be put to it, where 100% means I can fully replace a class in all circumstances, 50% means I can fulfill the role in "casual" content but not in any "hardcore," "difficult," or "serious" content, and 0% means I lack the basic tools to possibly fulfill a role in the trinity system at all (trying to be a healer, but lacking any heal spells whatsoever for example), roughly what percentage of the trinity roles can a default summoner fulfill? What about a summoner that tries to specialize?
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I've seem some people requesting a one man army so they can solo raids. I rather dislike the suggestion.
The devil's going to be in the details. Going back to my World of Warcraft Druid comparison, there were absolutely situations where Tank Druids were desireable over tank Warriors, healing Druids were desireable over healing Priests, etc. I just find it theoretically difficult because pet classes are also notoriously "clunky," because interfacing through a pet system always makes things a touch more awkward. So, unless you're really careful, you're just going to have a class that tries to be other classes, except very badly.
Number of summons is a primary consideration. If you choose the option to only have a single more powerful summon it may be an effective alternative to a tank, however it comes at the cost of your role variability in order for it to keep up with a character that's only focused on tanking.
Since summoners can have up to three summons I don't think it's realistic to expect that a single summon can replace a tank character in these cases. That being said, if you used all three summons as tank types, in certain scenarios that may be more effective than a single tank character. Maybe they won't hold up against a powerful boss as well, but with a large group of mobs they may succeed at controlling the aggro so damage doesn't stack all on one single tank or even worse: party members that it shouldn't. Just don't mention those poor healers who suddenly have extra bodies to heal and everything sounds great!
Since summoner abilities are cast through their summons, the abilities chosen by each summoner also affects which roles they are more effective at supporting. It provides balance so that it's not up to three extra characters suddenly appearing, but one character with more presence around the entire battle. Augments would further affect these skills and not necessarily the summons themselves (that's what your passives would probably be for). As such, you may expect your tank augmented summon's skills to do things like increase their defense temporarily or generate more aggro. Augmentation in this case makes your summons more effective at certain roles, but it may also require a heavier skill point investment just in order to do what a common tank player can do. They'd probably be a better tank than the other tank secondary classes, but the designers have said that the tank secondary classes are not designed to play as primary tanks.
tl;dr: The strength of summoners is in their adaptability as a support class. They will never be as good at a specific role as the other classes, but they can be effective in a wider variety of situations.
I know, right?
How many people do you think would have come for Doctor Frankenstein, if only he had a Facebook page, with which to put his experiments into context?
Um.... Hello? Recycling psychotic killers' brains by putting them into ever-useful useful flesh golems' heads? "Uh.... Yes, please!".
You're welcome.
IE: Summon your tank summons for tanking (Bear form), summon your healing summon for healing (Tree form)
I only played Hibernia so I couldn't give direct experience, but for those who've played Dark Age of Camelot, there's kind of a comparison that can be made to the Midgard Bonedancer class. It had a similar level of customization among its pets. Basically, that class had a "commander" pet that you directly controlled, and then three additional pets you could summon that all followed their cues off of the commander pet. The sub-pets came in a variety of flavors (dps, heal/support, melee). Plus, the Bonedancer had its own spells that let it be annoying in its own right. So hey, there's definitely precedence to the idea they're shooting for here.
It's gunna be a long year waiting for more progress to be made on it
Summon walls, Summon elementals, Summon weapons, Summon Tornados/earthquakes/firequakes etc.
In the meantime, would love to hear more on what summoner aspects you all have enjoyed or disliked previously!
I think as long as you include those four in some decent capacity among the huge class table, you wont find many complaints.
As for the idea of it being a balanced/fluid-role class, that's a much easier discussion since you could just repurpose any of the above and achieve that. IE: Healing summon deity, an angel companion that heals, a swarm of wisps that are essentially HoT's on nearby allies, and healing "turrets"
Edit: I guess a 5th but more niche type of summon is clones and illusions
Do you mean in other games? A couple ones come to mind;
Enchanter in Everquest 1. It had weak pets, but what made it cool was its ability to charm enemies and make them fight for the enchanter. Plus, it had some really potent buffs and debuffs, including mana regeneration buffs, and mesmerizing enemies for crowd control (basically a long duration stun that gets broken when the enemy takes damage).
Necromancer in Guild Wars 1. It had the ability to summon a variety of different undead minions from corpses left by players and monsters, and with a dedicated build could basically herd around a deathsquad of bony abominations that had to keep running around killing stuff so you could create new minions or eventually they'd all wither into dust, because the pets lost HP the longer they were alive.
Masterminds from City of Villains were fun mostly because you basically had a whole squadron of pets. I played a Robotics/Force Field Mastermind, and how it ended up looking is this geeky looking techno-wizard unleashing a hailstorm of giant robots blasting lasers at enemies while protective shields encompass them.. It was the first time I had played a pet class that really felt like you were walking around with a personal army.
Those were some of the more enjoyable pet classes I've played
If a summoner were to shift control into their powerful summoned creature, using let's say all three of their summoning slots, they would either remain immobile in an incapacitated state or become essentially an AI driven character. While the mind may call upon creatures from elsewhere to do their bidding, control of said creatures is where the good summoner differentiates themselves from the bad summoner. While powerful, the summoner needs to account for his summoner's body, which could have wondered off depending on the nature of the creature summoned.
A two-summons creature may create a slightly less powerful AI-driven creature where the player maintains control of his summoner character. I think mounts should fit in this tier, and player control occurs only while mounted. Both the summoner and creature represents about 50% of actions but where the summoner may be 75% as effective as a dedicated caster and the creature about 75% as effective as a dedicated tank or melee DPS. As some have stated, one of the reasons some play a summoner is for its versatility at handling multiple archetypes.
A single-summons creature may create what we could call trash mobs that are used either for scouting/spying (provided the summoner dedicate his actions to see or hear through such creatures) in a non combat state, or just mass bodies to slow an opponent or provide a little crowd control.
If you decide to make powerful summoned creatures, then I think you must necessarily create risks that the summons goes wrong. Risks that can be mitigated by the player through preparations (summoning circles that either keep the beast within the circle or the summoner when he's in the body of the beast), special concoctions, amulets, etc. The risk mitigation, however should never reduce it to zero. This sort of style of character creates a high-risk, high-reward character that experienced players may enjoy but where noobs may want to start with something a little more dependable. If played well, they should be hard to beat as the player is demonstrating some skill that should be rewarded. But nothing should ever be automatic, or else you create dominant strategies. And you need enough variety where it's not a game of spamming a set of summons over and over again. You could even apply a bit of randomness as to what creature is actually summoned - the one desired or something else that requires a change of plan or worse - disaster.
Think of the summoner as one on the edge of madness. Calling forth the power of the old ones to do his or her bidding, but at a price. The price applied to the summoning is where you can get really creative.
My ideal would be to have both: a hoard of summons that follow you around like pikmin - you tell this one to go here and cast this spell, that one to go there and take aggro for you, and then you have a main summon who always stays near you and synchonizes with your attacks.
IMO - Star Wars Galaxies, and to some degree WOW, had the best creature handler/beast master system which I am comparing for the time being to summoner. You go out, tame babies in the wild and effectively raise them and watch them grow as they continually get stronger. Abilities and stats are different so one wolf might be stronger than another. This would be akin to looting random weapons that drop during any other pve activity as stats vary from weapon to weapon. This would be very important as you hunt for pets or summons, for example a tank summon you would want them to have better stats in HP and defense values versus attack and preferably have a taunting ability. Maybe not every time you tame a tank summon they have the preferred stats and abilities but this would like the system rewarding and would open up the market for selling pets/summons. Certain pets/summons could be more rarer to find that would have better stats or abilities which would truly make the system most rewarding. If the pet/summon is so crucial to the summoner that system of acquiring the pet/summon needs to be as diverse as the any other weapon you would acquire for your character.
The possibility of breeding pets has already been mentioned through the use of animal husbandry. From my understanding it is more geared towards mounts and making different colors of them, however I don't think it is a far cry away from implementing stats and abilities to make a battle pet. So creating pets would also be a thing, where you could potentially breed creatures to get desired stats and abilities. Although this has been heavily geared towards animal summons the same could apply to zombies and spirits and still be unique. To tame a spirit you find a wandering spirit and must battle it to command...etc, etc.
In other iterations of summoner's and creature handler's such as Final Fantasy, simply upon leveling you gain the ability to summon a new summon. There is nothing rewarding about this and doesn't play true to the spirit of a summoner/creature handler classes. You play summoner/creature handler in games because of the companion and if there is nothing special about the companion or how you acquire them there is not going to be anything special about the class in general. Based on information already available to us, summoner is going to be a jack of all trades. In other words, not the best healer, tank or attacker so to give this class a hook it would be wise IMO to give this the Pokemon treatment. Creature handler in Star Wars Galaxies very much had this going for it which made it very fun to go out and hunt for babies in the wild. Collecting creatures for the fastest mount speed, best tanking, best healer, best attacker, coolest features, etc. make going the class rewarding. Just my two cents on how this class could be the best if they give it the proper attention it deserves.
I believe animal husbandry is also used for combat pets which is a system separate from summoners that all classes have access to. We don't know much about combat pets but it sounds similar to what you are describing.
combat pets wiki
Evocation magic would be something they create by manipulation of energy or say the elements. So in simple terms they might conjure lets say a small wind elemental who provides protection from projectiles. They could also infuse objects with power to create something along the lines of Totems from WoW.
Invocation magic would something that invokes power from an external force that directly empowers you or others, so basically calling upon something to grant you or others strength.
does plating as nagash and summoning millions of skeletons count?
Material component: A sword (though other weapons work of course) and an enemy
Somatic component: Drive the sword through a person’s chest forcefully on the battlefield
Verbal component (optional): Some variant of “die” yelled loudly, though improvisation won’t harm the spell
Casting time: This depends on how long it takes for decomposition, given the area and climate, and also the local population of scavengers, but it takes a while
Anyway, it’s a very simple spell that doesn’t require any real arcane training to cast. The actual utility of the spell is debatable.