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Summoner Desire Compilation and Analysis/Conversion
Azherae
Member, Alpha One, Adventurer
Something Hirschegar said in this thread reminded me of why I was planning to make these.
Disclaimer: I am not a Summoner, I just do this for the same reason as always.
I took the data only from the post linked above, and this one, for various reasons.
Things Summoner-interested people have said they want, in no particular order, sometimes sorted.
The challenges you can see here are not actually all that hard. In order to please all these people, Intrepid would need to ensure three specific things that can be viewed as 'sliders'.
1. For any class, the choice of how many summons to have should be there.
2. For any class, the choice of how much the summoner themselves fights should be there
3. For any class, the choice of how impactful a single summon is in terms of duration and buff effects, should be there.
So we have a slider from Avatar -> Swarm, from SomeBody to EveryBody, and Totem vs Assault (with no intention to indicate that Totems can't move).
A quickly drafted scheme gives the following options for a skilltree even based on what we see in Alpha 1 now. Please ignore the chintzy names.
And finally to deal with the overall duration and buff effect levels of the summon itself, we go with a quick analysis of the data.
Within the framework Intrepid has already spoken about (up to 3 summons), that's enough for now. People who want larger swarms', I can understand your wish, but that's a skilltree question moreso than a design schema question.
If anyone wants to discuss Augments, sorry, I could only speculate based on the ones I expect which I put in some tank thread a while back, but I remember that, at the time, they seemed sufficient to represent all the Summoner Classes, as the names indicated, since I just 'reverse engineered' the augments from the names.
The only one that isn't as clear is probably my belief that Mages won't get 'One Teleport school and then three different elemental schools'. Based on the names I actually expect it to be 'one Elemental School' and you can change the element on an ability occasionally or at some node or something. So I won't address that either.
So this is 'since those posts got long' and 'many people didn't know exactly what they wanted', I compiled things to see if it was impossible to make everyone happy. My verdict is that it isn't.
BUT THIS POST IS IN NO WAY AN EXPLANATION OF WHAT INTREPID IS ACTUALLY DOING (only what I think they're probably going to do)
I'll edit this post if any more Summoners jump on it. If you posted before in one of those two threads do us a favor and mention it so I don't have to check if I have to count you.
Disclaimer: I am not a Summoner, I just do this for the same reason as always.
I took the data only from the post linked above, and this one, for various reasons.
Things Summoner-interested people have said they want, in no particular order, sometimes sorted.
1. A potential Brood Warden wanted it to have to do with Spiders. Another wanted some golems and the ability to help soak damage with summons. A third wanted to use their own blood to summon, and fight up close alongside their summons. A fourth wanted a swarm.
2. A specific Conjurer wanted to make sure that the AI was pretty good and that they had the option to also do some things. Two others wanted to be strategists with the summons stronger. Another wanted to just let the summons rampage and they not lift a finger, and another was interested in line of sight and management. Two others wanted to meld with biggest summons (according to current Word of Intrepid, not planned). One suggested portals?
3. Three Wild Blades wanted to summon swords, one was also interested in being a Spellmancer that summoned elementals. Another Spellmancer really wanted to not just be watching their summons do things. A third mostly specifically wanted to be watching their summons do things.
5. A Beastmaster hoped things would be good and they would get to play a good 'Pet' class. Another felt drawn to this class. A third wanted to make a whole party of them, I think. Another wanted to be able to solo a bit. Another wanted to be able to 'charm' or call up nearby creatures from an area. Another wanted debuff abilities (apparently on hit). Six others didn't have full ideas but really wanted this type of class.
6. A Necromancer wanted to be able to sicken enemies and raise entities they killed to fight for them. Twenty-nine others just really hoped it would fit their dreams and think it sounds cool (and wanted to summon swarms, mostly). Of those, one specifically wanted debuffs. Three specifically wanted skeletons and zombies, one specifically didn't want zombies. One wanted a Lich form.
7. A sorta-undecided Summoner-ish felt they needed more information. Another was thinking on it because they were ok with 'low mobility, high damage'. One more dedicated Summoner gave a spec that I used as the framework for the design bit ( @LordBleak ), another two just said straight up "Just make it like FFXI"
8. An Enchanter wanted to summon only temporary buffs and to fight more personally, another wanted to definitely summon the pets, but still get the buffs, but was ok with the pets being pretty weak individually, and a third liked the idea of summoning actual instruments.
9. I saw only one person sort-of hint at having any interest in ShadowMancer (for poison pets). This is not surprising since the two mindsets are pretty divergent, but there was a lot of talk of ShadowLord.
10. Obviously there were a ton of notes about how people kind of want to wait and see since there isn't enough information, but about 12 of these were considering Summoner, mostly valuing either 'having pets' or 'flexibility'.
That last point is the point I can't address, but what I can do is give some 'scope' maybe by addressing 'how to get everything that people have definitely mentioned wanting, in one design schema'. This isn't really 'suggestions' either. This is 'what I think will be done, because this is the emergent answer', which I'm throwing here so that people can complain about what it is missing or doesn't do well enough.
2. A specific Conjurer wanted to make sure that the AI was pretty good and that they had the option to also do some things. Two others wanted to be strategists with the summons stronger. Another wanted to just let the summons rampage and they not lift a finger, and another was interested in line of sight and management. Two others wanted to meld with biggest summons (according to current Word of Intrepid, not planned). One suggested portals?
3. Three Wild Blades wanted to summon swords, one was also interested in being a Spellmancer that summoned elementals. Another Spellmancer really wanted to not just be watching their summons do things. A third mostly specifically wanted to be watching their summons do things.
5. A Beastmaster hoped things would be good and they would get to play a good 'Pet' class. Another felt drawn to this class. A third wanted to make a whole party of them, I think. Another wanted to be able to solo a bit. Another wanted to be able to 'charm' or call up nearby creatures from an area. Another wanted debuff abilities (apparently on hit). Six others didn't have full ideas but really wanted this type of class.
6. A Necromancer wanted to be able to sicken enemies and raise entities they killed to fight for them. Twenty-nine others just really hoped it would fit their dreams and think it sounds cool (and wanted to summon swarms, mostly). Of those, one specifically wanted debuffs. Three specifically wanted skeletons and zombies, one specifically didn't want zombies. One wanted a Lich form.
7. A sorta-undecided Summoner-ish felt they needed more information. Another was thinking on it because they were ok with 'low mobility, high damage'. One more dedicated Summoner gave a spec that I used as the framework for the design bit ( @LordBleak ), another two just said straight up "Just make it like FFXI"
8. An Enchanter wanted to summon only temporary buffs and to fight more personally, another wanted to definitely summon the pets, but still get the buffs, but was ok with the pets being pretty weak individually, and a third liked the idea of summoning actual instruments.
9. I saw only one person sort-of hint at having any interest in ShadowMancer (for poison pets). This is not surprising since the two mindsets are pretty divergent, but there was a lot of talk of ShadowLord.
10. Obviously there were a ton of notes about how people kind of want to wait and see since there isn't enough information, but about 12 of these were considering Summoner, mostly valuing either 'having pets' or 'flexibility'.
That last point is the point I can't address, but what I can do is give some 'scope' maybe by addressing 'how to get everything that people have definitely mentioned wanting, in one design schema'. This isn't really 'suggestions' either. This is 'what I think will be done, because this is the emergent answer', which I'm throwing here so that people can complain about what it is missing or doesn't do well enough.
The challenges you can see here are not actually all that hard. In order to please all these people, Intrepid would need to ensure three specific things that can be viewed as 'sliders'.
1. For any class, the choice of how many summons to have should be there.
2. For any class, the choice of how much the summoner themselves fights should be there
3. For any class, the choice of how impactful a single summon is in terms of duration and buff effects, should be there.
So we have a slider from Avatar -> Swarm, from SomeBody to EveryBody, and Totem vs Assault (with no intention to indicate that Totems can't move).
A quickly drafted scheme gives the following options for a skilltree even based on what we see in Alpha 1 now. Please ignore the chintzy names.
First Ability Tier: "Left Hand", "Right Hand", "Wave"
The first solution to the 'How many Summons' would be to give the summoner two separate options for 'low rank' summons. This helps because they can then put different Augments on each of them. The summon itself is shaped at least somewhat by the augment. You can then level the ranks to change other aspects of the summon. 'Wave' is the unlock for special attacks, and possibly applies to both. I figure summoners just have a Passive ability that lets them click a summon, then press the ability and click a target and it will move there and autoattack.
At low levels, you could forego summons entirely, shove all your points into 'Wave' and wait for the next tier, and probably not be disadvantaged terribly.
Second Ability Tier: "Greater Left Hand", "Greater Right Hand", "Wave II"
The Summons from the first ability tier can 'take up' one of 5 'points' in your summon schema, and the second tier ones take up 2 points. So you can summon Greater Left Hand, Greater Right Hand, and either Left or Right Hand, making sure that Summoners can get to '3 summons' pretty fast. Alternately, if you skipped straight to Tier 2, you just unlock either Greater Left or Greater Right and already have Rank 3 on Wave for it to use. At this point it's probably fair enough to require the summoner to have an actual summon to be effective. Most importantly, Wave II would give secondary abilities to summons, so you could decide that you don't need second tier abilities, since they probably all have Wave I, or you could have even skipped Wave I because you don't care about the low level ability of that summon, and just boosted the summon instead.
For simplicity we just keep going like this through Ruler's Right Hand, Legendary Right Hand, Ultimate Right Hand. This can help avoid the need for Summons themselves to have very complex skilltrees, leading to options for more summons.
To deal with the issue of how much the summoner themselves fights, you can rely on passives. Things like summon power, summon Mobility, etc, vs other enhancements to the summoner themselves or to the stats they get when the summon is active. Those who want to backline can take abilities to increase the Summons, and those who want to join in can take abilities to empower themselves according to which summon(s) they have active.
The first solution to the 'How many Summons' would be to give the summoner two separate options for 'low rank' summons. This helps because they can then put different Augments on each of them. The summon itself is shaped at least somewhat by the augment. You can then level the ranks to change other aspects of the summon. 'Wave' is the unlock for special attacks, and possibly applies to both. I figure summoners just have a Passive ability that lets them click a summon, then press the ability and click a target and it will move there and autoattack.
At low levels, you could forego summons entirely, shove all your points into 'Wave' and wait for the next tier, and probably not be disadvantaged terribly.
Second Ability Tier: "Greater Left Hand", "Greater Right Hand", "Wave II"
The Summons from the first ability tier can 'take up' one of 5 'points' in your summon schema, and the second tier ones take up 2 points. So you can summon Greater Left Hand, Greater Right Hand, and either Left or Right Hand, making sure that Summoners can get to '3 summons' pretty fast. Alternately, if you skipped straight to Tier 2, you just unlock either Greater Left or Greater Right and already have Rank 3 on Wave for it to use. At this point it's probably fair enough to require the summoner to have an actual summon to be effective. Most importantly, Wave II would give secondary abilities to summons, so you could decide that you don't need second tier abilities, since they probably all have Wave I, or you could have even skipped Wave I because you don't care about the low level ability of that summon, and just boosted the summon instead.
For simplicity we just keep going like this through Ruler's Right Hand, Legendary Right Hand, Ultimate Right Hand. This can help avoid the need for Summons themselves to have very complex skilltrees, leading to options for more summons.
To deal with the issue of how much the summoner themselves fights, you can rely on passives. Things like summon power, summon Mobility, etc, vs other enhancements to the summoner themselves or to the stats they get when the summon is active. Those who want to backline can take abilities to increase the Summons, and those who want to join in can take abilities to empower themselves according to which summon(s) they have active.
And finally to deal with the overall duration and buff effect levels of the summon itself, we go with a quick analysis of the data.
No one who wanted to have a large powerful summon also implied that they wanted to have it dissipate rapidly. Why, right? So a summon's tendency to stick around and provide something other than a buff could be tied to what rank the Summon itself is.
This would mean that players who only want a small buff or a quick burst of some effect could take just Right Hand, Left Hand, and put the rest of their points in Wave.
e.g. Summon the entity or entities quickly, knowing they will give a buff but not last long, and if you want, quickly use Wave before they dissipate for the effect or damage.
On the other side, players who want lasting summons that attack repeatedly can rank up the summon, while still balancing it. The Summon's DPS is enhanced simply by it being active for longer, and so, you 'reduce' their specialization in the additional damage from Wave.
Even with all this though, it would require Intrepid to make a minimum of 10 (Hands) x 4 (If every Augment matters) x 8 (if every secondary Archetype matters), for a total 320 distinct-ish summons.
This might not be terrible because they could reuse certain assets to cut down on this a lot. Beastmasters can summon, for example, Dunewings/Macaws and Gnashers at Tier 1, Bears and Griffons at Tier 3, etc.
This would mean that players who only want a small buff or a quick burst of some effect could take just Right Hand, Left Hand, and put the rest of their points in Wave.
e.g. Summon the entity or entities quickly, knowing they will give a buff but not last long, and if you want, quickly use Wave before they dissipate for the effect or damage.
On the other side, players who want lasting summons that attack repeatedly can rank up the summon, while still balancing it. The Summon's DPS is enhanced simply by it being active for longer, and so, you 'reduce' their specialization in the additional damage from Wave.
Even with all this though, it would require Intrepid to make a minimum of 10 (Hands) x 4 (If every Augment matters) x 8 (if every secondary Archetype matters), for a total 320 distinct-ish summons.
This might not be terrible because they could reuse certain assets to cut down on this a lot. Beastmasters can summon, for example, Dunewings/Macaws and Gnashers at Tier 1, Bears and Griffons at Tier 3, etc.
Within the framework Intrepid has already spoken about (up to 3 summons), that's enough for now. People who want larger swarms', I can understand your wish, but that's a skilltree question moreso than a design schema question.
If anyone wants to discuss Augments, sorry, I could only speculate based on the ones I expect which I put in some tank thread a while back, but I remember that, at the time, they seemed sufficient to represent all the Summoner Classes, as the names indicated, since I just 'reverse engineered' the augments from the names.
The only one that isn't as clear is probably my belief that Mages won't get 'One Teleport school and then three different elemental schools'. Based on the names I actually expect it to be 'one Elemental School' and you can change the element on an ability occasionally or at some node or something. So I won't address that either.
So this is 'since those posts got long' and 'many people didn't know exactly what they wanted', I compiled things to see if it was impossible to make everyone happy. My verdict is that it isn't.
BUT THIS POST IS IN NO WAY AN EXPLANATION OF WHAT INTREPID IS ACTUALLY DOING (only what I think they're probably going to do)
I'll edit this post if any more Summoners jump on it. If you posted before in one of those two threads do us a favor and mention it so I don't have to check if I have to count you.
Sorry, my native language is Erlang.
2
Comments
An additional point to solve a minor 'issue'. Since players don't start with any of their Augmented abilities, but probably would still like to get some thematics going, perhaps someone in the starting area can offer or let them craft specific Rings (partially the reason for the Hands theme).
E.g. equipping the otherwise effectless 'Ring of the Dead' changes the summons on that 'hand' to match those of a future Necromancer. Other obvious options:
Ring of Claws, Ring of Fangs, Ring of Bladed Rings, Ring of Shield, Ring of Chaos, Ring of Order, Ring of Life, Ring of Sea, Ring of Sky, Ring of Storm, Ring of Earth, Ring of Life, Ring of Bells, Ring of Truth (Bard thing), Ring of Flight, Ring of Tales, etc
Balance of this, for example 'whether they grant any abilities other than changing the summon's appearance and attack type', 'if they are bound for a while or can't be equipped after some level', or 'where and how they are obtained', or 'Whether they have higher level versions that can eventually be replaced by Augments', are not issues to be addressed by me (but if people comment on stuff I can add it to this post).
so I vote something between a Druid/Shaman that has to do with animal spirits.
First summoners are going to have to have some sort of abilities that aren't summons. Basic damage spells or support spells for whatever they summon be it heals damaged buff whatever. Otherwise I think they would be too passive of a play style overall where you could just summon your stuff and watch while your run around avoiding getting hit.
But in in regards to actually summoning things.
For starters I think it would be cool if summoners had some sort of unit cap to control whether they can go 'swarm' or 'big and powerful' summons for each class.
I'm going to use necromancer as an example here. Let's say I have a unit cap of 10 right now.
Zombies are one point each they're slow deal average damage. I select a Target hit summon zombie zombie runs out and attacks the Target.
Where as skeletons can be two points each, they are still slow but better and when skeletons come out they are armed (can even have variations based off your race humans have spear and shields, elves have archers, orcs have two-handed weapons, etc)
Then we can start to get into bigger undead things three or four points for some kind of wraith. Five or six points for some kind of ghoul. and when you use the activated ability of summoning again but you're at your cap that has the summoned creature use his ability on whatever your targeting. Example I clicked summon wraith the first time and a wraith appears at my location to start attacking whatever is hitting me, I select an enemy Target and then click the button again now the wraith uses his fear ability or something. If I have more than one of that creature on the field it would give me more than one charge to use that activated ability.
Idea being you can't open with that activated ability you have to get up to steam first and then use them throughout the fight.
Then each class can also have just one big 10 point summon of a vampire or bone golem that you can only get one of, but is definitely more powerful than all your other critters.
This would allow each summoner to have different types of play styles; for the guy that just wants a zombie horde, someone who wants a few creatures with activated abilities he needs to micromanage to optimize, and the last person who just wants a second set of hands to duo with.
As far as each combinations goes...
Summoner/Bard Enchanter
This one to me sounds similar to a Mesmer from gw2 as far as aesthetics go. Being able to create mirror images of himself that give buffs to those near the images he leaves behind. Different level summons provide greater buffs or to a greater area.
Summoner/Cleric Necromancer
Mostly as described above. But since clerics have life or death aspects it would be kind of cool to have a life version that is capable of summoning ghosts or angels that protect or heal targets rather than undead to attack stuff.
Summoner/Fighter Wild Blade
More melee oriented. Able to summon other weapons to float around him and help him in a fight. Different sized weapons or damage output are the different levels of summons.
So maybe he could summon 10 daggers or 2-3 spears that have an activatable Pierce through strike. And the 10 point summon could be a full suit of armor with sword and shield knight to fight next to.
Summoner/Mage Spellmancer
What I see here is something extremely similar to The necromancer but instead of undead being various elementals. A bunch of lesser fire elementals, a couple of fire elementals that have an activatable fireball, or a greater fire elemental that just burns everything nearby him and has an explosive ability. Copy and paste for the other three schools.
Summoner/Ranger Beastmaster
Beasts
Bunch of crows, a couple of wolves, a big ass bear. Insert animal husbandry system and go wild.
Summoner/Rogue Shadowmancer
Solo leveling aesthetic. Summoning shadowy minions. But it would be cool if you were able to smoke bomb or stealth skirt around the fight and keep your target fighting your minions. Until you can show up and backstab/execute whatever your target is at the right moments.
Summoner/Summoner Conjurer
I'll be honest, this is where it breaks down. I don't know what a true neutral summon would be that wouldn't fall under the flavor of any other class. Maybe this is where your rings come in? Maybe golems? And use elements that the mage doesn't have like Earth, Air, metal?
Maybe this is the true support role, and all his other base abilities can now be used on teammates?
I don't really know here.
Summoner/Tank. Brood Warden
You've seen my thoughts on this one having a bunch of Tyranid/Zerg looking minions. Explained here
https://forums.ashesofcreation.com/discussion/50881/a-different-type-of-tank#latest
I mean, you'll be able to hire npc's to do that regardless of class.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Yhr9WpjaDzw