This is going to be an extensive post but let me be clear from the start, I LOVE summoner, its very in depth and very well made, there are however a few holes. In PvE it's a CC God and Dmg Amplifier, in PvP it's great also with an incredibly high skill ceiling (but the pet controls need a lot of work).
PvE
Summoner in PvE fills a nice position late game where you can essentially CC lock most mobs for the entire time it takes to kill them, in a full party you only really need 2 summoners timing their skills off of each other to make all late game mechanics null and void, there are some that silence/stun happen regardless and this helps keep your attention but you never really can compete in terms of DPS with other archetypes.
Spirit Mystic
Healing is great, despite the tooltip saying "not currently implemented" the Amplify + heal on the Spirit Mystic works wonders for healing the whole party, but at the same time begs the question, why would you ever not spam Amplify on cooldown? it costs the same to heal the entire party as it does one person and activating Amplify doubles ALL sources of essence generation, letting you heal even more frequently. combined with the Cleanse ability of the Spirit Mystic, you are essentially a better cleric without the Resurrect. I've lead multiple parties successfully as a healer, in addition to this you can use Phase Out at any point to remove agro from yourself, something clerics don't even have!
Spirit Guardian
Tanking with the Spirit Guardian leaves me very conflicted… On one hand single target agro holding is phenomenal! your tank can taunt quick enough for it to be impossible to pull agro off of it and hold things in place, combined with the Dimensional Bolt ability being able to activate a second time to blink your summon onto mobs, you can tank through a dungeon without any worries about respawns because your party moves with you!… But there is the problem, the tank is effectively useless at pulling more than 1 mob at a time, if you swap targets and keep track of how many taunts you've done on each mob you can hold agro of 2, maybe 3 mobs at once but any more than that you don't stand a chance. Stomp is a very low tier skill that does some damage in AoE but barely generates any agro, this is the skill i almost always forget about, you can upgrade it with Quaking stomp but more often than not the CC chain from it doesn't actually work and if it does, you've just used ALL your essence and now can't do anything but start building it up again making your tank nothing more than a meat shield, In this gamers opinion the premise behind stomp/quaking stomp is there but it is a waste of a skill, and you would benefit a lot more from a Mortal Blast style move that spreads out agro, or a targeted AoE taunt instead of the potential AoE CC on a class that has so so many forms already.
Spirit Hunter
The Spirit hunter is honestly a lackluster DPS and only ever used when tank and healers are covered in the party, It has 2 forms, Melee and Ranged
Ranged Spirit hunter is just an auto attack bot from afar that rarely (automatically if enabled) casts Eviscerate which is just the same as shooting 2-3 normal attacks, and given the time it takes to cast it doesn't seem worth it to do this over have it set to just attack, its a small DPS increase on top of the rest of the kit and doesn't really fit at all, the Idea behind a ranged mode is great but there is no reason to use this mode over the Melee mode other than you want to turn your brain off and watch Netflix. You can enhance Eviscerate with Galvanic Evisceration, but this is a completely pointless skill solo and in group play you only will ever see a difference if there's a mage, and even then its barely noticeable, it may as well be skill-less.
Melee Spirit Hunter is much better than the ranged both in damage and AoE, it attacks faster for higher numbers, it can basically be set to auto and forgotten about until AoE kills it and you have to re-summon. If you micromanage it, it becomes essentially a Rogue without the skills to cast, doing more DMG from behind and this is great! but unless the AI changes to make it attack from behind this is a wastes skill interaction as the summon just attacks and doesn't care if front of back of the enemy.
*special note for the skill Incapacitate
Incapacitate is a phenomenal skill and incredibly overpowered, but NEVER used. Both melee and ranged stances get this long CC they can cast but is always immediately broken. there's no reason for this skill to exist whilst it breaks the CC on damage. all the DoT's you've applied? that breaks it. the summon itself? unless set to AFK mode and manually told to cast, it will immediately stop the channel and go back to attacking. so unless you want to pause a PvP fight midway without having any of your DoTs on your target to have a sip of your coffee this skill is incredibly useless.
PvP
This is where it gets complicated and becomes a broken mess. PvP as a summoner is typically a matter of casting your two DoTs on the enemy, then either taking tonnes of DMG channeling Eviscerate, trying in vain to land Mass Affliction or Suppression Beam to stop them doing anything but auto attack, which in of itself is only really a factor if you can kill them in this short amount of time which you cant unless lv25 punching down at a Lvl 9 or below. there is the potential to micromanage your summons and swap them around, dodging out the way of abilities with Transpose (if you can ever get this skill to work) it can essentially become a 2v1, but the degree of skill required for that is so high that if someone were to reach it they would be the PVP god of the server.
In Group PvP however the summoner becomes the PvP god, you either kill it or you will succumb to CC and unable to do anything whilst the rest of the summoners team destroy you mercilessly. you have a click to cast suppression ray that silences them constantly so it can't be cleansed, do this to a healer or a tank you take them out of the battle entirely, and when the front-lines clash you can put down Void to give your party a MASSIVE advantage as this also can't be cleansed as long as they're standing in it. this combined with Spectral bindings and even a Dimensional bolt + Soul flare combo you can AOE stun people in your void. If your party can't win after this you never stood a chance to begin with!
PvP with Spirit Mystic
This is hard to say as its completely broken. If you Command:Sic it onto an enemy, despite being flagged up it will actually HEAL your enemy, if you target yourself with it in open world PvP it keeps targeting the attacker, healing them again. you can set it to Passive stance and manually control everything it's doing but with the current state of PvP you have to either choose one of the other, you can't feasibly do both.Being able to Cleanse stuns/CC/Debuffs from yourself whilst stunned/silenced etc is great though!
PvP with Spirit Guardian
Why? There's not even a concept of this being useful. you can taunt the player but that will just put Humiliated on them, you can Sic on them and have a slow lumbering gorilla tickle them and potentially body block a skilshot, or you can waste all your essence at once to attempt to 3-hit combo an upgraded Stomp and trip them for a couple of seconds. This is not even worth considering and more than that, if you are being ganked and your Spirit Guardian is out, you're at a huge disadvantage.
PvP with Spirit Hunter
This is hard to say also as the Spirit Hunter is Potentially a god but practically a baby that has yet to learn to walk.
Melee Stance you can do decent damage, micro manage positioning to get extra damage from behind whilst weaving in your Summoner's abilities like a pro, just be sure to thank your adversary for standing still and allowing you to do all of this during the 10-30s it would take.
Ranged Stance is essentially just another DoT, weak damage and zero variety it'll just sit there doing small amounts of damage every second or two.
But here's where it can potentially become a god. If you Micromanage to the N'th degree and have the 5 hotbars required to bind all the skills you can swap between stances for some epic combos, Teleporting your summon in, melee range nuke, swap to range, jumping back attacking at range, all whilst applying DoTs and debuffs and then when the target comes at you, you can swap to melee range and Transpose swapping places making them in range for another nuke from the melee summon, if you really wanted to you could micromanage your summon to face AWAY from the target and leap backwards to gap close then swap back to melee and attack for more damage. Honestly with enough skill and forethought you could place void under yourself transpose your summon and unleash a few combos on your enemy without them being able to do anything.
Execution however…. is not likely…
In Summary
Summoner has the baseline to become Phenomenally overpowered or underpowered, and when it comes to utility there's no other that can compare. The Ideal solo class but not based around just nuking everything in its path. The Devs have done an amazing job with this so far but unfortunately it's this passionate gamer's opinion that it needs work.
My Suggestions
- Transpose seems to only work on flat ground when nothing else is happening, essentially making it a waste of a skill. I get that if it can happen at any Y coordinate or despite not having LoS it can be used to break things easily, but in its current state it can't be used at all.
- Spirit Hunter Incapacitate should be swapped to a stun that isn't channeled and doesn't break on damage taken.
- Spirit Hunter Melee Stance AI should always move to the back of the mob.
- Spirit Mystic should damage enemy's and not heal them, at least in PvP.
- Spirit Mystic NEEDS to scale with Healing Power, having a summon that casts heals that don't increase at all when you have full Healing Power gear seems like a massive Oversight, and if intended seems baseless, confusing, un-intuitive and wrong.
- Spirit Mystic AI would benefit greatly from automatically removing debuffs from the target it has been Command:Sic'd on.
- Spirit Guardian Stomp should be entirely replaced with a AoE Agro generating skill, this Summon is a tank, why does it have a DPS skill? and given the constraints of the summoners essence pool, why isn't it just an AoE trip? even if timed perfectly and the debuff immunity being removed that's a max of maybe 6 seconds of cc? you get more than that on the base summoner kit.
- All Summons would benefit greatly from having the Summoners weapon skill procs apply when summons attack, Spirit hunter could apply bleed, Guardian could apply daze etc.
- The Summoner right now seems very geared towards being able to respec skills to be situational, but isn't this a feature of the game whilst in development and wont be a thing on release? Won't we have to pick a summon we want to invest extra skill points in and stick with it? If so on release summoners will have a hard time competing for spots in the group as anything but DPS. why get a summoner when you can have a cleric that can res? or a tank that can AoE?
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
P.S. I am the Creator of Ashes Academy, a group of dedicated veterans of the game that aims to take in newbies and teach them as much as we can then send them off to join a guild that reflects their interests, this is to grow the Ashes of Creation community as a whole and not just in-house guild development. We love the game and want to show new players why!
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