Summoner WD thoughts

**LucianDK** · 31-03-2012, 17:19

Ive seen a good deal of sacrifice oriented builds to rapidly recycle dogs and blow them up.

But it leaves me wondering about the potential of a true summoner/minion master that focuses on retaining his army and swamping foes with numerical superiority. I could in particular see Hex runed with Jinx and Big Bad Vodoo runed with Slam Dance to become excessively nasty with the more minions you are capable of fielding at once.

Does anyone know precisely what happens you are at max zombie dogs and another skill procs more? Wasted or killing oldest and replacing it? Or does the skills allow you to exceed the cap from Summon Zombie Dogs?

Tried to strike up a summoner build http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/calculato...QPT!Zhe!aZcbba

Corpse spiders is the main attack, while calling a fetish shaman with secondary to hex foes and make them take extra damage.
While the build only goes for 3 Zombie dogs, Ive opted to rune them for leeching beasts, combined with jungle fortitude to give them extra staying power and survivability. I found I had no room for skills or passives to continually proc and draw in new zombie dogs, which more often than not might end up being wasted because of the hard cap on them.

Big Bad Vodoo and Fetish Army is the one-two punch for nasty situations. Lots of fetishes with augmented damage.
With finally the gargantuan as the final summon. Though I do wonder if the dogs from Summon Zombie Dogs and the Gargantuan are permanent or expiring at a set time?

Passives:
Jungle fortitude to give the pets even more longevity
Tribal Rites to lower CD on all 3 fetish related skills which im using.
Fetish Sycophants to proc temp fetish minions. I had strongly considered Circle of Life in combination with zombie handler, though i keep being concerned about the hard cap on dogs, plus limited range on CoL. Plus with Corpse spiders being highly spamable, it should see a good return on procced minions with no hard cap.

**WD pimpin summons** · 31-03-2012, 17:36

I would replace Jungle Fortitude with ZH, as the health increase is more or less the same as the damage reduction from JF. Plus you get the extra dog.

The problem with a summoner build is that the WD has so few permanent minions and their damage seems quite low. The CS will be the main killer in this build. FA and BBV contribute when able.

Almost forgot about FS! You are definitely aiming for a really fast attack speed if you want to be a summoner. That could really make or break the feel of the summoner.

**pcguy** · 31-03-2012, 21:54

Originally Posted by LucianDK

Does anyone know precisely what happens you are at max zombie dogs and another skill procs more? Wasted or killing oldest and replacing it? Or does the skills allow you to exceed the cap from Summon Zombie Dogs?

No extra dogs will be summoned if your passive skill procs, or if you choose to re-summon your dogs. Once you hit 3 (or 4, depending on if you have the Zombie Handler passive skill), no more dogs will appear until you re-summon your original three (or four), or one of the dogs dies and your passive skill triggers.

Fetish Army has no specified cap on the maximum amount of fetishes you can retain. If you would like an army, go with Fetishes.

You may also want to consider testing Creepers and Lob Blob Bomb when the game comes out, as I believe these two skills may also act as summons, as thus be buffed when casting Big Bad Voodoo. We do not know yet.

**HardRock** · 01-04-2012, 15:24

Originally Posted by LucianDK

Does anyone know precisely what happens you are at max zombie dogs and another skill procs more? Wasted or killing oldest and replacing it? Or does the skills allow you to exceed the cap from Summon Zombie Dogs?

Circle of Life summons new dogs even when all of your dogs are alive. I doesn't allow you to have more dogs than you could have otherwise. I don't know if it replaces your most damaged dog or not.

However, I have a feeling, that dogs have a shared health pool, meaning that when they lose a third of their combined pool, one dog dies. This would make sense, since their health is represented by only one HP bar. Watching that HP bar I noticed, that it seems to reset when one dog dies.

**LucianDK** · 01-04-2012, 15:44

Originally Posted by pcguy

No extra dogs will be summoned if your passive skill procs, or if you choose to re-summon your dogs. Once you hit 3 (or 4, depending on if you have the Zombie Handler passive skill), no more dogs will appear until you re-summon your original three (or four), or one of the dogs dies and your passive skill triggers.

Fetish Army has no specified cap on the maximum amount of fetishes you can retain. If you would like an army, go with Fetishes.

You may also want to consider testing Creepers and Lob Blob Bomb when the game comes out, as I believe these two skills may also act as summons, as thus be buffed when casting Big Bad Voodoo. We do not know yet.

Question, if you have the Zombie handler passive, does summon zombie dogs summon 4 dogs per cast, or do you need to rely on proc skills to bump the number of dogs?

I had forgotten abouth the Acid Cloud creating slime minions with Lob Blob bomb. Could perhaps be an idea to focus a build on having lifeleeching zombie dogs as meat shields, while you spam acid cloud on boxed up foes and having skills devoted to retuning mana.

Creepers could also have potential as they might take less time in forming and activating, though they are far less spammable, saddled with a 25s CD unlike the no cd acid cloud.

Though for minionage, I think its hard to top the super spamable corpse spiders couple with fetish sycophants. Though I do wonder if you only have 1 chance per spell activation to proc a fetish minion. In particular thinking of Firebats, if every second channeling it have the potential to call a Fetish.

**pcguy** · 01-04-2012, 15:56

Originally Posted by LucianDK

Question, if you have the Zombie handler passive, does summon zombie dogs summon 4 dogs per cast, or do you need to rely on proc skills to bump the number of dogs?

I am assuming that the Summon Zombie Dogs skill will be able to summon four dogs with each cast as soon as you equip Zombie Handler, and as soon as you rid yourself of Zombie Handler, the extra dog will die instantly.

It would not make sense to have to cast Summon Zombie Dogs twice in order to get all four dogs.

**Lucas S** · 01-04-2012, 16:00

I'm a little curious about the 3% proc rate for Fetish Sycophants. If I hold down firebats for a good few seconds (assuming I have a huge mana regenerating build), does that count as a single cast? If it does, there is not much synergy then :(

**HardRock** · 01-04-2012, 16:03

Firebats (just as DoTs and all similar spells) display their damage every half a second. I assume Fetish Sycophants have a chance to proc at those times.

**Lucas S** · 01-04-2012, 16:05

So holding down firebats for 5 seconds means 10 chances to proc (i.e. 30% proc rate)?

**LucianDK** · 01-04-2012, 16:05

Originally Posted by pcguy

I am assuming that the Summon Zombie Dogs skill will be able to summon four dogs with each cast as soon as you equip Zombie Handler, and as soon as you rid yourself of Zombie Handler, the extra dog will die instantly.

It would not make sense to have to cast Summon Zombie Dogs twice in order to get all four dogs.

Summon Zombie dogs have a 60s cd I should note. It was my thought that youd need other abilities or passives to proc the extra dog to fill out the ranks.