Summoner and patch 1.03

[Starving_Poet]

From the Blizz forums, we've done some testing:

Pets get Str, Int, Dex bonuses for armor, damage, dodge.
Pets don't block.
Pets don't get any Vit bonuses.
Pets get +resist bonuses.
Pets get any regen bonuses(spirit walk, blood ritual), but do not get any life on hit or life leech bonuses.
Pets get any %CC on items, so do their 'auras' burning dogs and big stinker.

So, from my testing in late hell, early inferno - one of the best ways to use them is as massive CC generators - if you're gearing for armor, resist, regen, int and str / vit - try to get as much CC on your items as possible, and with 5 extra guys hitting enemies, you can get a lot of CC out quick.

The problem of them surviving ACT 2 Inferno still remains - without some sort of life scaling, and with less insta-gib inferno-ness, I just can't see how to make them useable for end-end-game.

[sacridoc]

The thing that's frustrating about the pets is that it seems like you have to stack defensive stats exclusively in order for them to survive well, with or without buffs to the dogs in the future.

I've played around with them quite a bit... using different builds, gear, etc.

I think it's already obvious to people who have played around with it, but basically there's no way to do heavy damage with a summon build, and if you stack all defensive stats to make heavy tank pets, you'll do 0 damage and you have to rely on other players to kill things for you. Thorns is interesting, but in practice it's not very useful. It does nowhere near the damage of a player who stacks offensive stats.

Another thing that you notice playing as a summoner is that Life Per Sec is the most important stat. You need crazy regen in order for the dogs to stay alive. So while the Gargantuan is alright, in order for him to stay alive late in the game you probably have to get Fierce Loyalty and have Life Per Sec stacked to some degree.

It's kind of sad that Blizzard didn't implement a way for the pets to do legitimate damage. Instead, if you want them to stay alive, you have to stack all defensive stats to the point where your damage is nowhere near what other players do. At that point you'll be able to tank most enemies, but you'll never be able to kill things solo quickly.

Not like it's a new idea, but you're really not rewarded in D3 for being a tank. The only time that a tank WD is somewhat useful is on bosses and elites where your pets can tank what players can't. But you're not doing damage, so it's really questionable. And of course they can still die to AoE damage because of how the damage is calculated (I think), even in Hell if you have pretty high defensive stats.

I really don't understand why they made the pets so weak. In fact, they should do a ton of damage, but have the same lowered defenses. So that if you want them to stay alive and do damage, you have to stack defensive stats. And if you try to utilize them without defensive stats, they should die quickly.

But instead, they do no damage and have low defense.

Anyways, after playing a WD at 60 for a while you kind of wonder what makes this class better than WZ/DH... nothing in my opinion. Too many WD abilities are melee based, and the pets, a large part of our abilities, cannot both survive and do damage at the same time efficiently.

Overall, there's really nothing good about being a melee character, or using melee mechanics I feel like. The best characters in D3 right now are ranged, no doubt.

___

TLDR: Even if you stack defense so that your pets are almost invincible through ACT 1 Inferno, you're not going to do any damage and will have to rely on other players who have stacked damage to kill things for you. And how many people want to play with 3 DPS instead of 4 in a party?

Overall, playing a summoner is very underwhelming. And if they make it so that vitality benefits dog HP, everyone is going to have to regear, which should be fun. Also, if you're a summoner there's really no value in having high HP because you just sit far away and don't really do any damage anyway.

I'm not saying that summoners should be able to tank and do maximum damage too. But at the moment, if you want your pets to survive, you need huge defensive stats to the point where your damage gets almost non-existent.

[Chaosmage]

It would be really nice it they'd implement the good old d2c blood golem/iron maiden invulnerability with leaching beasts and thorns damage XD

Anyway I don't get the feeling they want pure summoner builds. You are supposed to either use dogs/gargantuan or fetishes.

[Smash]

Do you guys remember big words from Bashiok how petless build was harder. I said he is talking **** and who is right in the end?
It is obvoius that he had no idea what he is talking about and he was putting words from his ***.
Pets are not viable late game and even Blizzard confirm that now.
Lies has short life... nothing new.

[Silverfang]

From the Blizz forums, we've done some testing:

Pets get Str, Int, Dex bonuses for armor, damage, dodge.
Pets don't block.
Pets don't get any Vit bonuses.
Pets get +resist bonuses.
Pets get any regen bonuses(spirit walk, blood ritual), but do not get any life on hit or life leech bonuses.
Pets get any %CC on items, so do their 'auras' burning dogs and big stinker.

So, from my testing in late hell, early inferno - one of the best ways to use them is as massive CC generators - if you're gearing for armor, resist, regen, int and str / vit - try to get as much CC on your items as possible, and with 5 extra guys hitting enemies, you can get a lot of CC out quick.

The problem of them surviving ACT 2 Inferno still remains - without some sort of life scaling, and with less insta-gib inferno-ness, I just can't see how to make them useable for end-end-game.

So that means to really keep your pets alive, you'd have to be able to "spam" Horrify every 8 Seconds for the 100% armor boost and have at least one additional skill with a good amount of life per second (Haunt comes to my mind here...), while stacking up +armor, +all resistances, +%cc, +%cd, Strenght and Intelligence, get yourself a way out of a moment, when all pets are on cooldown despite the effort AND get to decent damage numbers... So fixed skills are (at the least) Dogs (Burning Dogs or Leeching Beasts) and Gargantuan (Big Stinker), Horrify (Frightening Aspect), Soul Harvest (needed for Damage - Siphon or, perhaps better, Languish) and Haunt (Consuming Spirit - %cc doesn't work here...). On Passives you'll then absolutely need Grave Injustice and Fierce Loyality. Not much room left here for additional defence skills or even a decent attack of your own.

Playing Summoners was the easiest route in any arpg i've played using the concept of summons. In D3 it seems to be the one thing exclusively for experts...

edit: Does someone here know, how the +15% armor from enchantress works together with the 100% from Horrify? Just had them used individually until now and both seemed to directly enhance the stat Armor by said amount. So are they just added? Or is one applied first, then the other?

edit: Strike that. Just tested it myself: It simply adds. Which means getting the templar and enough Life per seconds on item could free up the skillplace reserved for haunt. Yippieeee...

[Horcsog]

The theorycrafting on battle.net about pet scales mentions that cc is also very good, the best one being the Chance to Stun on hit affix. Do you think it's worth going for? We could get like 7%.

[Thrakhath]

7% chance to stun with the burning dogs aura on 4 dogs, and the big stinker aura on the gargantuan, is a lot of stunning. But may as well wait for 1.03 now, and see what they do.

[Mad Mantis]

Do you guys remember big words from Bashiok how petless build was harder. I said he is talking **** and who is right in the end?

Most developers and other people working in the game industry are really really ****ty gamers from what I've seen. Most aren't up to gaming in the higher difficulty levels. Couple this with a desire to have as many people playing the game as possible and the end result is statements that promise everything but turn out to be false as soon as someone competent plays.

[sacridoc]

CC gear is likely the way to go yeah.

But still there's only 1 way to create a true summon build... that's with Thorns + Bleed. And that sort of build wouldn't want cc.

Honestly, I don't really see how it's all that great to stack defense + cc for your pets when you're still the one that has to do all the damage. I mean they'll definitely be nice tanks which allows you to sit still and spam damage I guess.

But the battle.net threads suggest getting Firebomb: Fire Pit + Corpse Spiders: Spider Queen in order to increase the amount of CC. Those skills do pretty bad damage obviously. Yeah, you'll be able to tank stuff. But it's not really a complete summon build because your pets are just tanking for you while you do all the damage. You could do the same thing with stronger damage skills and Leeching Beasts and probably be successful. You wouldn't get all that CC, but you'd kill enemies faster.

Point is... the builds that a lot of people are talking about are just builds that use pets as tanks instead of relying on Siphon, Hex, Grasp, etc in order to kite enemies or whatever.

In my mind these aren't really true summon builds. You just end up replacing your core defensive skills with pet skills and probably losing damage in order to avoid having to kite. There are a lot of people who use pets like this in Inferno already even. If you have access to high end gear your pets will be able to survive throughout Act 1 even if you don't have a full pet build. I think pets will be buffed, and then become much more common when people have access to better gear. But they'll just be replacing other defensive abilities with the pets and still maintaining the typical damage abilities.

Anyways... I, like many people, enjoyed having minions that could actually kill things as a Necromancer in D2. I still think thorns is not that great, but I'm interested in making a WD where the summons are capable of killing things on their own.

Obviously Blizzard didn't design the class to be able to do this by any means, but I still want to see how good a real summon WD is that has max thorns damage + consistent bleed procs.

[sacridoc]

Of course the thing I forgot to mention is that thorns doesn't work on ranged enemies that don't switch to melee attacks in close range x_x