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I’d rather they reduce the pet hitboxes or make them ignore collision of fellow pets, and speed them up by 50%. Having half your army wander around isn’t great. Then add crushing blow to the teddy.

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I think the summon druid made a huge improvement forward, but still lacking a bit. I love the new ravens. I think the bear and dire wolves are strong too.

The spirit wolves need work. It’s nice to give them the cold damage for freeze, its a cool idea on paper, but in practice its just not that effective. They are the weakest of the summons, die easily. Their damage is very low. Their damage does not seem to be buffed by heart of wolverine. you won’t kill phys immunes with them, it will take too long. so they dont solve that problem either - phys immunes are as always handled by decrep weapon on a merc. or by avoiding the mob lol. I am not sure exactly what to do about the spirit wolves. Honestly reverting them to physical damage is probably best. I know its boring and they wont have an identity but it would be stronger for the character.

Like honestly I don’t even want to run the spirit wolves - I would rather save the points and do a bear + shockwave, or bear + melee attack of some kind. But as it is now you have to lean into the 4 summons all the way, plus probably one of the sages, and then you can’t do hybrid at all.

Well blizz if I think of something more to do with spirit wolves I will post up here but I hope you can figure something out^ edit: I will also add that the pros/cons of summon druid vs summon necro still favors the necro. He has corpse explosion. I don’t mind not having curses, thats okay. But I think somehow the druid summon approach needs some clever buff/approach to be different from the necro but still strong.

these are some cool ideas as well. how about better more aggressive AI? more like the necro skeles? maybe make either spirit or dire wolves defensive, the other super aggressive and faster. idk.

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Good Idea but I would add summon mastery as a passive bonus on top of synergies, not an individual skill because summonners already quickly run out of skill points if they want their full zoo.

Making it another individual skill to dump 20 points would only work if it made the summons so much stronger that it became worth it. And even then I mean…20 points raven - 20 p spirit wolves - 20 p dire wolves - 20 p grizzly - 20 point spirit.

You are already maxed out here so it eould force you to not put points in one of the summons and put them in summon mastery instead. This doesnt make sense when you consider that patch 2.4 allowed us to summon all 3 main summons at the same time . If that’s the case why force me to choose between one of them and summon mastery ?

I think we could make summon mastery into an unlockable passive buff. For instance…you benefit from summon mastery once 80 HARD points have been invested in the summoning tree.

That would reward dedicated summoner druids without forcing them to choose between summon mastery skill and one of his summons. And it would prevent druids who use + skill items to get the bonus which I think is great because it would only reward dedicated summoners and encourage build diversity.

Fundamentally though I agree with you the summoner druid still has room for A LOT of improvement lol.
I hope Blizzard reads this !

Also like some have said already. The spirit wolves need more buffs lol.
I think the best way would be to make them CONVERT physical into cold that way they benefit from the same buffs the other two summons get.

I agree with lot of points already said above so I’ll combine them into my 2 cents:

    1. :bulb: Minions AI needs to be much more aggressive, collision much smaller or ideally zero and minions speed needs to be increased as well
      -only aggressive minions are ravens (kudos to them)
      -other minions are usually just stuck in collision or just standing and admiring the scenery when mobs are killing me
      -this change can make teleport (charges) not as MUST in lower difficulties
    1. :bulb: Spirit wolves should be changed back to physical with 100% dmg converted to cold
      -this should partially fix the issue with not receiving bonuses from HoW, Might merc etc.
    1. :bulb: Ravens should provide bonus resistances to other minions
      -we are talking about 80 hard points already spent with ravens, spirit & dire wolves & bear so it should be ok (and even with this change still behind summon necro)
    1. :bulb: Poison Creeper should receive bonuses from ravens, spirit & dire wolves & bear
      -this might not be for everyone but I would like to have also Poison Creeper in my zoo and I am ok with 100 hard points investment
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As for the spirits and creepers, I’d like to have them non-targetable. They’re pretty much dead all the time, which is extremely annoying, especially since they seem to be priority targets.

Another solution to this would be the spirit staying put close to my location instead of mindlessly wandering off into the thick of battle, where every mob just casually drops a death blow on them.

Just add more synergies between everything on summon tree that would fix the problem.

Vine giving poison bonus to raven for instance 7% extra poison damage.
Ravens giving physical bonus to spirit wolves 12% and vines.
Bear giving bonus to werebear maul hit 10% per skill level.
Dire wolves giving damage to bear like 7% damage and 3% attack speed and move speed to all other.
Fire skills giving fire bonus 10% to spirit wolves.
Bear giving 10% hp more per level to vines.

Summon-Druid need something like the Necro-Summon: AOE

Single-DPS is fine… make Raven and Grizzly do splash dmg.

Summon druid needs more summons or more damge this will improve AOE and damage for instance 8 spirit wolves 5 dire wolves and all 3 vines and bear having some small chance of crushing blow.

I already unsummon everything but the bear in places like Sanctuary. Adding more path blockers that lead to even more pathing-AI-overload will only make it worse.

If anything, the pets need to be smaller in hitbox size (or allow for allied units to pass through), faster and aggressive.

My typical run looks like this: Bear and 3-5 wolves surround an enemy and fight, the merc sits at their bums unable to get to the target (and apply decrepify), and 2-5 wolves wander about aimlessly.

Its not about number being big its ABOUT AI being absolute IDIOTS!

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make it so that the summons melee buffs are provided to the druid as well. (you know, “strength of the pack” ? :slight_smile: )

the more you invest in your pets the more damage you do in melee as well.
that would make for a very interesting and unique build, not just a B-tier summon necro.

also, make the carrion vine heal the pets and merc as well.

Have you seen a durid summon Spirit of Barbs? No one ever add point to it.
Spirit of Barbs should change to provide all resistant. i.e 1% per lv, max 30%, Then, some durid may consider summon this spirit.

My Level 86 zookeeper druid )hardcore) has over 4000 life. Never seen a Necromancer with this. While the necro has greater raw power, the Druid can summon in town and can summon the entire army ahead, protecting the merc who is vital. The only trouble I’m having really is finding a weapon for the merc that does good lightning or fire damage with a poison component. They don’t seem to exist in polearms or spears, or even javelins. And finding druid pelts with 3 to raven and 3 to lycanthropy that can be made into lore or even delirium, allowing shifting to a bear with the increased life, without wasting a point in werewolf. The summoning druid has a harder time getting + skills in general, they appear on clubs but only rarely. A spirit sword is most likely the best you’ll get unless you are rich enough for HOTO,

Dont be mistaken. None said that necro is better on the summoning tree. Only that he has double or triple the amount of summons.

The thing that necro is the jack of all trades is the AD curse and the CE skill.
All it needs is a dead body. The way my necro clears a whole pack of 20-30 cows with 1 single use of curse and CE is insane.

Is just druid has no aoe skills if he goes pure summoner. And as wind druid he still lacks cause tornado misses half of the times if dont go melee to land all the nados

I think this is a great idea. Would overcome the problem of cold/physical immunes to a degree as well. Doesn’t leave much for oak sage/wearbear/lycanthropy though.

In the Summoner tree there are talents that nobody takes anyway, because they are useless. And these should be taken and redesigned into useful talents.

Turn the thorn spirit into a passive talent that gives bonuses to all the wolves, ravens and the bear and the 2 other spirits, as well as any tendrils.
And then we have the tendrils, which are basically all useless.
Those 3 slots would be free for interesting new spells, more buffs but as different variants, or new plant or animal summons like Nymph Call or Eagle Call, or as AE damage spell Root Grip or Moonfire Wrath. And if you want to bring a HP/Mana regeneration tendril, then it should also regenerate the life of all animals and at the same time give a defensive bonus, or spur them on for a few seconds and double the attack speed, and it should only be one tendril that combines all that. The points are basically all used up in the tree anyway…

In addition, the ravens should also be captured by auras etc. and the dwell time of the ravens should be at least doubled.

Make 5 out of the 3 dire wolves and make it so that the wolves can summon an alpha wolf as soon as you have invested at least 10 skill points. So in the end there are 5 ghost wolves (4 normal 1 alpha) and 5 dire wolves (4 normal and 1 alpha). The alpha wolf is stronger and brings a howl depending on the type of wolf, which drives his fellow wolves temporarily.

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