I love playing summoning classes in any game.
I initially rolled a Necro to play with my wife’s Frost Orb Sorc, then realized I might not have any corpses if I play with her. I also like having a lot of bodies to keep monsters off her.
So I rolled a Druid Summoner who doesn’t need any corpses. I never played Druid before.
I’ve heard mixed opinions on Druid summoning. Is it any good? Or should I just roll something else?
At what? Bear can get beastly with +20 skills; R 40+ skill points he tears stuff up. But you’ll have nothing for physical immune
But it’s better than anything in shapeshifting till you get gear; it’s also much less annoying on mana than elemental until you have gear.
I run wind druid usually, and I always start them off as a summoner. It’s easy, low gear requirements, you can insta-summon more minions. They are slower then the windy, but I think the pacing of summoner builds in this game has always been that way.
Plus you can throw in some optional skills for a different gameplay:
Werebear: great for CC, and it an allow you to run with a crushing bow weapon to help take down bosses.
Ranger: Using a bow can help boost your damage and assist in boss takedowns. slotting 2-3 Tal runes in a bow can put out some solid poison damage early on, and keep monsters from regenerating health so your minions can take them down.
Summoner druids Can be a very solid playstyle, though not the fastest, definitely safe and easy to progress in the game with.
Bosses will be your biggest challenge, as they are with any summoner in early levels (until you get bear). Equipping your merc with a strength runeword polearm can help out with it’s crushing blow, but just be prepared for some long boss fights.
Though your playing with your wife, so she will definitely help out in the damage department, while you and your minions can keep everyone safe.
Since I can’t post links here, Google druid summoner guide 1.10 diablo2 .net
It’s older, but that’s the great thing about D2:R - the game hasn’t changed, so all that 20 yr old info is still relevant. it’s a very in depth guide on mechanics and numbers, including gear and skill recommendations.
I find the druid works best as a hybrid summoner. Either you use werewolf form and the summons act to soak up damage, or you use spells to dish out damage with your summons tanking the melee monsters.
With 4 points in dire wolves and just a point in the bear, my bear had 1,760 life for tanking Baal and his minions. You can strategically resummon it in mobs to soak up damage. For less powerful enemies, the wolves do a bit more damage and attract more monsters.
Then you can either lay down elemental damage, or attack in wolf or bear form (bear form is quite slow though). Not quite as much of a pure summoner as the necromancer, but it gives you more to do. Unfortunately not quite as strong either, the necromancer is the only class that can push into Hell literally without gear. Elemental druids fare better than melee ones, melee has always been drop dependant and Blizzard had 14 patches increasing monster life to deal with new elite items and synergies, but never touched weapon base speed or damage, or did a major overhaul to % damage mods for blue and yellow items, so it’s possible to get quite “stuck” around Hell with a wolf who does very weak damage and can’t hit things due to attack rating. Respec to wind is always an option though, and the summons still do their job.
Look up the Edge runeword. Very cheap and the thorns aura helps your summons do decent damage so long as you are only in games with 1-3 players.
Thank you all for the replies!
I will try one of the hybrid options.
Given how well the Druid summons synergize and the powerful auras of the spirits, you’d think a Druid summoner would work, but blizzard thoroughly screwed summoners in various ways. They should rebalance them:
This all hurts my Druidic heart even more now that the Wolf and Bear summons look so pretty in D2R.
I agree @Valar. I think this should be added to the list of possibly balance reviews if Vicarious decides to actually add to the game.
I agree with this. I think at the very least they should allow us to use the bear with at least one type of wolf. So like 1 bear and 3 dire wolves. I also wish ravens get some sort of synergy they suck. Also a maxed poison creeper like can’t even kill a fallen in hell lol!
I am in support for all of it. I love the druid aesthetic now in D2R. The forms, the wolves, the bears, the spirits, the vines… everything looks really awesome now and would love to have them all up… And also be viable in endgame (like them all having synergies with each other and stuff).
Yeah.
I want a Nature summoner so my wife stops spending all her precious mana trying to kill my Necro summons.
Too bad it isn’t really Hell-viable.
On the paper it sounds cool Wolfs,Bears, Forestghost…but in game he is a joke… You can summon one solid tank or 3 usless wolfs… who the heck call this a “Summoner” skilltree? I mean assa and ama can summon a much better tank too. And their skilltree dont have the name summon in it. oh sry lets be fair you can also summon a usless worm with 0 dmg and a ghost with nice aura but dies every minute… Ravens can be “okay” but anoying to recast them not rly viable… and oh boy the elementalskilltree… Short blizz hate D2 druids.
i agree with it sucks not being able to summon wolves and bear at the same time. The only thing summoning druids are lacking is dps. Also summoning druid probably safest class in hardcore. And yes the vines are almost useless in hell difficulty if not nightmare already.
And people argue if frozen orbs needs a buff lol
The only, THE ONLY reason i was playing PD2, was cause summoner Druid was so strong, druid on Pd2 could have 5 spirit wolves+3dire wolves+2 bears+20 ravens+spirit all at once, the dmg wasnt so much buffed from original but imagine all these what dmg could all do,
On original D2 summoner (which is my fav spec) is trash!
It req super expensive gear only to be viable .
I only manage to reach A2 on Hell with Thorns build where even when my wolves were taking so much dmg and die at least this dmg was reflecting to the enemies which did this at the first place and they were taking some decent amount of dmg.
I think better if you can have 5 ghot/5 wolf and grizly like necromancer. But i dont think blizz change that.
you can do a summoner druid just fine in normal at least, and probably most of the way through nightmare. dire wolves with lots of points in spirit wolf/bear hit plenty hard. rabies is a cheap way to stop monster healing as well.
problem with smn druids has always been lack of numbers and they don’t scale particularly well for the point investment as you hit hell. 3 wolves can’t clear mobs nearly as effectively as a dozen skeletons plus golem plus revives and I’m hoping a mod comes out that allows bear+wolves, bear is disappointing in that it’s only useful for bosses and isn’t particularly fast at killing them. having a sorc will help a lot since bear is super tank with thousands upon thousands of hp but you won’t do a whole lot of personal damage.
I have completed hell and honestly it was horrendously slow, possible yes but you are limited pretty much to only using the bear in hell mode. I don’t see any point to playing it anymore, this is definitely the last class you want to farm with because of the speed.
If you get an act2 merc and give him the best gear it is what will carry you. I used oak sage, you need the extra HP by hell because the damage taken is so much
The necromancer is so much better as a summon class they aren’t even comparable, all the curses, amp damage removing physical immune buff, the ability to summon way more units, corpse explosion.
If you could summon wolves and bears at the same time that would help a bit, but still would not even be close to what a necro can do.
Vines are also stupidly weak and get almost instantly killed in hell, I ended up removing all points from them
I would have thought the way to go would be the beefiest tank summon you could manage and a rogue merc outfitted to the nines to do your actual killing for you. I’m levelling a necro right now, and keeping up on my merc’s armor and bow and so far she’s a killing machine behind a wall of clay and bone.
Well i got to 89 with my summon druid as my only char, yes it is slow but gear is really cheap and once you get to 45-50 lvl grizzly it can farm just fine and supersafe. Now i am making baal runs in 5 minutes with record of about 40 seconds in killing Baal himself. Diablo dies in less than 10 seconds. Merc is A2 NM might aura and deals with phys immunes with reapers dies maybe once a week. Also my spirits and 1 point vines survive CS/baal runs just fine. Made videos of some runs https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChfS5mSQZL0WpmlC-Q1rH9g
I tried multiple build, with multiple gear.
The only build without the best endgame gear was my summoner druid. I’m able to do full normal/NM players 8 solo without even a merc. It’s just so safe and powerful. I don’t even understand why people say it’s a low tier build.