Lol, because you cant beat hell with summoner without end game super expensive gear. When necro can with budget gear.
Blizz announced buffs and chnages for summoner druid. So is well known how week he is.
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SKILLS at level 90 (current level): 20 Heart of Wolverine/20 Spirit Wolves/20 Dire Wolves/20 Grizzly, 1 Ravens, 1 Oak Sage, 1 Werewolf, 1 Werebear, 1 Maul, 1 Shockwave all remaining points into Lycanthropy (15 atm). (Before calculating plus to skills.)
All summon skills are at 42 because of + to skills from gear and summon gc’s.
Dire Wolves do 1700ish damage (doubles when they eat a corpse) Grizzly does 5k+ and literally never dies. (This is not calculating damage bonus from HoW or from Might auras, or auras from gear.)
Ridiculously tanky, I shockwave everything… hands down most fun I’ve ever had in Diablo over the years.
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I am currently playing a summoner, using just summon abilities and a bow. I’m on Act 5 in hell, and honestly, with enough cheap +Skills gear, it’s super safe and easy. It’s just slow.
I traded for some low budget +skills gear, and am sitting around +15 to my summoning skills. The bear tears everything up, and rarely dies. Even if he does (or gets close to it), you simply recast at the position you want him to appear. It tore through every boss in hell so far like swish cheese.
Using a Harmony bow for the elemental damage, and also added a Peace chestpiece to get the Level 17 Valk proc. With the +Valkyrie from Harmony, the level 17 valk stays with me until she dies. It has been very helpful for nightmare and early hell, but I’ll be crafting a Fortitude or Treachery soon.
Using a Might A2 merc for the damage and AP boost, as I really need the AP boost with a bow.
One thing to keep in mind, is that the damage boost for the Dire Wolves is actually significantly less that it seems. It only doubles their pre-synergy damage, so any bonus you get from Dire Bear isn’t considered in that bonus. Likewise, using spirits will only boost the pre-synergy damage and health.
Ravens are a lot more useful than you would think. Invest a few points, and let the +Skills pump them up. They’re not great for damage, but their ability to blind enemies means you’ve got less ranged enemies targeting you. Just be sure aim that cast if you can to ensure they’re separated and targeting ranged enemies.
The biggest hurdle by far is dealing with groups of physical immune enemies at once. Act 2 Hell, looking for the Summoner was by far the worst part of the game so far.
I am looking forward to the changes coming. They mentioned that Ravens will be changed to feel like you’re an actual caster if you use it, so if that’s the case, I will likely ditch the bow, grab an Act 1 merc and give her a faith bow to provide the fanaticism buff to my pets.
It’s such a fun class to play. I think part of it is because it’s so open to customization. You can add in bear+shockwave, or go with an elemental route, or opt for a bow and become a Hunter.
Yeah, it’s not the most powerful build, but you really don’t need to farm for high end gear to make it viable. Just stack as many +Skills as possible.
Plus, the items that would give you the plus to Summoning aren’t really in high demand, so now is the best time to grab what you can.
Right now if you play as a beast hunter style (summoner with bow) I actually recommend faith. It has ITD that you can hit 80% of mobs with little investment. However, I would recommend you to invest 40 pts into fire elements. Investing in fissure and volcano helps with group clearing and boss fighting by a big margin.
Don’t invest in spirit wolf, the synergy from spirit wolf to others are minimal. And I actively use dire wolf under normal circumstances, only summon best when I need to tank/boss…in fact sometimes I just let my wolf go against bosses.
One thing summoner in dire need is crowl control…for that I would recommend either holy freeze merc, or reaper’s toll. The good thing about reaper’s toll is that it offer crowl control and it also boost your pet’s damage with the decrepit curse.
I’ve seen a lot of guides that suggest placing points into Elemental, I just really don’t like how the fire skills feel. Maybe when they reduce the cooldowns I may try them out, but for now I am sticking with pure summoning. I also have a Windy druid already, so I don’t want to go with another casting type druid.
If I had the runes for a faith, I would absolutely be using one right now, but it’s just not within my budget.
Right now, my skill distribution is about 20 HOTW, 15 Spirit, 20 DW, 20 DB, 5 Raven. Normally I wouldn’t put into Spirit, but I’m specifically trying to avoid using Elemental and Shapeshifting to make it a bit more of a challenge, and I thought the patch would have been released earlier when they said early 2022 (got my hopes up), and thought that the Spirit Wolves change would make them more viable so I wouldn’t need to waste a respec to invest into them when it does launch.
As for reapers toll, it again just comes down to budget. Not something I can afford right now. I’ve got a pretty solid Insight on him, with a Tal Rasha helm and Fortitude, so his damage and health recovery is overall decent. Once I eventually get a faith bow, I will likely switch to Holy Freeze A2 merc, assuming I decide to stick with the bow route.
Either way, I’m progressing really smoothly, so I don’t want to waste a respec.
Since the old version of D2, I’ve been wishing that Druid can summon Bear and 1 type of Wolves simultaneously…
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Like most of you here I hope Blizzard hears us
The druid needs to have all 3 main summons up at the same time.
It simply makes sense and for the life of me I don’t understand how anyone can say that would make him too strong when you have sorcs, palladins and javazons running around effortlessly crushing enemies in player 8 Hell lol.
He could have all 3 spirits , all 3 vines and ravens along with 8 wolves and the bear and still not come close to the S tier builds of those other characters.
Anyways speaking for myself I wouldn’t even need so many summons at once but all 8 wolves, and the bear at a minimum would finally make the summoning tree strong enough to stand on it’s own.
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Check this topic i made on Reddit.
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Checked now hoping we can summon more ghosts in the same line instead of only 1 giving summoner more passive damage(barbs and more hp for animals)!