https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4v6nb_wNUo
I’m still working on getting out of nmd46. The issue right now is I need to cap resists and it’s very time consuming to farm for gear. Damage-wise, I can do up to t60. When I run into poison though, I (not my minions) get 1-shotted.
Also you’ll notice my glyphs are nowhere near where they should be. Once they are, I should be able to stomp a bit harder.
I think you should try replacing the wand with a 2H scythe (you can try a 2H sword, but the scythe is better). This should increase your damage by 50%. I understand you are looking for a crit chance, but it seems to me that with the current formula the weapon is for a pure summoner with no alternatives.
I actually have an idea for 2H but I need to test it out. It’s based on how mechanics of another class works. If true, I might have a way to bring Minion damage way way higher than it should be. Can’t reveal it at the moment though, needs testing.
It’s too bad. Level 100 Summoner Vs Level 75 Grigoire.
Have you not gotten any other Uniques like Howl from Below or Bloodless Scream that would somehow improve your performance against such Boss?
It so happened that the only Unique I had when I was level 75 was the Lidless Wall Shield which I had since level 55. And the Lidless Wall is the opposite of a Summoner since it would require to sacrifice all your minions to get powerful endless Bone Storms. And that’s what I did, I became Blood Lance and I killed Varshan and Grigoire at their level 75 levels to get more Uniques.
After the kills I now have 2 more Uniques: Blood Artisan’s Cuirass and Ring of Sacrilegious Soul that strengthened further my Blood Lance build. Now, I ate for breakfast NM50 at since level 79.
I have 1 page in my bank where I dump all Summoner related gear. I dont think I would use it until I get a good Unique for it. Maybe a Ring of Mendeln would trigger me or else wait for level 100 til I get Xfal’s Corroded Signet to be an Uber Shadow Lord with Minions… Or Black River to be an Uber Corpse Explosion Specialist with Minions.
LOL! OTHER uniques eh? That’s a WHOLE different story. My main build is Blood Lance and absolutely demolishes content. This Pure Summoner is using gear I put together in a few days with glyphs not even fully leveled.
edit: I have 2 Ring of Mendeln’s. I could play Mendeln’s if I wanted.
This is my current iteration of a pure summoner. I am using BCE as my spender to proc lucky hit and apply the shadowblight/blighted aspect damage combo.
I had previously quit over the amount of damage I had calculated BCE was doing (13% of my single target and beyond 30% on AoE).
However after a self nerf (moving blighted aspect to a ring from my weapon) of a flat 120%[x] less damage to BCE and minions, and replacing my weapon aspect with reanimation 80%[x] (a 40%[x] buff to minions) as well as a 50% buff to frenzied dead (moving it from a ring to amulet) I felt I was no longer being carried by BCE.
In fact with my latest change (introducing Corpse Tendrils) I am hugely buffing my minion cleave potential which will be absolutely dwarfing BCE’s contribution even further.
If this is of any help with your Pure Minion Summoner goals feel free to check out my current setup here maxroll.gg/d4/planner/p9hm0tub
I also made a video of my advantures, however I had the wrong vampiric power applied which was absolutely ruining my single target barrier gen and healing… which I only realised after getting those irritating huge HP random event bosses. I changed after a 5+ min fight with them and cleared the rest quite quickly (for a pure summoner).
Anyways here it is. It may still be uploading as of posting this comment.
Does Blighted aspect actually increase minion damage? If so, I got some ideas. I’ll do a whole video on it if warranted.
edit: your video looks like it’s still processing.
I just dont see the point of the video.
Any Class at level 100 without using a Unique are garbage especially the Summoner.
But if you have Unique and refuse to use it and then complain for poor DPS, that’s something worse than stupid.
Again, I just dont see the point. We all know Summoner DPS sucks especially when with no Uniques that help.
I’m just having some fun here. I already “beat” the game. I have maybe 1 more unique to get and that’s Banished Lord’s Talisman but that’s it. I’ve done everything I wanted to do as Necromancer this season.
yeah should be processed now, and yes Blighted aspect is the single most powerful pet multiplier in the game, i think its the biggest multiplier full stop. On a 2hander its 240%[x] and thats about 90% uptime on big packs.
The only reason people don’t use it is its a crap if you kill everything really fast as it never builds up, but if you have awful damage and packs take multiple seconds or even up to a minute to kill, then it outclasses everything. it is also not very good on bosses as single target takes a bit longer to build shadowblight stacks.
I should add regarding blighted aspect, you need to spam and stack your sources of shadow damage to really build up those shadowblight proc’s fast. So for me using resources is instantly a bad choice unless you can infinitly spam without going out of resources.
This kind of forces you into using Corpse explosion with miasma as you can spam and stack it. This is further compounded by the use of the Sacrilegious ring as now your spamming is even faster. The huge problem with this strat however is corpses… which is where army of the dead comes in, as it is without doubt the single best corpse generator in the game. Now you need lots of lucky hit to get this skill off CD as fast as possible. Also shadow mages with the extra attack help stack shadowblight for just a bit extra.
But if you do all of this you insta 10 stacks of blighted aspect on packs.
I am of the opinion that in 2H we should push Reanimation.
the problem I have with attackspeed is it seems weaker then multiplicative modifiers.
So I wanted to see how all my attackspeed was stacking, so I tested unyielding commander but not isolated. So I already had kalan’s edict, frienzed dead stacked, and inspriing leader. I removed the vampric power attackspeed as its random and would throw off my tests.
Anyway i then recorded the attacks with and without army of the dead a few times, and I could barely account for 1 extra attack. So this means attackspeed is either working at 30% value for some reason and therefore I am not accurate enough, or its additive and therefore 100% on top of my already existing attackspeed is not what it seems. Or finally I made a mistake (very possible).
Anyway because of this, I have kind of opted not to overcommit to attackspeed, though I do have reanimation in my neck as the only other option was blighted aspect, and I was trying to nerf its impact on BCE impact on my overall damage.
I want to make sure we’re talking about the same thing. Reanimation: Your Minions gain increased damage while alive, up to [30 - 40]%[x] after 10 seconds. (Necromancer Only). I put this aspect in a two-handed scythe. You can put either attack speed or bone mages in the amulet (I did this in the 1st season, now bone mages are not profitable, and other mages do not provide the required damage).
ugh yeah i miss understood, thought you were on about attack speed. Yes I agree, reanimation in weapon, better burst then Blighted and for me personally more thematically accurate as BCE then does less damage. And given what you then put i n your neck as well, minions do only a bit less damage but get way better burst.
and yeah bone mages don’t work if you stack to much attackspeed and the only way to heal them is with the new heal which does less healing now then before, as well as damage reduction not seeming to have any impact on their self damaging effect.
Also mages are without doubt the worst at clearing speeds as they are purely single target. They are fanastic on bosses, but have zero scaling on packs. Even bone mages doing double damage and never dying probably get out classed by reapers against grasping tendriled enemies. Just always take the 15% corpse version of reapers, not for the corpse but to block their wind-up attack option. This can reset frenzied stacks if you don’t have enough attack speed or if they change targets after using it, and its a huge loss in upfront damage verses a cleave against 3 targets or more.
That’s my experience anyway.
I woke up, did some testing finally. I could’ve done it all evening yesterday but ah well. So here are my findings:
Here’s my thing about Shadowblight/Blighted Aspect. I am in favor of using Blighted Aspect to increase the minions auto-attack damage, however I feel that Shadowblight itself is ‘cheating’. That damage source comes from the Necro and can be scaled up using the stats that I’m building, which is Crit Chance/Damage. The whole idea here is to have the minions do the work. As sub-optimal as Kalan’s Edict is, that’s the one that I favor using, but there’s also other reasons to for it outside of damage.
Now if I were to play a Shadow Minion build, then yes, Shadowblight/Blighted Aspect all the way. Stack Shadowblight to 10 as fast as possible to squeeze as much damage as possible.
I feel that this particular playstyle is different from what I envision Pure Summoner to be. With my current build, it’s quite limited in these respects but it aims to buff my own minions (Supernatural Blight & Acolyte’s Decompose) while debuffing my enemies (Decrepify).
Welcome to the club.
Regarding weapons: the summoner receives maximum benefit only from the slowest weapons - these are two-handed scythes. All one-handed weapons are at least 20% faster. In absolute values, the difference is even more significant.
Two-handed scythe 4500, one-handed sword/scythe + focus 3500, one-handed sword/scythe + shield 3300. I think this is a bad decision, I don’t like the fact that we are limited in the choice of weapons.
Regarding crits: I did tests with Grandfather and all crits - the maximum crit of a skeleton with improved crits was ~40000, the maximum crit with a two-handed scythe and 80% reanimation was 37000. At the same time, the base attack is lower and we can only get such crits once every three seconds
My approach to this is, as long as my minions are doing 85%+ (ideally 99%+) of the damage and are not just conduits for my damage is fine.
So with that philosophy mendeln is out, unless its proc did next to no damage, which ironically is the case for a pure summoner LOL. But regardless I am not using it.
The Necro having to do lots of actions to buff minion damage is also fine, I am not looking for an AFK build. But I would like a build that only involved me cursing and doing some heals, or activating “frenzy” type abilities for my minions.
But the reality is, those options don’t exist as we need lucky hit to play the game, and that requires the player to do some form of basic damage even if its 1 damage.
The concept of using things like blighted aspect where you combo spells with talent tree nodes and aspects to create buffs for your minions is actually cool, and I like the idea of such interactions. The damage of BCE in my case (activating this combo) is just an unfortunate consequence, but at least it is now minor and I would estimate around 15% on AoE and under 10% single target.
For me one pillar of an ARPG is to find unique and in rare cases possibly unintended interactions to empower your character. Though in this case intended, its a really nice bit of development.
This is why I think the vampiric powers are excellent, they have quite a few of these unique combos, where the player has to discover the power through how they use these abilities rather then just be handed a flat xx% multiplier to damage or survival.
This is why I will never follow a guide lol, no disrespect to those who do. All my fellow dad friends who play follow them, I just enjoy the discovery and iterations of improvement as I learn.
How pure does your summoner need to be? One of my necros is all pets (4 enforcers, 5 mages, blood golem), uses a couple nodes on the cult leader board, runs black river, mendlin, varshann ring, with the dark CE, tendrils and leftover points in bonespear. The pets dont kill everything but they do a LOT. They can be as interactive as you make them, or do the afk ring thing and pop off a bonespear every so often.
Like a Virgin pretty much 
I don’t know if thats end game or early on, but early while leveling they do a fair amount. If you are playing a build in NM100 with your current setup, i would estimate their input is probably in the region of 10-15% of your total damage at most.
So pure summoner means exactly that, damage from minions. They are no longer a supporting/utility part of a build.
The best thing you can do is go to the target dummies, and then see how your minions do taking all 5 elite target dummies from 100% hp to zero. Then dismiss them using book of the dead, and your varshann ring then just spam your BCE and tendrals or whatever else you have on your bars. compare the speed and it will give you an idea of the impact your minions are having damage wise.