Summoner play feel issues

Necromancer
1

I want to bring up some problems I have with Summoner Necro that don’t relate to power, but play feel. It was one of my favorite builds in D2, and it sucks that D4 can’t do it justice.

First off is the AI, it sucks. The skeletons are constantly lagging behind, not attacking at all when there are enemies right next to me, and they don’t attack enemies at the edge of the screen until I engage. I want to basically be running after my minions because they’re so proactive, not the other way around. They should be engaging enemies like 1.5x screens away, and if I’m focusing something like a treasure goblin then they should prioritize that as well and not hit a bunch of trash mobs.

Second is the micromanagement. When I play a summoner necro I want to sit back and watch the minions do the work, but that is far from what I’m getting. The most annoying part is having to keep up the Priest buff and summon skeletons, not because it’s hard to press a button every 8 seconds but because you have to click on a corpse in a game where you can’t even see what’s on screen half the time. Why can’t I just click anywhere as long as there’s a corpse in range? On top of that you have to constantly keep tagging enemies with various debuffs like curses, Gloom, etc.

Next is the limited skill tree support. The only active skill that is specifically for a summoner is Army of the Dead, which feels strange considering Necro should be a lot more minion focused in general. As a result you end up picking almost only passives, which leaves very little room for experimentation since you basically run out of passives to pick that do anything at all for your build. A bunch of them that are supposed to be summoner specific aren’t even good, such as granting your minions bonus armor and resistances, since they inherit 100% of your stats and you’ll be maxing that for yourself anyway.

Item diversity is also very bad since there aren’t enough aspects/uniques for summoners, which again feels weird. It’s season 4 and there’s still basically only two summoner builds, with the only difference being whether or not you run Shadowblight, and they both play pretty much identically.

Rant over

2 Likes
3

Yeah, I am having a signal problem. The only logical reason for this is that my minions have come together as a collective and formed some kind of union. Because now, they refuse to do anything as if they are on strike.

4

The real problem is the golems pathing and the resulting unpredictable delay on his active ability. He should just respawn at the location I pressed the skill. Thats the real ‘feel’ issue with the summoner. He might not be able to path there at all because of a waller, or gets stuck in narrow doorways making the gameplay feel very clunky.

And even outside of that the gameplay is not very snappy or smooth. You dont really have a reliable rotation because of relying on cdr via lucky hit. Sometimes you get really good procs and it feels smooth to play, sometimes with low density or no bone storm up you need to wait a few seconds before you can start casting again.

5

You need two unique items. Sacrilegous Soul that autocasts summon skeleton and tendrils, and the Unique Glove that turns corpse explosion into an exploding zombie creator similar to Army of the Dead.

6

On controller it ”Auto-Targets” corpses.

You should give it a try instead of K/M

7

It auto targets to a huge margin of error on mouse and keyboard too.

Not sure why the OP is having such a problem with it… but i can literally just mouse click raise skeleton and it auto targets the nearest corpse, this doesnt work if the corpse is miles away but still its pretty forgiving.