Petless Summoner-How To Run In Circles And Heal Yourself While All Hell Breaks Loose

[Infares]

I put this in the nature section too but it's just as relevant here, and I know not everyone from the Earth board would go over to nature since not every earth build subs nature.

So I got hung up on the neanderthal boss in the snowy area of the orient, and my formerly full Coredweller spec was falling flat, so I decided to respec and try a new strategy. Long story short, I ended up speccing completely out of core dweller since I already had a fully pumped level 16 one started, and went 12/12 Eruption, with 1 point each in Earth Enchantment, Brimstone, and Volativity, then I got some Heart of Oak and the one that increases elemental resist since the ice attack sucks *** and I didn't realize at the time that I could micro my core dweller out of the AOE at the time, which I do realize as I type this...

Anywho, now I'm stuck petless and so I respecced AGAIN since I didn't have enough gold to respec everything so I decided to keep the eruption where it was, I got 1 point each in the first two Plague legs and put 8/8 into the one that reduces physical and elemental resists to make my Volatile, Earth Enchanted, Brimstoned Eruptions do even more physical and fire damage.

Strategy involves using eruption > Plague and kiting mobs around the eruption and healing myself with Regrowth as I take damage, so far I actually feel pretty good about the build, and by the time I get enough gold to respec back into Core Dweller I may or may not actually choose to do it, I might go ahead and finish the plague tree, finish EE/Brim/Vol and then finally start getting my coredweller back up to snuff, but I may put the 16/8/1/8 points I had spent on CD elsewhere until I have them ALL so as not to be constantly recasting CD since it'll take me a while to get that many points accumulated, and aura-buffed eruption with plague backup seems to work really well by itself for now, probably going to put 1 point into stoneform only and keep just enough points into Regrowth to heal roughly half my total HP pool at a time so I don't overdedicate but keeping it useful.

This build was a happy accident so to speak, I never intended to go petless with Summoner but being an eruption/plague engine that can heal itself seems pretty sound right now at level 30. Retried the Neanderthal boss and killed the Yeti boss with no trouble at all, this build kites like a dream.

[Prito]

Imagine with -100 recharge gear, briar ward every battle + eruption spam along with plague spam. Sounds pretty poweful to me! 8) Pets or not hehe

[Infares]

Originally Posted by Prito

Imagine with -100 recharge gear, briar ward every battle + eruption spam along with plague spam. Sounds pretty poweful to me! 8) Pets or not hehe

I'm kinda an opponent of -100% recharge, I'd actually like them to nerf it to a max of -75% (Which is still very substancial) but I'd take anything less than 100%.

I tried speccing full Briar Ward (Saved a copy of my character with every point not spent on masteries pooled up, would close TQ and paste it into my TQ save folder from my clipboard, overwriting the new crappy build with the one with no points spent, worked great for trying to see wtf summoner was capable of) and I really didn't like it, since you pretty much need to cast it every fight, monsters can still get through it, and the hp/mp regen isn't enough to justify it by themselves, I'd never buy the poison retaliation ability, and you really NEED massive recharge gear to use it effectively, its recharge is something ridiculous like 30 seconds or more. Even with 12 second recharge on Eruption between recasts I can still plague + staff (Blastos Fotia ^^) to pretty good results.

Kiting is much more my style, I still have 1 point in Stoneform for emergencies (and why the hell not) but I usually just kite with plague/eruption and Regrowthing myself while I run around with the +10% move from my HoO added to my run speed gear. At 35 tried respeccing again as above to see where I was at, and I hated every build that didn't have full Plague + Synergies (it's that powerful) and Regrowth to some capacity (I hate quaffing potions, you can only carry so many, and with mana regen gear you're effectively infinite barring spike damage and stuns).

I found it easier to use myself as bait for microing mobs into the radius of Eruption, and the fire and forget utility of Plague and Eruption both on bosses while dodging their range attacks does all the damage for you, doing some normal Typhon runs lead to some damn near two shot kills from taking the mastery shrine and hitting him with level 13/13/13 Plague and level 17 Eruption with level 7 Volativity/EE/Brim.

I'm to the point now where if I choose to take pets, I'll proly go all wolves, although I do still miss my Core Dweller, Survival Instinct gives wolves a huge buff to damage in addition to them being ridiculously hard to kill, so I'd more or less not buy points into Dissemination (!) and WANT them to get below 33% HP asap, buying points into Heart of Oak instead so that 33% HP for the wolves is still over 500, so they have some breathing room even at low life.

[Prito]

I actually agree with you on the -recharge myself. Personally Id rather see them have abilities that didnt have long recharge timer at all (like constant buffs, not 30 sec buffed, 5 min recharge as tq is now). An alternative would be to cap at 80 or so. Only thing is i find the magic in this game to be somewhat less spectacular and "awesome feeling" with no -100 recharge. Take chain lightning for instance. Very high "fun factor", spectacular effects and a good feel. Comparable with D2's spells in terms of spell effects and awe factor.

In summary I wish the magic was more breath taking and spectacular, especially when it comes to the spammable spells (aka no recharge timer spells).