ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Summoners are a fun class, but to me they have some problems. Here are some of the ideas to make summoners more interesting. Things may have to be rebalanced.
1. Add no friendly fire to all summoned creatures, Friendly fire causes summons to interfiere with each other, and in the cases of blindness, really hurt the player.
2. In the level up page, give me the stats for all of the summons. Simply listing the statistics makes it kind of vague, I want to know how leveling up the summon will affect health, melee damage, and ability damage, and how much the power and defense stats are on the summon, without having to go through the tedium of summoning it.
3. Stat increases for a summon doesn't look interesting. Actually make it a more interesting and useful effect, such as buffing global speed, or increasing damage and damage resistance.
4. Detonate doesn't look interesting, the range is too high and it suffers from the friendly fire issue. Reduce the range of the effect, but have the effect's power scale with level. This effect could also refresh the cooldown on the summon you detonated.
5. Have resilience tell me how much it increases constitution and summon duration by.
6. Wild summoning should be removed, instead have getting a summon to level 4 unlock an ability, or have a special ability that scales with a summon's level.
7. Summons should explicitly state that they inherit damage bonuses and penalties.

I think Detonate was given the side effect of resetting a random cooldown a few days ago, and can now crit. Still, I doubt I'll use it very often as long as it's friendly fire.
Also, I absolutely cannot see how the equilibrium decrease from jellies is supposed to be useful, given that summoners don't tend to deal damage by themselves and can therefore usually permanently meditate.

5k17 wrote:I think Detonate was given the side effect of resetting a random cooldown a few days ago, and can now crit. Still, I doubt I'll use it very often as long as it's friendly fire.
Also, I absolutely cannot see how the equilibrium decrease from jellies is supposed to be useful, given that summoners don't tend to deal damage by themselves and can therefore usually permanently meditate.

Permanently meditating is a bad idea. Your summons inherit your damage modifiers. So if you're summoning while meditating, you're doing it wrong.

supermini wrote:Permanently meditating is a bad idea. Your summons inherit your damage modifiers. So if you're summoning while meditating, you're doing it wrong.

Interesting... as far as I know, you don't get a direct -50% all damage modifier, but a numbing effect (as from numbing poison), which the char sheet does not display as a damage modifier... and that's still inherited? That is weird and, as I have just demonstrated, not made sufficiently clear. Meditation says "reducing your damage done" and the summons are only supposed to inherit "increased damage%".

5k17 wrote:

supermini wrote:Permanently meditating is a bad idea. Your summons inherit your damage modifiers. So if you're summoning while meditating, you're doing it wrong.

Interesting... as far as I know, you don't get a direct -50% all damage modifier, but a numbing effect (as from numbing poison), which the char sheet does not display as a damage modifier... and that's still inherited? That is weird and, as I have just demonstrated, not made sufficiently clear. Meditation says "reducing your damage done" and the summons are only supposed to inherit "increased damage%".

It certainly seemed to me as if my summons did just fine with me meditating.

5k17 wrote:

supermini wrote:Permanently meditating is a bad idea. Your summons inherit your damage modifiers. So if you're summoning while meditating, you're doing it wrong.

Interesting... as far as I know, you don't get a direct -50% all damage modifier, but a numbing effect (as from numbing poison), which the char sheet does not display as a damage modifier... and that's still inherited? That is weird and, as I have just demonstrated, not made sufficiently clear. Meditation says "reducing your damage done" and the summons are only supposed to inherit "increased damage%".

That's what I've been told, that they inherit it. I could have been misinformed.

There was one of the fellows here on the forum mentioning they didn't know that meditation's damage malus inherited, and then finding out in a second run and being astounded by how much damage everything was doing. So... yeah.

It's pretty trivial to check if you want to be sure. Summon something, let it smack something, summon something else with meditation on, let it smack something, compare. Think I got enough free ram to check without closing what I'm doing, let's see...

And yeah, it definitely inherits the malus. Had a warhound do 109 on a base attack vs. a degen skeleton, then 79 on a crit vs. a jelly. Then 60-ish vs a shadow when meditation summoned and 120-ish without. So yeah, it's crossing over.

Though... technically it is a damage increase. It's just an increase of -50%

supermini wrote:
Permanently meditating is a bad idea. Your summons inherit your damage modifiers. So if you're summoning while meditating, you're doing it wrong.

Good point, and it isn't clear that meditation at all does that. Added the suggestion and will work on adding others.

I made a similar post a while ago. http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=35119

I think it's safe to say that the range on Detonate is way too big.

Also, have fun getting 50 magic for the summoning prodigy in b43 when it comes out.

Will/Cun/Mag build.

Blighted Summoning is not about "getting" the 50 Magic, it's about a sidegrade build where you actually build Magic-the summons inherit your Magic rating, and need that Magic so that their spells do something. And with 0 HP modifier and both melee and skillset that run entirely off Will and Cunning, there's no real issue with making one a Magic build.

You just lose some HP. Not really impossible, with 0 HP modifier, or else -4 HP modifier classes would never clear.