ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Blighted Summons for summoners tend to have very weak abilities, due to using magic/spellpower. Even when inheriting the player's magic stat, the relatively low magic stat (compared to wil/cun/mindpower, which is boosted by the summoning) that when combined with the low-ranked abilities leads to very weak spells. One way to fix this would be to possibly have blighted summoning boost the summon's magic stat or just simply have higher ranked spells.

Well, you're supposed to have 50 magic to use Blighted Summoning, so it may not be as big of a problem as if you were to over-kit yourself for the prodigy. That being said, I haven't looked at it in depth. Having the talent gained from Blighted Summoning scale with the summon talent level could be good (if that isn't the case already)

lukep wrote:Well, you're supposed to have 50 magic to use Blighted Summoning, so it may not be as big of a problem as if you were to over-kit yourself for the prodigy. That being said, I haven't looked at it in depth. Having the talent gained from Blighted Summoning scale with the summon talent level could be good (if that isn't the case already)

Yeah, the thing is, whatever the 'primary stat' for each summon is normally (un-blighted), that is the source of their damage, is usually /massively/ enhanced by 5/5ing the summon - think 200+ will/cun/str. This works to get the attacks hitting at an appropriate level considering they have no gear, talents, etc. When you just copy over the 50 or so magic that you have to your summon without any enhancements, you end up with a very small amount of spellpower - like 30-35ish, which is pretty low for the endgame. As such, at times your summons can actually be weakened by blighted summoning - using your new blight abilities can often be a waste of a turn as they're considerably weaker than your normal attack.

The new abilities add a lot of versatility to the physical summons, though, and they don't waste much time using them due to cooldowns. You're losing a small amount of damage for more ranged capacity and utility skills attached to your summons.

And ranged summons in general have very good abilities relative to their quirks-Rimebarks just have to wait between cooldowns normally and this allows them to effectively double their damage due to that, Hydra have cooldown limitations that make them have a lot of dead time, and Flamespitters get area of effect damage, IIRC.

Having said that, the current skills actually don't scale to match the summon level-they are all at a flatrate 3. They probably should do that-L1 summons probably have relatively high end of a spell, and L5 ones relatively low.

But regardless, I don't think they should be getting 60+ spellpower or anything like that. That's out of place-it's meant to be a versatility upgrade, not making them into a Corruptor...

SageAcrin wrote:The new abilities add a lot of versatility to the physical summons, though, and they don't waste much time using them due to cooldowns. You're losing a small amount of damage for more ranged capacity and utility skills attached to your summons.

And ranged summons in general have very good abilities relative to their quirks-Rimebarks just have to wait between cooldowns normally and this allows them to effectively double their damage due to that, Hydra have cooldown limitations that make them have a lot of dead time, and Flamespitters get area of effect damage, IIRC.

Having said that, the current skills actually don't scale to match the summon level-they are all at a flatrate 3. They probably should do that-L1 summons probably have relatively high end of a spell, and L5 ones relatively low.

But regardless, I don't think they should be getting 60+ spellpower or anything like that. That's out of place-it's meant to be a versatility upgrade, not making them into a Corruptor...

True enough - it's just the only real 'summoner' prodigy ends up feeling pretty mediocre, even with the huge investment of 50+ magic - which is no joke for a summoner. Maybe the scaling talent level will fix it.

So I just bothered, for the first time, to really tackle this prodigy…

Essentially, as far as I can tell, it definitely makes at least three summons worse: Drakes, Hyrdras, and Spiders.

The Spider is of limited consequence but the Drake and Hydra are a problem, mostly due to the fact that you don't WANT them casting anything that isn't their strongest skill immediately upon arrival. Having that extra skill is… troublesome.

I suspect an easy fix to this would be to simply adjust the prioritizing such that those three summons won't use said ability until their other skills are on cool-down. Along that same line of thinking, you could just build in a mechanism that gives you two options for each summon: current AI or prioritized AI.

Or give them the talent at a sensible talent level.

Anyway summoner is a Wilder class, which is against Corruption.
Summoners' pet are using equilibrium, and Vim-based talents will increase equilibrium bar by a noticeable amount. A conflict anyway.

starsapphire wrote:Anyway summoner is a Wilder class, which is against Corruption.
Summoners' pet are using equilibrium, and Vim-based talents will increase equilibrium bar by a noticeable amount. A conflict anyway.

Good point, especially given that the Summoner doesn't really needs much of a buff anyway…

Delmuir wrote:
The Spider is of limited consequence

Blasphemy! Spider is OP if you 5/5 it. Easily can do 4k+ damage and their grand arrival is nothing to sneeze at.

Sradac wrote:
Blasphemy! Spider is OP if you 5/5 it. Easily can do 4k+ damage and their grand arrival is nothing to sneeze at.

Without enough damage and/or crit boosts, multipliers, etc., sure… I'll buy that. However, I'd like to see that spec'd out because if your spider is buffed such that it doesn't suck, I'm sure everything else is even more useful.

Then again, I suppose I could easily be wrong.

In terms of damage, pretty much everything is better than Spider and it can't even do any damage at all against poison-immune enemies. Taking into account that it's primarily for utility though, then you could say its damage is not bad. I mean, its company is Turtle, so that sort of tells you what to expect out of Spider.