YASD: Lvl 49 Cornac AM Summoner

[The Tapir]

http://te4.org/characters/177251/tome/3 ... b6c885dd47

So what was intended to be a "play fast, die faster" run after having been away from tome for around 2 weeks ended up being my most successful run ever. Opted to get fungus first and found an amazing, will-scaling, low cooldown infusion shortly afterwards and began stomping through areas that once stopped me dead - dreadfell, reknor, and the early far east dungeons all fell incredibly quickly to this summoner. Fire drake, ritch, war hound, and minotaur were incredible in outputting ridiculous amounts of damage, while the others filled various support roles. Despite stomping most of the prides and charred scar, though, upon getting to the slime tunnels I found myself to be vastly underpowered for what was ahead - I could not kill a single orb guardian and was forced to skip the 3 high peak stair guardians I did encounter. The debuff cleansing and healing that had served me so well in fighting the prides suddenly was nowhere near sufficient to cover the damage output that these bosses possessed, and even basic enemies were a struggle to kill with summons being OHKO'd immediately after being summoned. The only other area of the game that was remotely close to that damage output was the room of death, which was no major problem for this summoner as the damage I could get out was enough to wear the wyrms down fairly quickly.

Most of the enemies that gave me trouble were berserkers/marauders with the bloodthirst tree and cursed rares, which simply killed my summons far too quickly and as a result healed for ridiculous amounts each turn because of it. I'm still unsure of how exactly to beat these enemies, as nothing seems to work - spider apparently can't reduce healing, golem's unstoppable still doesn't prevent bloodbath from activating, and every other summon died immediately upon being hit. Most of my deaths, though, came from being stupid and getting OHKO'd when I should have moved to avoid it (Daikara from a boulder thrower, crit soul rot from a reaver/corruptor/demonologist rare in the far east spider/temporal den, crit mindlash from a halfling mindslayer rare in high peak, a bump attack (!) from a high peak bone giant that dealt 1700 dmg on a standard, unboosted attack, etc), but there were cases where the regen infusion set to autocast hadn't gone off or other silly stuff happened (got fearscaped by a orb guardian that was a forge giant rare - he healed for 180 hp every turn, had insane fire+physical resist to shut down minotaur/warhound/fire drake/flamespitter, constantly spammed burning wake-boosted fireflashes to remove my regen infusion and other buffs, and simply never lost vim due to getting so many summon kills (attrition was pointless against a vim pool of 1200+)).

In terms of character choices, I feel that outside of fungus AM was lackluster for me - aura of silence was beyond amazing in clearing the first rooms of the prides, but both resolve and AM shield never did much for me and seemed to be a waste of generics (the latter especially crumbled near instantly whenever activated). I've heard shalore could be a good summoner with trees like stone alchemy or bathe in light to complement timeless, but that leaves the prides wide open as major issues to tackle with the millions of mages they like to throw at you.

Overall, I wish that I could have had somewhat better luck/skill in getting to the final fight, as I would've loved to been able to make this my first victory post ever after nearly 350 hours in the game, but ended up two steps short of my goal.

[Majestix]

I am currently playing a Yeek Summoner (no AM though), getting close to going east for the first time. This is Insane Roguelike. A big difference between my character and yours is that I already have over 60% mind crit chance. The plan is to get close to 100% crit chance, and boost crit multiplier. Your summoning talents can crit, which makes the summons much better, which should help against those crazy powerful bosses.

To deal with healing enemies, healing nexus should help a lot. In fact, one of the reasons why I am skipping AM is because there are quite a few talents in that category that I want to invest in. Oh, and of course the fearscaping orb guardian should never get so much as a sniff of a summoner. The first button to press after activating an orb is a movement infusion. Usually, when I do the slime tunnels, I pre-dig a maze through the walls near each orb, which allows me to dance around these bastards without them ever getting me into their line of sight.

We'll see how it goes. Here is the char, in case you want to get some inspiration: http://te4.org/characters/149236/tome/b ... e37757716a