ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

I've been thinking about making a more durable Summoner hybrid build and I got the idea of Oozemancer + Summoner talents. But I ran into a potential problem: the summoning limit based on your Cunning. What I'm asking is if both Summoner and Oozemancer summons count against this limit. I think they probably do, but I'd like to verify this before I try running this hybrid.

Failing that, any thoughts on what might go well with Summoner summons? I'm thinking Shadows and, of course, some durability talents. Probably the Feed tree to help give hate.

I'm also giving thought to arcane summons, though in actual play it would probably work out more like a melee hybrid that has the alchemist golem (possibly skippable), temporal hounds, worm that walks, and the controlled horrors tree. Basically fighting side by side with your summons. I reached this conclusion because the worm tree lends itself toward melee with that teleport and the need to be close to it for maxinum benefits from its talents. Also, insanity gains seem to be quicker with tentacles/path of horror.

After poking around, I realized the golem was just too investment intensive, requiring three categories to make good use of. And without it, the build looks a lot like the ones being thrown around in the Tentaclomancer thread.

IDK whether summons and oozes count against the same limit.

It's also worth looking at Inner Demons as a "summon" for high mindpower summoners, as well as the Tinkers tree if you can fit in a source of Steam regeneration (who scale off of Steampower, which is Cunning-based and therefore shows up on builds looking to max mindpower). I'm extremely partial to the Toxic Cannister summon in conjunction with the Psyshot Solidify Air talent. Drop a cannister, seal them in with it, and even if it dies it releases another poison AoE cloud.

Shadows are hard on Adventurers because AFAIK the current Doomed recommendation is still to stick an extra cat point into Shadows mastery in order to get an extra Shadow, and adventurers can't do this. To a lesser extent than Golems, you're also looking at a case where you really benefit from multiple tree investment, but it's harder (but not impossible) to justify this when you're always going to be a Shadow behind.

If you want to dip heavily into a caster instead of a melee arcane summoner, it's also worth considering the Herald of Oblivion as a summon worth optimizing around. I did so with Harold of Oblivion, but I don't think that exhausts the potential of the Herald (who is amazingly strong).

Some good thoughts there! And some quick testing confirms that Ooze and Summoner summons indeed both count against the same summoning limit. Which is really a pity as that would've been a neat combination. So it looks like for a mindpower build that uses summons as its primary offense, I'm looking at Summoner summons, plus Thoughtforms, plus Inner Demons, plus Tinkers, plus something to give the build some durability.

You might consider Action at a Distance for Solidify Air and run a Drem. I *think* Frantic Summoning should work with Frenzy, so you can pop a Summon, hit Frenzy, hit Frantic Summoning (takes summon off CD), spam a bunch of summons at high speed (with them not going on CD the first time you use them), then before Frenzy wears off drop a Solidify Air so your opponents are trapped on the opposite side of the wall with your summons.

Then when it wears off, you can do either Frantic Summoning and Solidify Air again or throw down Drems From Below it Devours to buy some time for Frenzy to cool down so you can do the full loop again.

Note that Drem can’t join Zigur, tho. On the upside, if you play Drem, you'll also gain access to the Dwarven Nature talents, which give you another kind of summon you might consider instead of Thoughtforms.

Only serious issue with Drem is I'd have to use a category point to unlock Psiblades, which overall gives a nice boost to Mindpower which affects Summoner summons' stats. Not to mention that Mindpower helps with landing Inner Demons. I suppose I could just invest the category point and/or find other sources of Mindpower boosts.

EDIT: Also, whacking the Summoner jelly with Nature's Equilibrium is a nice way to lower EQ.

Frantic Summoning + Frenzy should let you summon 3 Oozes and hit them all with a Toxic Cannister or Solidify Air, that should keep you in EQ.

For more mind power you could go Gestalt, which will also let you recover psi faster. In fact, you could use a lot of the Psyshot chassis (depending on if/how you want to support your summons).

A rushed adaption from my Oozy Punishot build.

Starting talent selections: Psytech Gunnery or Distortion, Psionic Fog (just go 1/1 for great mobility and a heal/resource recovery), Summon utility, Gestalt, Summon: melee, Action at a Distance, Mentalism or Light
10: Nightmare
20: Tinkers
36& Wyrm: Dread or another Summon skill or the other of Light/Mentalism


Mentalism is bonkers good with Inner Demons or summons (since your copy does not put your talents on cooldown and summons from your projections don’t have the projections damage limitations), and Solidify Air from your projection does no damage so it’s great for trapping enemies in with your summons for a little cage fight. It’s a little abusive tho.

Once again, some good thoughts there. I considered going Dwarf and taking Solipsism since Dwarf helps stack saves. However, a little investigation (via using debug mode to quickly level up my test character so I could assign enough Cunning to to summon more than one thing) showed that you can indeed have more than one of the same summon. Which opens up some very interesting possibilities with Frenzy, especially since with Frantic Summoning you can summon at a very rapid pace. Doubles of summons you particularly want active in that situation, or leaving some summons off cooldown so you can quickly replace deceased summons. And so on.

As for your suggested build, it seems good, but I'd like to do a build where the damage comes almost entirely from the summons (except for the damage from Solidify Air). So I'd probably skip Psytech Gunnery/Distortion and instead pick the ranged summoning tree. The additional categories will likely go to Dread, another summon tree, or even Psiblades for even more mindpower (plus Leaf's Tide which protects your summons, too).

It turns out that the Psionic fog teleport also hurts summons. But this isn't really a very serious issue given how little damage it does.

EDIT: I'm considering using an alternative teleport tree, like Spacetime Weaving, since as is this build isn't very generic tight and I can probably find a good use for those 2 class points.

If you want to go pure summon and never want your summons on cooldown, you could grab Slime and max out Slime Roots for a teleport. Then you can use Slime Roots to reset Frenzy and Frenzy to make sure that Frantic Summoning, Slime Roots, and your summons don't go on cooldown (and the more frantic your summoning, the more you can fit in Frenzy's duration). Might need more EQ management if you do this, though, and it discourages you from using generics or inscriptions until you've got Slime Roots at 5 (where it starts resetting 2 random talents at a time). This probably makes Mergeback from Dwarven Nature especially good.

Earthen Power might be worth looking at as well, dual shields makes you pretty tanky and Eldritch Stone gives good durability and EQ management (although I suspect the AoE is unfriendly). Note also that Stone Fortress works off From Beneath it Devours for Drem.

Hmm, after consulting Sheila's summoner guide, class points get tight when I try to maximize my best summons--there aren't many that can be completely ignored. In addition, the summoning (advanced) category offers two very important talents: Master Summoner, which reduces summon cooldown and Grand Arrival, which gives them very useful extra on-arrival effects. Nature's Cycle and Wild Summon probably can be ignored--the latter offers situationally useful abilities to my summons and the former helps to reduce cooldown for Wild Summon (nice but not mandatory), Rage (bad talent), Detonate (rather good but one point wonder).

I'll probably skip the summon augmentation category, though--the only real standout talents are Detonate and Phase Summon. Both're pretty good talents, but I can probably get better dipping into other categories.

I did some playing around with the talent planner plugin and after maximizing the bare maximum of must max summons (hound, minotaur, stone golem, rimebark, dragon) and tossing 4 points each into Master Summoner and Grand arrival because 5 aren't really efficient on an Adventurer, I have 22 class points to play with. 5/2/1/5 in Dwarven Nature leaves me with 9, or 13 if I leave the last talent at 1. So, not much left over. I'll probably just take categories that're useful with low investment to spend the rest of the class points.