Summoner rework

[Aquillion]

Turtle I don't have very strong feelings on whether it should be tier 1 or tier 2, and I found jellies much more useful as soon as I had them unlocked (thus their placement in tier 1) I assume that people want the tree unlocked by default as well. Also, it does gain the ability to damage when upgraded. As for disabling instead, sounds as good, but not necessarily better of an idea.

The thing is, while the jelly is more important to summoners overall, definitely (since it's their source of combat equilibrium recovery), I don't think it'd be very useful for your first four levels, since your initial summons are so cheap. I mean, I'd use it, sure, but I don't feel that I'd really need it, while the turtle's ability to distract enemies is a major lifesaver.

EDIT: Wait, holy-- I didn't notice this!

EDIT: for locked/unlocked trees, Utility and Augmentation would be locked, the others would be unlocked

IMHO the Jelly absolutely can't be in a locked tree; it's basically essential to summoners as they are now. Summoning (control) would make a lot more sense for their second locked tree... having Summon Control and Resilience in separate locked trees would be annoying, but having the Jelly in a locked tree doesn't seem feasible to me unless the class gets another way to recover Equilibrium in combat.

[marvalis]

Tenacity: I didn't think that 50% resistances on summons would be cheesy as other (mostly melee) classes have skills that give up to 75% stun resist to themselves.

The problem is not that it is cheesy, but it will conflict with the inherited stats. Should not be to hard to code, but it is something to keep in mind.

Suppress Summoning: I found it to be useless, and never used it. Changes to make it not affect you would help. Here's a different idea, called Transfer Life.

My personal and subjective feeling is that summoners should not be able to use magic. That means no spells. Only skills that summon creatures or enhance their abilities. For the same reason I do not like the detonate skill. Killing your own creations seems so .... un-summoner like.

Changing Evolution to an added talent instead: good idea, it would make it much simpler, while having a nearly identical effect if it included passive effects as well as activated ones.

+1 I totally agree. Very interesting if you can do this.
Skill ideas:
Turtle: stunning strike on lvl 3, disarm on lvl 5?
War hound: some fighter skills
Minotaur: berserker skills
Stone golem: ?
Sand drake: sand breath, ? basically the sand drake skills.
Ritch flamespitter: ?
Hydra would get 2-3-4 breath attacks on level 2-3-5
Spider: poison spit (DoT) on level 2 and acid spit (slow) on level 4 or 5, regular poison attack at lvl 1
Fire drake: Big aoe at lvl 5

Name idea's:
Replace shaman with a healing tree. Why? Because other games have it . A tree of life that is stationary and has like a 15 second? cooldown. Easy to use.
Beholder - change to warp stalker or something idunno.

IMHO the Jelly absolutely can't be in a locked tree; it's basically essential to summoners as they are now.

Utility should not be locked as it one of the basic trees for summoners. I agree.


Here is a random idea: keep the sand drake and replace the poison vine with a sand drake:

Summoning (melee):
War Hound
Minotaur
Stone Golem
Sand drake

[Aquillion]

I do kind of think that the Shaman (or some sort of healing summon) could be useful if it extended the duration of other summons while it was out, actually. At least, it'd be interesting.

[lukep]

Slight update including summons gaining skills, but mostly compiling all of the information from previous posts into one place again. Hope that this isn't too much of an information dump.

Summoning (melee)
War Hound: gains +50% movement speed at level 3, rush at level 5
Poison Vine: deals 50% of its damage as nature (not DoT) at level 4
Minotaur: gains berserker skills, including AoE attacks.
Behemoth: gains one inscription at level 3, a second at level 5. Is a big, smashy monster.

Summoning (ranged)
Ritch Flamespitter: gains Napalm Spit (higher fire/burn damage, 4 cooldown) at level 3.
Hydra: gains sand breath at level 4.
Spider: gains Spit Acid (deals about 3/4 the damage of spit poison) at level 3
Drake: ???

Summoning (utility)
Turtle: gains 10% chance to disarm (3 turns) when hit in melee at level 3, ability to use "blind focus" at level 5, debuffing enemy def and saves in melee range.
Jelly: gains "engulf" at level 4, applies constriction effect on an enemy.
Beholder: gains second copy of "spot" talent, allowing it to spot two enemies.
Pusher: ???

Summoning (control): Locked
Absorb: Kills up to (1, 1, 2, 2, 3) summons of tier (1, 2, 3, 4, 4), and gives you a buff based on the summon absorbed.
Detonate: Kills up to (1, 1, 1, 2, 2) summons of tier (1, 2, 3, 4, 4), dealing damage and effects based on the summon.
Shift Lifetime: reduces duration of enemy summons by (5 * talent) turns, increases your summons by as much (in total).
Summon Control: as it currently is.

Summoning (augmentation): Locked
Rage: gives free action at level 3
Haste: gives wild speed (movement infusion) at level 5
Resilience: as it currently is.
Hold Life: Sustained (20 EQ), +3 equilibrium per turn. Any summon that dies (from HP or duration) has a (15 + 5 * talent)% chance to resurrect, at (30 + 5 * talent)% duration and max life. Can affect a summon more than once, but the weakness compounds.

Summary/Highlights
Talent bonuses added, including summons.
Turtle moved to tier 1 (and jelly to 2).
Summoning (utility) tree unlocked.
Summoning (control) locked, changed quite drastically.
-Shift Lifetime does not change HP at all, needs a more appropriate name, partial replacement to suppress summon.
-Absorb skill added, replacing Phase Summon
Hold Life replacing Tenacity.
Behemoth finally replacing Stone Golem.
Drake undecided, maybe a generic one.

[marvalis]

Minotaur: gains berserker skills, including AoE attacks.

Death dance will hit all squares around the minotaur, potentially hitting the summoner and/or other summons. This does not have to be bad, but it means that in some cases the minotaur is better not summoned. This could slightly decrease its usefulness.

Hold Life: Sustained (20 EQ), +3 equilibrium per turn. Any summon that dies (from HP or duration) has a (15 + 5 * talent)% chance to resurrect, at (30 + 5 * talent)% duration and max life. Can affect a summon more than once, but the weakness compounds.

This table shows the compound effect at 60% duration and HP. Assuming 100 hp. Iif the summon has more hp then you can read this as the percentage of hp.

Code: Select all

Total turns | Extra turns | Max HP
10               10            100
16               6             60
19.6             3.6           36
21.76            2.16          21.6
23.056           1.296         12.96
23.8336          0.7776        7.776
24.30016         0.46656       4.6656

Looking at this table I think it would not be worthwhile to have a summon be reborn 3 times. Two times reborn would mean double duration and hp. this would happen 40%*40% of the time. That is 16%. An extra two turns at 20% hp seems more annoying than anything else since this crappy summon would still be using a companion spot. One turn at 10% hp is even worse. Not to mention the text spam this will cause.

Then, here is another random idea:
I read somewhere that it would be nice to have more options to play the game differently with the same character, for 'flavor'. More options means... more summoning categories! That means the old melee/range/utility division becomes obsolete and needs to be expanded. Lets here some idea's about this.
An example would be to put them in elemental trees (or simply add these two trees):

Fire summoning:
Fire hound
Fire imp
Fire dragon
Fire mastery (+%fire dmg for _all_ summons)

Cold summoning
Ice ant
Snow giant
Cold dragon
Ice mastery

Beast summoning
Bear (taunt+hp but not dmg reduction skills like turtle)
Hawk (has a claw attack that causes blindness, attacks from range with 'squeal' a physical dmg sound attack )
Ettin (berserker with strong AoE attacks)
Physical mastery

[bricks]

I like the idea of more specialized summoning trees, playing more off a theme than the actual mechanics used. Both Summoner and Wyrmic seem to suffer from a lack of meaningful variety.

[Aquillion]

My personal and subjective feeling is that summoners should not be able to use magic. That means no spells. Only skills that summon creatures or enhance their abilities. For the same reason I do not like the detonate skill. Killing your own creations seems so .... un-summoner like.

I don't think that that'd be good for the game.

The problem is that no matter what you do, summoners are not going to be able to summon a creature every single turn. If you don't give summoners support magic of some sort beyond summoning, they'll have nothing to do on most of their turns... that's not very fun at all (at one point, IIRC, alchemists couldn't fire staves over friendly targets, and they tended to have the same problem.)

Also, I strongly dislike the idea of elemental-themed summoning trees -- that overlaps far too much with Archmages and the existing Fire Alchemy tree for alchemists. Elemental-themed trees are, mostly, boring boring boring. They all come down to the same choice used in dozens of RPGs in the past (invest heavily in one place and suck against certain opponents, or diversify and only have some of your abilities be worthless against certain opponents), and people who want that choice here can get it already in several existing classes.

One of the advantages that summoners get is a degree of versatility in their trees -- they can summon whatever best fits the situation, and can easily get a pretty wide variety of effects and approaches through their summons. Making them more specialized would IMHO make them less interesting to play, while reducing part of what distinguishes them from classes like Archmages that apply offensive effects directly rather than through summons.

But in any case, even if they do get more specialized trees, please don't divide it up by element! That's been done to death and was IMHO never terribly interesting design in the first place.

[Aquillion]

-Absorb skill added, replacing Phase Summon

Not sure about this.

Removing Phase Summon means they now have no mobility at all, right? That ability always seemed fairly important to me. There's a lot of useful tricks you can play with it -- I'd really miss it if it were gone. Absorb just seems less interesting of a replacement -- sure, it might give you access to a wide variety of buffs, but mobility is more important and opens up many more strategies.

[marvalis]

Removing Phase Summon means they now have no mobility at all, right?

I kinda liked phase summon too :/. I used it fairly often. IMHO it should stay as it is one of the only mobility talents (besides using teleport or phase door runes, or boots with disengage).

Since hold life and resilience try to do the same (longer duration, more health) merge them and insert phase summon again. I also move the most useful skill the the beginning. Haste seems very strong, and is now level 3. Rage seems very optional, and is now level 4. This looks best for me personal:

Summoning (augmentation): Locked
Phase summon (very good early game escape ability, can be taken at level 10 now!)
Resilience (good overall enhancement, can be take quite early now, beneficial overall)
Haste: gives wild speed (movement infusion) at level 5
Rage: gives free action at level 3

You are probably right about the no spells thing. It is going to be needed somehow. Stafe combat like the alchemist might not be so attractive. I must admit that my summoner never used any weapons except for the bonus they provide. I used to wield a shield+sling for the physical dmg bonus not to attack with. Even with staff mastery, I would still use a sling I think.

Aquillion, if you don't like elemental trees (you are right, they are boring) then could you try to make one of your own. If we can brainstorm some ideas then maybe we can find some good ones.
Imagine you are a summoner, what creature would you summon in your wildest dreams?
so... ideas people?

One more idea: In naruto, there is this guy that can paint creatures. He uses this technique to summon rats that scout for him. Maybe you guys know this? What if we could have a similar ability for the summoner? A channeled skill (like meditation) that summons a rat every x turns for as long as it is active. Those rats have a certain duration, and no attack skills. They have AI that makes them run around to scout.

I'm going to bother you guys with one more . I have been playing the alchemist last night, and I really like how the bomb attack had a cool-down. Between two bombs, you could move around and position yourself without loosing too much dmg (my staff attack did only 16 dmg or whatever at this time). What if the summoner had some skills that require positioning? For example a skill that does double damage when there is a summon on the other side. Maybe even a sling attack xP (or something else, doesn't have to be like this).
Example:

Summoner-sling
Flare (gives light, already exists)
Inertial Shot (knockback, already exists)
Head shot (new, double dmg when a summon is on the other side)
Relaxed shot (stamina regain, already exists)

That would also mean that we have to give the technique/combat-techniques-passive tree as something to unlock.

[Aquillion]

I honestly kind of like the general way the summoning trees are divided up now. Or, at least, I don't see anything objectionable about it. Early on, it ensures that summoners will get access to one new summon in each basic 'role' every 4 levels.

It does tend to discourage them from focusing heavily on one tree (since the trees support each other).


In terms of totally new stuff... one thing that appears in a lot of summoning-related myths and fantasy is the idea of high-risk, high-reward summons which are difficult to control or which require contracts of some sort to manage safely. That might be suitable for a locked summoner tree. On the other hand, they might be worth reserving for another class instead.