[b43] Summona the Cornac Summoner (Winner & Atamathoned)

[LNQ]

My first playthru, and first time playing beyond entering an orc pride / returning to Maj Eyal, so I did a few mistakes in the endgame.

Character summary:
http://te4.org/characters/22720/tome/8c ... 98cac93088

Notes about achievements:
- Defeated Atamathon on first try
- 0 deaths before the last boss, there one death due to being too confident and not really knowing what to do
(died trying to close the last portal because I let myself get targeted for many rounds against the ranged boss)
- Failed the timed quest in far east due to not understanding where to go initially

A few optimization failures:
- I went for armor proficiency, they were points wasted in hindsight. Wanted to make sure I didn't miss on any gear but there was really no useful gear that I needed it for. Those points could've been spent elsewhere .. for mana clash or resolve for instance.
- Wild summoning was 5 class talents wasted, I should've gotten fire drake to lvl 5 and perhaps turtle to lvl 4 instead. Otherwise I think I have perfect class talents for summoner.

Interesting things in my opinion:
- Antimagic was an excellent choice. The antimagic shield basically made my character. Antimagic shield prodigy (Tricky Defenses) was a no-brainer.
- Windtouched speed seemed like the best second prodigy choice as well. Not sure though.
- I was able to get my Magic to 50 temporarily so I could've gotten Blighted Summoning, but I realized that most of the skills the creatures get are based on the character's Magic stat. The abilities actually seemed pretty poor in that sense.
- Two Heroism infunsions ensured I had Heroism on for 20/22 turns or 95% of the time. As you can see in the character dump this meant Cunning in the 120s and Willpower in 150s, which was pretty cool imo
- I don't understand how Willpower base is at 63 .. at some point my willpower base jumped to 63 and cunning base dropped to 57, around the time I ate the second wyrm heart.


Gameplay tips learned from this character (and my previous summoner who stubbornly died permanently at hands of atamathon at lvl39):
- Go for the melee summons + ritch and spider. You're much better off with no AOE summons messing up your game. Hydra and fire drakes are ineffective together with other creatures. Also Hydra's grand arrival poison cloud hurts your units more than the enemies. Check the character summary for in my opinion the best class talent point distribution save for Wild Summon)
- With melee summons you can better fight in close quarters, which is where you'll fight most of the game.
- Max your survivability. The summons will always be strong enough to do damage .. important part is to make sure you don't have troubles staying alive. Mentioned above but antimagic shield was a must for this.
- Get Mindstar mastery ; it was very useful to be a formidable combatant yourself in some situations (finishing off units next to you yourself for instance). Also Leaves Tide is a fantastic survivability skill.

Balance thoughts:
- Summoning range should be changed from 10 to 3 or less. It's laughably easy to fight from afar, especially in open ground. Even a range of 3 wouldn't really hurt the effectiveness of my character much but it would've been a bit more fair.
- Would be nice if at leat some enemies realize when they see a summon that a summoner is close by and after getting rid of all summons would at least go looking if there's a source of the summons nearby. Now all enemies just stand there idly if there is nothing in the LoS after killing a summon.
- Meditation + antimagic shield is super super powerful. Maybe a bit too powerful. I'd up the antimagic shield equilibrium cost a bit so that there would at least be a real chance for the shield to break when meditating if you get a decent amount of elemental damage (I meditated 100% of the game).

Comments welcome

[SageAcrin]

Meditation still halves a Summoner's damage. (If you summon a summon while Meditation is on, its damage is indeed halved.)

It's a valid decision, but it does mean you lose a lot of damage.

Not that I'm necessarily arguing on AM Shield, though. Antimagic is hard to balance well for usefulness-it used to be pretty terrible for a while there, now it varies a lot on class.

Mind building classes, which have lots of Mindpower, get the most out of it-which is compounded by there being absolutely no Arcane Mindstars, meaning they don't eat as much of a hit on equipment. Maybe there needs to be some sidegrading done to make it a little less strong for high Mindpower, but with compensation for physical fighters.

Summon range has already been reduced to 5 in SVN.

Blighted Summoning is about specifically building up Magic, not swapping for it-Cunning and Will are the primary Summoner stats, so they can afford to build up at least some Magic if they want. It looks better when you're not AM, and can use things like Chants/Light escort rewards, though...

[LNQ]

Good to know the range has already been reduced. Range of 5 is still quite a lot but definitely better.

Yep Meditation halves the damage output of summons, but I found that you deal more than enough damage regardless. Only place where I could've considered taking off meditation was at High Peak where some stair guardian Bone Giants were just too durable to kill. But I just bypassed them and went for the stairs after giving up on killing them.

Survivability was just way more important. No meditation would risk to end up in a nasty situation if things escalate too quickly.

[Frumple]

Shed a lil'light -- that "second wyrm heart" you talked about is what happened to your base, and why your willpower is 63. The wyrm bile grants you a category point (generally your last) and randomly adds and subjects points (S'either a max shift of four or five points, either direction, iirc*.) from all of your base stats -- so far as I can recall, outside of actual leveling up, the bile is the only thing in the game that effects your base stats, and the only way to get a base stat over 60. It gives a little message about it in the combat log when you consume the bile, but it's pretty easy to miss. There's no set amount the bile adjusts things, though -- it decides the shift on a per-stat basis. [strike]You could theoretically get no change at all, or a thirty point shift either way, or anything in between.[/strike] This was wrong.

*Actually, just checked the code -- the change range is -3 to 6, so it can drop a stat by three points or increase it by six. You could lose a full 18 stat points, or gain a whopping 36, though it's generally fairly minor gains.