Comments on (Pagan) Summons

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Meowakin
Posts: 165
Character: Elsea Hunter

Comments on (Pagan) Summons

Post by Meowakin » June 8th, 2021, 9:27 am

Figured since someone else is making posts about a couple of the Arcana, I should share my thoughts on the state of currently available summons (non-Artifact, non-Epic if there are any) for Paganism. Brief breakdown of what I have:
  • Druid Familiar - Bread and butter, very useful and seems like a good power levels defensively/offensively. Most familiars are essentially tied to the player and cannot be more than 3-4 tiles from them, which actually ends up making them much easier to control/manipulate.
This spell is also wildly versatile and has amazing utility with pack goats, stamina regen, and more recently mana regen. The quagmire has been my no-contest choice for hunting as I have no options that can remotely compete for damage output that the mana regeneration gives me, while also being giant sacks of hitpoints for tanking. Alternatively I can summon up to 4 boglings reliably for a veritable wall of flesh and moderate damage. Only drawback is it takes some time to build up a full force.

  • Summon Fey - Summons a single pixie, pretty short cooldown. Against most enemies the pixie is very fragile, but it promises some respectable damage provided it casts the right spells. Weirdly resistant to some enemies, might have really high corporeal resistance? Not really reliable on their own but they have a small niche thanks to a short cooldown. They are not immune to my AoE (Thorn Burst? or Unholy Sigils) like the other summons.
  • Beast Pack - Summons 9-12 control slots of OSI critters such as boar, hind, great hart, brown bear. Pretty underwhelming and has a long cooldown. Seems to be the weakest option. Alligator so far is the strongest option, and brief testing does have 2 of them beating a bogling (familiar) in combat, albeit slowly. But that requires 8 control slots versus 3. I could see this being designed as a 'burst summon' spell since it can take up your entire control capacity at once, but you're most likely to get a swarm of nuisances to most enemies. Only real potential I see here is for RP reasons currently, such as terrifying weak players or maybe staging arena battles.
General behavior of summons in gameplay - I find that the behavior of familiars being tied to a certain range of me actually makes them much easier to manage, and also makes NPC mages a complete non-threat unless they aggressively use dispels (risen betrayer, blighted keeper so far in my experience dispel summons very quickly). Non-tethered summons will blindly chase off most mages, however, and easily run out of range to respond to commands, making it far more annoying than anything else. Archer AI practically ignores summons altogether, so I have to rely on tactics completely independent of summons to deal with them. Melee is pretty straight forward, barring nova effects (the one instance I'd prefer familiars not be tethered so closely)

I'd like to see more varied targeting behavior of NPCs in relation to summons. It would be interesting if some melee NPCs used the same targeting logic as archers providing they have a route to the target, and if some archers would actually try to deal with my summons. That could present some interesting challenges as archer damage tends to be just as high as melee and can bring down my summons quickly in my few experiences where they have targeted my summons in rare cases.

I've also noticed some oddities in summons targeting behavior, wherein I've had cases of an enemy not being aggro'd on them unless I attack the enemy directly, with the summons utterly ignoring the All Kill command if they are otherwise engaged with an enemy. Usually this is an issue with enemies that have spell reflect since I rely on the Guard command heavily to control them, and a spell being reflected does not cause it to register as an attack on the target. As a work around I find I can use war mode and double click them, but it's rather awkward for me. The kill command should take absolute priority over anything else for summon targeting, and in my prior experience on UO shards it has (but my memory might be fuzzy there).

Suggestion - I'd like some way to rely on summons as my actual damage source. Perhaps some way for me to channel mana into my summons to increase their damage?

TL;DR - In most cases there is absolutely no contest in choice for hunting, I will always want to use Druid Familiar even if I just want bruisers

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