Summoner Class

[Ninjamestari]

2. Ninjamestari - Chanter already has a lot of abilities that go well with summons: AoE buffs, debuffs, and heals, foe-only AoE... it's already been designed for use with summons. A Summoner subclass could add the ability to have two summons at once (including summons from items or other classes when multiclassing).

 

*puts a finger in both ears and starts making loud la-la-noices*

 

Seriously though, I didn't just mean abilities that combo well with summons, I meant a whole set of powers, talents and passive abilities that modify the amount of summons you can have up at any one time, what your summons can do in terms of abilities and passives and stuff like that. :D

Edited February 6, 2017 by Ninjamestari

[Ganrich]

Or maybe:

 

Summoner/Invoker - chants are weaker / don't stack, but summons (or invocations in general) cost one less. Perhaps need to learn the stories / lore of the entities being summoned. (Just as the Black Jacket matches weapon specializations and items to particular enemies' weaknesses, or the monk subclass consumes drugs for bonuses... the under-utilized in-game mechanism for Chanter could be based around learning lore, and also encourage people to read more of the "flavor  text" and learn about the setting.)

 

Bard-like / Chant-focused: chants are stronger, invocations take longer or are weaker. Perhaps can compose new chants based on learning new lore and get more chant overlap time. (For spells, can use scrolls, and take advantage of bonuses. Maybe learns lore about fire and composes a chant which gives +fire damage and has a long linger time.)

 

Not bad. I made the recommendation early on in PoE1 that Chanters should get a specific talent that lets them cast from a scroll once per encounter without consuming it. Combined with deep pockets it would have made the Chanters a good bit more active without constantly making scrolls. Imho, Deep Pockets is a must on Chanters anyway, but ymmv.

 

However, scrolls are getting an overhaul. Josh said somewhere that he doesn't want them casting spells available to any classes. That could make that Bard-like idea incredibly viable, or make it much less so. We don't know enough to say. I think he said this about scrolls on one of his SomethingAwful posts.

 

I think the class needs to be able to be made to have the potential to be much more active, and invocations need to be useable at lower difficulties (as I said above). This should be regardless of whether you want summons or not. Having a class that doesn't use half its features because of difficulty isn't good design. Half the fights in PoE are over, or close enough as to not matter, before you have the Chants to cast. This is even worse with higher level Invocations. Y

 

Maybe, instead of Chants building counters based on saying the phrases over time, you could increase the counters based on number of targets effected by the Chant? Then increase the required number of counters to cast Invocations as necessary. That way, it is less time based, and more positional. You could even increase counts if the Chanter is mixing buffs and debuffs, or if they aren't spamming the same phrase repeatedly. I don't know. Just some ideas.

[Yonjuro]

 

 ...

 In PoE, summons are weaker (on purpose), they don't last as long (also on purpose),  and the chanter is the main summoner partially because it provides a time interval before the first summon and between summons. 

 

I think you hit on something here about summoning in POE because the Figurines were so great for this very reason. Summons that can distract npcs at beginning or during a fight are so powerful because it frees up you actual group to devastate the enemy in the mean time. The summons dont have to be particularly powerful themselves. So there has to be some balancing with using them.

 

 

 That's a good point. A summoner who could summon faster would have that advantage. It is similar to the low level 'summon monsters' spells in BG2; they only summoned cannon fodder relative to most of the enemies, but that's often better than the party members being targeted.

 

 One way this could work with a chanter summoner would be to have summons available any time, including very weak summons at the start of combat, but to have them get more powerful the longer you build up chants. Of course, that wouldn't satisfy the people who just don't want the chanter to be the summoner, but maybe another class could work that way too.

[Heijoushin]

 

Part of the fun of summoning is summoning monsters ahead of time, either for scouting purposes... 

 

Summoned monsters didn't remove fog of war in IE games so I don't think they could really be used for scouting.

 

 

Quite so, "scouting" is perhaps an exaggeration. But the monsters could go in first and take the arrows for your party. If you party is already engaged with the enemy by the time the summoned monsters appear, then they're not very good arrow fodder. 

 

Also, summoning in advance allows spellcasters to solo (to a degree) since the summons can be their shield.

1. Send goblin summons in.

2. Enemy gather around goblins.

3. Hurl fireball

4. Repeat

Ha! Good fun!

 

But I guess I'm fighting a lost cause. If they're making all abilities "per encounter", that means that the abilities can only be used *in* the encounter.

[SaruNi]

 

 

Part of the fun of summoning is summoning monsters ahead of time, either for scouting purposes... 

 

Summoned monsters didn't remove fog of war in IE games so I don't think they could really be used for scouting.

 

 

Quite so, "scouting" is perhaps an exaggeration. But the monsters could go in first and take the arrows for your party. If you party is already engaged with the enemy by the time the summoned monsters appear, then they're not very good arrow fodder. 

 

Also, summoning in advance allows spellcasters to solo (to a degree) since the summons can be their shield.

1. Send goblin summons in.

2. Enemy gather around goblins.

3. Hurl fireball

4. Repeat

Ha! Good fun!

 

But I guess I'm fighting a lost cause. If they're making all abilities "per encounter", that means that the abilities can only be used *in* the encounter.

 

 

In PoE 1 you could have one character with boots of speed and good ranged / spell defenses or immunities initiate combat at a significant distance away from the rest of your party and time it so that when the enemies arrive your summons will be cast in their path. That's how I managed a lot of Concelhaut despite being at a much lower level than I should have been.

 

Since they're making all abilities at least per-encounter, they're probably going to make items like the figurines per-encounter too, right? (Maybe they take up Empower points or have a limited number of charges.) So a Summoner could take a talent that gives bonuses for figurines (maybe they take less Empower points or get additional charges) that would allow her to summon even before getting enough invocations. And some wearable items, weapons, or scrolls could give bonuses for summoned creatures. (Maybe even a high-level talent which allows the summoner to create figurines out of costly materials.)

Edited February 6, 2017 by SaruNi

[draego]

Josh mentions there will be chanter sub class that focuses on summoning in the all day stream 5.47

[Boeroer]

Have a look here: https://clips.twitch.tv/obsidian/HappyCrowGrammarKing

[injurai]

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The Chanter is the summoner class.

 

Chanter can basically summon stuff but it's not necessary just summoning IMO. To me chanters magic comes from chanting phrases. It can focus on buffs, debuffs, dispell, offensive magic and i think literally anything if you asked me.

 

 

​Yeah, but when are summoners just summoners and not something more.