I love animal based summon classes (and hate undead summons) but have trouble playing summons in any of the classes for Primalist.
There are two main problems in my opinion: durability and stupidity.
I’m not sure if I can use an absolute here, but it seems like no one uses summons for any high level play. They die almost instantly and then you have a 20 second cooldown before resummoning. If they don’t die right away, they go off on their own to fight a single mob while you have already ran screens away.
I think summons should scale protections with stats and levels as well as HP/Damage. Protections could scale +1% per character level but also +5 per stat, or vice versa. This would give them roughly 1000 global protections at lvl 100 with 100 attunement/strength so end game they can stay alive to do something.
The addition of skill trees to healing skills can also help summon durability (and probably their damage), but I believe the summons needs to be more sturdy on their own first.
Summon AI is absurdly aggressive. This is great early game when a wolf or sabretooth cat can offscreen mobs and gain your XP as you move through the map. Later on when you want the summons to stay nearby its an absolute chore.
Fury Leap’s bonus to wolves/sabretooth doesn’t stop their current action which I believe is a mistake. Often the pets just run super fast 3 screens away again to that one mob I didn’t care about again.
Would be nice to alter the AI so pets stay a bit closer to the player and disengage mobs after a certain amount of distance between the player and pet.
I’ve not had that problem with Fury’s Leap personally.
I do generally agree though - pets do seem to be underwhelming on the survivability front late game, and their super aggressive AI is nice early but not so nice later on.
I would love for pets to have some kind of leashing radius around the player, so if they move too far away they disengage and run back.
Totally agree with you on both AI and survival. At 150ish waves its almost impossible to keep my pets alive as primalist. Leap makes their Ai semi tolerable, but a lot of the time they seem to run off screen and do god knows what haha.
I have no problem keeping my Beastmaster pets alive. Summon Sprigran - spec into healing aura nodes. Druid - spec into minion healing effectiveness. The passive HP/sec is great.
I use 3 wolves + 1 saber and leap. It keeps them bunched up if they run off screen. Obviously the Spriggan is the limiting factor for me- he has to run after me and only gets “stuck” if a mob attacks him and I don’t spot it. I kill fast enough that it doesn’t bug me too much in Monolith. In the arena, its perfect because I’ll camp in one area and then I get to utilize the Spriggon special ability. I’ve encountered no difficulty with my pets or myself dying to do the insane passive healing.
The problem I’m encountering is my OWN survivability. Although health regen is insane (from 1 HP to 500 HP takes maybe 3 sec; if my Spriggon ability is active then maybe one full sec) I am running into difficulties with getting 1 shot. I need to stack more health. I have never seen my pets dealing with this “one shot problem” and I have never had a pet die. I’m been doing 10+ timeline monolith in the mid lvl 60s.
The current problem with my build is I’m playing melee with my pets. My pets do fine on their own.
I do that with my druid, if you don’t count the poison totems as pets (as I have no minion gear on me). Along with various healing passives and my own entangling roots skilled to heal/buff, works pretty well till monolith lvl 20 (probably even 30+, but don’t have that much time in a single session). The main problem are elemental resistances, attunement gets you only so much…
I’m no fan of health, since it reduces the protections and healing effectiveness
