The Tavern

I don't understand the broad distaste certain players have for playing with allies.

I'd like to draw a distinction between two separate uses of allies:

(1) Characters that are based around allies as core mechanic, that largely expect to use allies in every fight. Examples include the summoner background, some necromancer builds, hep, yred, beogh, fedhas for a while.

(2) Characters that have occasional or incidental ally effects. Examples include Trog BIA, TSO Angels, Scythe of Curses Procs, Phial of Floods, Sack of Spiders.

It is mainly a distaste for (2) that I don't understand. Can anyone who has this view elaborate where they are coming from?

I strongly dislike 1, but 2 is OK, mostly because allies are limited by piety or items, or it's a passive ability. 2 also can use melee, which isn't hindered much by allies.

Shtopit wrote:I strongly dislike 1, but 2 is OK, mostly because allies are limited by piety or items, or it's a passive ability. 2 also can use melee, which isn't hindered much by allies.

Fwiw i always combine 1 style play with melee attacks by the pc, it seems like by far the most effective way to play (treating the allies as enhancements of melee damage, rather than trying to tank with them by shoveling them by the bucketload at your opponents, which always feels incredibly ineffective, wasteful and tedious to me)

Summons are a conjuration that last several turn for the same MP. And can block LOS for you. And can cause distractions.

Type-2 allies are just plain incompatible with a) ranged fighters and b) conjurers. This is particularly true for end-game conjurers or level-9 spell slingers. Having an ally on the screen means that you either need to snuff it or that you cannot use your best weapons until it's out of the way (meaning: off-screen).

In other situations I occasionally use type-2 allies. BiA are good for bringing down oklobs, for example. But most of the time I still avoid them, because, as duvessa once rightly said, the moment you have an ally on the screen, all your actions revolve around that ally.

Siegurt wrote:Fwiw i always combine 1 style play with melee attacks by the pc, it seems like by far the most effective way to play (treating the allies as enhancements of melee damage, rather than trying to tank with them by shoveling them by the bucketload at your opponents, which always feels incredibly ineffective, wasteful and tedious to me)

This is not clear to me. It depends on the character.

For instance, a DESu can play more or less as a pure summoner, especially in the later game. I find that typically I should just let the summons kill the monsters; my turns are best spent moving to favorable terrain, creating more summons, or ordering the existing ones around. Whatever melee damage I manage to inflict is relatively insignificant. For something like a MfSu with polearms, standing behind the summons or alongside them, a hybrid style can work.

bel wrote:
Siegurt wrote:Fwiw i always combine 1 style play with melee attacks by the pc, it seems like by far the most effective way to play (treating the allies as enhancements of melee damage, rather than trying to tank with them by shoveling them by the bucketload at your opponents, which always feels incredibly ineffective, wasteful and tedious to me)

This is not clear to me. It depends on the character.

For instance, a DESu can play more or less as a pure summoner, especially in the later game. I find that typically I should just let the summons kill the monsters; my turns are best spent moving to favorable terrain, creating more summons, or ordering the existing ones around. Whatever melee damage I manage to inflict is relatively insignificant. For something like a MfSu with polearms, standing behind the summons or alongside them, a hybrid style can work.

It is less about the damage you inflict, then about giving the summons more time to do damage before being destroyed, generally the pc is much tougher than most summons, DE being one of the more fragile examples, but if you have a single target, and enough summons to attack it from the available directions, more summons are just shoveling more MP at something that is already fundamentally dead.

It is definitely possible to play that way (that is why a lot of summon strategy suggestions involve a lot of channeling) it might be safer (i dont usually feel that way, personally, as a summoner who is out of mp and cant do anything without allies is pretty exposed, but i can certainly see the argument for "if they never get the chance to hit me they can never kill me" ) but i guarantee it is 100% less fun to do so.

Plus by directly engaging the enemies with summons as support i can more directly control the motion of the bad guys leading them by the nose past clouds of summons to take a bunch of un retaliated damage. And if my hps ever do drop into the red zone i alway have a cloud of summons to drop behind to give me separation and safety.

It might possibly be that it is slightly less safe, but it is they way it seems most reasonable to play.

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Dislike Playing with Allies?

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