Playing pure Summoner is not fun


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Dungeon Dilettante

Posts: 4

Joined: Friday, 22nd February 2013, 15:41

Post Sunday, 21st August 2022, 14:19

Playing pure Summoner is not fun

Hi,

Summoning is weak, tedious and less fun than other spellcasting schools.

Despite having one of the most climatic spells in the game like Malign Gateway or Haunt playing pure summoner feels like picking a worse magic school, like you are trying challenge mode which is not only harder but most importantly unnecessarily tedious and boring. I am not even talking about balance e.g. how much damage conjuration spells can inflict in comparison to summoned cratures (conjurations win most of the time), but about the fact that summoning tends to be unreliable, summoned beings are hard to controll and you cannot be sure about their next move. Enemy monsters abjuring your summons and flooding you with theirs is one of the most unfun combat mechanic i have ever encountered in roguelike. Summoning has probably one of the strongest miscasts effect, it can royally screw you, much harder than taking unavoidable damage from conjuration misscast. The idea is why would you play summoning if conjuration is stronger, safer, more reliable and is not affected by strange anti spell school mechanic. When you play Summoner you dont feel as powerfull like you do when you cast high level conjurations clearing entire screen of enemies in one or two casts and that is exactly what makes playing spellcaster fun in computer game. Currently you dont feel powerfull enough as a summoner in DCSS.

Couple of ideas to make it more fun:

- summoning lacks spells that crates 'wall' of monsters which would physically protect you from enemies (beings summoned with such spells would constantly follow you and place themselves between you and your enemies with no need to order them to do so). If this is not possible how about 'Taunt' mechanic that would force enemies to attack your summons
- I would like to be able to give orders and see an indicator of the order on the target enemy (visible marker on enemy icon), after taking order my summons would behave exaclty the way they are supposed to - stop doing anything but chasing or attacking the target. Currently ordering my summons does not necesarilly make them follow the order.
- i belive we need more smite-like summoning spells, to make dangerous targets elimination easier
- the fact that abjuration was removed from player spell pool but late game monsters still have accesss to it makes me want to stop playing summoning entirely. Seriously just go conjuration and forget about any issues. In comparison, Conjuarion spells have no issues. Resistances are easily managable.

Abyss Ambulator

Posts: 1131

Joined: Tuesday, 4th January 2011, 15:03

Post Sunday, 21st August 2022, 21:05

Re: Playing pure Summoner is not fun

I agree that summons are still not very fun, altough I'd like to say that they are better than they used to be, and thanks for the improvement for the developers! But yes, playing with summons is more tedious than playing with damaging spells or melee or ranged weapons, since there are more actors whose actions you need watch every single round.

However, I think that this tediousness blurs your judgement about summons. Summons lets you disengage monsters that are next to you, summons can block line of fire from enemies. Also, while they are not fast to deal damage they are mana efficient. Long lasting summons like ice beasts can easily be casted before you meet anyone. These are actually pretty strong points for summons, but because summons are tedious to play well, usually players (me included) plays really suboptimally with them, hence they seem weaker than they really are.

Yeah, enemy abjurers are annoying, but they are not very common actually. Note that in crawl you are not encouraged to rely on a single approach (even if most approaches like damaging spells works fine alone), and nothing prevents a summoner to learn some damaging spells, melee or ranged combat. Summons can support a melee fighter really well. (Yeah, I miss abjuration too as it simply made playing summoners less annoying, and they are really annoying.)

So my response: avoid suggestions that makes summons stronger, they are strong. Try to identify key points that makes them annoying to use (and annoying to use well), and try to mitigate those.

Zot Zealot

Posts: 1004

Joined: Thursday, 16th August 2018, 21:19

Post Monday, 22nd August 2022, 13:30

Re: Playing pure Summoner is not fun

I agree that the summoning miscast is one of the most punishing miscasts in the game, though I don't recall having actual trouble with it since they tuned down the strength of the summoned nameless horror.

I actually like summoning, even in its current state. A summoning game takes a while. You could call that tedious, but you can also call it engaging.
If you're finding summons unreliable, I suspect you're not summoning enough creatures and not min-maxing sufficiently to get strong enough summons.

It's a little odd to me that you mention Malign Gateway as the ultimate spell, since I've found it rather lacklustre since the change. If you could choose the location of the portal it'd be good, but half the time it's in the wrong location to do anything and it no longer has the utility it used to of killing out-of-LOS.

My ideas for making summoning more fun:
- Make magic Ash great again. Bring back across-the-board magic buffs and bring back Transfer Knowledge.
- Make Sif Muna an actual mage god again. Change Sif so you can spam spells one or two levels above what you'd normally be able to.

Crypt Cleanser

Posts: 747

Joined: Friday, 6th January 2012, 12:30

Post Tuesday, 23rd August 2022, 02:52

Re: Playing pure Summoner is not fun

I like summoning a lot in its current state because the design encourages the player to use multiple different summon spells at the same time, and there's a wide selection of summoning spells to choose from. In my opinion it's currently the best designed spell school (note: I do NOT necessarily want other spell schools to be made more complex or """interesting"""). I wouldn't change the general design of summoning right now, other than maybe make abjuration less strong.
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Ziggurat Zagger

Posts: 4478

Joined: Wednesday, 23rd October 2013, 07:56

Post Tuesday, 23rd August 2022, 06:40

Re: Playing pure Summoner is not fun

I'd like abjuration to come back as a higher-level spell, so it would only be worth learning for those who invest a lot into summoning magic.
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Bloat: 17: RaRoPrPh{GuStGnCa}{ArEtZoNb}KiPaAnDrBXDBQOApDaMeAGBiOCNKAsFnFlUs{RoBoNeWi

Slime Squisher

Posts: 392

Joined: Sunday, 11th September 2016, 17:21

Post Thursday, 22nd September 2022, 21:45

Re: Playing pure Summoner is not fun

Conjurer is the best mage background because it has the most INT, but I think as spell schools, Conjuration and Summoning are about equal in effectiveness. But, Summoning is significantly more difficult to succeed with, as it all but requires a more nuanced understanding of monster behavior to get the monsters fighting the summons you want them to, as well as an unusual progression path for a spellcaster. In particular, you have to invest more heavily in spellpower so that your summons are durable enough to actually accomplish something before getting flattened. Also, Hepliaklqana is (in my opinion) a better choice than traditional spellcasting gods due to its synergy with Guardian Golem, its ability to handle specialized enemies that most summoning spells aren't as effective against (invisibility, silence, abjuration, etc.), its utility as an emergency escape when situations get out of control, and its ability to clear out weaker enemies without requiring MP expenditure or skill investment in physical attacks.

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