Blades Runner
Posts: 616
Joined: Thursday, 25th October 2012, 03:19
The current state of summoning
The result? It was fantastic the entire game, against the living. Infestation was particularly great, the new cactus summon was great, lightning spire pretty good... summon horrible things was solid. I could vamp drain stuff and tear stuff up pretty well once I got my army going. All well and good, even clearing Zot 5 out.
Well, then I got to extended with nothing but pan/hell/tomb left. Armed with necromutation that I could cast fairly well just from my high necromancy, I figured, I'd see how it goes. I had started the game with Gozag, but switched to Mak for the life on kills. Well, to my surprise at first, I realized I got no life on kill when my summons killed stuff. Oh well, no big deal so long as I could still drain stuff and use vampiric tactics. I set off to try my hand in tomb.
On paper, I figured, I should be able to weather the torments fairly well with necromutation while my army of summons burned down the enemies. It didn't go well. Smites were badly damaging, my armies got crushed pretty quickly, I got no life on kill from what they did manage to kill, and I couldn't quaff any potions to recover. That left blink and teleport as the primary means to reset the fight. The mummies summoning stuff triggered lots of traps though, and without a fast way to clear out the quickly booming piles of enemies, it would just deteriorate into a mess. Now, I can handle tomb without spells, but it generally requires lots of fog, blink and silence scrolls to whittle it down to a sane state. But, I didn't want to test the build in this manner--I wanted to see how well the summons could fight back. It was an awful mess.
What's the main problem? If the build isn't some stealthy ninja build, it's easily overwhelmed without AOE. AOE spells are barely compatible with summoning, except for perhaps ignition. I didn't train ignition since it didn't fit in with my test, and if I were to do it, it would then be used way more exclusively than the summons since I'd get more bang for my buck getting life and mana back when things died, and the hordes of summons would have been kept under better control than summons. Probably this level 8 spell would have done better on it's own than all the entire summoning and necromancy spell schools combined. If I wasn't invested in summoning, it could be another flavor, pick one - "tornado", chain lightning, shatter, firestorm - whatever, they'd all return life.
To further contrast the situation with a build that can take tso - it will get life AND mana per kill, and if it's focused either on axes or a big AOE spell, or even with neither of these, it'll still perform better from holy blasts (invoked), and on top of that still be able to quaff potions. But, what about torment? Well, yeah it still hurts, but the fact of the matter is that you can basically melee until you're low on health/mana, then drop a nuke and you're back on top again. The demonspawn with summoning couldn't do anything but just get beat down until the need to retreat and reset the fight happens.
This is an example in tomb, but the same basic issues apply through the rest of extended since they have torment, although it's perhaps not quite at the level of the tomb.
What's the conclusion: summoning/necromancy and vampiric effects can make for an outstanding standard game, but get really awful in extended. I can understand some trade-offs, but such a large gap doesn't seem called for. What's the fix? I'm not sure! For starters, if mak accepted kills from summons to restore life, that would have possibly tipped the scales. What's the problem with it, when you cast a whole lot of mana to get some sort-of-ok critters in extended and they take ages to kill something, meanwhile everything is mostly still targeting you.... versus, 8 or 9 mana and you can nearly wipe out a whole screen of enemies and get life for them almost immediately. Another fix might be to permit lichform to quaff potions. It's already a hefty investment, and getting confused a single time can still be the death of you. I like this solution less though since it would break interesting dynamics. If mak gave life for kills from summons though, the standard game could definitely be way too easy. Isn't there a middle ground somewhere that extended can be a bit less harsh on the undead/evil builds without a huge imbalance in the standard game?
When everything gets boiled down, it's a fight to keep health/mana up. I don't see anything more effective than AOE weapons (axes), and AOE spells combined with TSO, or Mak, and currently Mak is quite limiting for requiring personal kills, and not giving mana back (normally). Sure torment hurts the living more, but there are more than enough nasty situations like dispel undead, smite, lack of potions, lack of invocations to cast holy blasts that I don't see why evil builds need to be gimped by comparison.
And if anyone says you don't need any life on kills for extended, err... sure, there are edge cases, but come on. And to be clear, I'm not including stealthy "I stole all the runes and ran away from everything builds", I guess because, I just never have a good experience with that tactic, even though I'm aware some people can do that successfully. Sorry.