Vaults Vanquisher
Posts: 428
Joined: Friday, 17th December 2010, 22:07
Playing summoners
With both of my relatively successful summoners, I've found that I'm tripping the OOD timer on almost every other level and it goes something like this:
d4: run into something nasty, like joseph, and start spamming mammals, and duck into a corridoor or into a corner. It takes several waves before he's finally worn down, but eventually he succumbs.
d4: when he's dead, go to the next room and find Grinder, and spammal him, resting to regain mana several times, etc
d4: do this a few more times, going through many many turns.
d4: While I'm resting for mana back, a stone giant comes strolling along, and I spammal him too, and the next one, etc.
At this point, I'm like level 12, and finally I clear the floor (ie explore every room), and repeat the same thing on roughly every other level. It's quite time consuming and laborious.
Another question is efficiency. My best summoner, basically died to boredom, but I wasn't sure what the most efficient spell was. Summon Dragon wasn't online yet, so I was using summon ugly things, which cost 8 mana, but I could usually summon 6 at a time, channel, and summon a few more, and take down most things, but even seemingly trivial encounters could take about a minute to set up the summons, target my opponent and tell the things to attack it, and then back into a corner to channel, and resummon. very tiresome.
I'm loath to use summon demons, since I don't want to deal with a hostile summon. What is a good strategy to speed up my play-style here? I don't really want to hybridize into melee or direct damage unless it's really necessary, and I want to use my available experience to get Summon Dragon up, which seems to be what every self-respecting summoner should strive for.
Also, it's a pain to always tell my summons to attack. It seems that by default they only attack if you initiate, or if something attacks you. I'm getting tired of typing 'taf' over and over again. Is there a way to set up your summons so they just brainlessly attack whatever hostile is within eye-shot?