I like playing as a Summoner. I find it most effective when paired with Elf, because you can use their racial to summon blood before any fight (and the pools won't disappear). The blood totems do the most damage and have the most health (about 50% more health). I didn't find much use for Dimensional Bolt; it wasn't very strong and the randomness wasn't helpful, but the Infusion spells were deceptively strong. The armor bonus gets huge and they have a hidden 15% damage buff each. At level 8 my Incarnate has 144 Physical and Magic Armor when Infused, and these can be refreshed for 1 AP each every 3 rounds.
Before a fight I would cut myself for a blood pool, summon the blood incarnate, buff it with the 2 infusion spells, and summon 2 blood totems. Then you can manually have the Blood Incarnate run in and initiate the fight. Usually the totems are far enough back they aren't in danger and get several hits off.
Casting all of this had the benefit of the summon being off-cooldown by the time the fight started. This means I could immediately resummon the incarnate if it died quickly.
The Summoner points increase the amount of shielding your incarnates and totems receive from all sources (as well as more damage), so the Summoner can focus on adding shields to the Incarnate to make it remarkably tanky, and CC resistant.
Early in the game an Elf can eat body parts to learn Fortify and Frost Armor, which saves a couple more points for investing into Summoning. Because the Incarnate becomes so durable, it can get up close to several enemies and nets numerous Opportunity attacks.
I just finished a solo run with a build like this, and it worked really well. I would also strongly recommend Pawn for a summoner. It's very helpful to generate distance between yourself and your summons, which reduces your vulnerability to AoE. This also encourages enemies to hit the Summons and leave the Summoner alone.
I focused my stats into Finesse and used a bow to spend extra AP. Because the blood summons do physical damage, using a bow prevented me from working on 2 separate sources of armor; all of the damage was physical. Even if no blood is available, the Wood Totems can be reliably summoned for Physical, and they STILL do more damage than the elemental forms. This also has added benefit of allowing the Incarnate to Knockdown enemies with its charge, which won't happen for Magic damage variants.
Alternatively, stacking Intellect will increase the potency of armor buffing spells like Fortify and Frost Armor, which has synergy with the bonus received armor on Summons. Intelligence does not increase armor gained from these skills.
I feel like the Summons which attack Magic Armor could really use a damage boost. They are probably weaker due to their potential to add statuses to enemies, but I found that they had so much trouble getting through armor that I rarely got the statuses applied in a timely fashion, not to mention summoning them in safe positions isn't as practical as a Physical damage totem. Then there's the inconvenience that enemies are often immune to the elements near them.
Of the Polymorph skills, the most notable is Skin Graft. Being able to reset all CDs can net a lot of extra action points for an Elf with Adrenaline. You can't double-stack Adrenaline on the same turn (gotta wait for the debuff to wear off) but you can use it again much sooner. For the summoner build, this allows getting 2 totems down in the same turn, in addition to resetting all of your buffs and utility.
Although I don't recommend it, Glass Cannon has huge synergy with this skill setup as the max AP increase from both the Blood Elf Racial and Adrenaline means you'll continue to net extra AP on the turns afterwards (it completely negates the drawback of Adrenaline, but enemies will make you a very high priority and their CC will likely negate any benefits).
Last edited by error3; 07/04/17 01:46 AM.
