Game Mechanics Increasing Summoner use speed + other summoning tweaks

[Fred_D_Terrarian]

As the end of our journey is approaching, I felt like our fellow companions deserve some tweaks. After all, friends help friends right?
Increase staff use speed
First off, as title says, increase the use speed of summon staves. The stardust dragon staff has the fastest use time that I noticed, but it's still rather slow considering I need to click around 8 times. Make all summoner weapons, including sentry staves, almost-instant in terms of use time (similar to the venus magnum). This is so that frustration after death is reduced, and so that summoners don't get squished during an event after just respawning. This would also help in terms of combat, but I'll explain in my Next point.
Fire-on-summon for all Sentries
Make all Sentry Summons fire on summon, like the etherian sentries do. Until after plantera, I used the ballista sentry as a means to manual do damage to bosses and enemies. It was rather useful and it gave me an extra layer of fun and another thing to do, as only dodging feels rather weird to me. This got to me when I got my hands on my biome weapon, the Staff of the frost Hydra, as it didn't fire on summon. This, in conjunction with my first suggestion, can allow summoners to deal more DPS in combat, thus balancing (imo) the overall weak hit tolerance of the class. We could also take this to the next level by adding aditional effects to attack-on-summon: the queen spider could fire a spread of 3 eggs upwards, the frost hydra could fire a spread or a burst of ice fire, the lunar portal could fire a lightning bolt that inflicts electrocution, and the lunar crystal staff could fire 2 homing projectiles for every enemy in a certain radius. If these seem rather OP, then I suppose you could reduce the use time of these sentries instead of making them insta-use, but that would just take away what I would love the summoner to be, which is the ultimate glass cannon if I didn't mention it.
Minion staff cap effects
Cap-effects for minion weapons. If we could use sentry staves as active weapons, why not minion staves? These would only trigger when used while its minion is out and when the minion cap is reached. As such, the in-game minion replacement would have to be removed (i meant certain summons prioritizing over others, thus replacing a summon when its staff is used). These effects could be for buffing summons, making them fire a projectile towards cursor, or something else. This and the second suggestion would be for making Summoners a more active class.

Etc.
I know this doesn't belong here, but here:
An accessory that supports impure summoners. This would be something obtainable early game, so that summoners could at least use something else other than summons to fight early game. The accessory would remove attack-on-summon and cap-attacks, but it would buff the weapon used instead. The weapon buff would be based off of the active summon, would increase with more of the same minion, and can stack with effects from other minions (although the overall buff would be less than compared to using a single kind of minion). For weapon buffs, these could be as simple as weapon imbues but for everything, or be as strong as extra projectiles or damaging particle trails.
An accessory to really give "umpf" to summoner puries could also be desired. This would also be obtained early game, and instead of simply giving stats it would give effects to the summons instead. The buff could be for debuff infliction, for increasing the RoF or attack speed of the minion, make you, the minion and its projectiles leave damaging particles, and/or reduce or completely remove I-frames as a debuff (my personal favorite imo). These would only be active when using summon weapons only: if even a single point of non-summon damage would be dealt then these buffs would deactive for 10 seconds (another miscellaneous suggestion, but I'd also like for the Shield of Cthulu to be changed to just deal unclassed damage because I feel like this gem of an item shouldn't just be limited to buffs to melee damage and because it would be a liability to summoners if the idea above were to be added).
These are all I can think of right now, but I will be sure to expand upon this in the future.

Edit: added a suggestion for a summoner purist accessory and polished the post

 

[Baconfry]

it gave me an extra layer of fun and another thing to do, as only dodging feels rather weird to me.

If it feels weird, that’s because it is weird. Summoners are not supposed to sit back and let the summons do everything. Or rather, if you do that, you should expect to perform much worse than the other classes. If you want to be a purist, that’s your choice, but don’t expect to be as effective in combat as everyone else.

 

[Lord Garak]

If it feels weird, that’s because it is weird. Summoners are not supposed to sit back and let the summons do everything. Or rather, if you do that, you should expect to perform much worse than the other classes. If you want to be a purist, that’s your choice, but don’t expect to be as effective in combat as everyone else.

On the contrary, that's precisely what they're supposed to do. Which is why we need more active Summoner weapons.

 

[Baconfry]

On the contrary, that's precisely what they're supposed to do. Which is why we need more active Summoner weapons.

Adding active summoner weapons would be a paradigm shift. Not necessarily a bad one, and I don’t disagree with the idea itself—only this rationale. I support summoning interactivity because it would be a cool new feature, and not because it would fit a preconceived (and not necessarily accurate) notion of what summoning is supposed to be.

 

[Sigma90]

Summons are still very much a support class as opposed to a main class. As Baconfry said, you're not supposed to just sit there. You're supposed to equip and use some other weapons. Personally, I combine summons with long-range melee weapons, but you could combine summons with range or magic. Therein is the tradeoff. You'll never be as good as a 'pure' class unless you're willing to sacrifice some of your summon power to boost your melee / ranged / magic power.

An accessory that supports impure summoners. This would be something obtainable early game, so that summoners could at least use something else other than summons to fight early game.

Early game is not supposed to be class focused. That's why all of the wood and early ore armour sets provide generic boosts. It's not until you get to Molten armour tier that armour starts giving class-specific buffs. That's a good thing, because a new player should not be worried about what class they should play as. They should be experimenting to find out what suits their play style. The first realistically obtained summon weapon and armour is not available until you've killed Queen Bee*. There's no need for a hand-holding accessory to tide players over until then. Equip a Shackle. Equip some climbing gear, or something to swim with.
* Slime Staff is too rare to be realistically obtained early.

Sorry, but I think this is a solution in search of a problem. I play summons from time to time (and doing it now), but I don't think it needs a boost.

 

[Lord Garak]

Summons are still very much a support class as opposed to a main class. As Baconfry said, you're not supposed to just sit there. You're supposed to equip and use some other weapons. Personally, I combine summons with long-range melee weapons, but you could combine summons with range or magic. Therein is the tradeoff. You'll never be as good as a 'pure' class unless you're willing to sacrifice some of your summon power to boost your melee / ranged / magic power.


Early game is not supposed to be class focused. That's why all of the wood and early ore armour sets provide generic boosts. It's not until you get to Molten armour tier that armour starts giving class-specific buffs. That's a good thing, because a new player should not be worried about what class they should play as. They should be experimenting to find out what suits their play style. The first realistically obtained summon weapon and armour is not available until you've killed Queen Bee*. There's no need for a hand-holding accessory to tide players over until then. Equip a Shackle. Equip some climbing gear, or something to swim with.
* Slime Staff is too rare to be realistically obtained early.

Sorry, but I think this is a solution in search of a problem. I play summons from time to time (and doing it now), but I don't think it needs a boost.

There should be no "support" classes in this game. Each class is supposed to be able to have advantages and disadvantages that leave them pretty much on the same footing, something the other classes already struggle with. Summoner straight-up drops the ball with its incomplete feeling design and lack of options.

 

[Sigma90]

There should be no "support" classes in this game. Each class is supposed to be able to have advantages and disadvantages that leave them pretty much on the same footing, something the other classes already struggle with. Summoner straight-up drops the ball with its incomplete feeling design and lack of options.

Agreed; that's the same problem with the Throwing class. But we have to make do with what we have. If it were up to me, summoner would be a hybrid melee/magic class, throwing would be a hybrid melee/ranged class and something else for ranged/magic. The hybrid classes could benefit from both class's modifiers, but wouldn't be as good as a 'pure' class.
Summoner's advantage is the dual-nature of its operation: summons plus something else. The disadvantage is the lack of defence and the dual-nature not being as strong as a single class.

 

[Acamaeda]

The reason that Summoners aren't balanced for pure Summoning is that it's always an option to use another weapon alongside your Summons. If pure Summoners were balanced with other classes, Summoners with other weapons would be overpowered.

 

[Lord Garak]

The reason that Summoners aren't balanced for pure Summoning is that it's always an option to use another weapon alongside your Summons. If pure Summoners were balanced with other classes, Summoners with other weapons would be overpowered.

Not if whatever supplemental, secondary summoning weapons were added were weak enough damage-wise to both complement their partner tools while at the same time present new options to discourage dual-class styles. Like a cross between an accessory and a weapon, one you have to keep using to gain its advantages rather than switching to a new weapon.

 

[Fred_D_Terrarian]

Agreed; that's the same problem with the Throwing class. But we have to make do with what we have. If it were up to me, summoner would be a hybrid melee/magic class, throwing would be a hybrid melee/ranged class and something else for ranged/magic. The hybrid classes could benefit from both class's modifiers, but wouldn't be as good as a 'pure' class.
Summoner's advantage is the dual-nature of its operation: summons plus something else. The disadvantage is the lack of defence and the dual-nature not being as strong as a single class.

really, i wanted to suggest buffing summoner as a semi-make up for the fact that ranger's getting a "massive" buff in 1.4 as throwing is gonna get migrated to there, and also because i think the fact the summoner has such a low defense could be used as one of it's quirks, similar to how mage does it. if anything, the summoner lacks more reliable damage or anything that a player can do while still counting towards summon damage. the quasi bullet hell play style of the summoner is what i like about it, and it's a shame that the damage it outputs usually doesn't compare to how much you've been dodging.

 

[Acamaeda]

Rangers aren't really getting a massive buff if you're talking about throwing stuff. Throwing weapons are all pre-Hardmode, where classes don't matter that much and you can mix things up more. In Hardmode, once class-based bonuses are big enough to matter, throwing weapons quickly become obsolete.

And for doing damage as a Summoner, it's just not designed for exclusively doing summon damage. The devs aren't going to put in a ton of work to balance the game for some specific self-imposed challenges. Just use a non-Summon weapon on the side, or accept that you're going to be weaker for choosing not to use one.

 

[Lord Garak]

Rangers aren't really getting a massive buff if you're talking about throwing stuff. Throwing weapons are all pre-Hardmode, where classes don't matter that much and you can mix things up more. In Hardmode, once class-based bonuses are big enough to matter, throwing weapons quickly become obsolete.

And for doing damage as a Summoner, it's just not designed for exclusively doing summon damage. The devs aren't going to put in a ton of work to balance the game for some specific self-imposed challenges. Just use a non-Summon weapon on the side, or accept that you're going to be weaker for choosing not to use one.

Is this 2014? Red himself along with official Re-Logic language acknowledges the existence and role of class-based roles in the game. Every subsequent update has further magnified those distinctions. I would like to think we'd have gotten over the "classes are self-imposed and niche" argument back when it was so prevalent at this forum's birth. The game should be and is being balanced around individual, distinctive classes, full stop. Summoner should not be left shallow and pathetic because "you can use other weapons". It doesn't fit the game's themes, and Summon-specific primaries would do nothing to stop you using other weapons in their place even if you wanted to.

 

[Acamaeda]

Is this 2014? Red himself along with official Re-Logic language acknowledges the existence and role of class-based roles in the game. Every subsequent update has further magnified those distinctions. I would like to think we'd have gotten over the "classes are self-imposed and niche" argument back when it was so prevalent at this forum's birth. The game should be and is being balanced around individual, distinctive classes, full stop. Summoner should not be left shallow and pathetic because "you can use other weapons". It doesn't fit the game's themes, and Summon-specific primaries would do nothing to stop you using other weapons in their place even if you wanted to.

In most cases, in Hardmode, classes aren't a self-imposed niche but in fact make you stronger. That doesn't mean that there shouldn't be exceptions. Summoners can use non-Summon gear, non-Summoners can use summons and sentries, non-mages can use things like the Nimbus Rod and Rainbow Gun (if they don't interfere with their other weapons). All of these give players more options on how to play and makes the game more diverse and interesting.

Making Summoner viable and diverse without use of side weapons would take a lot of work that would be better spent elsewhere. I'm all for expanding the class and adding some more weapons and such (which it sounds like they're doing to some degree) but developing lots of unique Summon type damage weapons that are active use is a lot, and would also sort of break the central concept of Summoning. Summon weapons create a thing that fights for you. Filling out the whole class with weapons that satisfy this and are also active use would be a huge undertaking based on a certain interpretation of class stuff.

 

[Dapling]

Is this 2014? Red himself along with official Re-Logic language acknowledges the existence and role of class-based roles in the game.

Red also said that summoner is meant to be a subclass of the other three classes, which insinuates you're meant to use weapons alongide minions, not exclusively use them.

Here were his exact words from the 8th anniversary Q&A:
"Ranged uses different types of ammo to modify the base projectile, magic has mana management and a bunch of crazy weapons, and melee is more basic for people who don't want to bother with any of that. On top of those three you have summoner that I consider a sub class of all the others, except you are supported by creatures that do all the work for you."
You can go to the 8th anniversary Q&A and check his first answer if you don't believe me.

 

[Empty air sandwich]

As it happens right now, you can think of summoner in two different playstyles: classless generalist that freely uses all weapons while just having some more creatures behind him (and in actuality you still deal most of the DPS yourself with normal weapons), and true/pure summoner who doesn't have technical reasons to use in the first place because there's no support for it as it's just the first one but without attacking
I would see no reason to not simply make both existant and viable by adding more integrated features and potential to the second, with the playstyle over the two simply chosen by the personal preference of the player, especially since the second one is what a lot of people actually wanted behind the idea of the class, specifically disliking the first one, truthfully.

Being able to manual-use minion staves for ordered attacks without messing with the summon count sounds like a great fun idea and even gives reason to have multiple summons right in your hotkeys as they result in different attacks. Almost like it's a real class or something. I guess it also would work if there was 1 button to officially summon a monster from it and a separate button to just get it to do the attack (both costing the MP), avoiding the summon count problem and still letting minion summoning be done by live click number instead of standard use cooldown.
I think a way to spice that up further for some real cronch would be for most minion staves to naturally have a minion limit of its particular kind to promote having several different types of summons at once, and then take some time to design new special manual-use attacks for each minion, possibly aimed by you, and how you could fight having all that available for each one and how boss fights would pan out (instead of just having a billion casts of the same one summon and "attacking" just by using it again and again). A bunch could even have an attack that involves movement/strikes to where you're aiming so you could manually force them to relocate to where you want their AI to go if you think they are in the wrong place for them, maybe some do a special attack on the place where they are right now, and only a few do a "stop what you're doing and keep shooting where I tapped for X seconds", so you even use them intelligently and situationally to order each one on the fly by swapping to their respective staff and using it when it's appropriate, instead of becoming another "point to big monster, hold/mash Attack until one of you dies" deal like you would expect from a normal shooty class instead of this.
(and there needs to be a summon that can inflict Ichor by some means for all of them to take advantage of, otherwise it would be semi-needed for every summoner to borrow the Ichor ammo/spell and manually plant and renew it all the time which would be annoying)

I had a thread in I think equipment, but I only thought of a singular explosion staff that deals damage as summon-type damage and lowers enemy DEF per hit, along with summoner armors gaining a separate effect where they give further +%SummonDmg as long as you're only dealing damage as summon-type damage, I'm really seeing some cool potential with this minion idea.

 

[Krypt]

In my opinion there is at least one tweak to summoning that will improve it immensely. But before that, I need to explain how recasting a minion works.

When you are at max capacity with your minions, and you summon again, game destroys the minion that is closest to your body and then summons a minion to replace it right at your cursor. Also, a minion auto attacks the first enemy that enters its range if the line of sight is not blocked. That minion stays on that enemy until that enemy dies or until you get far enough from the minion that you trigger its rush-back-to-the-summoner mechanic. You may want to recast your off-screen minions to get them back near you as guardians that keep enemies away from you, but wait right there. Recasting mechanics in combination with the way minion aggro works is a problem for the summoner.

Now why is this a problem, you ask? Simple. A summoner is vulnerable when all of their minions are off-screen, pinging something until it dies. The summoner is open to attacks of other enemies and this is especially a problem when there are hordes of enemies coming at the summoner. Even more of a threat when the summoner is playing multiplayer thus the spawn rate is higher. The summoner ends up having to either use other weapons to diminished effects, or they have to recast a minion. Recasting the minion, as I explained above, only keeps resummoning the minion that is closest to you but doesn't allow you to get the other minions that are further away from you to come back to you. This effectively gives you only one minion to defend yourself with as the other minions won't be resummoned because they are further away than that one minion that you keep resummoning, and they will not come back until the enemy they are aggro'ed to is either dead, or you go on a marathon to make sure your minions teleport/rush back to you. Only to end up having to go through this again regularly.

The tweak I suggest is extremely simple. Instead of recasting a minion while you are at max capacity destroying the one that is closest to your body, make it destroy the one that is furthest from you. This will end up bringing them all back one by one, starting from the one that is furthest away, and then the next, etc. This will get all of your minions back in proximity and thus on guard duty. In my opinion this tweak alone will go a long way to make summoners much more effective and good, and more importantly, consistent.

TL;DR - Right now, recasting a minion of the same type you already have replaces the minion that is closest to you. Make it so recasting replaces the one that is furthest away.

Edit: Right clicking an enemy to direct minions to attack it falls short to remedy this, as hordes are much more difficult to manage that way.