Shady Glasses
Steampunker
- Introduction -
Terraria is very well known for having a very satisfying character progression, with each class becoming a powerhouse in the endgame, fulfilling proper roles in a multiplayer environment and being overall very fun to play through the game with. All of that said, however, there is one class in the game that doesn't fit into any of these qualities. In fact, some could go as far as say that it's the opposite. Very shallow, boring progression, no purpose to exist, the potential to be something completely unique and yet being one of the most overlooked and ignored parts of the game, these are all things you probably think of if you're as much of a fan of summoner as I am. In this glorified wall of text rant, I will go over the many shortcomings of the class, such as its progression and mechanics, the treatment it gets from the community and the developers, as well as what could be done to positively improve it in a meaningful way, along with positive and negative (mostly the latter) examples.
- The usual summoner playthrough -
Starting off simple, we have the most talked about point about summoner, it's progression. It's safe to say that it's very lacking, with only 1 viable minion option before any boss and 1 viable whip option in general (The leather whip being a very boring task to do for such low damage, you're better off skipping it, same goes for slime staff), and it doesn't get better after that. Get used to your bird, because it'll be your only friend until the queen bee, where you also get your only pre-hardmode set, along with the second last upgrade before hardmode begins. You see, I haven't counted the vampire staff for a singular reason: It's not worth it. It's slight damage increase with a very flawed grounded AI doesn't make the time you'll waste fishing in blood moons for a rare weapon drop, especially one that gets outclassed by the hornets worthwhile at all. I will give a very honorable mention to the old one's army sentries, though. Despite not being really strong, the fact you can spam-click the ballista and flameburst sentries make them miles better than anything you'll get in pre-hardmode, they're at the same level (maybe higher) than imps.
After the wall of flesh, things do look more hopeful. There is a set of 2 weapons readily available, which you can easily farm for in a couple of minutes along with a full armor set. Great! Summoner is finally catching up to the others, right? not exactly. While the spider staff can easily stunlock most enemies, you'll see that it is terrible against airborne, knockback immune enemies, which also happens to be 2/3 of the mech bosses - and did I mention that's your only viable option, if you don't want to go insane farming, that is? While there is technically 3 other options you can get at the start of hardmode, only one of them is viable and actually possible for most players to get. Those weapons are the pirate staff, the sanguine staff and the blade staff, the latter being the only one you should go for. Why? well, the pirate staff is the rarest of all of those, and somehow the worst: It's a grounded minion that deals contact damage, and the Sanguine staff is another summon that you get from fishing in blood moons, by trying to get the Dreadnautilus to spawn, a miniboss to challenge the mech bosses themselves. The blade staff deals very low damage, but makes up for it in having 25 defense penetration, 35 if you have both the sharktooth necklace and stinger necklace, and maybe even 55 if you have ichor, which you don't, because you're a summoner and summoners have 0 items that can deal ichor. So once again, summoner is stuck with 2 viable options for early hardmode, and it won't get better for a while. After defeating the twins, you have the option to make the optic staff, but you shouldn't because the blade staff is just as good, if not better. Make yourself some hallowed armor, though, because they're a well-needed upgrade (only because of the dodge ability, really), unlike the forbidden armor + OOA's sets. Don't waste your time, the sentries and armors are not worth the farming you'll need to do to get them, unless you want to limit yourself even more and only use the ballista, which is a very bold move, but a respectable one. You also have the choice between 3 whips, I guess. I'll get into whips later, just know they're really, really bad, despite what your DPS meter might tell you.
Well, finally we've reached Plantera! Finally, summoner will start to actually be decent! You finally get an accessory that increases your minion count, which is a very huge upgrade, aswell as the tiki armor, a VERY huge upgrade. When it comes to weapons, however, you're out of luck. The first one you can get comes right from Plantera itself, the pygmy staff. It's a grounded, ranged minion with slow projectiles, oof. They are so inaccurate against anything that doesn't move straight towards them, you're better off holding onto your blade staff, or get the sanguine staff, since you have much more damage now that you're wearing some really slick tribal armor (you'll will still probably waste a good hour or so.). The raven staff is what you want to get next; they deal fast, high damage to enemies. They also fly, unlike the desert tiger staff, which is as worthless to get as the Frost Hydra (the frost hydra is literally worse than the ballista sentries in every way and may take 10x as long to get). You'll also want to grab some spooky armor while you're at it, the reduced defense means nothing when you'll be super fragile anyway. What you won't want to grab, however, is the deadly sphere staff - the AI manages to turn 50 base damage into a massive downgrade from the Raven.
- It's not just progression though -
Finally, we are reaching the last parts of your usual summoner playthrough, and now, summoner is actually doing a bit of damage! it's still not great, but it's not awful either, unless you're using the tempest staff, of course. That sharknado suffers from the same problem of the pygmy staff, being way too inaccurate for it to be of any use. Finally, after a good 70% of the game has been done, summoner is at a point where it can deal decent damage, does that mean summoner is finally good? Sadly, not really. There are a lot of other issues related to the class than mere damage and defense - If those were the only issues, I honestly wouldn't be writing this - it comes to how scarce it's weapon selection really is, along with that selection itself. Even considering the bad ones, there isn't a single point in the game where you have over 3 reasonable choices for your summons, not even for whips.
Okay, so with the progression explained, do we just add more weapons? No, of course not, who would ever think that? Summoner has probably the weirdest weapon selection and, by a huge margin, the worst design for a class in the entire game, which is a big deal when you consider that the melee class of the game has the potential to have infinite range. So, let's break down summoner's arsenal. First, are the minions themselves: by the most part, their range is very deplorable. In most cases you'll need to get really close to your target for the minions to actually go and attack it, and even closer if you want to get the benefit of your whip. That, of course, is an incredibly stupid thing to do when you have, by far, the worst defense out of all the classes. Whips are terrible, absolutely terrible. Not because they don't work as intended, but because the intention is dumb. First, we have to realize that summoners have the lowest defense of all the classes of the game by a huge margin. Then, realize that the melee class of the game has, right at the start of the game, weapons with longer range than every single whip in the game, and you see the problem. Whips are so low-range that they're only effective as a "gah! there are enemies in front of me but my minions are focusing elsewhere! quick, come back here minions!" type of tool than anything else, as being that close to any enemy, especially those that fire projectiles, is just asking for trouble. So basically, whips, while technically increasing the summoner's damage output by a considerable margin, has reduced its effective range to a point where using whips is too dangerous for it to be worthwhile, which makes them essentially useless for any summoner that knows their place on the food chain. Weirdly enough, the minions with the actual most range are the sentries, which you can spawn on the position of your mouse and they will stay there, dealing damage to enemies. Honestly, the only issue with sentries is that they're incredibly underdeveloped. The only place you'll get worthwhile sentries is the tavernkeep, the only good equipment you get for sentries is locked behind the same event, the only things outside of it being the spider sentry, the frost hydra and the two moon lord sentries, which are the only non-o.o.a. sentries that are good. The simple fact they're so disconnected from the game and so scarce, with very little to support them, makes them sadly very unviable.
So, summoner's effective range is lower than that of a melee player, with the lowest defense of the game, no supportive capabilities of any kind, because every minion attacks and the whips' only purpose is to increase your own damage, and even then, the damage is still considerably lower than the other classes (haha SDMG, Zenith and Last Prism go brrrr). So, what does summoner actually have that is somewhat unique from the others? Well, to be blunt, nothing? The one thing I see about summoner's "specialty" is that the class is perfect for crowd control, or "a dodging class". While these are safe conclusions to reach with summoner's descriptions, they sadly aren't exactly true. Most summons' AI need a line of sight check with enemies, which means you couldn't stand on a box, safe from troubles, and just let your minions do the work (Unless you're using sentries.), however, considering the other classes' options, including the blood rain bow, daedalus, meteor staff, flying knife and many other weapons that pass through blocks, summoner isn't really the best at dealing with crowds. As for dodging, the class itself never actually capitalizes on dodging, unlike the melee class, that capitalizes on tanking by having high defense, several damage reduction accessories and increased aggro rate, or the ranger class, that capitalizes on staying away from enemies by having several ways of decreasing aggro rates, as well as increasing damage at the cost of decreased mobility. Summoner doesn't have anything that directly improves its dodge rate - the closest it gets is with the mobility buffs from the old one's armor sets - every single item in the game is for general use, and doesn't really point towards a singular class. Even worse, if one tries to constantly focus on dodging, they will quickly realize that they can't dodge very far; most minions will stop attacking their enemies as soon as you're a couple blocks too far. Not only that, but the fact that several minions aren't 100% accurate, or aren't fast enough to catch up, means that if you only focus on dodging for boss fights, you'll quickly notice how much you'll need to compromise in your evasion to make sure your minions are being able to do damage.
So, if summoner is not really focused on crowd control or dodging, what is its specialty? What's so special about summoner? Well, the thing that truly differs summoner from the other classes is how no one likes the summoner class, not even Relogic. That wasn't a joke, by the way. while this is a more subjective thing i wholeheartedly believe that there isn't a single member there who feels any passion for the class, otherwise we wouldn't be in a situation where the last update of the game would need to do "so much" for the class. It's hard to imagine, but this class has been in the game for almost 7 years now - its birthday is in a month, September 30th - and it's still very clearly not good. If such attempts to expand and really finish the class were made earlier, we wouldn't have to discuss this problem. The simple fact that whips exist are quite the red flag; they are, code-wise, the same weapon with different stats and sprites, which allowed them to fill several holes in summoner's progression easily and quickly. Some of them even act very similar (Durendal and Snapthorn, Firecracker and Dark Harvest) and all of them are (weirdly enough) affected by more melee-based buffs than summoner ones. While I wouldn't blame a game dev team to pull off these kinds of tactics, this is not what summoner needed. It already was heavily neglected the previous years of its existence, to add a high quantity of content that addresses nothing except for "summoner doesn't have an active weapon!!", just makes things worse, and hurts even more, especially when the team goes out of their way to say "we are giving summoner some love!" before the update comes out. At least we have mods to improve the summoner class, right?
And here's where my motives come to light: I made this as a way of addressing as many issues as possible with summoner, and then present as many ways of improving that as possible. No vague solutions such as "add more pre-boss content" or suggestions that take away from the class itself. I'll also demonstrate some examples of how the class was improved/worsened/unaffected in some mods, as a sort of practical demonstration of my points.
- What to do? -
So, as a quick reminder of summoner's issues: It has a very weak, very linear progression, it's minions (and whips, too) lack any meaningful variety other than "deal damage", a role which the ranger class does miles better, It's effective range and defense contradict each other, it doesn't capitalize on any sort of playstyle and consequently has no proper role in a multiplayer setting (aka, it has no reason to exist). Now, that's quite a lot, right? Thankfully, the second issue is almost a blessing in disguise, as the lack of summoner weapons throughout the game means we have an almost clean slate to work with, which could allow anyone to turn it into something much different from what it is on vanilla currently without many issues.
Before solving the usual issues - progression and overall effectivity - we need to first think: What is the point of a summoner? This is a rather broad question, with a lot of valid answers. Because of the core design of summoner being "spawning things into existence", these said things could be anything, thus, a summoner could fit any niche. From vanilla's content, it's easy to assume that it works somewhat as a high-dps without relying on aiming, but its execution isn't great, as the minion AI is, to put it simply, way too stupid for that to work well. This is arguably the simplest way to fix summoner, but it's not very creative, in my opinion. The AI changes for the minions would be to overhaul the targeting system, for real this time. Right now, a summon's targeting is nothing short of wack. my suggestion is to create a priority system, where different enemies have different priority levels based on what type of enemy it is as well as position. Naturally, bosses would have high priority levels, making sure your minions focus on them on most occasions. However, an enemy's proximity to the player would also increase its priority, getting even higher than a boss' level if that enemy gets dangerously close. To compliment this system, minions should be able to switch targets as soon as the highest priority enemy changes, to make sure that the player is always free of random wyverns and such spawning during a boss fight. Finally, to encourage using different kinds of minions, a group of diverse summons should be able to target different enemies, to allow for better crowd control and liberty. This could be achieved by each minion having a way of "communicating" with each other - Basically, if a high-priority enemy is already targeted by a minion, any different minions would ignore them, and target other enemies instead (A whip's mark would still attract all your minions, in case the target requires more damage to be brought down). This fix, while rather simple, is visibly very complicated to implement, as it would require, at least, a rewrite of summoner's minion code and, at worst, a rewrite of most summoner weapons. As I'm not familiar with Terraria's code, I cannot tell how dauting of a task this fix would be, but I am sure that if properly executed this could make summoner much more fun to play as a "no aiming required" class. Additional Improvements to support this evasive version of summoner would be exclusive dodge chances or buffs from armor and accessories, which are much simpler to do.
But what if, for you, summoner wasn't about dealing high damage while you graciously dodge everything? What if you wanted summoner to be a supportive class, that grants several buffs or heals to your party while you watch them use these buffs to melt bosses? Then, this is where things get interesting. Because of the minion slot mechanic, anything that works for the sake of support can also work as a form of trade-off, the more supports you have, the less damage you deal. This could make summoner a valuable member in a multiplayer team, having stronger supportive capabilities than mage, with the tradeoff of very weak dps, unlike mage, which is, at most, a half-damage dealer half-support, always doing decent dps and decent healing. In a 4-player team with a supposed support summoner, the mage could switch to a dps setup while the summoner switches to a fully support-based setup, which would be an overall increase in damage (since mage has a higher dps than summoner in all occasions) while at no loss of support. The fact that you can have several minions also means that you can have several different forms of support active at the same time, which allows for different support setups, focusing on healing, stat buffs, or even more unorthodox things, such as mana generators or damage shields. None of these would be actually broken by themselves, since you'd have no way of properly attacking with a roster full of these - the only option being other classes' weapons or whips - so you'd mostly use one or two slots for these supports in a standard, single player playthrough. I personally think this is a rather interesting way of breathing life and purpose into this class, while it doesn't directly fix a few of its issues (such as progression or its effectiveness), it does address the issue of summoner having no real reason to exist, being a clunkier, worse-in-every-way ranger. This summoner would be a real jack of all trades, being able to support the team in many more ways than mage, and becoming a self-supporting damage dealer in single player, having a trade-off of damage for any sort of buff.
There are still more potential ways of expanding on this class, however. Simply improving its offense or defense is only the tip of the iceberg for such clean canvas. So, what if we went a little crazy? What if we wanted to make summoner a class that truly embodies the term "Army of minions"? What I mean by that is, of course, having more than just your usual minions and ballistae. Different categories of minions, perhaps with their own different slots, which are more directly focused on doing tasks that your usual minions can't properly deal with, such as enemies getting too close. Perhaps one minion type would be a one-slot, controllable summon? This would work as summoner's "active weapon" that some people complain about so much, being able to attack less important targets while your minions take out a boss directly improves summoner's survivability and range. Possibly, this 'control' of a specific type of minion would be at the cost of not being able to use your whips, which means reduced damage. This could also allow for interesting effects, similar to flasks, where a category of 'weapons' that would be used to control it could give different types of buffs to your normal minions, perhaps as the primary use, with the control feature as a secondary. These wouldn't directly fix any of summoner's issues, however, with creative implementation and a bit of real love, this could turn it into a high-dps, high management type of class, as you'd constantly switch between different buffs, controlling your special summon and using your whip, which could be really fun, and if well executed it could still work as a semi-support class.
Well, those are all the tangible ideas i could have for expansions, although there are some other smaller ideas that could fit. You could add items that work similarly to Castlevania AoS' blue souls, temporarily summoning creatures to attack or support in some way, at the cost of mana per second, or perhaps equipable summons that serve smaller functions of attack and support. Regardless, none of the mentioned ideas are simple "just add X", they require some effort to make sure they're actually changing the class in a positive manner. Sadly, this isn't something I see at all when looking at posts about "summoner improvement ideas". In fact, most of them just say "add more weapons", which isn't the only, nor the biggest problem with it. That mindset of simply adding more is definitely something that's leaked into the modding community, however, and it's why I am writing this right now. Before writing this, I've done some research on a couple of Terraria mods, in search of some meaningful additions. I've found two examples of good additions and one large example of what not to do.
- "Play with X mod it fixes everything" -
Before this, I must specify that I'm not a modding person. I prefer vanilla Terraria over any kind of mod, and don't really have any preferences. That said, Thorium has the best expansions to summoner I've seen, while Calamity does the worst expansions. There, I said it. Thorium, while doing very little in the long run, does more than enough to help summoner become more dps-centric, with the new banner mechanic and it's armor and accessories helping sentries become good alternative playstyles, with a selection of support-based summons to give some help to the player. It's rather simplistic and could definitely be a little bit better, as the support summons are a bit scarce and help the player rather than an entire team, but it does improve on summoner quite a lot with very little. The other good example of a summoner expansion is more of a quality of life mod, the Summoner's Association. This mod does even smaller fixes that improve upon a summoner's life, such as being able to see how many minion slots you have, as well as a tool to direct your minions towards a specific location and another tool for quickly summoning a desired layout. It doesn't really attempt to fix summoner's state in the game, but it sure makes it better and more fun, which is very respectable and definitely deserving of more attention.
Oddly enough, however, is that on my research I've never seen anyone really mention Thorium or the Summoner's Association as good examples of expanding upon summoner, instead what I saw where several comments about Calamity being a great example of fixing the class. Curious, I checked the wiki to see what they did. Not really a surprise, but calamity probably does the most straightforward, unnecessary and overall useless "fixes", only exception being the increased aggro range of minions. Mechanically, the only thing Calamity changes is that you're forced to keep holding a summoner weapon in order for your summons to do their normal damage. When it comes to weapons, nothing is changed from vanilla, they all only serve to do damage and don't support the player in any meaningful way. One thing that I suggested earlier, the equipable summons, is actually tried here, but its execution is very mediocre. These minions, like the rest of calamity, are very broken, not only having abilities that scale with your progression, they also gain upgrades that combine most of them, meaning that you'll never actually need to pick a different selection of summons for different supports, since you'll be able to have all of them while only using 2-3 equipment slots. Calamity is a mess of a mod in general, and I could make a whole other essay talking about it, but this is about summoner, and simply put: It tried way too hard, while also not trying at all.
Meanwhile, at the rest of Terraria mods, I've yet to see anything that tries hard to properly expand on the class, most of what I've seen are just very flashy summons, that don't really do anything different other than attacking differently. It's probably because most mods don't care, and that's fine, but I do hope that more mods come out trying to improve it with more than just new summons that attack, because that's one of the lesser issues here, yet it's the only one to be actually addressed by most. It's surely not an easy task, as Calamity has shown, but it's definitely doable, as Thorium has shown. For the sake of being transparent, I've looked at: Fargo's mod (both mutant and soul), Antiaris, Spirit, Tremor (Don't know what I was expecting, really), Ancients Awakened, Joost, Enigma, Disarray and of course, Summoner's Association, Thorium and Calamity. I haven't looked at other mods, but I feel like if I didn't stumble upon them while researching these, they probably aren't that big, or good.
- Conclusion -
I do believe wholeheartedly that summoner has incredible potential as a class, however, it's blatant neglect by Relogic throughout the years might have directly impacted how much people actually care about summoner, most not really being able to see anything in it other than a terrible AI attacking for you. All of the criticism here isn't with the goal to ridicule the class and the people who like it, but instead to hopefully shed some light on its problems so mod creators have an easier time implementing good improvements and turning it into the unique, fun class it so obviously can be. Thanks for reading so far, this has been a "project" I've had on my mind ever since 1.4 came out, and even earlier than that, when I first heard about thrower getting merged back into ranger, but only had the courage to do it now. Please note that I'm not a perfect god of summoners, and my opinions could be, and in some places they probably are incorrect. I encourage whoever reads this fully to inform me of any possible mistakes or things I left out, and I also encourage people to give their own opinions on the class, and they think it is/should be.
In the end, Terraria's 1.4 summoner will probably stay like it is forever, sadly. It's up to the community now to come up with proper expansions to the class and really make it good. I'm making my part, by writing some of the bigger issues, and some of the solutions I came up while thinking about it, either way I hope the class' shortcomings get addressed in the future, whatever means that may be.
Terraria is very well known for having a very satisfying character progression, with each class becoming a powerhouse in the endgame, fulfilling proper roles in a multiplayer environment and being overall very fun to play through the game with. All of that said, however, there is one class in the game that doesn't fit into any of these qualities. In fact, some could go as far as say that it's the opposite. Very shallow, boring progression, no purpose to exist, the potential to be something completely unique and yet being one of the most overlooked and ignored parts of the game, these are all things you probably think of if you're as much of a fan of summoner as I am. In this glorified wall of text rant, I will go over the many shortcomings of the class, such as its progression and mechanics, the treatment it gets from the community and the developers, as well as what could be done to positively improve it in a meaningful way, along with positive and negative (mostly the latter) examples.
- The usual summoner playthrough -
Starting off simple, we have the most talked about point about summoner, it's progression. It's safe to say that it's very lacking, with only 1 viable minion option before any boss and 1 viable whip option in general (The leather whip being a very boring task to do for such low damage, you're better off skipping it, same goes for slime staff), and it doesn't get better after that. Get used to your bird, because it'll be your only friend until the queen bee, where you also get your only pre-hardmode set, along with the second last upgrade before hardmode begins. You see, I haven't counted the vampire staff for a singular reason: It's not worth it. It's slight damage increase with a very flawed grounded AI doesn't make the time you'll waste fishing in blood moons for a rare weapon drop, especially one that gets outclassed by the hornets worthwhile at all. I will give a very honorable mention to the old one's army sentries, though. Despite not being really strong, the fact you can spam-click the ballista and flameburst sentries make them miles better than anything you'll get in pre-hardmode, they're at the same level (maybe higher) than imps.
After the wall of flesh, things do look more hopeful. There is a set of 2 weapons readily available, which you can easily farm for in a couple of minutes along with a full armor set. Great! Summoner is finally catching up to the others, right? not exactly. While the spider staff can easily stunlock most enemies, you'll see that it is terrible against airborne, knockback immune enemies, which also happens to be 2/3 of the mech bosses - and did I mention that's your only viable option, if you don't want to go insane farming, that is? While there is technically 3 other options you can get at the start of hardmode, only one of them is viable and actually possible for most players to get. Those weapons are the pirate staff, the sanguine staff and the blade staff, the latter being the only one you should go for. Why? well, the pirate staff is the rarest of all of those, and somehow the worst: It's a grounded minion that deals contact damage, and the Sanguine staff is another summon that you get from fishing in blood moons, by trying to get the Dreadnautilus to spawn, a miniboss to challenge the mech bosses themselves. The blade staff deals very low damage, but makes up for it in having 25 defense penetration, 35 if you have both the sharktooth necklace and stinger necklace, and maybe even 55 if you have ichor, which you don't, because you're a summoner and summoners have 0 items that can deal ichor. So once again, summoner is stuck with 2 viable options for early hardmode, and it won't get better for a while. After defeating the twins, you have the option to make the optic staff, but you shouldn't because the blade staff is just as good, if not better. Make yourself some hallowed armor, though, because they're a well-needed upgrade (only because of the dodge ability, really), unlike the forbidden armor + OOA's sets. Don't waste your time, the sentries and armors are not worth the farming you'll need to do to get them, unless you want to limit yourself even more and only use the ballista, which is a very bold move, but a respectable one. You also have the choice between 3 whips, I guess. I'll get into whips later, just know they're really, really bad, despite what your DPS meter might tell you.
Well, finally we've reached Plantera! Finally, summoner will start to actually be decent! You finally get an accessory that increases your minion count, which is a very huge upgrade, aswell as the tiki armor, a VERY huge upgrade. When it comes to weapons, however, you're out of luck. The first one you can get comes right from Plantera itself, the pygmy staff. It's a grounded, ranged minion with slow projectiles, oof. They are so inaccurate against anything that doesn't move straight towards them, you're better off holding onto your blade staff, or get the sanguine staff, since you have much more damage now that you're wearing some really slick tribal armor (you'll will still probably waste a good hour or so.). The raven staff is what you want to get next; they deal fast, high damage to enemies. They also fly, unlike the desert tiger staff, which is as worthless to get as the Frost Hydra (the frost hydra is literally worse than the ballista sentries in every way and may take 10x as long to get). You'll also want to grab some spooky armor while you're at it, the reduced defense means nothing when you'll be super fragile anyway. What you won't want to grab, however, is the deadly sphere staff - the AI manages to turn 50 base damage into a massive downgrade from the Raven.
- It's not just progression though -
Finally, we are reaching the last parts of your usual summoner playthrough, and now, summoner is actually doing a bit of damage! it's still not great, but it's not awful either, unless you're using the tempest staff, of course. That sharknado suffers from the same problem of the pygmy staff, being way too inaccurate for it to be of any use. Finally, after a good 70% of the game has been done, summoner is at a point where it can deal decent damage, does that mean summoner is finally good? Sadly, not really. There are a lot of other issues related to the class than mere damage and defense - If those were the only issues, I honestly wouldn't be writing this - it comes to how scarce it's weapon selection really is, along with that selection itself. Even considering the bad ones, there isn't a single point in the game where you have over 3 reasonable choices for your summons, not even for whips.
Okay, so with the progression explained, do we just add more weapons? No, of course not, who would ever think that? Summoner has probably the weirdest weapon selection and, by a huge margin, the worst design for a class in the entire game, which is a big deal when you consider that the melee class of the game has the potential to have infinite range. So, let's break down summoner's arsenal. First, are the minions themselves: by the most part, their range is very deplorable. In most cases you'll need to get really close to your target for the minions to actually go and attack it, and even closer if you want to get the benefit of your whip. That, of course, is an incredibly stupid thing to do when you have, by far, the worst defense out of all the classes. Whips are terrible, absolutely terrible. Not because they don't work as intended, but because the intention is dumb. First, we have to realize that summoners have the lowest defense of all the classes of the game by a huge margin. Then, realize that the melee class of the game has, right at the start of the game, weapons with longer range than every single whip in the game, and you see the problem. Whips are so low-range that they're only effective as a "gah! there are enemies in front of me but my minions are focusing elsewhere! quick, come back here minions!" type of tool than anything else, as being that close to any enemy, especially those that fire projectiles, is just asking for trouble. So basically, whips, while technically increasing the summoner's damage output by a considerable margin, has reduced its effective range to a point where using whips is too dangerous for it to be worthwhile, which makes them essentially useless for any summoner that knows their place on the food chain. Weirdly enough, the minions with the actual most range are the sentries, which you can spawn on the position of your mouse and they will stay there, dealing damage to enemies. Honestly, the only issue with sentries is that they're incredibly underdeveloped. The only place you'll get worthwhile sentries is the tavernkeep, the only good equipment you get for sentries is locked behind the same event, the only things outside of it being the spider sentry, the frost hydra and the two moon lord sentries, which are the only non-o.o.a. sentries that are good. The simple fact they're so disconnected from the game and so scarce, with very little to support them, makes them sadly very unviable.
So, summoner's effective range is lower than that of a melee player, with the lowest defense of the game, no supportive capabilities of any kind, because every minion attacks and the whips' only purpose is to increase your own damage, and even then, the damage is still considerably lower than the other classes (haha SDMG, Zenith and Last Prism go brrrr). So, what does summoner actually have that is somewhat unique from the others? Well, to be blunt, nothing? The one thing I see about summoner's "specialty" is that the class is perfect for crowd control, or "a dodging class". While these are safe conclusions to reach with summoner's descriptions, they sadly aren't exactly true. Most summons' AI need a line of sight check with enemies, which means you couldn't stand on a box, safe from troubles, and just let your minions do the work (Unless you're using sentries.), however, considering the other classes' options, including the blood rain bow, daedalus, meteor staff, flying knife and many other weapons that pass through blocks, summoner isn't really the best at dealing with crowds. As for dodging, the class itself never actually capitalizes on dodging, unlike the melee class, that capitalizes on tanking by having high defense, several damage reduction accessories and increased aggro rate, or the ranger class, that capitalizes on staying away from enemies by having several ways of decreasing aggro rates, as well as increasing damage at the cost of decreased mobility. Summoner doesn't have anything that directly improves its dodge rate - the closest it gets is with the mobility buffs from the old one's armor sets - every single item in the game is for general use, and doesn't really point towards a singular class. Even worse, if one tries to constantly focus on dodging, they will quickly realize that they can't dodge very far; most minions will stop attacking their enemies as soon as you're a couple blocks too far. Not only that, but the fact that several minions aren't 100% accurate, or aren't fast enough to catch up, means that if you only focus on dodging for boss fights, you'll quickly notice how much you'll need to compromise in your evasion to make sure your minions are being able to do damage.
So, if summoner is not really focused on crowd control or dodging, what is its specialty? What's so special about summoner? Well, the thing that truly differs summoner from the other classes is how no one likes the summoner class, not even Relogic. That wasn't a joke, by the way. while this is a more subjective thing i wholeheartedly believe that there isn't a single member there who feels any passion for the class, otherwise we wouldn't be in a situation where the last update of the game would need to do "so much" for the class. It's hard to imagine, but this class has been in the game for almost 7 years now - its birthday is in a month, September 30th - and it's still very clearly not good. If such attempts to expand and really finish the class were made earlier, we wouldn't have to discuss this problem. The simple fact that whips exist are quite the red flag; they are, code-wise, the same weapon with different stats and sprites, which allowed them to fill several holes in summoner's progression easily and quickly. Some of them even act very similar (Durendal and Snapthorn, Firecracker and Dark Harvest) and all of them are (weirdly enough) affected by more melee-based buffs than summoner ones. While I wouldn't blame a game dev team to pull off these kinds of tactics, this is not what summoner needed. It already was heavily neglected the previous years of its existence, to add a high quantity of content that addresses nothing except for "summoner doesn't have an active weapon!!", just makes things worse, and hurts even more, especially when the team goes out of their way to say "we are giving summoner some love!" before the update comes out. At least we have mods to improve the summoner class, right?
And here's where my motives come to light: I made this as a way of addressing as many issues as possible with summoner, and then present as many ways of improving that as possible. No vague solutions such as "add more pre-boss content" or suggestions that take away from the class itself. I'll also demonstrate some examples of how the class was improved/worsened/unaffected in some mods, as a sort of practical demonstration of my points.
- What to do? -
So, as a quick reminder of summoner's issues: It has a very weak, very linear progression, it's minions (and whips, too) lack any meaningful variety other than "deal damage", a role which the ranger class does miles better, It's effective range and defense contradict each other, it doesn't capitalize on any sort of playstyle and consequently has no proper role in a multiplayer setting (aka, it has no reason to exist). Now, that's quite a lot, right? Thankfully, the second issue is almost a blessing in disguise, as the lack of summoner weapons throughout the game means we have an almost clean slate to work with, which could allow anyone to turn it into something much different from what it is on vanilla currently without many issues.
Before solving the usual issues - progression and overall effectivity - we need to first think: What is the point of a summoner? This is a rather broad question, with a lot of valid answers. Because of the core design of summoner being "spawning things into existence", these said things could be anything, thus, a summoner could fit any niche. From vanilla's content, it's easy to assume that it works somewhat as a high-dps without relying on aiming, but its execution isn't great, as the minion AI is, to put it simply, way too stupid for that to work well. This is arguably the simplest way to fix summoner, but it's not very creative, in my opinion. The AI changes for the minions would be to overhaul the targeting system, for real this time. Right now, a summon's targeting is nothing short of wack. my suggestion is to create a priority system, where different enemies have different priority levels based on what type of enemy it is as well as position. Naturally, bosses would have high priority levels, making sure your minions focus on them on most occasions. However, an enemy's proximity to the player would also increase its priority, getting even higher than a boss' level if that enemy gets dangerously close. To compliment this system, minions should be able to switch targets as soon as the highest priority enemy changes, to make sure that the player is always free of random wyverns and such spawning during a boss fight. Finally, to encourage using different kinds of minions, a group of diverse summons should be able to target different enemies, to allow for better crowd control and liberty. This could be achieved by each minion having a way of "communicating" with each other - Basically, if a high-priority enemy is already targeted by a minion, any different minions would ignore them, and target other enemies instead (A whip's mark would still attract all your minions, in case the target requires more damage to be brought down). This fix, while rather simple, is visibly very complicated to implement, as it would require, at least, a rewrite of summoner's minion code and, at worst, a rewrite of most summoner weapons. As I'm not familiar with Terraria's code, I cannot tell how dauting of a task this fix would be, but I am sure that if properly executed this could make summoner much more fun to play as a "no aiming required" class. Additional Improvements to support this evasive version of summoner would be exclusive dodge chances or buffs from armor and accessories, which are much simpler to do.
But what if, for you, summoner wasn't about dealing high damage while you graciously dodge everything? What if you wanted summoner to be a supportive class, that grants several buffs or heals to your party while you watch them use these buffs to melt bosses? Then, this is where things get interesting. Because of the minion slot mechanic, anything that works for the sake of support can also work as a form of trade-off, the more supports you have, the less damage you deal. This could make summoner a valuable member in a multiplayer team, having stronger supportive capabilities than mage, with the tradeoff of very weak dps, unlike mage, which is, at most, a half-damage dealer half-support, always doing decent dps and decent healing. In a 4-player team with a supposed support summoner, the mage could switch to a dps setup while the summoner switches to a fully support-based setup, which would be an overall increase in damage (since mage has a higher dps than summoner in all occasions) while at no loss of support. The fact that you can have several minions also means that you can have several different forms of support active at the same time, which allows for different support setups, focusing on healing, stat buffs, or even more unorthodox things, such as mana generators or damage shields. None of these would be actually broken by themselves, since you'd have no way of properly attacking with a roster full of these - the only option being other classes' weapons or whips - so you'd mostly use one or two slots for these supports in a standard, single player playthrough. I personally think this is a rather interesting way of breathing life and purpose into this class, while it doesn't directly fix a few of its issues (such as progression or its effectiveness), it does address the issue of summoner having no real reason to exist, being a clunkier, worse-in-every-way ranger. This summoner would be a real jack of all trades, being able to support the team in many more ways than mage, and becoming a self-supporting damage dealer in single player, having a trade-off of damage for any sort of buff.
There are still more potential ways of expanding on this class, however. Simply improving its offense or defense is only the tip of the iceberg for such clean canvas. So, what if we went a little crazy? What if we wanted to make summoner a class that truly embodies the term "Army of minions"? What I mean by that is, of course, having more than just your usual minions and ballistae. Different categories of minions, perhaps with their own different slots, which are more directly focused on doing tasks that your usual minions can't properly deal with, such as enemies getting too close. Perhaps one minion type would be a one-slot, controllable summon? This would work as summoner's "active weapon" that some people complain about so much, being able to attack less important targets while your minions take out a boss directly improves summoner's survivability and range. Possibly, this 'control' of a specific type of minion would be at the cost of not being able to use your whips, which means reduced damage. This could also allow for interesting effects, similar to flasks, where a category of 'weapons' that would be used to control it could give different types of buffs to your normal minions, perhaps as the primary use, with the control feature as a secondary. These wouldn't directly fix any of summoner's issues, however, with creative implementation and a bit of real love, this could turn it into a high-dps, high management type of class, as you'd constantly switch between different buffs, controlling your special summon and using your whip, which could be really fun, and if well executed it could still work as a semi-support class.
Well, those are all the tangible ideas i could have for expansions, although there are some other smaller ideas that could fit. You could add items that work similarly to Castlevania AoS' blue souls, temporarily summoning creatures to attack or support in some way, at the cost of mana per second, or perhaps equipable summons that serve smaller functions of attack and support. Regardless, none of the mentioned ideas are simple "just add X", they require some effort to make sure they're actually changing the class in a positive manner. Sadly, this isn't something I see at all when looking at posts about "summoner improvement ideas". In fact, most of them just say "add more weapons", which isn't the only, nor the biggest problem with it. That mindset of simply adding more is definitely something that's leaked into the modding community, however, and it's why I am writing this right now. Before writing this, I've done some research on a couple of Terraria mods, in search of some meaningful additions. I've found two examples of good additions and one large example of what not to do.
- "Play with X mod it fixes everything" -
Before this, I must specify that I'm not a modding person. I prefer vanilla Terraria over any kind of mod, and don't really have any preferences. That said, Thorium has the best expansions to summoner I've seen, while Calamity does the worst expansions. There, I said it. Thorium, while doing very little in the long run, does more than enough to help summoner become more dps-centric, with the new banner mechanic and it's armor and accessories helping sentries become good alternative playstyles, with a selection of support-based summons to give some help to the player. It's rather simplistic and could definitely be a little bit better, as the support summons are a bit scarce and help the player rather than an entire team, but it does improve on summoner quite a lot with very little. The other good example of a summoner expansion is more of a quality of life mod, the Summoner's Association. This mod does even smaller fixes that improve upon a summoner's life, such as being able to see how many minion slots you have, as well as a tool to direct your minions towards a specific location and another tool for quickly summoning a desired layout. It doesn't really attempt to fix summoner's state in the game, but it sure makes it better and more fun, which is very respectable and definitely deserving of more attention.
Oddly enough, however, is that on my research I've never seen anyone really mention Thorium or the Summoner's Association as good examples of expanding upon summoner, instead what I saw where several comments about Calamity being a great example of fixing the class. Curious, I checked the wiki to see what they did. Not really a surprise, but calamity probably does the most straightforward, unnecessary and overall useless "fixes", only exception being the increased aggro range of minions. Mechanically, the only thing Calamity changes is that you're forced to keep holding a summoner weapon in order for your summons to do their normal damage. When it comes to weapons, nothing is changed from vanilla, they all only serve to do damage and don't support the player in any meaningful way. One thing that I suggested earlier, the equipable summons, is actually tried here, but its execution is very mediocre. These minions, like the rest of calamity, are very broken, not only having abilities that scale with your progression, they also gain upgrades that combine most of them, meaning that you'll never actually need to pick a different selection of summons for different supports, since you'll be able to have all of them while only using 2-3 equipment slots. Calamity is a mess of a mod in general, and I could make a whole other essay talking about it, but this is about summoner, and simply put: It tried way too hard, while also not trying at all.
Meanwhile, at the rest of Terraria mods, I've yet to see anything that tries hard to properly expand on the class, most of what I've seen are just very flashy summons, that don't really do anything different other than attacking differently. It's probably because most mods don't care, and that's fine, but I do hope that more mods come out trying to improve it with more than just new summons that attack, because that's one of the lesser issues here, yet it's the only one to be actually addressed by most. It's surely not an easy task, as Calamity has shown, but it's definitely doable, as Thorium has shown. For the sake of being transparent, I've looked at: Fargo's mod (both mutant and soul), Antiaris, Spirit, Tremor (Don't know what I was expecting, really), Ancients Awakened, Joost, Enigma, Disarray and of course, Summoner's Association, Thorium and Calamity. I haven't looked at other mods, but I feel like if I didn't stumble upon them while researching these, they probably aren't that big, or good.
- Conclusion -
I do believe wholeheartedly that summoner has incredible potential as a class, however, it's blatant neglect by Relogic throughout the years might have directly impacted how much people actually care about summoner, most not really being able to see anything in it other than a terrible AI attacking for you. All of the criticism here isn't with the goal to ridicule the class and the people who like it, but instead to hopefully shed some light on its problems so mod creators have an easier time implementing good improvements and turning it into the unique, fun class it so obviously can be. Thanks for reading so far, this has been a "project" I've had on my mind ever since 1.4 came out, and even earlier than that, when I first heard about thrower getting merged back into ranger, but only had the courage to do it now. Please note that I'm not a perfect god of summoners, and my opinions could be, and in some places they probably are incorrect. I encourage whoever reads this fully to inform me of any possible mistakes or things I left out, and I also encourage people to give their own opinions on the class, and they think it is/should be.
In the end, Terraria's 1.4 summoner will probably stay like it is forever, sadly. It's up to the community now to come up with proper expansions to the class and really make it good. I'm making my part, by writing some of the bigger issues, and some of the solutions I came up while thinking about it, either way I hope the class' shortcomings get addressed in the future, whatever means that may be.
