- "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.
about calamity with the rest of us
terraria.wiki.gg
