PC Summoner Discussion - What could be done to make it more viable?

did i do a good :)


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If you ask me, whips should just have an accessory tree like the yoyo, made of few more accesories, which would make them more useful.
But of course, the range upgrade should go to hardmode as the snapthorn have enough range to do most of the job, but hardmode there are fast projectiles coming at you, which does not help for summoner to ever get close.

If anything summoner just needs more stuff pre-hardmode and few more accessories, the added stuff for summoner in 1.4 is indeed a nice direction, just doesn't feel complete.
 
If you ask me, whips should just have an accessory tree like the yoyo, made of few more accesories, which would make them more useful.

Summoners already have an accessory tree; they have to sacrifice a number of slots just to play their class effectively. Forcing them to sacrifice more isn't helpful.
 
Summoners already have an accessory tree; they have to sacrifice a number of slots just to play their class effectively. Forcing them to sacrifice more isn't helpful.

That's why I think it should be like the yoyo, which eventually becomes 1 accessory, trading 1 minion slot for better usage on whip can help in some regards, and to have few more accessories for summoner around pre-hardmode, and early hardmode, because most of the good summoner accessories are locked behind Plantera.
 
That's why I think it should be like the yoyo, which eventually becomes 1 accessory, trading 1 minion slot for better usage on whip can help in some regards, and to have few more accessories for summoner around pre-hardmode, and early hardmode, because most of the good summoner accessories are locked behind Plantera.

But combining accessories can only happen later in the game. The primary problem with summoners is early-game.
 
Yep, but even without combining, he can afford picking 1-2 slots for the whip, only having Lightining boots and Obsidian shield being mandatory to have, with 3 optionals being SoC for dash, Mana Flower vs Wall of Flesh and Brain of confusion for dodge.
If said accessory increases 8-10% summon dmg or 5+ tag damage, it is already enough to run passive.
 
I think that one of the issues Summoners have is the lack of variety when it comes to summons. Relatively few minions are viable without being outright superior to each other in most of the game, with pretty much the only point the Player would be likely to consider using several minions at once being early HM, due to the Spider and Dagger Staves being available at about the same time. Otherwise, the game pretty consistently gives you one staff per stage of the game, often resulting in the game trying to make you use minions with subpar behavior due to earlier ones not being powerful enough. This is most noticeable in late pre-HM, in which the most powerful minion cannot attack in water, as well as post-Mech but pre-Plantera, when the Twins Staff is better than any other alternative that can be reasonably obtained at that point.
As such, I think that incorporating several types of minions in more overlapping tiers, encouraging the Player to use mixed minion setups, would at the very least make playing as Summoner more enjoyable, as well as potentially allowing for improved playability. This could include stuff such as minion combos, or minions with complementary behaviors (Say, land-borne melee minions that deal a lot of damage and flying ones that can pin enemies down so the former can attack).
Another feature Summoners are lacking is the lack of prefixes: Minion staves use mere magical prefixes, while whips use melee ones. Both should use unique Summoner ones that do things such as making minions take up less slots (A bit like how the Spider Staff does by default), or increasing tag damage.
Whips themselves should be more useful. Not only do they need greater reach in general, but they should be more controllable in terms of tagging, as they currently tend to simply be normal weapons with a summon damage type and an effect that is slightly useful on paper but in practice is not controllable enough and the tagging is already done by the staves themselves.
I also think Summoners could use more "support" weapon types, such as fans that can be used to temporarily make minions stronger, or an item that allows players to command minions and make them place themselves in specific spots for stuff such as setting up ambushes on strong enemies, or to better protect them while doing other activities, such as fishing.
Even the game GUI itself tends to not "like" Summoners, for reasons such as not showing how many minion slots you have filled, how many minions of each type you have summoned...
 
There also needs to be an actual variety of minion types. There's no reason to do anything more than have the max possible number of whatever your strongest summon is, because every single summon does the same thing: generically deal damage. There are no support summons, support weapons, or anything at all that isn't "more of the same".
 
There also needs to be an actual variety of minion types. There's no reason to do anything more than have the max possible number of whatever your strongest summon is, because every single summon does the same thing: generically deal damage. There are no support summons, support weapons, or anything at all that isn't "more of the same".

OK, but... how would that work?

The thing about summons is that they're basically on autopilot. Most of the interesting things that you might consider doing ultimately require controlling them.

Let's say that you want to have a minion that can temporarily block off passages, to do a crude form of crowd control. OK: how do you program that into a game with varying terrain? This is also why non-sentry minions fly and pass through blocks: it's too hard to program units that can understand terrain very well.

So if you're going to have some support minion, then it has to be something that can work in an automated fashion. Maybe you have a minion that slows targets down and de-buffs their defense, but doesn't damage targets directly. But even then, there is some optimal ratio of support-to-direct-damage summons out there.

And then you have to think about multi-classing, which is the default way of playing Terraria. If you have some support minion that is useful with only one or two summons, then you've effectively made every class that much stronger, since they can always call up one or two of them. Coming up with an automated support mechanism that is actually useful, yet cannot be abused by everyone else is not easy.
 
OK, but... how would that work?

The thing about summons is that they're basically on autopilot. Most of the interesting things that you might consider doing ultimately require controlling them.

Let's say that you want to have a minion that can temporarily block off passages, to do a crude form of crowd control. OK: how do you program that into a game with varying terrain? This is also why non-sentry minions fly and pass through blocks: it's too hard to program units that can understand terrain very well.

So if you're going to have some support minion, then it has to be something that can work in an automated fashion. Maybe you have a minion that slows targets down and de-buffs their defense, but doesn't damage targets directly. But even then, there is some optimal ratio of support-to-direct-damage summons out there.

And then you have to think about multi-classing, which is the default way of playing Terraria. If you have some support minion that is useful with only one or two summons, then you've effectively made every class that much stronger, since they can always call up one or two of them. Coming up with an automated support mechanism that is actually useful, yet cannot be abused by everyone else is not easy.
I can think of several ideas that are based on items already used in the game that wouldn't really mess anything up.

For example, you could create the minion equivalent to the golden shower that can be summoned, but only attacks when a melee weapon or a minion does damage (which would count whips). It also subsequently consume mana upon its attack, much like the golden shower. The attack itself could be similar to the Terraprisma and just be a short range aoe around the damage dealt to apply the defense down debuff.

From the above example you could even separate what I mentioned into several different minions, like creating a minion that attacks only when other minions or weapons do damage which could double a specific type of damage (such as tag or minion damage) or creating a minion/sentry that will drain your mana pool to attack, but does a ton of damage until it expires.

I think summoner is just an unexplored class from a design standpoint and could be made so much better if it had many more people experimenting with it.
 
I‘ve never considered summoner a class, ever. To me summons have always been a support for other builds because of their relatively limited item pool. Even with stardust armor, it never seemed like more than a way to fool around. No post-avenger medallion, no real system of progression, not even a decent set of accessories. I’m not sure trying to make it 100% viable is even possible if this is the last major content update.
 
Ideas that I have thought about:
Maybe flasks (like ichor and cursed flames) could also apply to whips.
What if whips had some accessory to increase their range, similar to the yoyo string.
This one is a stretch, but what if there was some kind of reforge from the goblin tinkerer to increase minion slots. (maybe by like .25 of a minion slot)

I am not a game developer, or even a modder, so these maybe really bad ideas.
 
I‘ve never considered summoner a class, ever. To me summons have always been a support for other builds because of their relatively limited item pool. Even with stardust armor, it never seemed like more than a way to fool around. No post-avenger medallion, no real system of progression, not even a decent set of accessories. I’m not sure trying to make it 100% viable is even possible if this is the last major content update.
I think of summoner as a class because it even has just a small amount of resources dedicated to it. To me, it's always been the "fledgling" of classes constantly one update behind the others, lacking in everything except late game power (though power is a thin line topic). If anything, it needs way more ideas put into its design before it can be considered remotely on par with the other classes. If this game was designed with summoner in mind, we'd have at least 70% more content and resources dedicated to it and way more options to choose from, but because we don't and possibly because Relogic can't anymore (most likely due to code/engine limitations), all they could do was round it out as much as they could before handing it off to the community to mod it into something they couldn't.
 
I'm glad I was directed to this part of the forums, this seems more like my proper home (thanks Mods)!

I actually have a few questions for those of you who are dissatisfied with the current state of things with Summoner Class.
  1. Firstly, I've been going around actually promoting the Summoner Class as powerful, in this post here. What parts of it would you say you disagree with, as I've had consistent success so far.
  2. Here's my real concern though, I have yet to fight my first Mech Boss, so what I'm hearing now seems a bit worrisome. Are you all saying that the game was changed in 1.4 to purposely make Minions much less effective/ function against Bosses, or are you saying that Minions still function as they did, in let's say, 1.3.5, but are lagging being the improvement made to the other classes in the updates?
  3. Lastly, are you saying that using Whips is essential for fighting Bosses, namely in Hardmode, or that the optional damage boost is poor design only because it's counter-intuitive in nature?
Thanks for any & all feedback, this is the part of the forum I should've been in from the start! 😆🍹 @SkyanUltra @Cumbleton
 
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My personal, anecdotal experience is that many of the minions in 1.4 no longer properly attack bosses. The entire reason I gave up with my summoner, in just NORMAL MODE, is because the majority of the minions I used wouldn't stick to the boss and attack it like they used to, so my DPS was completely shot to pieces. I ended up fighting Duke Fishron as a Challenge-Run No Armor or Damage Accessories ranger because my sharknadoes refused to attack him. The laughable solution to this is to get in kissing distance of the likes of Fishron, the Empress of Light, every single hardmode boss and *whip it*. Yeah, no.

1.4 took the class with the absolute least defence, and the absolute least mobility (because just to be a summoner in later Hardmode you end up giving up accessory slots as well, and your armour gives no help), and told it that it had to melee. Not all players are even as good as Chippy, and Chippy reckons he's garbage. In amongst this ever increasing pandering to the lunatic hardcore players, everyone apparently forgot that many people are on phones, casual, or just plain freaking old and ain't exactly the twitcheroo they used to be.

I gave up on Summoner, and started a melee run in disgust instead (I like the journey, so I start over in situations like this). When I got back to Duke Fishron, I handed him his butthole on the first try, because my melee actually had MORE RANGE than the summoner and stupid amounts of defence and helpful accessories compared to the summoner and her lazy minions.

Summoners have MASSIVELY overtuned disadvantages put in place because the power of minions is enormously overrated. They have no defence because, theoretically, they should spend the entire time running like hell away from danger while their minions kill stuff. But they've been given whips and minions that are reticent to act if you're not using the whip. They have to give up accessory slots to continue adding minions and actually just be a summoner, which further impacts their mobility, personal combat abilities, and survivability.

The devs seem to have this idea in their head that summoners can effortlessly run away from everything while the minions slaughter it all.....but that's not the reality in the game. Bosses that want to get close to you will do so. Events will throw enough at you that you're going to get hit a lot regardless. Even with fully functional, bloodthirsty pets the summoner has still been more challenging than the cookie cutter classes. Summoners have always been the glassiest cannon in the game, and they didn't even have THAT BIG of a cannon. Now they have to take their glass face and headbutt bosses to even get their cannon to fire.
 
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This is the best analysis of summoner's issues that I've seen so far. There is currently an ongoing thread called Official Item Balance Feedback and Discussions Thread, which is being reviewed by the devs, and I think your analysis of the problems with whips and sentries would be much welcomed there.

No, it would not. That thread is for item balance, not for major overhauls. Please do not contribute to the thread's ongoing derailment.
 
Summoners have MASSIVELY overtuned disadvantages put in place because the power of minions is enormously overrated.
I do agree their power is overrated, but I don't think it's by that much. After all, I did a melee summoner playthrough where I pretty much had all melee gear and kind of abused summons to help my damage (sometimes exclusively relying on them to do damage). Having three minions out was generally enough to deal with mobs of enemies without any additional help in master mode, so long as I had the highest tier of summon I could at the time. The one thing I want to see, if Relogic is bent on keeping summoner at low defense, is to give them more ways to evade or reduce damage. Heck, even just turning some of the handguns into the ranged equivalent of whips might even be enough. Summoner is just a class I would consider needs to have the most versatility/variety or it will just suffer from the idea that it is a "weak" class. I actually think it is plenty strong in terms of damage, just undertuned in weird places because of some niche instances where it is out of line (which probably wouldn't even matter in the long run).

Side note: Does anyone even use the targeting system with a summoning staff for bosses? I feel like that could use some QOL with whips now on everyone's mind.
 
Side note: Does anyone even use the targeting system with a summoning staff for bosses? I feel like that could use some QOL with whips now on everyone's mind.
It's a good long range targeting solution. Allows targeting when the target is out of whip range (which is more often than not).
 
With the addition of whips, it might be time to buff the defense on summoner armor to reflect that they're a mid-range class now. Maybe boost it to slightly higher than the ranger, but not quite as tanky as melee.

Adding a few accessories to help them out might be good, too. Maybe one that grants a chance to negate a hit taken, but despawns one of your minions in return.

Though the answer is probably meant to be "you're not supposed to go pure summoner; you're meant to use other weapons too." Even if other classes can go pure just fine.
 
With the addition of whips, it might be time to buff the defense on summoner armor to reflect that they're a mid-range class now. Maybe boost it to slightly higher than the ranger, but not quite as tanky as melee.
I don't agree with this, only because many accessories, old & new, have much better upgrading paths in 1.4.0.5. 🤔🍹 In Master Mode, you get an extra accessory slot to play around with, for free, Summoner tends to be "buff neutral" most times, the only things I feel effect it directly are Summoner based items that buff Minion DPS or the number of Minions you can summon.

Adding a few accessories to help them out might be good, too. Maybe one that grants a chance to negate a hit taken, but despawns one of your minions in return.

Though the answer is probably meant to be "you're not supposed to go pure summoner; you're meant to use other weapons too." Even if other classes can go pure just fine.
We already have items like this, Brain of Confusion (so I've heard), Frozen shell, Cross Necklace, Star Veil, Worm Scarf, Master Ninja Gear (Black belt). There's nothing a Summoner would sacrifice equipping any or even all of these items. In fact, you could trade one slot & make up for it with Summoner Potions & other damage buffs. There's too much to work with to justify adding more specialized equipment. Heck, you can even equip a Repeater & carry Archery Potions if you wanna do a bit of Hybrid play.

I don't get this new wave... it's so confusing.
 
I did a melee summoner playthrough where I pretty much had all melee gear and kind of abused summons to help my damage (sometimes exclusively relying on them to do damage)

We call this 'not being a summoner'. Which is why you did so well. You weren't a summoner, you were melee, and toyed with a couple of minions. We're here talking about summoners.
 
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