Diablo solidified my love for “summoner” classes. So of course that’s the bulk of my time invested in the game. And I have only two requests.
Increase summon aggro range. I have been able to stand in place and get attacked by a mob while my summons stand and watch. This is very aggravating. Summoners also have low health bars so having to stand 10 or less meters from the battle is dangerous, especially with AOE death effects.
Summon teleportation. If I equip speed enhancing items I can cause my minions to constantly teleport. This is annoying. And a simple solution could be to increase the range before this occurs. A more robust solution would be to include lathing, and only teleport summons that cannot navigate to their controller.
Hopefully this message hits the right set of eyes.
This game requires more management and configuration than Diablo, but as such you can achieve more efficiency. Think of it as driving Manual vs driving Automatic.
Change the pet’s behavior to aggressive. The aggro range is like that to prevent people from making the pets fight while they watch from a safe spot. Pet builds are strong as they are right now. Removing that inherent risk would be too much.
It would help if you provided some examples like which pets you are using.
As far as my time using almost all of the mastery pets go though, they work relatively well and attack enemies before they even reach me, you may even want to consider using the “Pet Attack” command as well to move them ahead of you into a crowd.
I’ve never heard of pets teleporting except when the distance between you and them is too great where they teleport to your character to catch up, and I never have this happen constantly like you describe on my characters. Especially later on when I can start to find items with % movement/total speed for my pets.
I don’t focus on pet movement speed. All dps and survivability. I am sure if I changed I would see what you describe but I don’t want to adjust my strategy…
Also…I have tried pet attack, but this too has a very limited range. They’ll ignore it unless in range of the unique minion aggressive range. So this too is an incomplete solution.
Isn’t that the point of a heavily focused summoner build? To let your army do battle?
The mobs will target the player, and then you have to bob and weave to keep from dying. This would not change if the distances were adjusted. I am not arguing for kilometers here I am arguing that the mobs should never outrange my minion aggro.
Hm, I don’t know what to advise because once my pets are set on Aggressive they charge all the way across the screen to get at foes in most cases.
When you say DPS and survivability, who are you talking about? Because pets do best with gear that has “bonus to pets” on it. You should be grabbing anything you can find with that on.
Pretty sure skeletons and other “non-configurable” pets have Aggressive stance by default, 'cause my skellies attack everything on sight, basically. You’re probably mistake agro range for Threat level. From my experience skeletons don’t pull much agro on them.
And you should probably post your build here, maybe you’re level 20 fighting Krieg or something.
I am, have filters set as such. But my preference is for anything other than “overall speed” bonuses. I’d rather them hit hard and often and take punches better, than run faster (yes I know overall means attack speed as well but attack speed bonuses are usually higher).
My cabalist with all configurable pets (hound, fiend, familiar), all set on aggressive, would have those three aggro first while the 8-9 skeletons would hang back until the fight got closer. In fact, waiting for enemies to come within this range while the 3 config-able pets weren’t the closest in the formation to the enemy would still have them acknowledge the enemy and engage first.
Of note: these behaviors seem to become more exaggerated the more minions you have on the field.
Config pets are set to normal. If non-configs have aggressive by default why are none of them engaging while being shot at by the mob? I sat there and let several volleys hit with no reaction from the troops.
Configed pets set to aggressive go murder things at that range. Skeletons are less enthusiastic.
I’d like 5m added to the range of the aggro, but I’d settle for 2-3 even…
Routinely run into the described behaviors with all 3 pets on aggressive.
The aggressive ones attack as expected, the skeletons and other non-configs do not.
Putting it a tad more nicely, summoners can make some of the most sturdy and defensive characters out there as already shown. It sounds like you’re a fairly new player so there are chances you’ve made some mistakes but that’s to be expected - everyone here will have made mistakes early on into playing the game and learned as time went on.
Like Duck_King said, it’d be great if you can upload you character and share a link with grimtools so we can advice you on how to improve.
As someone who has levelled a couple of pets character from 1 to 100 including Skeletons, they are certainly viable, though I will say Skellies are on the harder end to make work and require more knowledge and careful choices in devotion, mastery skills and gear to compensate for their frailness. You can’t just steamroll everything with damage, especially when you get to Elite/Ultimate.
