I'd like to leave some feedback about summons overall in Wolcen. I have never played with summons before in an ARPG, and thought hey, why not, there has always been top tier summoner builds in other ARPG and its pretty much the only build i have never gone with, lets give it a shot!

Oh boy did i not know what i was setting myself up for.

Am currently level 65, and level doing expeditions even for that level is a dream to be had. In contrast a friend is running a spin-to-win build at level 71, and can easily push to expeditions at around 90. More than 90% of my dmg comes from plagueburst and anomaly while my cheerleading squad mostly just hangs out in the back, throwing the occasional pool noodle into the mix. Did the mistake thinking "Oh, if i just get high force shiled, and some life steal for it, i will be all set. I can just let Livor Mortis tank, go into masochistic effigy for massive shield and chill while it gets regend by my massive lifesteal + faith of leech, solid strat!". But apparently any "force shield life steal" from full force shield just wipes your entire shield and you now got 5% HP from masochistic effigy, great stuff.

However, going with this was not all bad news. I noticed my summons dmg does not reset my shield. Meaning that they do not deal spell dmg, even if "spell" is set as a note on them to indicate that they are effected by spell damage. So now is not only my build i was going for completely useless, the gear I've been grinding is totally useless for my build as well! Awesome!

Some things that needs to be addressed with summons if its going to be viable ever:
1. There needs to be a way to see your summons dmg so that one can easily understand what to go for. An easy temporary fix would be to just show their dmg numbers when they attack. That would at least give us something to figure it out with.
2. Both Hunting Swarm and Feeding Swarm is completely useless if used for anything else than mob density to boost plagueburst. An enemy that my friend can spin down with 2 hits in less than a second, requires my army of 6 Hunting Swarm more than 30 sec to dps down. Thats with help of my poison ailment I've been stacking for plague burst.
3. The summons AI in a lot of cases do nothing. An enemy has to pretty much run into them or you have to spam click the ability to "command" them to attack (why the fuck does this cost MP? Its already useless, the manacost is just a massive "Fuck you for trying to play with summons")
4. More things about the "command" ability:

• While running, the "command" does not use any spell animation, nice. Probably the best thing with the build.

• While stationary, the "command" ability uses an animation, canceling your attacks, wtf

• The command ability with Feeding Swarm doesn't seem to use any pathing at all. "Oh sorry I was behind the pillar, I'll guess i just keep chilling over here"

And yes, IM MAD. I've put hours into this character going for this build. Trying to make it work. Just running into another "Haha, fuck you" after another. There is just NO WAY to hit level 90 with a summoner build in this game. I wouldn't even call my build a summoner build anymore. The only thing it got that kills anything is plagueburst + anomaly. The summons are just eating 3 of my skillslots and mana, and the only thing they deliver is disappointment.

Except for Livor Mortis. His AI sucks and most of the time he is not where i want him. But at least it feels like he accomplishes something sometimes.

Please rework summons. Or just remove them for the game so that others dont have to feel this pain.