As mentioned in the title, I decided to play a full summoner from level 1 until the end of the campaign, and then through expeditions.

At no point did I switch out of summoner. I did transfer the skills from another character, which could have been achieved by resetting the game and purchasing them at the start instead. I did not level any skills using currency from other characters, I did not duplicate any skills, and I did not use the 5th skill slot.

Seeing there's very little summoner scaling available, I rushed the minion damage reduction nodes on the Gate of Fates (Sacrifice of Flesh and the minors behind it). With those allocated my minions very rarely died.

So, let me stop wasting your time and go through my thoughts.

Must have QoL changes:

• Minions should NOT bodyblock you. - It is not as bad with the minions running ahead, but sometimes they stand still when fighting. Getting blocked by your own minions feels absolutely garbage.

• There needs to be a move command for minions. - Moving minions out of AoEs is impossible at the moment. Thankfully they are very tanky after Sacrifice of Flesh. That said, ranged minions feel terrible when you run into the barrier mobs from act 3 and they just shoot into the barriers over and over again. This feels even worse if you focus on ranged minions for damage (such as a Hunting Swarm duplicate).

• Minions need to attack structure enemies. - Spawners such as Lambach tentacles seem to be completely ignored by minions for some reason. This means that when you want to kill these enemies you are forced to spam focus fire on CD until they die. This also goes for the respawning enemies at the end of act 1 whose names escape me.

Other good QoL changes:

• Better focus fire mechanics. - The active effects from the minion skills allow you to give brief directions at the moment, Although not a must, it would be very nice to have minions continue targeting the moused over enemy, facilitating killing danger/problem enemies first.

• Hunting Swarm's pierce modifier could come earlier. - This is minor, but minions feel pretty terrible for clear compared to other options. When you run into a few spawner enemies early you are forced to either skip or spend quite a lot of time shooting through their hordes. Once you get pierce this gets greatly alleviated, and having that modifier available from level 5 instead of 8 would be pretty nice for early minion leveling.

• There should be a middle ground in minion aggressiveness. - With the new aggro minion AI it is incredibly difficult to buff your minions with AoE support skills unless they are standing still to hit an enemy.

• Minion damage/health visibility. - There is no option currently to enable minion health bars or minion damage. Throughout my playthrough I just guessed when my minions were low and placed Bulwark of Dawn on their feet. Similarly, it is tough to see if things are affecting your minions' damage when you cannot see their numbers.

• Increased area for support skills. - Skills like Sovereign Shout and Duskshroud have very interesting effects attached to them, but are incredibly painful to keep up on all your minions. This could be easily achieved with modifiers without affecting other skills.

• Sovereign Shout needs a better animation. - Speaking of Sovereign Shout, this skill feels terrible to use due to the massive animation that makes you stand still. It would be nice to either allow you to cast whilst moving or shortening the animation.

Bugs/Unidentified problems:

• Summons lose interest in enemies at times. - At times it seems like a few of the minions will simply get tired of fighting and will just stand still/walk around. This will usually fix itself with either time or moving far enough that these minions teleport to you. Sometimes a fresh enemy will also make them become aggressive once again.

• Enemy placement and melee minions. - Whilst there are times when the Livor Mortis golem and all of the Feeding Swarm fledgelings seem to stack on eachother, there are other times where it seems like they cannot get to the enemy. This may or may not be the same issue stated above.

Some suggested things to look into balance-wise:

• Improving minion AoE clear. - Cheaper/more available modifiers such as Hungering Swarm's pierce or exploding arrows (Rotten Roots) would be very welcome for other minions.

• Adding better ways to scale minions on Gate of Fates. - Allowing minions to benefit from things like Which Time Cannot Heal, extra projectiles from Archion's Teachings, or attack bounce from Wintry Hail are all brief examples of things that could be interesting to add to your minions. Additionally, having some actual working summon damage available on the tree would be nice.

• Providing working gear modifiers for summon scaling. - Having summon damage, health, and especially movement speed available on gear would actually be huge, not to mention things like increased number of summons (assuming it is possible to isolate it to a specific skill), ailment chance, and attack/cast speed.

• More build diversity through modifiers. - Allowing modifiers that increase ailment chance from minions (currently only available on Livor Mortis and Parasite), more damage conversion options, AoE slams for melee minions similar to exploding arrows (Rotten Roots), or life based explosions for massive tanks like Livor Mortis (similar to the Feeding Swarm's Cadaverine, which felt very underwhelming when I tested it) would make it so there are many interesting ways to build summons.

I have no idea how well this will even hold up on anything past adept, but my guess is it will be a slogfest. Currently it is very easy to get a summoner incredibly tanky, but it feels like there are very few ways to improve their damage. The only way I see to have this clear higher expeditions is by cheesing Mark of Impurity enemy explosions and/or Anomaly globe explosions, and at that point it may as well not be a summoner anymore.

These are the main things that I can think of from the gameplay I have gotten so far.

I am happy to see game bugs being fixed and an attempt at balancing builds and diversifying what is viable.
Your game has a lot of potential, and could easily become a major name in the arpg market.
Please keep up the good work!

Edit:

I decided to add one more QoL change that I think should be taken into consideration and is not specific to summoners.

• Potions MUST be able to be used whilst doing other actions. - Not being able to use potions whilst attacking or using skills feels extremely clunky and unintuitive. Whether this was intended or not, it makes the game feel unresponsive, and could easily be mistaken as lag or bad servers if a new player were in online mode.