Summoner build viable?

[Idlemind]

Pretty fair along and can only craft spider wand, but I have birds, snowmen, sword, etc.

Overall finding summons kinda blah compared to Terraria, do they get good at some point?

I'm using the aphorea mod or whatever it's called but the summoner = necromancer and the summons aren't tied to a weapon so you can't target something with them until you get a wand and the skeletons at least initially do 1 damage.. not sure how they scale.

So far the only summoner set is the spider armour from forest caves which are pretty lackluster and later I can build a crown to tweak a set but there's no set bonuses for summons

[BIT Bear]

With armor, trinkets and potion you can have a maximum of 7 summons (14 with skeletal staff) at once and later armors give extra damage, crit or speed to summons.
Plus there are weapons that add more summons without taking summoning slots. (Frost piercer, slime cannister and there was another one I can't remember right now)

So it's not that bad tbh.

Edit: Unmodded btw.

[Oragepoilu]

Haven't played very recently but it used to be the most easy way to go around finishing the game.

Attacking slowed you down, so being able to almost only focus on dodging/moving, while taking more time to take down boss, also let me killing said boss with little setup.
I was also able to, IIRC, get a speed banner since I didn't really needed to attack that helped me while I learned each boss.

Aphorea class summon scale up with target hp, so yes they are terrible early on and barely noticeable later (boss take less damage from them); you will most of your damage from the other bonus (extra minion), as far as I could gather reading post about it. They also sucks because they aggro everything, so this mod is clearly not a good idea if you want to play summoner. Especially since you get a stupid flat half HP and little armor, meaning you get slapped down to your grave in very little time for basically no to very little bonus.

But yeah, depend what you are looking for. In terraria you can always attack while you use summon (not slowed down here) - but to be fair, I never really understood why it's often presented like it's a great thing because if you need to attack anyway why not simply picking a type of damage that as limited as summoning (mob invincibility frame greatly limit it's usage and overall DPS for example).

[BIT Bear]

I forgot to include the Fools Gambit you can equip in your ability slot.

So you could have 8 summons (or 16 with skeletal staff) instead of the 7 I mentioned earlier.

[Detective Panda]

I have a really great summoner build-- you have to get armor and trinkets that increase your max summons/summon damage, etc. You can do this through enchanting the weapon or grinding for trinkets. I have 5 max summons and it's honestly so OP!