New Summoner is Good

[Mattrex]

I'm pleased to be able to say that the rebalanced Summoner feels very good to play in 1.0. I wrote a bit a few months ago about how I believed Summoner at Mastery 25 was too reliant on very specific talent packages to succeed. Well, I just played a successful game today and it worked out great.

The run was challenging enough (especially around nights 8-10, when I wasn't certain I was going to make it, and for several nights I was skipping just ahead of the curve by buying key talents each night), but by the end I had managed to put together the kind of cracked build that I was used to being able to make on the Archer or Bandit. Not only did I win at Mastery 25, I managed to go for almost six minutes in the Endless Nightmare, beating my best times for all my other classes.

I thought I'd say this because I know people usually only talk on the forums if they have something to complain about, so I wanted to give some encouragement regarding what I think to have been a successful approach to the class's design.

[Trash]

I feel like the Summoner has some good things, while other things are truly, abysmally bad.

-Cooldown reduction not working on base summoning speed feels pretty brutal, since there are no nodes for attack speed. This one is just kind of a gripe, and would be pretty minor if it weren't for my other major complaint.

-What in all holy hell are you supposed to do with the Flies talent package? The queens summon a single fly every 10 seconds, the percent chance for flies to upgrade to hornets doesn't stack with each additional point in that talent, the percent chance for enemies that die with decay to spawn flies doesn't stack with each additional point in that talent, you get no ability to just directly make flies... I just don't know how it's supposed to be viable, ever, unless you take it as your 3rd or 4th package once you already have things that gave you real abilities.