Druid Summoner vs. Necro Summoner

[emk]

Druid Summoner vs. Necro Summoner

I've been having a blast with my Necromancer-Summoner as my first character to make it to Hell difficulty. Now I'm starting to think of some alts to play with some of the nice twink gear I've collected. I've never played a druid before, so I was wondering...

How do Summoner Druids compare to Summoner Necromancers? Is the playstyle the same or significantly different? How do the summoned creatures compare?

 

[Verashiden]

Well:

Necros can break phys immunes while Druids can't.
Actually, Necros just have a tool box in curses.

Druids can keep a room stunned for hours if need be.
Druids require you to pay ALOT more attention.
Druids can have over 5+ variants of a summoner. Necros not so much.

Necros have a TON of meatshields that do weakish damage.
Necros need bodies to summon

Druids have a few Summons that are each vital in their own way.
Druids don't need bodies to summon.

Both builds can easily be done untwinked.

That's the gist of it.

 

[Jary]

A popular route to go for Summoners like Rashi mentioned is mixing in shockwave. I went the Shockwave-Summoner route and it worked awesome. If you master the build and get up to lvl 45-50 Summons, hell will be your playground, it's one of the most secure builds I've ever build... very hard to die with.

I don't think the playstyle would be too much different, especially if you end up using nigma to hop around with teleport... since you can't "exactly" tell your bear to attack who, your best...or only manner of control is tele-stombing each individual target and voiding PI's etc off with shockwave, then just keep going... just like hop scotch heh. Then whenever you're in a bind you can shape into Bear and stun a crowd with one swift shockwave for 15 seconds, just like that. :laugh: Just it takes a lil' more finess since instead of doing a collective ~10k+ damage, you're doing a single concentrated 10k+ damage from your Bear. Instead of using numbers/curses for crowd control, you use shockwave... just takes a hot min to get used to but I assure you you'll be comfortable almost anywhere in the game. In a way it's a little more comfortable knowing you have ~6-8k life with dr too as apposed to bone armor... you can't always predict when it'll break and you get trampled

I suggest you try it's a lot of fun. This thread may give you some help... just in case:

http://forums.diabloii.net/showthread.php?t=557909
if you have any questions on breakpoints:
http://strategy.diabloii.net/news.php?id=551#General%20Breakpoints

 

[Nathanjk]

IMO if you want to go summoner you may have more fun playing the towndump werebear guide. Ive been doing this and it combines a summoner with a bear and I find it very fun. I'm also playing HC so its pretty safe as well.

 

[Yogey]

necro summon good points :
.can max res and other bonuses on summoned creatures.
.also necros and curse for advantage, for example amp dmg + lower res etc.
druid summon good points :
.can make summons without needing corpse.

overall it depends if its for pvp and pvm.

 

[GandalfTheGhey]

Ya 1.10 ruined it for pvp druid summoners ( unless you stay in town ^^ )

But druid summoner is still a very viable pvm build.

Also don't forget you don't really need to max anything but your Spirit + Grizzly, providing you have enough +skills ( and only want to use grizzly ).

This means you can max at least 2 other skills ( perhaps from ele tree ).

Get a merc with reapers toll and he will be able to break some PI's, not to mention make monsters easier to kill.

If you got the runes get a beast runeword or faith and put it on your druid.

Very few hell monsters can kill a grizzly with 5K life. His life regen is so much he won't die.

Oh, ya, and IM will ruin your day too