Summoner Build Guide
The entity:summoner build lets four allies fight your battles while you stand at the back and feed them damage. You field a wall of skeletons, battlemages, wolves, and corpse eaters, then play as a support caster behind them, throwing damage spells over their shoulders and keeping the pressure on. Enemies have to chew through your summons before they reach you, and by the time they do, the fight is usually over. It is the most hands-off way to play a entity:spirituality character, and at full strength your pets hit hard enough to carry encounters on their own.
This is a pure Spirituality build. Everything scales off one attribute, which keeps the leveling simple: pour points into Spirituality, take the summoning line, and let your army do the heavy lifting.
Build: 08dadc31c187Attribute spread
Spirituality is the only attribute you actively need. Each point gives +1% Spell Power, +6 Max Mana, and +0.3/s Mana Regen. The key detail for this build is that your summons scale with Spirituality, so every point you spend makes the whole army stronger, not just your own spells. There is no split to manage and no second stat fighting for your points.
Because The Fall of Avalon rewards meeting gear requirements and dumping the rest, Spirituality is where almost everything goes. A small amount of Endurance early keeps you alive on the rare occasion something slips past the front line, but Spirituality carries the build from the first summon to the last.
Skills
The build is anchored by Astral Bonds, which raises your summon limit to 4. Four active summons is the difference between a single distraction and an actual front line, and it is the first skill you should target. Everything else builds on having a full roster out at once.
Invocations of Might strengthens what you bring to the field, Feeding Frenzy and Power Conduit push your summons' output and sustain, and Hold the Line keeps the wall standing so the enemy stays bottled up in front of you instead of streaming through to your position. Together these turn four summons from disposable bodies into a durable, damaging force.
Because your summons scale with Spirituality and your skill points reinforce them, the build's power comes from the army first and your personal spells second. You are not trying to out-damage your pets. You are trying to keep four of them alive and angry while you add what you can on top.
Spells
The summon roster is the build. Skeleton Knight is your frontline body, a melee summon that tanks and trades in the press. Summon Battlemage adds a caster to the line, throwing magic from behind your melee summons the same way you do. Wolf's Call brings in a fast, aggressive pet that chases down stragglers and harasses ranged enemies. Summon Corpse Eater rounds out the roster with another body to soak hits and fill the front.
Mix the roster to fit the fight. entity:skeleton-knight and entity:summon-corpse-eater hold the line, the entity:summon-battlemage adds ranged damage, and entity:wolfs-call runs down anything trying to flank you. With entity:astral-bonds you can have four out at once, so the standard opener is to summon your full army before the enemy closes and then start casting.
For your own contribution, run damage spells in the same vein as any Spirituality caster: open the engagement, drop your summons, then add direct damage from the back. The summons set the tempo; your spells finish what they soften.
Gear and playstyle
Run caster gear that scales your Spirituality and your spell output. Anything that raises Spell Power or Max Mana helps both your spells and your summons, so the gear that supports a standard mage supports a summoner just as well. You are not in melee range, so armor weight is less about plate and more about keeping your mana and casting where they need to be.
The playstyle is patient. Before a fight, throw out your full roster of four summons. Position behind them, let them engage first, and pick your targets from safety. Your job in the fight is twofold: keep the front line populated by re-summoning anything that falls, and add damage spells onto whatever your pets are already fighting. The enemy spends the whole encounter trying to get through a moving wall of bodies, and most of them never reach you.
Against a single tough target, the summons swarm it from multiple angles while you stack damage from range. Against a group, the wall holds the choke and your AoE-friendly spells thin the crowd before it can flank. Either way, you are rarely the one taking hits, which is the entire point of the build.
The weakness to respect is the gap between summons. If your whole roster goes down at once, you are a soft caster with no front line until you can re-summon, so manage your mana and keep replacing bodies before the wall thins rather than after it collapses. As long as four pets are up, you are in control of the fight.
Where it sits
The Summoner is a solid A-tier build and one of the most relaxed ways to play. It does not have the single-hit ceiling of an assassin or the raw scaling of a pure lightning mage, but it asks very little of your reflexes and it never leaves you exposed as long as you keep the wall up. For players who like to command a fight rather than be in the middle of it, this is the build, and it only gets stronger as your Spirituality climbs and every summon inherits the gain.
For how this ranks against the other archetypes, see the class tier list. To weigh it against the strongest builds, see best builds.