Are there plans to allow multiple summons?

For example, if I summon a skeleton, then summon a lich, my skeleton disappears. I was hoping to build a character that focuses on summoning many minions, but this is currently impossible.

 

Sounds a bit overpowered to me. For years I would watch players in NWN summon stuff and then just go invisible or find a corner to hide behind while their summon did all the work with little risk to themselves. I'm hoping that wouldn't be the case here. If multiple summons were possible.. the all summons should drain focus.. meaning more summons.. more focus drain.

 

Of course I would expect it to be balanced, and the focus drain that's already planned for summons should help. Maintaining multiple summons would require a lot of focus, requiring a mage-like build, while preventing the player from using many other spells.

 

Horde summoner type characters may be fun to some people, but they are pretty much always extremely ugly, glitchy and laggy and thereby make the game less fun for other people.

Here is how that goes: "Hey, this character can summon 10 minions! ... In order to save texture memory we had to make them all look exactly the same and have the exact same animation... There is no true NPC collision in the game, so they all get stuck in each other and turn into a ball of flailing limbs... don't worry, they aren't overpowered because they are weak individually ... and of course any enemy with AoE wipes them all out instantly because of that ... so we had to give them AoE resistance ... now everyone who has to fight them in PvP absolutely hates them because we removed the natural counterplay to being attacked by lots of weak enemies... since nobody wants to kill them one by one we had to nerf their damage so they can be ignored... now the people that wanted horde summoning hate them too... why did we put this in the game?! "

 

Gu

Guild Wars 2 has the horde summoning Necro (and to a lesser extent Mesmer) without those issues. It's possible to do it right.

 

Ask a Mesmer or a Necro if people love having them along in a 50 Fractal and they will tell you all about the issues of Guild Wars 2.

 

Guess they could have so if you made a combo of two summoning skeletons glyphs it could summon two
But what would be a working cost then?

 

Sounds over powered to me too.

However, perhaps it could be designed so that for each additional summons, the number of hit points was split between the summoned creatures. So with more summons, strength of the deployed force did not improve.

 

I played Guild Wars 2, and never heard complaints about minions causing lag, or being hard to kill with AoE, etc. Necro had issues in dungeons because condition damage is broken, not because of minions, and Mesmer is one of the best classes to take to a dungeon.

The devs have mentioned adding focus drain as a working cost to summons. More summons would just drain more focus.

 

Our experience playing Guild Wars 2 is very different then. There is no room for pet classes of any kind if performance oriented PvE groups currently, and in PvP pets are built to be ignored, everyone just goes exclusively for the main character.

 

The inability to have multiple summons certainly renders many of the skills somewhat redundant and limits build variety. The focus drain would balance concerns re OP toons running around I'd imagine. Or perhaps something else?

But ya, I was surprised to learn I had wasted a bunch of time and training on multiple pets as well.

edit: Thinking about this more, why not just lower the HP or damage of the summon by ~33% -50%, increase recast, reduce focus drain by a fair amount, increase focus cost to cast by a bit and allow multiple summons?

 

PvP-wise there is nothing less fun than Mesmers and summon Necros for me in GW2.

The best words to describe them is "clutter" and "anti-telegraphing".

 

I like the current system that for each summon, your "max available" focus gets reduced.
For higher lvl summons, max focus should be reduced more.

For example -
Wolf -> -50
Greater Wolf -> -70 ?

 

I understand every point here. But to summon a single skeleton is like... bleh. In the other way one room could have hundreds of different item and that is worst that few skeletons. I also had no problem withe the puppet master in GW 1 or 2.

 

I agree multiple summons would be a nice option to have, but it is definitely a headache to balance it properly. I do like the idea that different summons would have different drain levels, so you can choose to have 1 or 2 powerful units, or 5+ weaker units. I'm not as worried about the cheese factor as others might be because different styles of play than someone else will always get a bad vibe at some point (magic too powerful vs melee, magic not powerful enough vs melee, etc etc). As long as there is a fair balance it could be fun.