Viable Summoner?

Is there a Viable Summoner build? I tried the Necro but his minions get ganged up on and creamed... alot of recasting with him.
The barb can only have 1 of the spirits at a time?!!?? it gets overwhelmed.
And the elementals(including druid acid dogs) are cool but weak.
Dont even get me started on the pally's zealots...
Mostly they all seem to be buffers for the characters not a stand alone army like the old Skeleton Necro.

Ele druid with acidbeast is very strong. have to make sure you get their resistances up. 25% hatred, 50% terror and 75% destruction. + minion life jewels work great also. ele druids can do most ubers with TU gear.

Necro Summoner is perfectly fine. Just stick with Rampagors, Shadows, Embalming max and void archon 1 point. Choose one Ele Totem, i prefer Fire and max it too. Take a2 mercenary Shapeshifter for Bloodlust Buff and use only honorific gear with minion life, - fire resi, fire spell dmg and minion resi like sleestak mentioned.

pro trick: use rings with daystars, theyre awesome.

at higher lvl: use su wand to buff with lionheart and tainted blood. use su necro shield trollskull for bl buff. use main hand su bone wand for acid fiends and su necro shield with krakenstance to make ur army insanely fast and deal moar ele dmg.... lvl 90 talent can be ur choice, i always stick with deathward. in toraja u can use rathmas chosen on edyrems for easy farming.....

What do you mean?Median xl's summoner are way stronger and better than d2,the reason why you can not find lots of builds here is because they were already a lot at the old forum

In median xl,necro is still the strongest summoner,if you read the doc carefully,you will run out of short-cut key for your skill switch,that many summons!YEA BABY!  

Summons do not just buff char,they buff each other two.

A necro summoner build is very viable, but also very, very slow moving compared to almost all other builds. You can give this one a try, which is very newb friendly (with no starting items): http://www.medianxl.com/t856-v6d-summoner-necromancer

I found you can do all easy ubers and summons without any problems whatsoever. Destruction Baal proved to be quite a challenge because the more you summon, the more damn baal summons, so best method I found was to switch rings out to ones with lolsummons and, along with the rest of my massive army, use the charm with Jitans Gate and teleport over to his dumb ass as fast as humanly possible. You may still die. Several times. But if you're lucky, he'll die in moments. Regarding medium ubers, you will have a lot of save-and-exit moments where you have to restart the level with lots of frustrating deaths. Hard ubers are almost impossible without massive gear upgrades, which I never bothered with.

Ok. Thanks guys. I have no idea what SU/TU gear is... I haven't been playing that much. I never really have a lot of free time so I like to read up and figure things out before the investments.

TU stands for Tiered Unique and SU stands for Sacred Unique.

Necromancer summoners are viable but make note that they basically break down into two categories: physical damage based and elemental damage based.

The elemental damage based build is much more expensive as it works best with the sinwar sacred unique demon head and talon of trang oul sacred unique bone wand. The kill speed with the elemental damage summoner necromancer is very impressive though. Other gear should focus on summoned minion life and the skill plan would look something like this:
Skillplan elemental damage summoner (Necromancer, 2012 v005)

The physical damage summoner is cheaper but a little trickier to put together. You need to focus heavily on minion life and minion damage on your gear with crafted items. using the blackheart tierred unique grim wand on switch for dark power is usefull. Make liberal use of bane if you go this way. A skillplan for this kind of summoner may look something like this:
Skillplan physical damage summoner (Necromancer, 2012 v005)

If you can get the scourges to not die (their base life is terrible) then a holy summoner could be a good build. Scourges use crucify as a primary skill giving them a little bit of AoE and respectable damage in theory. Combined with the right resurrects, some skills from items and the right support skills it could a formidable build indeed. Good luck if you try that though.

Well, unless Marco hits him too severely with the nerf gun, druid summoner is quite bad ass. The acid fiends with their synergy become quite tanky with max resists plus a modest amount of +minion life. Also they benefit from their aura. Most importantly their base damage is considerable so the benefit greatly from +minion damage. They are agressive. Meanwhile you can stand back and spam the spell of your choice.

For the necromancer I like the Re-Animator!!! Annies have level appropriate damage and life. So you are in a level 120 area, you get level 120 annies. Then you buff them!!!! One point shadow and one point void archon under the influence of a 1 point RC. Annies now have 50% more life than the locals and their damage is buffed plus the va debuff on the baddies. Now hit em with some dark power and give them a burning veil to walk through. Oh, what's that over there? Maxed DFT and HT. So our Annies are faster, do more phys damage, have rainbow damage, a bit of magic damage from DP, 50%+ crushing blow plus whatever other buffs we lay on. Acid fiend aura courtesy of our mask, shapeshifter merc with a GotW proc. Buff buff buff. And we don't even have to kill anything to get started.

Careful tho. I once had 30 corpses per cast and 100% reanimate as skeleton. My graphics card shot out of my machine in protest.

grimjerk wrote:Well, unless Marco hits him too severely with the nerf gun, druid summoner is quite bad ass. The acid fiends with their synergy become quite tanky with max resists plus a modest amount of +minion life. Also they benefit from their aura. Most importantly their base damage is considerable so the benefit greatly from +minion damage. They are agressive. Meanwhile you can stand back and spam the spell of your choice.

For the necromancer I like the Re-Animator!!! Annies have level appropriate damage and life. So you are in a level 120 area, you get level 120 annies. Then you buff them!!!! One point shadow and one point void archon under the influence of a 1 point RC. Annies now have 50% more life than the locals and their damage is buffed plus the va debuff on the baddies. Now hit em with some dark power and give them a burning veil to walk through. Oh, what's that over there? Maxed DFT and HT. So our Annies are faster, do more phys damage, have rainbow damage, a bit of magic damage from DP, 50%+ crushing blow plus whatever other buffs we lay on. Acid fiend aura courtesy of our mask, shapeshifter merc with a GotW proc. Buff buff buff. And we don't even have to kill anything to get started.

Careful tho. I once had 30 corpses per cast and 100% reanimate as skeleton. My graphics card shot out of my machine in protest.

Sounds fun. What is the spread for something like that? Is that the passive skill that reanimates as Rathma's chosen?