Why darktide will never get a summoner class like necro sienna (and that makes me sad)

Id absolutely love it and with how disposable people are im 40k could be made to work.

You press the button and as a member of the warband proper (lvl 30 spoilers) you are given a small team of rejects (ai) yet to earn this position. Your not high ranked but they are lower then you. They pop out of a spawn door nearby to follow and fight. Could work.

With only one of these it is not so bad but the VERY FIRST thing people will do is get togeather a squad of all 4 summoner squad leader classes and summon all of them at once…

Even if they half the ai squad down to 3 members with four “summoners” thats 16 allys on the field…sounds like an absolute NIGHTMARE to balance.

Or they limit it to one “summoner” per match and we all know if they did that how the darktide community would react.

It would be amazing to get but…dosent seem resonable or possible

I wish that the summoning class in VT2 was a Bretonnian peasant mob instead of skeletons.

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I never saw the draw of summoning in a game that already has the entire screen full - after all, if someone plain doesn’t want to play, there’s smite.
But in theory (meaning I don’t think that’d translate to the game), it could be an interesting challenge.
You get a group of weaker bots as underlings, and are yourself just armed with a lore-friendly balanced laspistol, and then you need to survive snipers and trappers while your underlings do what bots usually do.
The more summoners you get in a team, the more hilarity ensues, until the last team member with an actual weapon gets downed because they can’t hold onto their keyboard anymore from laughter.
I approve - I’d want to see that.

1 techpriest with servitor.

I don’t think we would be summon ‘Rejects’, or character like ourselfs.

Restricting it to having Servitors would be much more appropriate.

Have the ability be able to summon 1 Servitor only. And have those Servitor be Technical Servitor, those that are simply armed with the Servo claws.

Then have a side node that either give a new Servitor, or one that give a new weapon instead (Stubber/Bolter most likely)

So even if every player take the same ability, you would have at max 4P + 8 servitors.

Which while being a lot, they wouldn’t have the same abilities.

Why would the Summoner not be able to use weapons as normal ?

Lack of a pet class makes me glad. The Sienna necro class is overtuned like hell and her minions just add to the visual noise in the game. I really don’t need more sources of Friend or Foe confusion in Tide games.

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I think the bigger issue is that the game is portrayed as a small strike team. Not even a full sized properly military squad, but essentially just a fire team element. The game has its roots in L4D, a zombie suspense game about four survivors, and being a small team is core to the narrative.

A team dropping potentially as a small platoon ends up being a very different vibe.

Upon activating the ability, your character will blow a whistle.
Summoned by the sound, peasants will immediately emerge from nearby buildings to assist you.

You can command the peasants to perform certain actions, which is signaled by different whistling sounds and the cracking of a whip.
When your peasants kill an enemy, they have a chance to pick up a piece of the enemy’s equipment, to use it for themselves (similar to how your minions in “Overlord” pick up weapons and armor pieces to wear).

Tbh, this would probably be the funniest implementation of a summoner/necromancer class, that i have ever seen (aside from Overlord).

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That’s how I imagine a Tyranid game would play. You as the synapse creature and your little minions running around to your commands.

Ooh that’d be rad, I’d be interested in playing that.

I don’t think summoning is something Fatshark is good at making happen.

Sorry, but I find Sienna’s Summoning very uninteresting.

A) Her summons are weak and lacking impact.
B) It’s too many skelly bois, who run around like headless chicken.
C) You don’t feel them taking any pressure off of you at all.
D) They serve no real function, other than being visible indicators that dmg is being dealt passively.
E) In accordance with all aforementioned, you cannot do anything meaningful with these summons. “Attack” “Defend” commands don’t matter because they have no impact. And you cannot buff / heal or do much with them otherwise.
F) Last point of contention, but also important - It doesn’t fit the theme. Why would Sienna be a damn necromancer tapping into unholy energy? In Lore that’s the stuff Mannfreds and Heinrich Kemmler use to torment the Empire.
Sienna could have easily summoned elementars or stuff related to fire, but they turned her into skelly lady. Very uncreative.

You cannot use these summons for meaningful attacks.
You cannot use these summons to body block enemies reliably.
You cannot use these summon to support your team.
They feel pointless.

In conclusion:
Not how I’d imagine summons to work, nor how I ever saw them in any other game. Fatshark is good at horde shooters and horde melee gameplay. Let them stick to it.
But you will not ever get satisfying summoning gameplay from them - Because they will translate it into more meatballs on screen.

A. This is part of the balance, the Summons aren’t there to do all the work for you.
Same thing doesn’t apply most of the time games have Summoners, but a well balanced Summoner should still have the summoner fight.
Can’t make them too strong, or they become crutches, this can be alleviate by having the Summon be more defensive, or by making it more passive1

B. That is a quite fair point, VT2 doesn’t let you have more than 1 Necro, who at max (and only temporarily) can have 8 Skeletons, here it would be better instead to have it be 1 Servitor, with talents that let you have a second Servitor alongside it.

D. They are cool, serve as buffer, and Necro isn’t just the Summons, they’re not the whole package.

E. This could be fixed by having the Summon have a ‘sub ability’ which would be available when the Servitor is present, and giving the Summons a cool down upon destruction2

F. For Darktide, using Servitor wouldn’t really go against the theme.
As for Sienna Necro, it doesn’t break lore, it is just character assassination. She killed her sister, twice, due to being a Necro, and fought tooth and nail to not be branded as a criminal (working with a Witch Hunter, who then became a WP). Her becoming one just break her personal story.

Well, Elementals aren’t taught at the Collegium, only in Araby, and at an illegal College in Altdorf. And Elementals are technically still Daemons…

Still would have preferred Embodiment of Aqshy, having Sienna transform into a towering (Monster Sized) monster of flame with a Fire poker/Spear.


1: Servitor shouldn’t be a killing machine, it should for the most part provide CC and deal lower damage, but do it on quite a lot of enemies. Letting the Tech Adept serve as the damage dealer

2: This would leave space for the abilities sub node to grow more than simply having it change the number of Summons or their weapons


Personal conclusion:

I’m not often a Summoner player, but I did play a fair few of them, Inquisitor Martyr’s Tech Adept with the Psiloi constructs, GW2’s Ranger and I dabbled in the Cathayan Engineer and quite a few others I don’t really remember.

But what I would want from a Summoner class/branch, is to not have it be also a Pet one, but rather one where you can have some additional troops that are there to make due as stop gaps, or as temporarily attack increase:

Ability: Reclaimed Servitor:

On mission start, you don’t have the Servitor, but you can summon it, but when you summon the Servitor it has an Overclocked state for X seconds, after which it’s in it’s regular state, where it’s slower, unable to run and will take damage faster.

Upon start a cooldown toward the ability that won’t summon more Servitors but will activate the Overclock state, causing it do move faster, pull aggro, deal more damage (basically acting as a mini-Ogryn)

That way the ability isn’t out when the Summon is present, but rather is used to make the Summon actually useful

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