This is my guide for my Support Hybrid Summoner class. I hit level 200 in the beta shortly after release and have had a lot of time to play with the skills and get a feel for what build i like most. I Feel like a lot of the skills i chose have a ton of synergy and almost none of the skills are wasted.
This will not be a leveling guide!
I was part of the group of the first 200s on icbt2 and it’s not my place to give away any “spots” or strategies we used for leveling. This may turn you off to this guide right away but if you are a competitve gamer you will understand the hard work and effort we put into maximizing efficiency to be able to claim the first 200s for icbt2 and with an Open beta still to go, getting there first will still be the goal. If you need a leveling guide Lord Stormkov has made a general document detailing where you can level and grind and put way more detail into it then i could possibly hope to achieve.
This is a work in progress and if you have any questions if you head over to His Twitch Channel I’m sure he would be glad to answer any questions you might have.
Now, if you are still reading, here is what you are here for.
Why Should i play Support Hybrid Summoner Derf?
I’m glad you asked.
Tree of savior is a team game. If you aren’t a barb you are going to get more out of grouping with others. Whats the easiest way to get a group? Why, be support of course. But, what if you could also do really good damage and have no problem soloing?
Sign me up!
1. Build
In case you are in a hurry, here it is right here at the top.
ew why did you pick XXXX class
C1. Wizard: pretty obvious here
C2. Pyromancer: Of the two, pyromancer deals better damage AND has a buff that makes our party do more damage. Since we will not be taking any damage spells for a while, we need them from the pyro tree and boy are they good ones. (As a note: I feel the cryomancer cooldowns are very long for what you get and the real strength of the cryomancer path is in C3 when you get snowrolling and frost pillar)
C3. Linker: DERFY MAYS HERE WITH ANOTHER FANTASTIC OFFER
HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO DEAL DAMAGE TO 5 MOBS AT THE SAME TIME?
SOUNDS GREAT RIGHT?
BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE!
IF YOU CALL IN THE NEXT 10 MINUTES, WE WILL GIVE YOU A BONUS 100% DAMAGE ON ALL YOUR SPELLS.
Seriously though, when you link mobs together each one takes 100% of the damage from your spell. If the spell hits 2 linked mobs, each one takes their own damage, plus the damage from the linked mob. This does not carry to 3, 4, or 5 mobs, so sadly, no 500% damage. You can also purchase attributes to increase lightning damage on linked mobs up to 100% so all your krivas and elementalist friends will love you. If you know a Wugushi i GUESS you could take the 100% poison link attribute as well and carry them. We will cover the linker attributes more in the skills section
C4. Thaumaturge: This is probably the weakest link in the build. If you want to be more group oriented and to level faster, go Thaumaturge, if you want to be more offense go Pyro 2/ Elementalist here. this guide will only cover the Thaumaturge side but if you go Elementalist they have 3 spells that do damage and one that doesn’t so it shouldn’t be that hard to choose what skills to take. Linker C2 is also an option if you want more links.
C5. Sorcerer: The shining star of the build. Be warned, the AI of all summons is BAD. It will take some finesse to get them to do what you want.
C6. Necromancer: What, are you gonna go alchemist? Yeah, if you want to do chores all day in town go do alchemist. Another question i get a lot is “Why not C2 sorcerer?” The only skill worth anything in the sorcerer tree is summon. Adding 1 point to summon gets you 39 damage added to the summon and 1 defense. For our points that’s extremely low. Extra points in salamion gets us 43 damage per point. Our cat buffer has no 6th level and all our other skills only have 1 level. Which means you will be forced to “waste” 5 points in summon familiar. So for reference we get about +200 damage on our main summon, and 200 on our fire summon. When you get C6 your shoggoth will do about 1200 damage with only 1 point. So for our points you can go sorcerer C2 for 400 damage for 10 points, or 1200 damage for 1 point there is also the versatility of the necromancer kit. You actually get some nukes instead of just more summons, adding some variety to your toolbox.
C7. Warlock: I will leave a space here when the class skills are announced for OBT but i more than likely will go Warlock.
2. Stats
Let me tell you a secret.
It’s a good one.
SPR is useless
WHOA WHOA WHOA hold on there. Don’t smash your keyboard in disgust just yet.
Let’s dive into this. Don’t worry, i left my TI-85 in my backpack and i don’t even own a slide rule so we won’t get into math here.
First, What does SPR give you.
It gives you 1 SP recovery, and 13 SP
SPR Recovery!? Don’t i Need that? I’m always out of SP!
Sure you do! however the Time between ticks is so long that you will be out of mana in a fight waiting for a larger tick of mana and you will probably finish the fight by auto attacking before you get that tick. This build with linker and summons doing damage for you, will also cast less spells than other builds so you wont need the SP as much.
SP potions don’t scale with your pool, so if you had a 10000 SP pool, drinking a Concentrated level 5 Sp Potion still gives you 455 SP. Meaning you will still run out of mana eventually as the ratio of SP recovery to SP is always the same no matter how many points you have into it. It’s still 1 Recovery, 13 Sp in the pool.
At first it seems great to get SPR as you can last longer, level faster. But, in a land without free respecs and you have to cough up cold hard cash to respec, most of you will end up doing your final stats from the start because its cheaper then buying a stat respec off the cash shop at launch.
But why don’t we need a little SPR?
One of the sorcerer attributes gives you 1 SP recovery per point Without increasing your SP pool this is important because your Sorcerer summon Drains a PERCENT of your mana each tick. Keeping your SP pool smaller means less mana per tick is drained by your summon which means less potions. We also get a sorcerer summon that gives us an SP recovery buff, again Without increasing our SP Pool
THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT TAKE AWAY IN THE WHOLE GUIDE, IF YOU ARE A SORCERER DON’T INCREASE YOUR SP POOL, ONLY YOUR SP RECOVERY
Now that that’s out of the way, What is a perk of SPR?
Well our summons (Sorcerer Summon and Shoggoth) Def scales with our SPR, the problem is they both have field boss level HP to start with. And summoning them costs next to no mana so there is no risk to just resummoning them if they die, which they rarely do unless the mobs hit exceptionally hard. You can get def at a better rate just by upgrading the cards for your summon.
Int: Our most important stat. This makes our auto attack hit harder, which will help us in the early levels. It makes our spells hit harder by increasing our MATK, and most importantly, it scales our Summons Attack making them hit harder. Int also becomes more valuable as we level up out boss card because each star gives us +10% attack on the summon meaning we get more Summon attack per point of int the higher our boss cards level is.
Con: Using this build you sometimes have to get in there and mix it up Face to Face with a mob, you need just enough Con to survive a hit or two until you can get away or kill the mob. We will be linking and swelling mobs which puts us in close range. There is also the fact that the Summons wont attack unless you are close to the enemy and not moving. This leads to you getting hit trying to coerce them into attacking. We will cover this more in the Skills section.
Leveling Stats: Go Full int until you start dying to the mobs you are fighting, and put a few points in just enough to live, and then keep doing int. It’s not a ration, it’s just as needed. I didn’t start needing Con until i got to Demon prison and started dying on the pulls.
This is what my final stats look like.
3. Skills
Each skill is given a ranking based on power level and usefulness. Reminder some skills such as flesh cannon are really good, however they don’t fit into the playstyle of this build very well.
##Wizard
Energy Bolt 3/5 Basic leveling skill, you wont use it after you get Pyromancer skills
Lethargy1/5 At level 5 it lowers attack by 18, pretty much useless
Sleep 2/5 This one is an alternative to Reflect shield, just choose the one you like more. i don’t use either.
Reflect Shield 2/5 Better than nothing and you can link your party and cast this to make sure it triggers for the full amount with little effort from you.
Earthquake 3/5 Basic leveling skill, you wont use it after you get Pyromancer skills
##Pyromancer
Fireball 3/5 A great spell, but as you level you will use it less. In a group people will just knock it away.
Firewall 1/5 Doesn’t hit very many times and the damage is low.
Enchant Fire 2/5 A buff that is situational. Gives a small amount of attack to the party and makes their attacks have the fire property for bonus damage. The range is super short though, make sure you are standing on top of the People you want to buff
Flare 1/5 You won’t use this, it’s just not reliable without the attributes and you won’t have time to be casting spells before things are dead so it’s best not to go this one. (If you read the comments below people have outlined some benefits to this skill. Again this is just my personal preference i didn’t rate enchant fire or this spell very high. So feel free to go with your personal preference between the two.)
Flame Ground 5/5 A great spell, you can set it and forget it in a group, you can link and kite them around in it, You can put it under a mob while your summons tank. A variety of uses and your go to damage skill.
##Linker
Unbind 1/5 You really won’t use this that often. You can take it its only one 1 point if you party link a lot, but i found that linking my party got me killed more than it saved anyone else. Take a point out of physical link if you take this.
Physical Link 3/5 An ok spell. I saved a few peoples lives by linking them, but also killed myself a lot. In the end i just didn’t bother because we weren’t getting hard enough in the existing content for it to matter.
Joint Penalty 6/5 Amazing spell. 10/10 would waifu. Just out of the gate making everything you do hit 5 mobs means you kill 5 times faster with only 5 points. You also get 100% bonus damage when hitting 2 or more linked mobs. which means you could kill 10 times faster. The Cooldown is ridiculously short for what it does as well. You will hear me use the term “damage per point investment” later on and this is the best investment of points for damage in your entire build.
Hangman’s Knot 5/5 Another great spell, Gathering all your links in one place will help you kill faster as well as your party. It has the added effect of Rooting all the mobs for 5 seconds which is huge for you. It has a shorter CD as Link so it’s always up when link is. I will explain how to use it later on in the guide.
##Thaumaturge
Swell Left Arm 4/5 A great attack buff. I just wish the range was longer. Like enchant fire you need to be on top of your party members for them to get the effect. For the 5 points you spend getting +68 (plus the attribute bonuses that i will explain later) per player in the party makes this worth 340 additional damage on the partys attack. With the attributes that soars to 715 Damage bonus to the party. You cant beat the damage you get here for the points invested. You will also get a debuff that goes with it that is a passive effect that weakens enemies and another that has bonus attack on shrunk enemies. All that for just a 5 point investment.
Shrink Body 2/5 Use this to make enemies with a lot of hp, have less hp so your party can kill them faster. It has no downside. Has an attribute to make mobs take extra magic damage.
Swell Body 3/5 When grouping this is a super underrated skill. What if every 25 seconds your party got 100% bonus experience on 10 mobs. That’s a bonus 20 kills a minute, 1200 kills an hour. That’s huge. this also works on blue mobs for 100% exp on blue mobs if you ever find any. Works for double drops on white and gold mobs too.
(A note on the “increases drop rate” from this skill. It doesn’t give you 2 drops it gives you 2 of whatever it would have dropped. So if the mob was going to drop a roxana recipe and i swell it and kill it, it will drop 2 of that recipe, not 2 separate loot rolls.)
Transpose 0/5 This swaps your Con and Int, but your HP amount stays the same, so you get 30k hp but you are now at 5% hp because you only had a 2000 HP pool to begin with. Would be better if it stayed as a %. It also wears off before you can rebuff so you cant just keep the large amount of HP you have to rebuff, reheal, every 60 seconds.
##Sorcerer
Summoning 5/5 Your first summon. All of a sudden getting cards from all those loot cubes becomes awesome.
Attack Ground1/5 Useless in its current state. Summon will walk forward attack a few times then wander back sometimes without killing anything. Also will still follow you if you move too far from him.
Riding 3/5 Good skill but takes a lot of mana. You ride your summon and gain access to their skills, some are better than other experiment and find ones you like. You also run a little faster riding so if you have mana pots to spare feel free to ride it around for fun. This gets lower marks because the mana it uses is a LOT and the monsters all have pretty lackluster skills with one exception i will cover later.
Morph 1/5 This skill is bugged on current icbt but even if it wasn’t it is purely cosmetic. Just makes your summon look like another summon. On top of being stupid it also only lasts for 30 seconds. I assume this is a pvp ability to hide what summon you are using at the start of a fight. (on icbt this just summons the card you have in the second slot)
Hold 3/5 Moves your summon to a location and it stays there no matter what. I use this when i solo farm by putting it in the center of a room, and running around and training mobs to the summon. You can also use this to grief people by placing it in their farming area and it just stays there ksing them. You wont get any exp but if someone is moving in on your farm area this is a good way to get them out.
Summon Familiar 1/5 This is just Ok. The bats don’t do a lot of damage compared to the other skills you have, and you have to resummon them each time they all suicide into something. You also have to attack or be attacked and in close range for them to work. So it doesn’t mesh well with our plan of buffing and linking and swelling while our summons do damage for us if we have to keep summing bats and attacking.
Summon Salamion 2/5 Better than anything else we have. Would be better but when you summon him he stands still for 5 seconds before “activating” and his range is very short and you can’t control him. So usually as you are running around kiting and linking, he will deaggro his target and start following you and wont attack again until you come to a complete stop with an enemy close to you. Yeah its as annoying as it sounds.
Summon Servant 3/5 This is a cat that buffs you. the best buff is the AOE buff and the SP recovery buff. you have to stand still and allow him to buff you and its slowwwww. Like watching paint dry. you can buy an attribute to speed it up. The cat also cant get hit or he stops buffing. He has the same issue as all summons where he wont do anything while moving so you have to be stationary to get the buffs. Just a gripe he does FIVE buffs. I usually just get the first 2 then run off so he doesn’t fill everyone buff bar up with junk.
##Necromancer
Gather Corpse 1/5 This spell has super low damage and you only get the parts if you kill the enemy with the spell. even then, it’s one corpse. Might be better with wands and +dark damage items int he game.
Create Shoggoth 4/5 Great summon, has good range unlike the sorcerer summon. I usually never have to wonder why he is standing next to me doing nothing. You also can get an attribute that gives him an AOE debuff. This summon does not Drain SP like the Sorcerer Summon so you can use both at once.
Flesh Cannon 4/5 This is an awesome spell. You get an evil laugh (the best part) and you hit multiple times in an area. Problems with this skill in the build is, it has a cast time. You have to stop and cast it, and the area it can hit is quite small. Think the range of your fireball, about the width of your character. I have tested with it and found i get hit by the enemy casting it while charging it, or they walk out of the area i was casting on (it has a long cast animation) But it hits like a truck. 10k or higher at my current level and stats.
Flesh Hoop 5/5 This is good because we can use it on the move. It hits multiple targets which goes with our build, and we can put it on and keep linking and running and swelling and buffing.
Dirty Pole 1/5 Does nothing but gives the “decay” buff, which lowers an enemies max HP every tick. However that’s just Max HP, not current HP. This is more of a pvp skill where you can throw it out and even though other players can heal they all have reduced HP. But has no purpose in PVE. You can get an attribute for your shoggoth to apply this debuff in an AOE around him anyway.
Disinter 2/5 You can buy corpses from the necromancer master. In OBT if this is not the case, this is your go to corpse gathering spell, after you link and blow everything up, use this and get 1 corpse part per monster you kill.
Corpse Tower 3/5 This is an ok spell, however its damage it low in comparison to our other skills, and it only hits one thing at a time.
Raise Dead 5/5 This is the best skill in the necro tree. At my current level the skeletons hit for 1100 each, and you get 5 of them, so use it on a boss and that’s a tick of 5500 damage every second or so. That’s a lot of dps and the best part is you don’t have to do anything. Just let them do their thing. The CD is low so if some die you can resummon as needed.
4. Attributes
I will cover some of the useful attributes. Obviously you should increase all the + damage ones as you have money. So i don’t need to cover those.
##Wizard
None. no literally don’t get any of them. not even cloth mastery because it increases your max SP but not your Recovery rate. Which is bad. If anything get plate mastery. There are some Plate equips later on you might be able to take advantage of and bonus HP is better than SP
##Pyromancer
Get Fireball: Flame Debuff. Sets enemies on fire, the burn damage is based off your int. We like damage based off our int because we have a lot of it.
##Linker
Get the Lightning damage 10% attribute. You will see healers a lot and their Krivas lightning is super powerful to begin with.
Get hangmans knot additional damage. +20% damage right out of the gate on all your binded enemies is awesome.
Also get the hangman’s knot AOE defense Debuff.
If you find yourself linking your party a lot pick up Physical Link: Defense for a defense bonus while linked.
##Thaumaturge
Take the Enhance left arm: Shrink specialty if you feel yourself shrinking a lot on tougher mobs so your party deals more damage to them.
Take Swell Body: Additional Damage
Sorcerer
Nothing good here other than the SP increase.
Take the Hold cooldown decrease it only has 1 level.
If you have spare cash take the Summon Salamion: ignite and Summon servant: Quick Order
##Necromancer
If you take disinter, Increasing the range is a must.
there are a lot of + Dmg attributes in this tree so i wouldn’t worry too much about the extra stuff.
Create Shoggoth Enlarge doesn’t make it that big so its not even that cool, Here is a comparison:
##5. Cards
There’s only one card that matters
Currently it’s the only Ranged summon. which in and of itself makes it better than the rest. But , he also hits twice, one from each arrow and he shoots twice. So instead of doing 2000 damage like a regularly leveled summon at my level would do. Templeshooter does 4000 per attack. The card drops from templeshooter in the B1 Royal Mauseleum (The one with purifying event and the rooms full of bots)
He also has great skills.
**Currently whether through a bug or other means the second slot in your grimoire will be used as the stats for the primary card. You can use a shadowgaler card in your second slot and level it instead of templeshooter and it will have higher crit and damage since templeshooters main stats are con and spr. I do not know if this is intended and i will update this section when i find out because i don’t want any of you to level up shadowgaler then have it be fixed a week into obt and now you used all your cards on galer.
##6. Tips and Tricks
Hangman’s knot will pull to the closest enemy to you. Use this to position the group where they can be AOE’d
As a Pyromancer your fireballs can be linked and when you hangman’s knot you can pull them into the group and root them on top of it.
Here is a video showing off both concepts.
You can glitch and go in the sky using your summon by dismounting beside a wall and holding the direction of the wall then jumping.
You will need to get a feel for the summons range and stay inside it. You can move out of range ONLY if the Sorcerer summon is in its attack animation, but you have to return to its range before it is ready for the next attack or it will just move.
This video Shows that off as well as how bad the AI is of the summoned pet.
The skeletons are MUCH more aggressive than the other summons and have a longer range. They will even run to attack things off screen. You sometimes might have to retrieve them. Use them when farming as they are less maintenance and you won’t waste the mana potions from using your sorcerer summon.
You will find some areas you just cant use summons. They get stuck on stairs, in the geometry, i had one map where they got stuck in the floor every time i passed it. This build works just fine using link and flame ground and fireball without summons. buff yourself and your auto attack should be doing around 600 - 800. you can link and flame ground but you might not be able to kill a swelled mob before the buff wears off if you are solo. If you are in a group, you are still a linker thaum and no one will complain you aren’t using your summons because they still get links and double exp as well as your buffs.
##7. How do i play it?
The final section i will give you an overview of how to play.
If you are in a group, have all your summons out, and run around and link, hangman’s, Swell, keep buffs up and if you have a free second or two you can drop some flame ground or fireballs.
Your basic goal is to just have all your damage being done by the summons so you are free to link, pull mobs, root, buff people, swell or shrink when needed. While your summons obliterate everything they can reach.
If you are solo grinding you can use any maps with elites on it. You will get double the experience points from the elites. Which when i was leveling, was about 8 - 10k per at level 170. You have a lot more grinding options with this build because even mediocre maps become great when every mob gives double exp. Your temple shooter deals so much damage you have a very high ceiling as to what you can kill as well.
The one tactic you need to get good at using is the “Derf Maneuver”
This is your bread and butter for solo grinding and group grinding in areas with small packs. I didn’t have my summon out in the video because he would have one shot them, but when you grind you will and when they are rooted in your flame ground your summon will be able to fire on all 5, giving him join penalty damage of 100% and he already attacks twice. So it will be 4 attacks on every enemy each time if they are linked.
##8. Bonus material
That’s all i have. Hopefully i didn’t forget anything and if you are interested in playing a support summoner this helps guide you in the right direction. Here are some bonus videos and gameplay videos of the build in action.
From Steparus Channel :
Level 190 Dungeon Run
Level 175 Dungeon Run
Level 200 Dungeon Run
Short Grinding Video
Longer Grinding Video
If you made it this far thanks a ton for reading. If you have any questions or are curious and want to see it in action i stream at www.twitch.tv/derfqt pretty much every day in the evening and i’m happy to answer any questions.
but you’ll have to discover it on your own >:)