User talk:Manifold/Summon Stone Attack Damage

Direct damage only?

Direct damage is one of the elements important in PvE, but it's not the only one. Control, disruption, buffing/debuffing, and indirect damage are also important. I know the nameless dummies are less than idea for testing most of these, but during your experiments, did you get a chance to observe or check for anything besides direct damage?  — Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 00:13, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

I've gotten as many of the missing attributes as I could, and found an additional skill. And found that the students of disease and poison can disease and poison non-fleshies. And there's some odd AI with summons: When I summoned them near the students, they wouldn't leave until they were all dead, but my heroes don't attack the students unless told to. When all of the students were dead and I got the summon to move to the near/adjacent/etc dummies (and out of the aggro range of the students) they would run back to attack the students when they re-spawned, but only a few times, before ignoring them from then on. It might have to do with the spirits I left in the area of the students, but I didn't play around with that a whole lot. They'd also sometimes be in one of the adjacent/nearby dummy areas, kill a target, and then move to the other area, even though there were plenty of closer targets. Manifold 00:34, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

Right, summons behave more like minions than h/h or even allies. But, you recently suggested that the Celestials were under-powered. I wonder if that's true, if you take into account other effects. For example, the Fire Imp is at the bottom in terms of damage, but it causes AoE damage and is one of the sturdiest allies in the game (even at low levels, it can successfully solo certain areas). Similarly, the Devourer is weak on direct damage, but can speed up its attacks and poison targets. The CeleDrag might not cause much damage, but (a) that's analogous to caster wanding (low damage) and (b) it can KD decently.

In other words, do you really think that, on balance, the celestials are underpowered? Or did you have something else in mind when you were asking Joe about the amounts listed on this page?  — Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 00:48, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

I definitely think that the warrior, dervish, paragon (assuming, the monkey seems to be rare), and to a degree assassin, celestial summons are much less powerful than they should be. They have better bars than the Golem or Fire Imp, but even a great dervish bar is going to be awful with a scythe that criticals for 14. It's like if the imp had 15 energy. A lot of the builds are utility/support oriented too, which makes purposefully gimping their weapon damage make even less sense. Manifold 01:14, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

Good to know. I'll keep that in mind as a sort out which toons get which stones. Thanks for putting this info together.  — Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 04:47, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

Wouldnt the Swarm of bees have the lowest possible output? or did you just check stones where you know what you were summoning?