Necromancers, Summoners and Conjurers... Oh My!

H0urg1ass

When I play a game the first character class that I look for is a pet build if it exists, specifically necromancers.

I played THREE of them in Age of Conan (So I could bring a necro to multiple raids a week), Grim Dawn, Diablo II, Torchlight II (kind of)... and a couple others I'm sure I'm missing right now.

Whether its Necromancers, Conjurers, Summoners (or whatever flavor you like), what is your favorite game with a pet class?

I'm partially asking because I'm looking for a new game to play and I want some undead pet action if possible.

TiamatRoar

Path of Exile where I can get an army of zombies, skeletons, golems, revived enemy monsters of my choosing, a guardian crafted out of equipment I selected and melded to it, a fire breathing turret, and spammable short duration mini flaming skulls. D3 only let my necro have a small handful of Skeles, one golem, and spamming even shorter more mana costly slele mages nstead of spamming flaming skulls and mana issues sucked. Witch doctor was a bit better at least but still not as good as POE.

Really liked Zombasite, where I could basically get a city of equippable clan members of many different classes at once even if I could only take two adventuring with me at a time.  And having an army of skeletons, demons, and revived monsters of my choice.  I think that was actually my favorite arpg experience of all despite the game being low budget indy and not being very polished. Alas updates generally ended so it's back to poe for me eventually.

Modded torchlight 2 had some crazy pet and summoner possibilities including being a D2 druid summoner except the vine summon wasnt useless and having a merc that could be any unmodded player class including a summoner and another mod that also changes your pet into one of the player classes and custom summoning spells resulting in an army and a pet with an army and a merc with an army which was lolz.

Adventures of Van Helsing final cut.  A ghost partner, a gun platform that's basically a flying arsenal armed with machine guns and rockets and lasers and a flame thrower, four melee bots, three ranged bots , a heal bot, and a rocket turret, with you yourself casting buffs or firing a disintegrator ray.

Dungeon Fighter Online. I enjoyed both the summoner and the Necro. Er... does that count?  I guess it's a bit too different that itd require me to say too much I suppose.  Too bad noxon ruined it. It was revived but I am not going through that grind again even if I did like the game

Palebane

Love engineers with drones and turrets, robots with missiles and such like in Fallout 4, Torchlight2, and Hellgate (as well as TF2 and OW a little). Magician and Necromancer classes in EQ were pretty fun as well back in the day.

Po_gg

H0urg1ass said:

I'm partially asking because I'm looking for a new game to play and I want some undead pet action if possible.

A 4th necro in AoC, perhaps?  

Jokes aside, AoC is one of my favourites, and I can think on just one which was better in fun, mechanics and overall pet control: the Mastermind in CoV.

Since it's accessible again (sorta, kinda, in the grey, etc. etc. - but they're in negotiations with NC), you could give a spin to that maybe.

My second most played comes already much "lower" on the pet class scale, at least in difficulty (still fun and has some interesting mechanics), the LM in LotRO.

Other nominations, CO has the gadgeteer, sadly not even in the same ballpark as the Mastermind, when I used to compare the pros and cons of the two games the weaker pet control is a big con in CO's column... (the Inventor Archetype is available for free during an event, so you can test it for free)

GW's necro (not the GW2) was fun to play, but in control it's lacking compared to AoC.

In Rift you could assemble a pet "class" within all 4 categories, with a couple odd soul combinations, but in effect it was only around the level of LotRO's LM, without being a great game like LotRO (no offense, Rifters )

I'd add STO, Science can work as a pet class in heal and support, not to mention in a sense everybody is, on ground mission you control and assemble your Away team, you can look at them as pets.

There are lots and lots more I'm sure, but the above ones I've played for long enough to actually suggest them.

WarWitch

Engie in defiance 2050, gw2 Necro can do all pet build as well. Gl on the new game.

Azaron_Nightblade

Po_gg said:

H0urg1ass said:

I'm partially asking because I'm looking for a new game to play and I want some undead pet action if possible.

A 4th necro in AoC, perhaps?  

Jokes aside, AoC is one of my favourites, and I can think on just one which was better in fun, mechanics and overall pet control: the Mastermind in CoV.

Since it's accessible again (sorta, kinda, in the grey, etc. etc. - but they're in negotiations with NC), you could give a spin to that maybe.

Masterminds are still unmatched for me too, yeah
Other than that, PoE definitely has some fun combinations available too!

Wizardry

FFXI had awesome pet classes,the Summoner or the Beastmaster.There is no other game that comes close to the power of the FFXI Beastmaster class as the pet can tank Bosses or even perform powerful AOE's and at least one pet could even heal the entire party.

Thing is that in FFXI you can also have npc's to form a group so if your a BST class you get a pet on top of the npc's to form a very powerful solo group.

The problem became Square Enix,changing the design of the game over expansions to cater to sales and ruining the experience of leveling up and grouping to become too easy like the rest of the mmorpg's.

H0urg1ass

TiamatRoar said:

Path of Exile where I can get an army of zombies, skeletons, golems, revived enemy monsters of my choosing, a guardian crafted out of equipment I selected and melded to it, a fire breathing turret, and spammable short duration mini flaming skulls. 

This honestly sounds freaking awesome.  I keep skipping PoE for other games, like Grim Dawn, but I think I might just have to dip my toes into that pool.

Po_gg said:

A 4th necro in AoC, perhaps?  

Jokes aside, AoC is one of my favourites, and I can think on just one which was better in fun, mechanics and overall pet control: the Mastermind in CoV.

Agreed, AoC has an amazing Necromancer class.  It's probably one of the primary reasons I played three of them.  The sheer combination of pets and the fact that they all have different abilities and roles still makes me very happy.

The Necromancer in AoC is like opening up a toolbox and finding the right tool for the job.  There's multiple raids that wouldn't even be able to be accomplished without them like Hathor-Ka and that one boss that you have to keep draining their mana so they can't use their big spell.  Forget his name.

That being said, I just can't do CoV.  It's just not my thing at all.  I'm 100% completely and totally not into the superhero genre.

Tiamat64

H0urg1ass said:

TiamatRoar said:

Path of Exile where I can get an army of zombies, skeletons, golems, revived enemy monsters of my choosing, a guardian crafted out of equipment I selected and melded to it, a fire breathing turret, and spammable short duration mini flaming skulls. 

This honestly sounds freaking awesome.  I keep skipping PoE for other games, like Grim Dawn, but I think I might just have to dip my toes into that pool.

My own build fits them all in (and comes with a short-CD mini-teleport ability too and a self-heal "super-move" that I can only use every 50 kills but is nice for emergencies), but you can have builds that specialize in JUST the revived enemies or JUST the golems etc too if you wish (POE has a ton of build customization options, really)

Curse abilities are optional, also.

(other minion builds include ones for archers who summon mirror images of themselves or melee characters  with floating relics that blast shockwaves whenever the character hits something, or turret masters, though even those that don't specialize in turrets can fit one turret into their build at the cost of just one out of 24 -32gem slots if they want to.)

Utinni

Try Star Wars Galaxies beast master characters. Both pre-cu and NGE servers have good versions with a ton of pet-related content.

Iselin

ESO has 3 pet classes but ironically it's neither the Necro nor the Warden that is the best pet class. The sorcerer is. It can be and is played by many with 2 permanent pets (a healer and a DPS Daedra) and a temporary ultimate Atronach.

I love pet classes too and that's my main in ESO.

Caffynated

Try Overlord. You play an evil overlord who commands dozens of demonic imps with different combat specialties and skills used for solving puzzles.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/11450/Overlord/

Cleffy

Watch out, there are a lot of really powerful necromancer and n the off topic forum. They may try to overwhelm you with finding tutorials.