Alongside the release of the Blight expansion, Path of Exile is retooling the Summoner archetype with a bevy of bloody new skills. These new additions in POE 3.8 help flesh out one of the class types that mostly needed some love in the skill reworks. The Summoner archetype has been a source of scorn for some Path of Exile players as the damage from minions has been rather difficult to focus and target. With some new support gems, GGG is changing that though, let’s dig in.
Summon Carrion Golem
Carrion Golems offer a nice general role for a summoner. Aside from dealing DPS on its own, it scales damage from non-golem minions around it, up to 80% more damage. It has multiple abilities like a direct damage attack and a leap slam movement ability to move around, offering a strong base for Golem-based builds.
Feeding Frenzy Support
This handy little gem will let the Exiles summoned minions be much more attack focused. The Feeding Frenzy support gem makes supported minions aggressive, increasing the range that they’ll seek out enemies. This phase also grants a buff that increases minion attack, cast and movement speed. The overall DPS of your minions also increases.
Meat Shield Support
The Meat Shield support gem acts as a scaling buff, reducing the damage they take and forcing the minion AI to focus on the closest targets to said minion. The incoming DPS against your minions is also reduced while affected by this gem. One particular aspect is that if you apply both Meat Shield and Feeding Frenzy, those main effects cancel out, returning the minions to their original behaviour. All other bonuses from the support gems still apply.
Deathmark Support
This support gem is used for more specific targeting of your enemies. Deathmark forces minions to attack targets with Deathmark applied, overriding the targeting behaviors of the two previous gems.
Different combinations of these three support gems let you use different minions for different roles. Players could combine different layers, like Meat Shield for defensive mobs, while using Feeding Frenzy to deal the majority of your DPS.
Infernal Legion Support
This is basically Righteous Fire for minions, casting a fire damage aura on you minions that deals passive Fire damage both to enemies and themselves.
You can see all of these new support skills in action in a trailer down below.
