Maybe you like summons. Maybe you never tried them and you are just curious and want to give them a shot. Maybe you can’t beat Duke Dirtbeak and you are desperately in need of spiritual guidance. Maybe you just need a build which is not gear dependent and it is easy to recreate so you can start farming endgame and build a stash for your next uber character. Maybe you are just bored and you don’t know how to spend the next 15 minutes.
Don’t worry I got you covered. This guide will teach you how to become an Ultimate Summoner.

To be more specific an Ultimate Summoner is a summoner style build which heavily focuses on physical damage (done by pets), reflected thorns damage (from pets and you) and with support damage in the form of poison, shadow and fire (all from pets).

Pro

• Not gear dependent. You do not need any specific legendary to make it work.
  
• Good for farming gears for you other characters
  
• Meatwalls tanking for you
  
• You will never feel alone

Cons
Too OP that will put you in the mood to go in the forums and spam “do you even game balance” and “gaem too ez”

The Ultimate Summoner is a summoner style build which heavily focuses on physical damage (done by pets), reflected thorns damage (from pets and you) and with support damage in the form of poison, shadow and fire (all from pets).
Instead of doing lot of burst damage and oneshotting stuff, this build rely on slowly tearing off enemies, with lot of different multiple sources of damage. But before we discuss on damage let’s check the build defenses first because our damage is heavily linked on our defense system so understanding that will help you then understand how to utilizes your defenses to slowly tear off the enemies.


Aggro management and meatwalls
This game has permadeath. And a good build will always focus on putting several layer of defenses so you can avoid the chances of dyeing. One way the Ultimate Summoner builds her defenses is to keeping the aggro of the mobs away from the player and keeping it on the pets.
Even if a mob is attacking you instead of going for the pet, summoning a pet close to the mob attacking you automatically will switch the aggression of the mob from you to the pet. The only exception being blinking champions which have a really nasty attitude to stick on you anyway.
Similar to aggro, you can use pets as meatballs so you can create meatwalls and have the pet obstruct the path from you and the mobs.


Increasing survivability further
An error here would be thinking that since mobs will be on pets most of the way you can get away with light armor and a caster offhand. This is really wrong because while you are keeping MOST of the aggro away from you, things get hectics easily, specially in higher doors, endgame item drems/nightmares and new game plus. So we actually wear heavy armor, a shield and we have runic crystal which boosts our defenses and redirects damage from us.



The offence system
So, basically we have meatwalls tanking for us and we are quite tacky as well, with a shield, heavy armor and fully focused on defenses. So… how to we kill stuff? We basically uses several “small” sources of damages, but many of them, so they slowly adds up to wear the enemies off.
We have:

• pets & player auto attack
  
• player & pet reflect damage thanks to the passive horned skin
  
• thorned ground thanks to the floraconda (think of it as a moving caltrops)
  
• pet explosions with parting gifts and runic crystal skill orb mod

None of the above will ever crit for big numbers, but these small numbers, one by one, will slowly tears all the enemies apart.



Synergies

• Discipline. Discipline pumps not only pet health but also elemental defenses which we turn into physical one with Phantom Skin passive of the wild child. Use a staff as weapon and you have one stat wonder that pumps offense and defense at the same time.
  
• Self sustain. Paladin Radiant aura non old heal you on block but also heals your pets and give them lot of benefits. You have to be close to your pets but with this build you are already supposed to be in the middle of the action. Also, the heal we get on block will offset the health loss of summoning soul shades with the shouldshade skill orb which lowers the cost in souls at the expenses of a 7% health loss for summon.
  
• Several damage sources. While most of the damage is physical, you can summon soulshades and growing plan to kill physical immune mobs with poison and shadow damage.

If you understand how these synergies works together you will understand how to use this build in the best of the way.

Your final class will be a Floramancer, due to the fact that we want the class passive benefits since they are the best for this build.

Regarding stats points, put all your points in discipline. Really. Discipline from level 1 to 15.

Regarding skills this is the suggested order:
As soon as you start the game get Summon Floraconda and Bed of Thorns.
RESPEC NOW WITHOUT EVEN PUTTING A FEET INTO TANGLEDEEP.

While we will need to max out Floramancer if we invest too much at the beginning we will then have a huge fall in power (because we lose the passive benefits), so it’s better to go multi class asap, grab the skills we need, and move back to floramance definitely (and then have the huge increase in power due to the passive).

Then we go Soulkeeper and grab Summon Soulshade and Parting gift.
After that we respec again and we go Wild Child (even if this is your first character you should have just unlocked it) and grab Phantox Skin AND look out for a frog and get Frog Hop skill. This will be your mobility skill which is free and doesn’t costs you ANY SINGLE FP.
Then go paladin and grab Radiant aura and heavy guard.
Now if you already have HuSyn unlocked, repec to HuSyn and grab runic crystal, Fortify, Rocket charge (another mobility skill). Then go Floramancer and grab all other skills till you max it out.

Summon Floraconda
The bread and butter of the build. Your best friend. Keep this out and eat a gelato while your Floraconda do all the dirty job for you.

Grow Spitting Plant
A good meatwalll that is ranged. It doesn’t move but it benefits from horned skin passive.

Summon Soulshade
Probably useless (due to the high requirement of souls) until you get you hands on a summon soul shade skill orb. After that is another skill that you will regularly use as soon as you meet a champion.

Parting Gifts
This is one of the skills you use during the downtimes (when you have all you other summon abilities on cool down). In particular with bone crab prefix enjoy watch you harmless bone crab become a walking bomb.

Radiant aura
Self sustain skill needed to heal pet and you after summoning the soulshades. Like soul shade skill it’s quite useless before you get the orb to modify it.

Runic crystal (with skill orb) and Fortify
Another offence/defence system of the build. While incredibly boosting your survivability, the added explosions of the crystal helps you slowly tear apart the mobs.

Horned Skins and Phantom skin.
If you have read the explanation above you will understand why this build rely heavily on these 2 passives.

These are the affixes you should look out for:

Familiar (x5)
On every single piece of gear. They boosts pet health. A must have. While they are only used DURING the summon (once is summoned you can remove them) I find it tiresome to do weapon swap, so I have them regularly on the main weapon and offhand without bothering too much.

Companions (x5)
Pet damage and defense. Yes please.

Conjuration
Only on weapon and it’s useful of soulshades, spitting plant, bonecrabs and all the eggs you will throw through the game

Bonecrabs
Only on armor. It summons tiny and cute bonecrabs (for me they are walking bombs) that you will explode with parting gifts.

Concentration (x2)
Only on accessories. Boosts Discipline by 20.

That’s it. Really.

What a Ultimate Summoner would it be if we don’t have a pet from the Corral?
Sad thing is that we probably won’t have much use for it until floor 19 (and new game plus).

The pet we need is made breeding a Verdgrizzly and a Neutralizer.
You want the son to have these 3 skills: Summons floraconda, Medi-ray II and Fly.

In this guide I will not go in details on breeding, but of course eep breeding them to slowly increase the health pool of your pet. And enjoy a pet which summon MORE floraconda. While you can increase the pet health with breeding you can’t increase summoned floraconda’s one. But they still can act as meatwalls and the more the merrier!


Feel free to write in the comments if you have questions.
And enjoy being a Ultimate Summoner.