How do you survive as a Necromancer Summoner?

I am having hard times. Invested in all kind of protection and even health generation but it’s all crap without leech and abnormal stacks of HP

General mapping in Monolith is not a big deal, but Arena is another story. After wave 80+ the mobs kill me quite effectively as well as my minions melt just as fast and no amount of defense seems to help them and me.

There’s no decent source of leech and life on hit for summoner, as well as decent amount of ward generation. Just little bits here and there, which work FINE in “maps” but in arena just not enough

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If you’re playing a summoner build like Wraiths, where you summon a large number of fragile minions that aren’t expected to last very long, you can get pretty solid sustain from on-death effects like Mania of Mortality or the Death Rattle unique, because you constantly have minions dying to feed them. You can get extra mileage out of this by taking the Putrid Wraith passives in both Necromancer and Lich (neither requires unlocking the high-tier passives), so that you have even more minions dying nearby to feed your health pool.

That said, I’m not sure what you’re supposed to do if you focus on fewer, stronger minions like golems. If you don’t have minions dying all the time, it is indeed very hard to sustain, especially against small numbers of strong enemies where you can’t rely on on-death effects.

As I’ve said before, I think it’d be a good idea for Sacrifice to have a branch focused on eating minions for buffs/sustain, which might help with this. There’s also the fact that several of the Acolyte skills that could reasonably be expected to help with sustain (like Transplant and Soul Feast) don’t have trees yet. Maybe this problem will go away once those skills get fleshed out (the ward nodes on Mage’s Teleport certainly helped them out).

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Strong minions are your best defense.
Beside that, knowledge.
That of the Arena maps/monsters AI. Tactical thinking. Don’t stand in the open, where monsters can jump at you from afar. Put your minions ahead, hide around the corner, run in circles, whatever works works. It feels like some spawns are scripted (same monsters appear in same sequence). If you can recognize a familiar setup, you know when and where to expect a dangerous mob/pack.

Craft better gear.
These are numbers I currently have:
~400-500% increased minion life
~700-1000 minion dodge
~400% minion damage (+200% from 50 INT) - more always better but I’m still working on it.
100% glancing blow chance - best defense you can afford.
zero dodge rating for you - just don’t have enough affixes on gear for that.
1.5k life or 1k life with 500+ all resists. Tyrant passive (+60% life to you) helps.

Spec your minions to be durable. IMO Skeletons are best specced into melee only, max health leech (take Necro passives as well), max bleed chance (they can leech from bleed), max dps (more leech). With these amounts of leech my skellies were keeping themselves healthy at wave 150. Minion Dodge helps, as it increases minion’s effective HP, without making it harder to leech to full life.

Golem - I use spectral, as it gets 500 dodge bonus, which makes him really tanky. He still dies cause he can’t leech as effectively as Skellies, but it takes time. The more time it takes the better for you.

Wraiths - usually die from old age before they get killed, so just make them as annoying as possible. Summon 7 at once, to save time for more pressing matters like running arount trying to not get hit.

How far did you make it into arena with your stats?

Wave 150 so far. My minions were doing well, I just got one-shot. I’m still working on reaching 100% Glancing Blow chance, and gear overall is far from ideal.

I’ve seen posts here from better geared summoners, who can go to waves 200+, but eventually die to one-shot anyway.
It seems that only certain builds in the hands of most skilled players can reach waves 400+, and it comes down to constantly being focused on not getting hit. Some of these claims may also be old stories from alpha times, when arena waves scaled more slowly, and it was possible to have 10k+ ward due to unbalanced passives.

Yeah just noticed that I stated 100% Glancing Blow under “stats I have”. Well I wish I did.
I Just got carried away with my train of thought while writing the post, so 100% is the magic number you want, but I only managed 80%. just need maybe 1 more item to craft, but keep failing at it / running out of runes etc.

So not very much. I did around 150 as well

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