Asuran Summons Discussion

I was looking around on wiki and this forum and there really isn't a lot of good discussion or numbers about the relative power of the Asuran Summons skills. Is it just me, or are these really underrated? I suspect that the average GW player kind of ignores them because of the necessary polymock grind involved to get them. Especially on my ritualist and with reasonable Asuran Rank (I think I'm about 7), the Ruby Djinn that I've been running around with almost never seems to die and for a single PvE skill, I've got essentially an extra party member who is continually setting foes on fire. Really for a fire and forget skill that last for almost a minute, that is pretty nice.

I haven't unlocked the other summons yet but looking at the skill descriptions:

Ice Imp: Nasty AoE snaring and a nice hex primer

Naga Shaman: Knockdowns every 5 seconds if you can provide the weakness (a pretty easy condition to meet)

Mursaat: Armor penetration and weakness (to me seems like the least effective of the summons)


Compared to other "abused" PvE skills, one of these seems like a keeper to me. Anyone have some decent insight or numbers for these skills compared to the effectiveness of some of the other PvE skills that these might end up booting off of a bar?

I use the Djinn summon sometimes on my ritualist, i've not used the others much but at rank 10 he has 15 in fire magic and his immolate can do 75 damage. Usually I use the vanguard assassin support instead as a third pve skill, I like that I can summon him into the middle of a group and they'll waste their initial skills on him, and the skill recharges in 30 seconds instead of 60.

i dont like them to be honest. and yes half of the hate is because i cant get them i suck at polymock. rest is i rather use a normal summon stone and save that skill slot for a skill not a summons. xD

3 second casting time.

You can use both (Asuran Summons and a summoning stone). I just checked.


But since it lasts for almost a minute you really aren't going to be casting it in the middle of a battle, and again since it is so "fire and forget" the net casting time is going to considerably less than doing something like spamming Necrosis for a minute.

Do people really have that much problems with Polymock? I absolutely enjoyed it (I also don't believe I lost once, as it was way too easy) and I kinda wanted more, way more, when I did the last quest.

You got to remember that polymock is a game of ping, not of skill.

By and large they simply do not pack enough punch to justify a PvE skill slot. Especially when the vanguard sin is competing for that slot. While the snare and KD sound nice in theory, the fact that you aren't able to aim or time them takes away a lot of their usefulness. If you want an AOE snare from a PvE skill, use TrypSig. If you want random KDs, use GDW. The only summon I ever used in a build was the djinn in a Fevered Dreams build. Maybe about half the time he set the right guy on fire and added some reasonable DPS. Ultimately I dropped him for more e-management to keep up with the pace that can be managed with 7 heroes.

Biggest reason I don't use one is the 3 second cast time. Yes you can do it outside of battle or anticipate a death by casting ahead etc, but I don't like standing still for 3 seconds that often . Also, my PvE slots are usually already filled with other skills.

Other skills are better.

Ebon sin beats it by far.
Air of superiority, free recharges mid battle
Great dwarf weapon, +20 Damage per hit+KDs from any profession
Ebon Wards, HSR/+15 armor ignoring damage per hit
Finish Him!, Basically an instant kill at -50% health

If I can fit a 3s casting time skill on my bar, I can most definitely use one of the better ones listed above

If the skill bar is already filled and working well, it does not really make sense to have that skill in. Personally, I do not really like it.

No skill is worth wasting time playing psuedo pokemon.

The asuran summons are nice. The differences between them and a summoning stone is that you can have more than one per team and you can keep casting them when they die.

Can you imagine traveling with a team of 8 asuran summons assuming you have a full human team (which are almost extinct nowadays)? Not only do they deal damage, they take damage also.

I use them in my 2 players/6 heroes team on my passive character as a cast-and-forget skill, because it is not easy to be playing 2 active characters at the same time.

I'm curious, other than an AP build, why the Ebon Sin would supercede an Asuran Summons. I think you are going to get more bang for your buck from the Summons rather than the sin that lasts like, what 10 seconds, and then have a significant recharge after that.

This. PvE skills are limited to 3, and for some profs you should choose them wisely(read:main ele dmg output as AP). Asura summon is inferior to most of the other pve skills(and he haven't listed Kurz/lux and SS ones.....CoP, SY will never be dropped for an asura summon).

In some niche situations they're useful(if u don't know how to fill the bar of a FD mez, the djin is a good choice afterall) but that's all.

The point of the EVAS is that he shadowsteps to meele range. This means that he will eat much more dmg compared to the casters naga/imp/mursaat/djinn. Also, he can trigger physical stuff like mop/barbs.
And is cooler.

EVAS provides an extra frontline tank thats more controllabe than the Asura Summons to help draw aggro, and if you meet the rediculously easy requirement of a condition or hex, you get a KD and two unblockable and powerful dagger skills. They supply more damage faster than any of the Asura Summons. Even though you only have EVAS half the time, it still does more damage. Also, Physical > Ele damage, which also triggers things like MoP and Barbs. This makes EVAS much more desireable when you want to take out a healer or high damage dealer.

Just out of Asuran skills alone I would rather have Pain Inverter or Technobabble over a Summon.

Although just for lols I would like to take a full group of real players with Asura Summons and echo'd EVAS. Probably not the most effective, but sounds like fun.

Ice imp is what I use when I actually use a summon, especially on ele...

Mursaat doesn't do anything special; immolate is pretty lame in anywhere HM; Stoning is sad unless you pack weakness, and the Naga manages to get a lucky hit.

Unlike Vanguard sin support, you need to invest 3s to cast and you can only have one making it bad for AP bars. If your summon dies you have 60Cooldown so unless you glyph of swifrness there's really no strength in using them except using Ice imp to proc snow storm or some other DOT that doesn't involve AP (i.e. Triple heats, which is not stronger than AP earth).

I think EVAS generally dishes out more damage over a period of time than asuran summons. But does the EVAS really dishes out more damage overall than the Ruby Djinn, without barbs and MoP? I doubt that because, without AP, the EVAS has a 15s down time at best, if you are not targeting charrs. While the asuran summon can be kept up at all times, at max rank, provided it lasts its full lifespan of 60s.

I also doubt the EVAS can take as much damage as an asuran summon because they last shorter than 15s unless you are targeting charrs. Also if you are a rit, the asuran summons would be affected by your spawning power attribute, but not the EVAS.

With AP however, I would choose EVAS over an asuran summon. But without AP, MoP or arcane echo, an asuran summon may be better.

Barbs is a 10e 2s cast time hex on only 1 target, generally not worth bringing. For those complaining about the 3s cast of asuran summon, you have your 2s from barbs and 1s from EVAS so you are already investing at least 3s cast time on ONE target if you use barbs.

You would be surprised how OP summons are in this game.

Well, I prefer EVAS for getting at 1 enemy fast.

When I do FOW NM, I prefer to cast EVAS to 1 monk because he can kill it fast without help while I focus on others.

When you bring lots of AoE skills, the Ice Imp comes in handy. Since he only has one skill, it spams it as much as it cans, and all it snergy is focused on that one skill, so it will cast it as soon as it recharges.

That way you can keep lots of enemies snared without having to waste points in water magic.

Polymock is awful to me. I'd sooner poke myself in the eye. That said, as a fire ele who uses SF, I run with the djinn (and the van sin) . Immolate makes me work better, and the long recast just means trying to cast when not in a scrap. Maybe it's not optimal, but it seems to work okay to me. But then there was a long thread once about how fire is useless in hm. With a great deal of mathematical proof. Didn't sell me on that. The glowy guy is just fun to me.

BTW, even with Painful Bond applied, the Djinn seems to out damage Vampirism if we are debating relative PvE skill value.

I like them conceptually, but never seem to have the space for them - I love Necrosis and, like previous posters, prefer the Vanguard Assassin (precision & damage sponging).

I did use it briefly in some solo spirit-y builds, but that was back before modern spirit builds were refined - now there just isn't room for them with all the lovely spirit buff skills.

Granted; only my main actually has them unlocked (I didn't enjoy Polymock), but I'd make the effort if I ever really wanted them on any other characters.

Just doing a little impromptu damage testing on the dummy (obviously an enemy's armor is going to be significantly different in a real world battles).

Vampirism - Fairly straightforward. At max Sunspear it steals 20 and does active Painful Bond (so that is another 21 damage if you are running 16 Channeling on a rit). It attacks every 2 seconds, so that is about 20 dps. Added benefit = healing.

Ruby Djinn Summons - Used a toon with max Asuran rank. I was too lazy to break it down but against the Master of Damage, the Summons averaged about 28 dps over about a minute. Added benefit = condition application

Ebon Vanguard Assassin - Again, used a toon with max Vanguard. I basically just cast him and wrote down all the numbers he generated. It came out to a total of 540 damage. Assuming you don't recast until the full 30 seconds, that averages to 18 dps. Added benefit = can be buffed with curses, can cause knockdown, teleports into mob.

Was also doing MoD testing, would've saved some time if I had read the above post. I got basically the same results. The djinn or naga actually outdps the sin, and the imp will be on par if he hits an average of two targets. Assassin has one conditional (albeit targeted) knockdown for 30 seconds, while the naga will churn out ~5 random KDs on weakened foes in that time. Vanguards tend to attract aggro and sponge damage, but that also shortens their life and DPS. Vs ebon vanguard barbs, you can also buff the asuran summons with either of the ebon wards. So it depends what you are looking for in a summon.

EVAS is fun to Arcane Echo... I've even run them with Air of Superiority a few times, and had up to six assassins at once. That's pretty funny to watch.

I honestly don't understand polymock, and so I forgot these summons existed.

They're on my list of things to fiddle with after I get GWAMM, or at least after I finish the EotN VQs/grinds.

The summons work very well for me, but then I am a warrior so having a cast and forget skill that can deal dmg and soak up some is a great thing to have. The imp is likely the most effective with its snaring and I find it rare that they die before the skill recharge.

You can also use Great Dwarven Weapon on them to grant some bigger dmg and KD's as they will 'wand' inbetween casting.

Team of players + naga's + a couple copies of enfeebling blood? Leaves plenty of room open for other skills too, and a heck of a lot of damage sponges.

But it's more of a fun-but-not-so-practical application of it.

I'm fairly certain there has been a proper theorycrafting on this back when EotN was new.

Even if the assassin doesn't do as much dps over time he does it in a shorter time which is usually what's important.

I played a lot back when EOTN was new and everyone was too busy abusing ursan to theorycraft about other things. I ran the summons for a while on some of my other chars, way back when, and I stopped using them because they're the +1 skill. A 7bar build, +1.
I never figured out a way to synergise with them as I only played melee-style chars and as a frontliner my skillbar is either very packed or I'm too busy/lazy to go casting stuff.

That's the point of Deep Freeze

Deep Freeze is 25 energy and a 2 second cast time for a snare of 10 seconds and a downtime of 5 seconds.

The Ice Imp (albeit a PvE skill) lasts for up to 60 seconds and will provide the same movement reduction and approximately the same efficiency more or less (6 seconds of snaring recharging every 10 seconds).

I'm not sure if Frozen Ele sees this thread but I'm curious of his opinion of the Ice Imp.

You're relying on an un-microable AI to supply a snare that is a smaller AoE for less time, wat.

Some other things I'd like to add: EVAS will recharge in 15s 20% of the time for most casters with staves, does a quick ~145 armor ignoring damage within a few seconds of being cast (if taking down a monk, prevented heal/prot is like virtual damage), and many small fights can be finished inside of its 15 second lifetime, making its front-loaded damage even more useful.

Asuran summons suck up either 3.75 seconds of battle time, essentially costing an extra 2 seconds (vs EVAS) of whatever else you might be doing, or suck up 3.75 seconds of out-of-battle time, making your heroes wait around and directly adding to vq/mission/whatever time (or letting human groups run off without you). Summoning in battle makes more sense to me from a speed point of view since your party can do stuff during that time.

True (didn't notice the different in area of effect), but again I think I'd have better things to do with most of my bars than worrying about casting a 25 energy 2 second snaring spell. If I wanted snares, I think the Ice Imp (which is automated and gets summoned outside of the battle) will do a decent job. But again, I'm not a big snare guy so I can't really say that much about it. Again, my argument FOR the summons is that their benefits are fairly passive. You can precast them and you will get almost a minute of them doing their own thing while you can be spamming your own skills.

polymock....never got the hang of it (and as an old woman with bad eye sight and even worse ping---)....so they look nice, but just aint never gonna happen for me.....maybe when its the ONLY thing I havent done I will sit and try to get past the 3rd one---(before I toss my computer out the window).....

Cast time is actually very similar on EVAS vs. summons. Because you'll need to cast EVAS twice over the 60 seconds an asuran summon lives in, and deal with aftercast, for a total of 3.5 seconds vs 3.75. Either way it's extremely tangental compared to whatever effects you get out of them.

EVAS is only going to proc a staff recharge 20% of the time, for a 10% average lower recharge, which means 10% more DPS than calculated, which is still not superior. If you use cons or wisdom ward or serpent's quickness/mantra of recovery, the story may change.

There is something to the front-loaded and targetable (somewhat) aspects. This depends on the area and what you want out of a summon though. Personally I don't use them much because all the arguments people made about wards and weapons vs asurans, those also edge out the assassin for me, if you don't have a significant way to abuse recharge, or else something like mark of pain to proc big damage. What's important is how they fit your overall build and team vs other very powerful PvE skills.

If you ask me, it's popularity is mostly due to 1) not polymock and 2) it jumps out and does something cool on the target you pick, instead of being a passive in the background. I've seen this skill preferred on plenty of terrible bars made by players that could never figure out which of the two were optimal.

You cant just take the 20% recharge for spells from staves and call that an EVAS advantage over asuran summon. Asuran summons are spells too. Besides, you need at least 50% faster recharge for EVAS to have it up at all times.

I don't see what is the big deal about polymock. I got all the summons for all my 16 pve characters. Just buy some gold polymock pieces and be done with it easily.

True about casting the EVAS multiple times per one Asura summons; I was mostly thinking about the out-of-battle casting slowdown. Though in my experience a 1.75s cast can often fit between other skills recharges much easier than a 3.75s cast.

If you proc a half recharge on Asuran summons it will gain you nothing since you can only have one Asuran summon out at a time. Vanguard sins are not limited in this way. I don't know what you mean by that last part; 50% faster recharge is what a staff proc gives you, but the idea of full EVAS uptime is kinda meaningless since they are unlimited summons--you want as many as you can get, like killing the boss in a boss pack first to get an immediate second 'sin.


Thinking back to vanquishing, one of the nice things about opening a battle with EVAS was the way it clumped monsters. Normally if you move into range of or cast on a mob, the ranged monsters you poked will attack you, the melee monsters will charge you, and the rest of the ranged monsters will need to move into attacking/casting range, spreading out as they do so. Dropping an EVAS into the pack will get all the ranged monsters to stand still and attack it while the melee monsters clump up on it, giving your party time to drop AoE on the mob (such as a minion wall having time to close in on the mob and explode it in a series of Death Novas).

We might as well look at the dps adjustments to be made for hardmode monster armor, typically on the order of 80-100, for around a 40% reduction. Using the dps numbers posted earlier: Vampirism would still be 20 dps, EVAS would be 14 dps (with +10% from a staff mod and 145 armor ignoring damage in its skill chain), Ruby Djinn would be about 20 dps (assuming 3s burning every 6s) if burning has full effect and down to 13 dps if it has no effect (burning already supplied elsewhere or other sources of degen causing the -10 cap to be reached or fighting burning-immune monsters; possibly higher dps if synergized with Searing Flames), and presumably other summons would be around 13 dps if similar to the Djinn minus the burning (even lower for the Mursaat, I figure). Of course, the way I used EVAS tended to get its initial spike and then it died, which would be closer to 6 dps (worth the loss of 9 dps for the aforementioned battle start advantages, imo), but it can be cast moments into a battle after monsters have selected other targets to get the assassin's lifetime up.

Not that I should even be furthering the Asuran vs Vanguard debate when it's really a question of Asuran summon vs all other PVE skills minus the other two on your bar.