Summoner wizards..do they suck or is what I have heard wrong?

[Neonchameleon]

Finessing:

Storm Pillar. It's something summoned.

Multiclass to Shaman. And you have a bound spirit with you.

My current wizard requires more minis than the rest of the party combined (Himself, Familiar, Spirit Companion, Storm Pillar, Flaming Sphere vs four other PCs).

 

[Zaran]

No offense guys but Flaming Sphere isn't a Summoning. You can do that with Summon Fire Warrior though.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

No offense guys but Flaming Sphere isn't a Summoning. You can do that with Summon Fire Warrior though.

No, it isn't a Summon in the technical sense, but really the difference between conjurations and summons is pretty esoteric and from a fluff perspective doesn't really matter much.

There are tons of other spells that are thematic. Bigby's Icy Grasp becomes a rotting corpse zombie that grabs onto your enemy. Other non-summoning spells that you can easily theme if you happen to need them: Stinking Cloud, Web can become clutching shadows, etc.

To get back to the OP's original question though; Summoners are a perfectly viable wizard build. Given a high CON and taking advantage of the feats and implement choices available and then say getting hold of a good Tome you're able to do pretty well. Summon Fire Warrior isn't a bad spell, though Summon Dretch may be better. In either case you get a fairly tough "shield" that you can attack through with little danger. The monsters will have to try to kill your Summons, which is pretty much just wasted damage.

Don't neglect the non-combat utility of summons either. Most daily attack powers are pointless outside of a fight. Summons however are almost guaranteed to be potentially useful. Being creatures they can do things. Even in the most strict interpretation of the summoning rules they can walk around and spring traps, etc. If your DM isn't one that goes by such a limited interpretation they can generally do anything a normal creature could do within limits. Anyway, they certainly have a higher RP and non-combat utility than most other daily powers.

 

[Zaran]

I get the reskinning of spells to make them necromantic. Just making sure you don't start adding the Tome of Binding bonus to conjurations.

 

[Takhisis]

For those who thought I needed an undead horde, that was not my intent at all. I'm sorry if the OP came off that way. Also, thanks for the all info. I suppose I should stay current with what is going on. I was completely unaware of the dragon mag's summons, a lot of which work nicely for what I'm looking for. Also, the invoker hybrid could be a nice option and could actually come across as 4e "true necromancer" who has both divine and arcane casting. Also, while the darklock/wizard would be nice flavor wise, I'm looking to be a summon using controller, not a blaster with a little bit of controlling power. Hybriding with a Darklock while fitting flavor wise would make my character more focused on damage and less so on control and summons so crunch wise a pure wizard would be better for what I'm looking to do. As for paragon paths, if I remember correctly there was some kind of "blood mage" paragon path which would be a nice thematic fit though I am not sure if it's good or if it sucks.

 

[Wednesday Boy]

For paragon level you might want to multiclass to psion and take the "thrall herd" paragon path since it basically gives you a continuous zombie slave that you can have out at all times.

I was thinking the same thing! And while I don't remember the details, Psionic Power gives summoning powers to Psions. And Psions are an Intelligence based class, so they fulfill that critieria for the OP as well!

 

[Zaran]

For those who thought I needed an undead horde, that was not my intent at all. I'm sorry if the OP came off that way. Also, thanks for the all info. I suppose I should stay current with what is going on. I was completely unaware of the dragon mag's summons, a lot of which work nicely for what I'm looking for. Also, the invoker hybrid could be a nice option and could actually come across as 4e "true necromancer" who has both divine and arcane casting. Also, while the darklock/wizard would be nice flavor wise, I'm looking to be a summon using controller, not a blaster with a little bit of controlling power. Hybriding with a Darklock while fitting flavor wise would make my character more focused on damage and less so on control and summons so crunch wise a pure wizard would be better for what I'm looking to do. As for paragon paths, if I remember correctly there was some kind of "blood mage" paragon path which would be a nice thematic fit though I am not sure if it's good or if it sucks.

You know that there is a Necromancer coming out in an upcoming Essentials book right? Heroes of Shadow I think is the title

 

[Takhisis]

Yes, but we don't know if that book will have the full class or just new powers/builds. Mainly because the Assassin was supost to be DDI specific so the heroes of shadow book may only be new powers/builds rather then actual classes and the classes will be DDI exclusives, like the assassin. I'm not too keen on monthly payments so DDI is most likely out of the question unless I pay for it for only one month, print out all the content from it, and then cancle subscribtion to avoid monthly payments that way. However, there could be a chance that if it's just new builds that a Necro may in fact be a new build for the wizard. We've, after all, seen Hexblade as a warlock build and I believe Hexblades where mentioned as one of the "classes" in heroes of shadow, so it very well could mean that the "Necromancer" will be a new wizard build in that book and not a DDI exclusive.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yes, but we don't know if that book will have the full class or just new powers/builds. Mainly because the Assassin was supost to be DDI specific so the heroes of shadow book may only be new powers/builds rather then actual classes and the classes will be DDI exclusives, like the assassin. I'm not too keen on monthly payments so DDI is most likely out of the question unless I pay for it for only one month, print out all the content from it, and then cancle subscribtion to avoid monthly payments that way. However, there could be a chance that if it's just new builds that a Necro may in fact be a new build for the wizard. We've, after all, seen Hexblade as a warlock build and I believe Hexblades where mentioned as one of the "classes" in heroes of shadow, so it very well could mean that the "Necromancer" will be a new wizard build in that book and not a DDI exclusive.

It sounded like the HoS is going to use some as-yet-to-be-defined mechanism to allow some 'shadow mixin' for other classes. We don't know if that only applies to Essentials classes (HoS itself is probably softcover but not an Essentials product per-se). It may be possible to use with existing 4e classes as well. We really don't know what sort of rules structure will be used for this. Is it going to be some sort of MC type option? Themes? Essentials class builds? Who really knows. I really doubt it is going to require having DDI to be useful. WotC has never yet published material in printed form that referenced back to DDI-only stuff, that doesn't really seem like something they want to do.

Oh, the Blood Mage PP is awesome. It is one of the better PPs around. There has been some significant errata but a good Blood Mage can really kick butt. Not sure it would fit really well with a summoner or not, though the 'inflict damage on myself" mechanic does make having a bunch of CON useful, so it might not be bad. It certainly has a bit of a necromantic feel to it. Refluffing it to sacrificing a bit of your soul to the dark forces of death would of course be trivial...

 

[tyrlaan]

A bit of a radical thought... but if you like Invoker but not it's Wisdom-centric powers, why not just refluff Invoker AND change it to work off INT? Some of the invoker builds are already Wis/Int, so why not just reverse the two?