Gloomhaven Ultimate Circles Guide

the summoner gloomhaven's most hated class and for good reason there's a lot of management that needs to be done and there's a ton of room for error and that's why i've created this guide to help you manage the summoner to help you take advantage of the summoner's strengths and to go through a lot of tips and tricks to manage your summons and make sure they don't die one of those is going to be understanding monster focus and we'll go through that and then we'll make sure that you're not clogging up the battlefield and taking an hour on each turn and if you can do all these things the summoner is extremely powerful top close to top tier class and this is backed up by somebody who works with isaac childress i believe his name is marcel there's a quote floating around out there where he talks about the summoner and how it can be extremely powerful so in this guide we're going to go through all those things so that you can maximize your summoner game so how do we make sure that our meat shields i mean summons actually do something and that they're not just out there taking one hit and dying we're gonna talk about summon ai utilizing movement making sure that you're in the right position yourself as a summoner using that hit point pool to protect your summons so that you can keep them out there and if you can keep them out there they can do some serious work for you so we'll go through all those things and i'm going to try and change your opinion of the summoner a key part of playing the summoner is understanding the monster focus rules and the summon focus rules so that you have a good idea of what's going to happen on the battlefield and you can proactively make sure your summons are in the right place to either do damage or avoid damage one of the biggest problems with a summoner is that if you make mistakes and the monsters come in and they destroy your summons you can become ineffective very quickly all right so you're summoning summons go in the order and they always go before you but summons go in the order that they were summoned so when you summon something make sure you put a token under each summon use the same color and then if you go past four summons use a second color so that you always have a good understanding of which summons are going to act first because this is going to be critical for you when you're actually making your plans and i'll give you an example let's say you summon two wolves even for the two wolves even though it's one card you're gonna put a one under one and you're going to put a two under the other and let's say that you've been playing them for a turn or something and the first wolf has lower hit points and the second wolf is full this first wolf is still gonna move in and find his focus first you're not gonna be able to move that second wolf in front to take aggro so just make sure you're planning for that and then always summon your thorn shooter first and we'll talk about this more later on but if you're running wolves or something like that it's great to have your thorn shooter first because it's gonna fire off it's gonna poison enemies it's gonna soften them up for the rest of your summons going fast for the summoner is a pretty tall order our fastest initiative at level 1 is 24 and then throughout our entire set of cards it's 13. we are really great at going late though so make sure you're using late as a major strategy for the summoner you go late in a round so that you're not focused especially when your summons are equidistant to enemies compared to one of your allies and then when you're summoning very often if you're summoning a melee summon you can put them at the back and go slow and allow them one turn to get in close and then go slow again and then go fast so that your summons can make sure to get a late attack and then an early attack with no fear of being attacked from the monsters and when i say no fear i mean you're gonna go as fast as possible and once in a while you're gonna get beat but it's still a very viable strategy for getting minimum two attacks out of your summons with let's call it low danger more on the theme of keeping summons alive we're gonna use burst damage sometimes to keep our summons alive so make sure you're using your bottom attacks and some strong attacks as well so that you can kill enemies before they get a chance to attack your summons and then also we really want to use our positioning well summoner actually has great move there's a couple good jump moves things of that nature so you can maneuver yourself around the battlefield as well and you really need to use yourself as an aggro sink to take some of the aggro off your summons so that you can keep them alive as well so make sure you're out there and using that hit point pool you can't just stand in the back and fire off range attacks all the time sometimes you're gonna need to get involved in the fray to protect your summons and one last thing your summons do act when you're on a long rest so you can be very effective and long rest and your summons are going to continue to do work and that also means that when you're picking items it is a great pick to pick a spend item for the summoner because you're able to long rest more effectively than other classes because you're still able to do work even when you're long resting wild animation is going to be our best early summon but it's got one drawback and that's the move so to counteract this i like to go ahead and go very late in the first round and i'll use the bottom move of mighty bond and i'll actually jump over the enemies and set it behind them set the thorn shooter behind them or off to the side as well and what that does is you're going to put it out of range still so that it's not getting focused and it has four range so it's going to be able to sit there and it's going to be able to fire away with fairly low risk and you're going to put it up near the next door and what this is gonna do is it's gonna allow you to get your thorn shooter into the second room a lot easier maximizing your time and then you can use unending dominance later on to get it back for rooms three and four the move on wild animation is really nice but using the strategy i just talked about you know around being able to use it in two rooms its top is just far too powerful to use the bottom unless you're using some sort of alternate melee build and that's cool too if you're doing that but generally you want to use the top and it's going to you know do a lot of work for you so you know don't leave home without wild animation leathery wings is just not a good summon it's too squishy it's got decent move and it's flying so it's going to be able to find a focus and it's going to die quite quickly as soon as you're above like scenario level zero and you're mostly going to be above that it does produce wind and once in a while you're going to get a couple turns out of that and maybe that could be useful for for somebody else for another class you're playing with or something along those lines but it's just not going to be good for you the bottom strengthen it's all allies but you can't move and it makes it really tough to pull off one thing you can do with leathery wings though that is semi-effective and at early levels this may be useful for you is you can go late around you can summon your wolves and then you can strengthen them and then next turn there's going to be a couple strengthened wolves coming out for some attacks and that can be pretty powerful at low levels volatile flame is a summon that can do some pretty good work for you and at lower levels it's fairly powerful it's gonna go in it might get one attack it might get two attacks i really like to just unload it into a room before i go in there and let it soften everybody up but it's gonna do some pretty good work and then the bottom is good for burst damage when we're trying to kill off enemies and we're using a bottom and top attack living knight is pretty good if they're shielded enemies so if you know they're shielded enemies and you're at scenario level three and below you can definitely take the wolves they're going to do some good work for you and you can leave something like voldemort behind past that they're going to run out of steam as soon as enemies have shield 3 and above these guys are not going to do very good work for you but there are some combos that you can use kind of in mid level so stick around we'll talk about that in a little bit and then the bottom of this card is actually fairly decent and can help your summons with survivability so between vaulted bomb and this one it's kind of a toss-up it depends on the scenario all right we've also got forged ferocity here and the iron beast can do some good work against enemies that have multiple attacks but low damage attacks but he's gonna have trouble keeping up and most of the time he's not gonna do a ton of work for you but there are some things you can do with the bottom you can enhance the bottom later on and we'll talk about that later in the video and i think this is going to be really powerful for you also if you do want this guy to keep up you can sort of use the same trick i talked about with wild animation which is jumping to the other side of the first room and summoning on that side so that he's much closer to the door so that he doesn't have to cover nearly as much ground to get into room number two next we're going to talk about your best card on ending dominance but first if you could go ahead and like this video it really helps me out a lot and subscribe to my channel and turn on notifications so that as i put out new content you're notified and also just briefly i've got another video i've made i think you're really going to like it i've ranked all 22 gloomhaven classes including jaws of the lion and including forgotten circles so go ahead and check that out i'm going to put a link up right here and go see how your favorite characters stack up against the rest of the classes in the gloomhaven universe unending dominance is a core card for the summoner so let's talk about the bottom first get back four loss cards this is going to allow you to get back summons that have been killed or who have fallen too far behind and they're not going to be able to make it to help you in later rooms in the scenario this is really going to help you out with your longevity as well so i mean it's a great powerful card kind of like the spell weavers reviving ether slightly less powerful but very very useful the top summoning the golem it's pretty good at lower levels you can get a lot of work done when you're at scenario level maybe two at the highest but once you start getting up higher than that it's too risky of a play it's much better to play the bottom and get back four of those lost cards whether they're summons or other cards than it is to gamble on a golem who gets killed in one or two attacks because the monsters pulled you know an unlucky card for you and don't forget that unending dominance whether you play the top or the bottom is a cannot recover card it is not a lost card so you play it once and you play it once only blackfire is a great card it doesn't look that powerful at first glance and it's not overpowered but it's very useful to us first at level one it's our fastest card so when we're trying to go fast we're gonna gamble at 24 and use this card the bottom is very good for controlling how much damage your summons take and so you can move in you can muddle a bunch of adjacent enemies and weaken attacks on your summons if you can't get if you can't avoid them any other way and this synergizes well with the golem if you're taking it at lower levels because it produces flame every turn you can use black fire you know fairly consistently to wound and then it also synergizes well with volatile flame as that produces fire as well this is a great card for us doesn't look super powerful but it's something we have to take for all those reasons biting wind is another great utility card if you do have wind which is tough for us because we're not taking the summon that produces wind but if you do you can use this to push enemies away from your summons push them into traps it's gonna be quite useful for you and it'll be you know just a reasonable attack three and then the bottom is really good utility as well for you know keeping your tankier summons topped up with hit points or helping your allies or whatever and at initiative 25 it's good for the summoner so we're definitely taking this card as well we're going to talk about mighty bond and bonded might together because they're so similar mighty bond is vastly superior because it's got that move forward jump the loot one is nice but it's pretty tough to loot without moving on a bottom action and so we're going to use mighty bond a lot of the times to maneuver around and we're going to use bonded mite top to actually control our summons and don't forget one of the most important parts about these cards is that they allow you to control the movement of your summons so you're going to be able to use this to move a summon around to target a different enemy to you know make sure they're not taking a ton of aggro and gonna die and so the move part of this is actually more important than the attack part because it allows us to keep our summons alive these are both core cards especially at level one ethereal vines is a fantastic card for control attack one whatever range three immobilize three potential enemies reusable is very very strong and it's got good emission 30 is pretty good for the summoner i feel sad just saying that but 30 is pretty good for the summoner the bottom move too is gonna allow you once in a while to keep your uh allies topped up by healing them but i think you're to be playing this uh for the top part like 95 percent of the time so you can control melee enemies and manage the aggro against your allies and your summons unwavering hand is an okay card it's got some flexibility the heel three range three is decent if you've got like a summon like the rock colossus that can sometimes need healing and then the bottom force one enemy to move one is okay once while you're gonna get them into a trap and you might be able to move them away but it's probably not powerful enough to take this is gonna be one of the cards i most likely leave at home so what are we going to take well let's start with what we're going to leave behind because it's less cards and it's easier we're definitely leaving leathery wings behind 100 of the time almost always we're leaving unwavering hand and then i'm taking the wolves or the volatile bomb uh depending on the scenario so you can kind of swap those in and out and then everything else is good at level two we've got earthen steed and grasping the void grasping the void is a very good card cursing and potentially stunning is really really nice the bottom can help us with burst damage and that attack two at range three is not bad and then we get to heal as well so very good card and then we've got earth and steed the top of this can be useful but i don't think most people are using it for the top at initiative 13 this is our fastest card and so when we need to go fast we need to play this card and the move five jump on the bottom is fantastic this is going to allow us to quickly reposition allow our summons to attack first and it's an absolute must pick at level two even though i really love grasping the void there's just too many things that need to be done at quick initiative and move five jump is just going to help you so much you have to take it even though it doesn't look very powerful i mean it's a suggestion i'm using pretty strong language here i think you should pick earthen steed because it's just so helpful at level three we've got tear the fabric and oozing manifestations uh yes i have the sense of humor of an 11 year old boy but using manifestations just makes me laugh so the top of oozing manifestations is pretty good he's a pretty good meat shield shield 2 and muddle is gonna mean you know almost three damage off an attack so even up to like mid scenario levels he's going to be a pretty good meat shield he's going to muddle people he's going to be able to do some reasonable work and he can keep up with you um i don't know why i'm calling an amorphous blob uh a he but the slime spirit can keep up with you as well so pretty decent summon and then the bottom of this is actually really good for burst damage you know i love having a couple bottom cards that i can combine with the top attack and you know do some good burst damage and you can immobilize which is good control and potentially curse as well and then tear the fabric the top is really good against shielded enemies but they do have to be you know five or less hit points so it can be pretty situational the heel for self is good as well because like i said you're going to be out there taking some aggro but i do like to take oozing manifestation most of the time over tear the fabric at level four we've got living mountain and we've got divided mind the rock colossus from living mountain is pretty decent up until mid scenario levels but he runs out of steam after that where he can get beat up pretty quickly he's nice if you have a craig heart though he's making earth every turn if you can keep him alive and then the move to loot one on the bottom is good the summoner needs a lot of money enhancing summons is great because they act every turn and so you actually want to enhance a lot the summoner probably needs the most money out of any class and then we've got divided mind and divided mind is going to be a great card but just remember that you've got to be positioned really well especially when you're going to use the bottom because the summoner doesn't have any top moves and so when you're trying to get two summoned allies within range two it can be tough to pull that bottom off but still great flexibility and the top is really good for keeping your summons alive and maneuvering them around the battlefield so that they're not getting angered on when it's gonna kill them and then here's a a nice combo that's kind of fun you go laden around and you summon two wolves then you play divided mind and you make them attack so you've got to make sure that they're right against enemies so they can attack right away then you use a stamina potion and you get divided mine back next turn you go as fast as you can and then the wolves are gonna attack again and you're gonna play divided mind again so you're gonna make them attack again so now you're at six attacks and then potentially you can play a card that makes them attack top or you can do an attack on your own that's going to be six attacks minimum from the wolves so attack 12 pierce 12 with a top action and especially at fairly low scenario levels this is going to be very powerful and you can rampage through some shielded enemies so go ahead and try that out another great combo with divided mind is once you get to level seven you can take the void eater and then you pair it with a thorn shooter and just by playing this card you're going to allow them to attack twice and so you're going to get four attacks in a round and it's going to be a total of 11 damage so thorn shooter attacks for two and poisons and this is going to be on the same enemy then void eater attacks three curses and then you play divided mine thorn shooter does three and then void eater does three and so you're gonna do 11 damage if there's no shields and you're gonna curse two and it's gonna be a lot easier to use this card on two ranged enemies that are probably sitting fairly close to each other and not moving and just focusing on the monsters so at level four i'm taking divided mind most of the time at level five we've got strength in numbers and we've got conjured aid strength in numbers is a pretty good card you're going to swap it out directly for bonded might most of the time i think and it's gonna be really helpful for moving your thorn shooter around because it's got that move plus one the attack plus one is just gravy it's not super powerful you know your summons are doing two three four damage whatever but still good utility and then the bottom if you're playing with items that summon and you've maybe got another class that's summoning with you this card can do some serious work you can easily get six or seven attack and it's going to be the same amount of range so that's some pretty long range laser beaming just be careful it's a bit of a trap card because you can't move you've got to just sit there and play it so you're going to use it for burst damage but it can be pretty tough to play sometimes because you like to move a lot to keep your summons alive and then we've got conjured aid and the sprite is pretty good just remember that it's going to focus on the enemies first and because it has range 3 this can actually make it a bit tough for it because it's shooting from further away than it can heal and so it's gonna focus on an enemy and then it's gonna do its heel after that and sometimes you're not gonna and sometimes you're not going to be in range or nobody's going to be in range for it to heal and the bottom 5 move is pretty nice we've got lots of other move though so i'm taking strength in numbers almost every single time also because later on we're going to have another summon the void eater that's going to be a lot better than the healing sprite and you don't want to have a ridiculous amount of summons out at once and so sometimes i think you're gonna take the healing sprite and then you're not gonna use it very much once you get to level seven at level six we've got endless spikes and we've got inexorable momentum endless spikes is just not a good card i'm not really sure what was going on when this card was created and if you do think it's good go ahead in the comments let me know why you think it's good but from my experience once you get to this level you're at level six you're probably at scenario level three or four sometimes you're higher depending on you know the level of your allies but they very often die without retaliating i mean it's not that hard to get five damage and then the retaliate doesn't take effect so i found this card to be pretty underwhelming and then retaliate two affect all summoned allies it's not that great either because most of your summons are fairly low hit points and so when you play this it's going to be worth a couple damage usually because you're only going to play it when a summons actually going to stay alive so this card i mean pretty underwhelming inexorable momentum is quite good because our summons have trouble with shielded enemies because they're more about doing damage consistently every turn versus burst damage so this is a great card to take to deal with shielded enemies pierce three is very strong if you can use the wind it's attack five pierce three that's going to be quite good for you and then the move three one adjacent summoned ally performs move three is pretty good but just remember that you're not controlling it on this one so this is really only good for catching up this is great for when your thorn shooter has fallen behind and you want to push it up towards the next room but it's not good for repositioning but still i'm taking inexorable momentum a hundred percent of the time here at level seven we have negative energy and we have staff of visions staff of visions is a pretty decent top attack it's gonna be good if you're in a melee build i don't think we're in melee range a ton and if we are i think a lot of times we're trying to take aggro and we're also trying to move our summons and then the bottom move three strengthen affect all adjacent allies if you can push the initiative of this down using an item or something like that then this becomes pretty strong because you can give all adjacent allies you know effectively two turns of advantage because it lasts until the end of their next turn so if you go first it's pretty good and the initiative is solid at 27 for this class but we've got negative energy at this level and the void eater is in my opinion the best summon overall it can output a lot of curses especially when you're using extra cards um to make them attack during your turn you can output you know a couple curses every turn and over the course of you know an entire scenario it's very powerful and the bottom i don't think it's used a lot but it can be very very good in certain situations so if you've got items that can summon and you're playing a melee summon build and you're summoning you know some of your melee summons like wolves or something like that and you've got a decent amount of summons out i'm saying summons a lot here and then maybe you've got an ally who is also doing some summons you can put out a ton of curses with this card in a very short period of time like i've put out over five curses in one shot with this card so based upon those things i'm taking negative energy one hundred percent of the time at level seven at level seven we've got intervening apparitions and we've got otherworldly rage intervening apparitions the top is a bit of a trap card it can be effective in certain situations but it's also very easy for an enemy to come in and waste it with a with a low damage multi-target attack so you've got a few summons out you know you've got somebody that does multi-target and this happens a lot at higher levels where you know some ranged enemies get some ad target and stuff like that you know a couple damage to three year summons it's all gone and it did very little work so it can be quite ineffective at times and then the bottom is one of those cards that at times once in a while it's going to be amazing you've got an enemy that's cursing you a lot you get rid of all the curses it's going to be super helpful in producing light once in a while is good and then otherworldly rage the top looks better than it actually is because you don't get a move along with it the move helps so much to reposition and make sure that your summon is doing the right thing instead you just get an attack too and it is a more powerful attack you add wound and poison and it's good like if you add that to the void eater it's attack four with wound poison and curse so it's you know it's good but not having the move really lowers the value and then the bottom the old switcheroo you can swap places with one of your summons this is going to help you a lot to manage aggro and do some really cool things it's going to allow you to get your thorn shooter somewhere that it needs to be so for that reason i'm taking otherworldly rage almost all the time at level nine we've got horned majesty and inter-planar mastery i don't know why those are making me laugh okay so inner planar mastery pretty good utility get back summons for a third time can you know really allow you to use summons in every room so good utility there the move six jump is fantastic and the initiative 22 is pretty good and then the horned majesty which is the glamour card at this level the unicorn's pretty strong but in my opinion it should have been eight health i mean that would make it a lot more usable six health it's pretty squishy at later levels or at higher scenario levels but the attack for pierce 3 is very powerful and if you are going to use this card you can build around it although you've got a plan ahead and you can take something like intervening apparitions but only take intervening apparitions if you're going to do like a one summon build or a very low summon build really focusing around horned majesty and getting it to attack a lot using top actions and then protecting it with intervening apparitions if you do that it can do some pretty serious work and then the bottom is very powerful as well all summoned allies within range three perform attack plus zero that's pretty good a range three helps a lot to get you know all of uh your summoned allies right and it's all summoned allies so if you are with somebody else who's summoning you've got items for summons this is gonna be quite powerful for you i think i take horned majesty a little bit more i don't know it's really really close i think it depends on how you're playing but i i think i go with horned majesty more often than interplaner mastery all right coming up we're going to talk about a couple cheap enhancements but if you could go ahead hit that like button it really helps me a lot it helps me get my content out to other people so they can enjoy it as well so the first one we're gonna do the first enhancement is wild animation we're gonna add a plus one to attack this is gonna allow you to output some serious damage over the scenario also you could add plus one to the move if you're having move problems but using the techniques i've described in this video you should be able to manage the one move and get the thorn shooter through a couple rooms per summon and so you probably don't need to move but if you're having troubles go ahead and do that and the next one i think that's really cool is forged ferocity and we're gonna add blast to the bottom of this and if you've got somebody that's summoning allies as well you could easily get four five six glasses per use of this card and it is going to be amazing it's going to bump your damage up because you're attacking a lot each turn with all your summons three four five attacks around so you're cycling through your modifier deck quickly and you're going to crank through those blesses and do a ton of damage the alternative and this is a bit more expensive is you can add a shield under this and this is going to be a you know shield 2 on all all summoned allies i mean that's going to be really effective as well but you know quite a bit more expensive i would go with the bless and you're gonna be outputting some serious damage perks for the summoner pretty straightforward because we're attacking so much we want to get rid of all the negatives and then start adding in positives so that you push that overall damage output up and that's really going to help you you know kill enemies faster and keep your summons alive don't worry about the heels or the rolling elements stuff i don't think those are going to be super helpful for you for prosperity level one i there's not going to be any spoilers here but i just want to say that if you've got items if you found items that can push or pull that is going to help you a ton to manage the battlefield keep your summons alive so they're out there but no damage next at prosperity level 1 the cloak of invisibility is really good because it can allow you to manage melee enemies aggro by blocking them from going to a certain spot and without you know always taking damage yourself so i like to take the cloak of invisibility also you can take some things you could take a heater shield or something along those lines or some armor to mitigate damage but don't take an armor that's gonna add negatives into your modifier deck i don't think it's worth it and then for potions of course minor scam minor healing healing because you're going to be out there you know managing aggro and taking some damage yourself i hope that helps and if you could go ahead hit that like button i know i've asked a lot here but it really helps me out a lot subscribe to my channel and turn on notifications so that when i'm putting out new content you're notified and thank you so much for watching the video

Channel: Neural Net Games

Views: 8,916

Keywords: board games, table top games, summoner, gloomhaven, summoner guide, summoner weak, summoner help, summoner strategy, summoner tips, best summoner cards, best summon, thorn shooter, void eater, ultimate guide

Id: WxZbkDJuDyw

Length: 33min 42sec (2022 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 21 2021