Much thanks! That did the trick. Now to remember all the things I've forgotten in a few months.

That's quite an accomplishment.

Also is it normal now to have to ctrl-alt-del out of the game at start up if you want to go back to the beginning screen or exit the game instead of being stuck in character creation mode? ESC does not work, nor does clicking the "x" at the top right.

My favourite tactic with a summoner is to simply summon a flame ritch at a corner before turning it, or in the middle of an open area before entering it. This guarantees that monsters in that area target the summon instead of you, since they don't even see you, and it reveals their existence. True, you occaisionally waste a summon this way, but once you have the jelly summon it becomes trivial to reduce your equillibrium. I've literally dropped it from 150 to 0 just by standing in a narrow hallway throwing jelly after jelly in front of my opponents. Then, once equilibrium reaches 0, bam, fire drake time.

Even if you end up in melee combat, your time is still better spent summoning or healing yourself than attacking. It's useful to boost your defence and armour, but if you're reduced to attacking with your weapon, you're not doing very well. It does help to be a dwarf, as their racial power makes it easier to stand around getting hit while your summons take care of business. A good healing and regeneration infusion are very useful here, too. I got lucky on high power psychic infusions for both, but if you watch the stores you shouldn't need too much luck to get those fairly common items.

And yes, it's true that boosting your cunning only makes a difference every 10 points, but what a difference! Reaching 30 cunning is a critical, high priority goal for any serious summoner. Having three minions means you can produce a melee summon like a jelly or war-hound to hold the enemies off while you bring out some ranged support, and still have a slot open in case you get bushwacked by unseen foes and need to pull out your reserve hydra.

If you realy want some personal combat abilities for emergencies, wait for the sand-drake powers to become available and spend a category point. Unlike melee attacks, they'll take advantage of your high willpower.

My best moment was when I beat the boss in the spellfire scar without ever even seeing it, as my fire drakes and hydras kept running off around the corner and dying, so I just summoned new ones in the same place.

My first and only summoner was pretty early and got farther than anything I'd run, but it brickwalled *hard* at some of the early bosses that are pushovers to easier classes like fighters and mageblades and archmagi and alchemists. I lost several lives running from things my pets couldn't scratch in the sandworm hole and couldn't even threaten the lake ruins boss.

I went towards firedrake, hydra, and pudding spam with high mental stats and avoiding melee.

Cunning is only useful at every 10 pts as it changes the number of summons. (:

Just take the T-Engine.exe from b25, and put it in the directory of b24. You'll need to rename the old one.

Not sure if it's a bug or an "enhancement", but the same has happened to me. In the previous beta, when you return from the lake, it acts like any other map, you return to the previous map where you originally exited. With this new version, I end up in a grove of trees, trapped. It seems consistent for me, I've run three characters through it (elf, halfling, dwarf mages), and all have done the same.

I just phase door or teleport out and it works fine. Of course, if you don't have those options available for some reason...

EDIT: Just got stuck in the trees with a Berserker that only had a phase door infusion of 6 tiles, preventing the above escape. Using a pickaxe to dig out ate up a lot of game time (I dug diagonally, 17 tiles!), but that's another way out if you're stuck.

Oops, would this be a spoiler? :P

If you've downloaded b25, try using the new binary (mac/linux/win) on the old b24 files (backup your old binary!), I believe the reknor fix lies in the binary, not the lua, and the binaries are "compatible".

thanks DG!

but I just gotta ask:

are characters from b24 transferable to b25?

I know, I'm a programmer too, and I doubt the data model changes would accommodate for this, but I'd really love to port a character so I'll be brave and ask.

Thanks for humoring my question :)

You're awesome.