While the game has only been out for a couple weeks now (and still only in PDF form,) MCDM is testing out a tenth class for Draw Steel that didn't make it into the core rulebooks: The Summoner.
The Summoner does what it says it does: you summon minions to do your bidding and fight alongside you. Most classically, the "iconic" subclass for it is the Necromancer, or "Undead Portfolio," but you can also specialize in Elementals, Fairies, or Demons as the other three subclass options.
As I've been playing Diablo IV since it came for free on the PS+, I of course gravitated to the Necromancer, and I think that the design here seeks to replicate the feeling that you get in Diablo games where you have a massive number of minions fighting for you.
Summoners use Essence, like Elementalists, as their Heroic Resource, but Summoners also effectively get a second resource in the form of Minions. You get to pick two Signature Minions from your subclass, and you'll automatically get two brand new minions at the start of each of your turns, as well as two when combat itself begins (so 4 by the start of your first turn - if they're still alive).
Your minions work like minions controlled by the Director does - you organize them into two squads, and each squad pools its stamina together in the same way. Squads make actions together. You can attack with them via Strike for Me, a free triggered action that goes off when you either make a triggered action to make a free strike or use a signature ability, which then has a number of minions determined by your power roll make free strikes instead of using the triggering ability.
So, in case you weren't already getting this: this is a complex class. They actually warn players that this is an advanced class that you probably want to save for after you've gotten a bit of Draw Steel under your belt. I imagine this will be very popular among Directors who get a chance to play and are very familiar with playing with minions.
I do wonder a bit about this Strike for Me feature - that it might be easier to simply make a Signature Ability for Summoners that allows them to have a certain number of minions make their strikes.
Summoners have their two types of Signature Minions that get automatically summoned, but they can also spend Essence to summon more powerful minions. For example, your standard Signature Skeleton has 2 Stamina and a Free Strike damage value of just 1. But a Grave Knight, which comes at two knights for 3 Essence, and this one has a Signature Ability that can do up to 9 damage and inflict bleeding and has 6 Stamina.
As a note, one thing I'm trying to wrap my head around is that it looks like one of the 3-cost minions for each subclass has a signature ability, while most only have Free Strikes.
Summoners all have the Call Forth ability that lets you spend Essence to summon additional minions - 1 for each Signature minion and then the set number of minions for the higher-cost ones.
The point is: Summoners are built to fill the battlefield with minions that will fight for them. I think it has the potential to be very powerful - if nothing else, you can crowd the battlefield to restrict enemy movement by putting a bunch of minions in the way.
What I worry is that I'm not sure there's any way this isn't going to bog down combat by a lot - a Summoner is going to need to take the time to position all of their minions and then figure out what they're doing. I think holding to a strict interpretation that any given squad can only do one main action is going to make this a little better, but you're still commanding yourself and two (and I think later more) squads.
It's kind of fascinating to see, given how D&D's 2024 revamp really tamped down on the ability to summon lots of creatures into battle. I know that MCDM is somewhat contrarian toward the direction 5E has gone (in some places justified, in other places I think it comes off as contrarian for the sake of itself). That being said, I understand the impulse: the class fantasy of a Necromancer is very much that "army of the dead" feeling.
Naturally it's a very different thing in video games, but I think about the two class specializations in World of Warcraft that very much fit into this mold: the Unholy Death Knight is the game's necromancer equivalent (though you're a heavily-armored melee character) and the Demonology Warlock is the equivalent of this one's Diabolist (I will quibble here a bit: like D&D, Draw Steel draws an - arguably more dramatic - distinction between demons and devils, and the Diabolist summons demons, despite the fact that Diablo means very specifically devil. In a lot of languages, Vs and Bs are interchangeable. This subclass should be Demonologist. /End soapbox rant.) Anyway, WoW's examples both find ways to get a lot of minions out there. Demonologists have one of their core rotational abilities summon up to 3 imps that blast targets for 12 seconds, and so at any given time you might have as many as 18 or more of these guys shooting at your enemies in addition to the larger demons you have summoned. Unholy Death Knights have a somewhat more cyclical experience, where one of their 1-minute cooldowns can summon up to 4 undead minions on top of your permanent ghoul.
The thing is, in WoW, as well as in the (also Blizzard) Diablo games, the behavior of these minions is automated, so it doesn't really slow the game down in any way.
I think even as someone who feels pretty confident that I could run Draw Steel as a Director at this point, I would really want to have this class well and truly internalized before I'd inflict a 15-minute turn on my fellow players.
I'll be curious to see how things develop as the playtest goes to a wider audience. I think they might just embrace the complexity and sell it as an advanced class, which might be fine. But I do imagine that Directors might feel the need to ban it if players aren't really on top of their shit.
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