and my mere existence and lack of any kind of skill in anything is still enough to throw me out of communities.

Errr, what are you talking about? Who is throwing you out exactly?

If you have trouble with the game thats because you make mistakes. If you actually want to fix them, we need to find them first. Which is easy if you provide necessary info about your characters.

Yay, awesome! Now make the starter do the same and not die halfway to a spider in the cave of whispers or something. I also don't play summoners except in TQ, nature pets at least look good, its not some ugly zombies you know. What is the problem with wolves though?



80% vitality resistance. Sorry, I don't have another video with trash gear or something like that, it was done once and now she's in epic. If we were talking about how to defeat Hades without breaking a sweat its just that, vitality resistance. I'm sure botebote can do it with 0% and I can, but thats not the point.

Typhon killed more wolves, at low health he casts nothing but meteors, so its just meteors, meteors, meteors every 5 sec. Wolves die. But we have more wolves than he has meteors

Ice shards caster druid is gear dependant. It needs lots of mana cost reduction while also needing high cast speed, -recharge and int/elemental damage together with all the defense stats. Perhaps you can get by in normal with golden fleece in chest and low ice shards levels, but don't go deep into this until you can assemble something like 70% reduced mana cost from gear on the go. At which point together with briar ward 32% reduction spells cost no mana.

These lol op boots are from normal but seem to have incorrect armor value. Like they are heavy armor. There is a bunch of act 5 MIs like that.

Summoner starts very slow. If someone thinks starting as melee is slow and painful they shouldn't try summoners. It catches up later, but in Greece boss fights are looong and drawn out. Buy a few scrolls for bosses, storm witches do fine. Megalesios is the biggest bastard, not just because he converts summons, his limos will heal him. Assign a hotkey to "select all summons" in the menu if you didn't already, to order pets to attack limos instead. There are 1001 other situations where this hotkey will help too.

Yeti health buff seems to help, they aren't exactly tanks but at least late normal aoe does not oneshot them and I can heal them out. Moment of truth will be past tower of judgement I guess.

Pet gear? Two rings and necklace with pet damage, staff with pet damage. Update them as soon as you can. You start with beastcaller's (tier 1, level 3), then spiritcaller's (tier 2, level 14), summoner's (tier 3, level 28) etc up to the new tier 6 and 7. Somehow tier 3 pet jewellery is never in normal shops, though it drops in act 4. But you can always start one of your old characters and buy some in early epic, especially since you say the game is hard for you. Oh, wait, you don't have any. Well, don't know why would you shoot yourself in the leg like that.

For a druid that damage should be elemental because wisp can buff it and does some itself, while you can debuff it with plague and squall. Spirit class can use vitality because it can debuff it with deathchill. All the rest use physical. Wolves strength of the pack skill buff physical and plague debuffs physical, so its the safest choice overall. It does not matter in early game though, in normal Greece just use what you can, then start specializing once you get access to tier 2 and higher.

In TQAER some artifacts and other items got pet stats too, try to get yourself razor claw for normal/epic.

Summoners do not need any damage except this pet damage, so fill the rest with all the resistances you can get, and maybe some hp. If one of your masteries is nature, try to get -40% recharge for briar ward. Briar ward will solve 3/4 of your survivability issues and help your pets too. Thats in epic and later, don't bother with -recharge in normal, its scarce there. If you heal alot and also cast spells you will appreciate reduced mana cost, though its not always easy to get outside jewellery (and your jewellery is reserved for pet stats).

Still, why wouldn't you show us the stats of your characters? Two pages with main and secondary resistances, OA, DA etc. It might also reveal something about your gear.

Hades is trivial with capped vitality resist. Get yourself a demon's blood on a ring, or better two (if normal ones).

Why don't you want to use staves exactly? Regrowth is an expensive skill and you will use it on cooldown. If you are not going to use caster gear you won't have mana, its a fail from the start  . Trance of convalescence is deep into dream tree but you are going to need mana a lot sooner. To get trance sooner you will have to start as dream, but then it is going to be a different build altogether. Dream is best started as a caster with int gear (again) including staves. And only become a summoner in epic. Its an easy thing to do, maybe not as easy as a conqueror but simpler than a pure summoner through normal. Like this

And in case you actually want a summoner, here is a better plan for level 12, level 24 and level 30
Accelerated growth at max early. Main skill leveled up sooner like you're playing a caster (and wolves are your main spell). I've tried briar ward in normal and it has absolutely pathetic health there. So while it does work as a decoy its not for long, not to mention cooldown which you will not be able to adress for quite some time. Briar ward becomes good in epic (and excellent in legendary, just like other pets). 1 pt in both distort reality and temporal rift might be a better pick to help your pets in normal, but it also comes much later, around middle to late act IV I guess.

Concerning Lucid dream, it locks out the others passives in its tree, so you have to have at least one point in it to unlock them anyway. And you do want to unlock them. Why wouldn't you want free DA from a mastery skill? If you want to skip some points, put less in nightmare and nymph.