Evoker

The Evoker is the most straightforward spellcaster of the classes. She foregoes any type of pet or minion, preferring to take on the forces of evil by herself, using her arcane talents to strike down enemies. It can be a difficult class to play solo, especially when taking on tough bosses, but can deal a lot of elemental damage in a small amount of time.

Equipment

The key thing to remember here is that not only do most of your spells require a focus item to be castable, but that their damage magnifies with the damage of the focus item that you wield. Higher damage on your focus item will increase the damage of the spells that you cast, in other words. Other mods to your focus items will also apply to your spells, like bonuses to status effect strengths, although the interplay between the items and the spells isn’t always spelled out clearly.

Until you hit level five, you may find the Evoker to be an annoying class to play as; your spells won’t do much damage, and you’ll find yourself constantly backing away from your enemies while they pound on you. When you reach level five, however, you can start using Dual Focus to wield focus items in both hands, and you should immediately see a boost to your spell power. Find two good focus items and keep them upgraded at all times! If you need a bonus of some sort, go for Shield Penetration; you can’t add status effects to your shielded foes, but shield penetration will let you bypass their shields and Ignite them up.

Evokers are great at putting status effects on their foes.

As far as your equipment goes, you’ll need lots of stamina and willpower, so be on the lookout for items that add to either of those stats. Apart from that, shields will be helpful to avoid damage. Also, be sure to stock up on powerpacks at the vendors; you’ll need them to restore your power levels during fights.

Skills

You have a lot of choices here, with skill trees for each of the five main types of damage. The fire tree will be an obvious good choice for soloers, as it’ll let you Ignite bosses and burn them down, but you’ll also want to find another specialty and split your points up accordingly.

Apart from the damaging spells, there are also a number of utility spells that are available to you. Brom’s Curse will be required at the outset of the game, and it will remain helpful throughout, as it can let you quickly regain lost life. It also works well when used in multiplayer games, as the percentage-based health restoration remains useful at any difficulty level. Drain Power is also going to be a necessary spell for most spellcasters, as it’ll get you out of a pinch when you’re running low on power.

Summoner

The Summoner is essentially the spellcasting equivalent of the Engineer, or the analog of the Necromancer from Diablo II. Having learned to bind small demons to her will, she can summon them into battle and then set them loose upon her foes. In addition to summoning minions, she has the ability to use her necromantic powers to restore health to herself and her allies.

Equipment

Unlike Evokers, Summoners have few offensive spells to cast; thus, they have little need of a Focus Item. (Although you will need one to cast Drain Life or Elemental Drain later in the skill tree, so keep one in an alternate equipment slot.) Instead, they’ll typically want to grab a nice ranged weapon that they can use from the background to help their minions deal damage. Anything that can quickly drop shields can be handy here. There are a number of heavy rifles that are nice to have, but it can be tricky alloting a lot of Accuracy points; you’re going to need a lot of Willpower if you want to summon any number of elementals.

You won’t be finding much armor on your equipment (which is fitting, since most of them seem to consist of a few straps of leather), so try to stock up on shields to protect yourself from the enemies that bypass your minions. Apart from that, Willpower will be a handy stat to gain on items, as will minion armor and minion health.

Skills

The Summoner’s skill tree is separated into roughly three areas: healing and power, elemental summoning, and minion summoning.

Healing: Healing is going to be a big aspect of multiplayer play for summoners, who are something of a support class in multiplayer. Afterlife is a fine spell for solo play, as it’ll let you easily convert clumps of corpses into mounds of health between battles, while Brom’s Curse is probably better for multiplayer or for boss fights.

Elementals: Elementals are small creatures that swarm around the summoner, dealing elemental damage of a given type. Elementals are relatively cheap to cast, and can be summoned instantly on a small cooldown, so they’re easy to replace when they’re killed (and the lower-level fire elementals are notoriously weak when they get hit by enemies). However, all of the elementals will also cause a drain on your Power pool, reducing your maximum amount of power while they’re summoned to the playing field. Fire elementals, for instance, reduce your Power pool by 17 points, so if you have 100 Power, you’ll be able to afford 5 Fire elementals. That will only leave you with 15 Power points, however, which will not be enough to let you resummon your minion if it should happen to die. You need to be sure that you either overload your Willpower stat to the point where you can summon as many elementals as you like, or throttle back your elemental summoning to the point where you can cast your other spells if need be. It can be a delicate balance, but it’ll come to you as you play.

Summoners are usually content to hang back and let their pets dish out the hurt.

There are five types of elementals, each corresponding to the basic damage types: fire, electricity, spectral, physical, and toxic. Each type of elemental will be able to confer their status effect on an opponent, making different elementals handy for different situations. Fire elementals are useful for inflicting Ignite on enemy bosses, for instance, while Force elementals can be used to stun swarms of opponents, allowing your minion an easier time taking them down.

Minions: Unlike elementals, you can only have one minion out at a time, so choose wisely. If you intend to use a later pet, like the Witch Doctor or the Warper, then you may have a tough time saving up your skill points for them unless you’re playing in multiplayer.

Your Carnagor is the best solo pet; it’s a big, bad beast that will hold your enemy’s attention while your elementals and your rifle go to town on it. Its triggered abilities will let you Enrage it for more damage and movement speed, or turn it into a Meat Shield, where it will taunt all nearby enemies into attacking it. Meat Shield will also regenerate some of the Carnagor’s health. Stack up on Carnagor skills if you’re going to be running solo a lot; otherwise, you may want to wait for a higher-level pet.

The Witch Doctor is your support minion. She’s primarily focused on healing yourself, your elementals, and your allies, if you’re in a party. This is not a strong solo companion, as your elementals will probably wind up popping into dust before the Doc can heal them if they get swarmed. It can be useful in party play, though.

Warpers will be the high-end damage pets, capable of rapidly issuing spell damage to nearby foes and perhaps phasing them. It won’t be capable of taking as much damage as the Carnagor, though, so you’ll need to do a good job of protecting it, or simply team up with a Guardian or Blademaster and let them take the damage.

Lastly, the Reaper can only be used for 20 seconds out of every five minutes at its first rank, making it an emergency-only skill, although an effective one.