Summoning golems with rage would be good and would make for a very new game dynamic I think as no other class gets allies early on
I made a couple of prototypes with this using Bushido and Yeti Baby as possible summons to see what it would look like. Bushido is OP, but Yeti is quite fine, esp. when you remove the freezing effect. It works so good, I will probably just reskin the Yeti and keep the same attack animations and possibly HP/damage. I have to modify the AI to have better obstacle avoidance because ice levels have very tightly packed layout and the Golem will be used in all levels.
Here's the plan: hero will have a melee weapon and low-ish stats, most probably 60/60/60. Rage attack summons a golem, and you can only have one at a time. If he dies, you can summon a new one when the rage is full.
Now comes the fun part: the golem never attacks the enemies until you order it, and you do so by hitting them with that very same sword. So, you pick a target by hitting it and the golem will keep attacking that target until either one of them dies. The target stays as long as the enemy is alive, so you can go around and attack other enemies if you want. This makes for a really fun strategy as you can control who to attack and you can surround enemies and fight them together. Or you can just mark a tough enemy and run away to deal with weaker ones until the golem takes care of the business.
I think the trouble with turning stuff to gold is that you already have the portable foundry and I'm not sure the game needs more ways to get rich.
Yes, I have given up on the gold idea. Too many ways to get gold, and it would probably make this class too powerful as well. This hero also starts with the alchemist kit and ring which is a huge bonus, but lack of bombs/keys can be a problem early on, so I think 100 HP will be the good choice for starting health.
We will see if the HP / damage of Golem needs to be tweaked later.
Now, I need to do all the animations for the new hero from scratch, so it may take some time before I have a demo version for testing...