Arelith

I find myself playing solo more often than not. As such I tend to avoid caster classes as I'm terrible at spell selection that doesn't enhance my melee prowess. Clerics, while excellent at melee enhancement can get tedious with the amount of spells required to maintain the right level of prowess for level appropriate areas.

I'm looking for a class that can be fairly resilient without constant recasting and has a wide range of summoning ability to augment offensive capability. Cleric might still be the way to go, but are there any others? Bard tops out at level 6 summons, Ranger at level four. I'd avoid both of those as a summoner.

Druid or shaman I'd say. Shaman has some choices as to what you mix with but barb and ranger dip with throwing axes is pretty simple. Druid is just summon, change shape and go to town. Anything with elemental swarm is extremely strong, including clerics.

I'd say Ranger can be a solid class as far as summoning goes. Call your Animal Companion, add awaken (in game items can gain this for you), add the sequencer of your choosing. Don't forget to use empathy on animals in the area and you end up with three animals to fight at your side. Two of which can be replaced at any time. I use this strategy on my pure ranger build all the time.

Rangers are the swiss army knife of PvE. And their companions can be quite useful if you have enough levels in the class.

While some might call me out on this comment, a Tribal Path Barbarian can also be "easy" mode, and you can either go Melee with them, or go Ranged.

If you want some magical shennanigans, you can do Tribal Barb / Shaman, since Shaman and Tribal Barb has some inherent synergy with one another. I did a 30 Tribal Barb once, was relatively easy, especially for a "Melee" character.