The name says it all.
I ask because there's been a constant discussion discussion about it in our Jade Regent game. We have a Ratfolk Synthesist who the GM is convinced is broken, but that the player insists is not. We just hit 2nd level, and it keeps being brought up that he has 3 attacks, (Claw +3, Claw +3, Tentacle -2) 32 HP, 18 AC, and Evasion. None of his saves are above +4. I would like to say that I have flat refused to form an opinion about it, partially because I wanna turn the question over to y'all.
Other members of the party:
Ratfolk rogue.
Half-Orc Paladin.
Tiefling Two weapon fighter.
Tengu Cleric.
What're your thoughts on the matter?
No - it is not broken.... especially given that the synthesist hasn't chosen optimal evolutions anyway.
Ummmm, could you elaborate, please?
Wow, Ninja'd. I am blind. lol.
I don't know if he dumped his physical stats, and he doesn't ever seem to cast spells.
Compared to everyone other than the cleric? It's absolutely broken, without a doubt. Compared to the cleric...it depends on how the cleric's optimized, but all else being equal, it will not outshine the cleric. That said, to use a full caster optimally means to not "degrade" yourself into a big stupid fighter and act like a normal caster as often as possible. So the cleric and summoner would then be doing different things and there never would even be a question of "who's stronger?" However, as long as he doesn't completely mess up his evolutions...and even if he does, he can fix them anytime he levels up, the Synth will leave the melee / noncaster classes in the dust at their own game.
The Cleric seems to be mostly a utility-spell caster who doesn't do healing unless it's with the Heal skill. He took a variant Channel ability, so it's not as useful, and he seems to be used to playing brick characters, so he gets in melee a lot.
The synthesist's main strategy seems to be to get up next to something, stand in the same square as the rogue (Knife Master archetype) for flanking and then spam attacks until it dies.
The Synt. class is broken. If the player picks reasonable feat and evolutions the Synt will outshine the rest of the party given time...
Sure at low levels 2wf could do more dam - if the Synt doesn't get full attacks, and there's monsters with a bit of DR - but around lvl 8 the Synt should start to outshine everybody else...
The full casting cleric could perhaps keep up - if he focus on something non-melee orientated - but his spelllist is made for melee buffing...
I really don't like the Synt. to bloody broken if you ask me... But try it - and if you agree band it from future champaigns.
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The Eidolon is part of the class features for Summoner and shouldn't be accounted for in CR calculations. The DM just needs to take the precaution against full casters.
One of my players would say no. I would say that in *most* cases, yes. The archetype invites min-maxing stats, and if you're using point buy, it can be very unfair to other players because they essentially get the best of both worlds in that respect, and none of the drawbacks.
The summoner spell-list isn't exhaustive, but it's a far cry from useless. Grease, mage armor, shield, and compel hostility all make for an exceptional melee character early on -- those are just 1st level spells. Their 2nd level spells include invisibility, glitterdust, haste, detect thoughts, bears endurance and similar spells.
It is my personal opinion that they are broken, if only because I don't think you can trust many players not to min-max it.
Thank you all for your information and thoughts on the matter. I'z appreciative.
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The summoner spell-list isn't exhaustive, but it's a far cry from useless. Grease, mage armor, shield, and compel hostility all make for an exceptional melee character early on -- those are just 1st level spells. Their 2nd level spells include invisibility, glitterdust, haste, detect thoughts, bears endurance and similar spells.
The synthesist won't be able to take or use many of those spells early on. He is compelled to take the rejuvinate eidolon line as that is the ONLY means of healing damaged to a fused Eidolon.
Later in the campaign, a synthesist can make effective use of out-of-combat spells, but will remain nearly pure melee in combat.
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Is the Eidolon suit a Biped or does it have the Limbs(arms) evolution? If not, then he can't even cast spells. Depending on how you read it though, that one tentacle might be enough.
arcane spell casting is far from a "simple task." If you look at the vestigial arm discovery from Alchemist, it says that you can't use it to attack or cast spells, and that's an actual ARM, with FINGERS.
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Is the Eidolon suit a Biped or does it have the Limbs(arms) evolution? If not, then he can't even cast spells. Depending on how you read it though, that one tentacle might be enough.
I am assuming the eidolon has arms. If not, you would be forced to take still spell just to heal your eidolon.
The synthesist looses out to the standard Summoner in the action economy, so if the synthesist is broken, then the Summoner is completely broken.
My opinion is the synthesist is powerful, but not broken, unless you consider the standard summoner broken.
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It's certainly good, better if the player knows how to optimize. However the same is true for pretty much every class. I wouldn't worry overly much about it.
Quote from the Synthesist:
While fused, the synthesist counts as both his original type and as an outsider for any effect related to type, whichever is worse for the synthesist. Spells such as banishment or dismissal work normally on the eidolon, but the synthesist is unaffected.
This right there helps quite a lot, nothing like sending the eidolon away. And once it's gone rolling a veneralbe summoner with STR 5 isn't such a great idea any more.
The summoner spell-list isn't exhaustive, but it's a far cry from useless. Grease, mage armor, shield, and compel hostility all make for an exceptional melee character early on -- those are just 1st level spells. Their 2nd level spells include invisibility, glitterdust, haste, detect thoughts, bears endurance and similar spells.
The synthesist won't be able to take or use many of those spells early on. He is compelled to take the rejuvinate eidolon line as that is the ONLY means of healing damaged to a fused Eidolon.
Later in the campaign, a synthesist can make effective use of out-of-combat spells, but will remain nearly pure melee in combat.
The eidolin can be at 1 hp and still function as normal. He can sack his own health to keep it alive past that, and keep himself healed up. He needs rejuvenate eidolon to maximize his total hp count, but it's not required. In any case, he only really wants/needs the first spell in the line. And only if the DM doesn't let him find/buy wands of it.
I have had a friend build two summoners, one normal summoner for another friend in a game he was running, and one which was a synthesisfor himself in a game I was running.
In both cases, once they hit lvl 5 the eidelon/synthesist had more HP, more attacks, higher attack bonuses, better saves, and better AC and defenses than any other character we could build.
The synthesis was definitely worse in this regard than the synthesis who is getting extra HD (if not the other bonuses) equal to 3/4 his class lvl. Furthermore, once he can use evolution points himself, the character is essentially getting to stretch the evolution points further for the eidelon build.
This really gets out of hand when you consider stacking the bonuses for a huge eidelon with a belt of reduce person. In this case you aren't even cancelling the bonuses for going from large to huge, you just get a -2 str and +2 dex, which allows the character to be a large eidelon with improved state adjustments.
So, IMO, both classes are broken, but the synthesis more so.
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The regular summoner should have done better since it can cast spells, and still have the eidolon attack where a syntheist has to make a choice.
Having played a Synth to 12th level, I can tell you that they are potent. However, they do have weaknesses. The ed is effected by dismiss, which means Summon Ed is essential, and hope you can cast more often than it can be dismissed. Despite my best tactics, while my AC was excellent, by Touch AC was lousy - with little defense, besides Blur. The stacked health pool means you can soak damage, but it's difficult to heal back up during combat, because (and this may be just my GM's ruling, but as a GM myself, I have to tend to agree) most heal spells cannot be used on me (inside the ed), so Rejuv is your only heal. And in combat, as a melee character, you're taking yourself out for as long as you need to heal yourself up (and likely taking damage that whole time, too).
And let's face it. While you have some spells you can use as a caster, the arch is built to be a variant melee caster. But you're also a melee character who's fairly feat starved.
It has versatility. It has strengths. But it also has weakness.
Of course, since my character was a Gnome Inventor, wearing a suit of battle armor, these strengths and weakness were uniquely suited to the character.
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Just because a dismissal is super effective against a synthesist, doesn't mean they're not broken. Their rules set are unclear, poorly worded, and allow an immense amount of min-maxing to create a character that can 'do everything,' which goes against the entire ethos of the Pathfinder class system.
Having a summoner that can offer three attacks at +3 (1d6+1) is not inherently better than a synthesist having one attack at +8 (2d6+6). It's a disruptive class and every time I've played with one, eyebrows have been raised by fellow players.
My opinion is the game would be stronger if they were rewritten, or not allowed.
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Are they broken? No. If you believe that than you just don't know how to optimize the other classes.
It is scary that I have been agreeing with RD too much lately. I am sure I can fight with a synthesis in the party, and hold my own.
As for Cid's comment the two creatures are one creature. Since the summoner can be affected by other spells it should be able to be affected by heal also. The eidolon hp is used as a shell to protect the summoner's hp.
The synthesist gains the eidolon’s hit points as temporary hit points.
<stops typing>
I wonder if cure spells were meant to apply to the temporary hit points. I am too lazy to debate right now though, but I will start a thread on this later.
Yar.
Just to confirm one of the synth's weaknesses.
From the SRD, the PRD, and the CRB
When temporary hit points are lost, they cannot be restored as real hit points can be, even by magic.
I'm at work, so I can't give a CRB page number atm, but yeah... healing is not easy when most of your HP are temporary HP.
~P
That is good enough for me. I thought that the rule.
The summoner does not have to focus on himself or the eidolon. An eidolon is good enough on its own to handle things in combat. The summoner also has a decent spell list, and can go the archery route assuming 20 pb.
Getting to any caster made to be physically weak can end up quickly.
I doubt you will outshine everyone in terms of HP/AC/Att/Dmge. Well maybe HP, but depending on the GM those can disappear pretty quickly. Most GM's just don't focus fire because they don't really want to kill the PC's.
This is not PVP and even so beating up a regular summoner eidolon combo has nothing to do with in game play as part of a group.
Summons are not weak. Even before fooling around with augment summon they can be annoying at worse.
Your stats were probably a result of size which often gets in the way unless the GM makes accomodations for your size. Most characters can get a similar AC if they really go for it. The saves can also be done by anyone.
As for the saves the synthesis probably has a decent advantage in most of them, but you can get really high saves with other classes also, particularly the paladin.
Yar.
Just to confirm one of the synth's weaknesses.
From the SRD, the PRD, and the CRB
When temporary hit points are lost, they cannot be restored as real hit points can be, even by magic.I'm at work, so I can't give a CRB page number atm, but yeah... healing is not easy when most of your HP are temporary HP.
~P
In the FAQ:
"...effects that specifically restore hp to an eidolon (such as rejuvenate eidolon) restore temporary hit points to a synthesist's eidolon."So most things don't work, but it IS possible to heal your eidolon temp-HP.
One of the things about the Eidolon (especially the Synthesist variant) is that there are a lot of rules and rule exceptions to follow. And if you don't get it all right, then problems can easily creep up.
And remembering back on the previous threads, it seemed like 50% of higher level Eidolon builds had some mistakes in them (higher for Synthesists).
But another part of the problem is that Eidolons are trivially easy to make powerful. Eidolon evolutions are versatile and powerful, and there are only like 40 of them in total (all concentrated in one or two places). It's much simpler for a player to familiarize themselves with all these evolutions and to figure out nice combinations than it is to familiarize yourself with the hundreds and hundreds of feats and spells. And if you screw up and make a mistake, or notice something new, you can just rebuild the entire thing from scratch at the next level up.
So while I agree that an optimized Summoner (or Synthesist) is no worse than the optimized Wizard/Cleric/Druid, it is easier to make stronger Summoners, while simultaneously easier to screw up some rules. And that's a bad combination.
One final note that I would like to point out is that the Eidolon is completely independent of stat generation. If you play in one of those roll 3d6 6 times type of games, the Eidolon is going to wreck face comparatively (especially at low levels).
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We have a level 9 synthetist in our group whom in my opinion absolutely breaks the game. The character is a be-all, 5-attacks, 15' reach, dimensional, invisible, flying mount with over 230 dispensable hit points that can easily single-handed kill any and all opponents (possibly even a 20th level fighter) including his entire party if need be.
I am sure all of that is not possible. Rules are being missed somewhere.
I've played both a standard summoner and a synthesist summoner, and neither one seemed broken. They were extremely effective, but no more effective than say... the party paladin, who would run over bosses as soon as Smite Evil got going.
Admittedly though, a lot of the 'broken' builds I've seen for summoners involve eidolons that use weapons to bypass their attack limit. I haven't bothered with that yet because it didn't fit the flavor of the first eidolon, and the 2nd doesn't have multiattack yet.
Now that I think about it, I think the real problem with summoners is that they don't scale properly with stats. Eidolons are *always* powerful, all the point buy changes is the summoner himself. They were probably fine in my games because we usually play around 25 point buy.
If you are letting summoners play in a 15 point buy game, you'll probably have problems unless you nerf the eidolon's stats a bit. Maybe -2 to every physical stat would do it.
I would never allow them in a home game.
Just because a class can be abused doesn't mean it shouldn't be allowed at all. My games played with summoners and synthesists have been my favorite games in all of my roleplaying just because of the flavor of the characters. If you are really worried about them being too powerful, just make a houserule that limits them a bit. A good one would be that a certain number of an eidolon's evolution points have to be spent on non physical combat evolutions.
Personally, I've been pondering a houserule that has an eidolon's evolution points scale with the Summoner's Charisma modifier. This way they are weakened properly in low point buy (unless the summoner risks lowering other stats too much).
Why not just make sure the player and the GM know the rules so no abuse occurs and avoid house rules if you can?
Thanks Thalin, I say we round up all the synthesists and have us a books burnings.
I did write an email to paizo expressing my concerns regarding the unbalancing mechanics of the summoner synthesist within the Pathfinder community, yet if they are anything like other corporate bigwigs than I don't anticipate any practical response. I think thus in the matter of the summoner: an once of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Cheers,
Calling out rules issues is one thing and is a good thing. But don't start making negative comments about a company just because you are angry with some archetype. Especially since the staff here are usually more than happy to answer various questions asked them. Hell, look at the Ask James Jacobs thread in the Off Topic Discussion.
As for the synthesist, I can say that I haven't played one. I can fiddle around with one, though it'd be nice to see the stats of the player. Also, if you haven't read it yet, here is a list of all the errata for the Synthesist. Hopefully, there will be some misunderstandings in there that are cleared up.
The synthesist clearly outclasses *all other characters (and monsters for that matter).
You're either exaggerating or have never played in games with properly designed paladins or wizards ;) For example, the synthesist will never be able to outdo the shear boss destroying power of a paladin using smite (even AFTER the smite nerf). I know this from in game experience. Sure, a synth can pass the paladins damage by a bit while he isn't using smite, but if he couldn't then eidolons would be underpowered.
Summoners and Sythesists are powerful, but are definitely not more powerful than every other class out there. I guess they could get scary in a 15 point buy game, but I would still expect paladins (and a few other classes) to often outshine them.
Yes. Not because it is super powerful (if played with all the RAW & RAI properly), but because it is so poorly written (see how many FAQ there are for it, and unanswered FAQ, too) that it is really unplayable. This, it’s too easy for a Player to have one, with reasonable interpretations on what the rules are, and have a super-powerful PC. I agree with Joah here.
It’s also a tier 1 or 2, while the rest of the party (not counting the cleric) is much lower.
Lastly, it’s looked on as a spellcasting class, but it usurps the Tank role. Thus the pally and Fighter will feel left out.
The name says it all.
I ask because there's been a constant discussion discussion about it in our Jade Regent game. We have a Ratfolk Synthesist who the GM is convinced is broken, but that the player insists is not. We just hit 2nd level, and it keeps being brought up that he has 3 attacks, (Claw +3, Claw +3, Tentacle -2) 32 HP, 18 AC, and Evasion. None of his saves are above +4. I would like to say that I have flat refused to form an opinion about it, partially because I wanna turn the question over to y'all.
A few things
What kind of damage is the synthesist doing?
What kind of damage could the pally be doing with a two handed sword?
How often is the the sythesist getting his full attacks?
Multiple attacks are really good at low levels, but peter out as you go higher, other characters get multiple attacks, and damage reduction starts to ruin their days. The synthesist may very well be in the "Sweeet spot" for his build
Ratfolk rogue: Rogues are very low power. Anything looks good standing next to them.
Half-Orc Paladin.: Whats his strength score?
Tiefling Two weapon fighter.: two weapon fighting is a little underwhelming.
Tengu Cleric.: Sounds like a melee cleric. Whats his strength and weapon choice?
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Lastly, it’s looked on as a spellcasting class, but it usurps the Tank role. Thus the pally and Fighter will feel left out.
In my experience, the synthesist will typically spend less time casting during combat than the paladin.
Typically, he will be filling a role other than caster: depending on build that role can be dps, tank, or support.
Thanks Thalin, I say we round up all the synthesists and have us a books burnings.
I did write an email to paizo expressing my concerns regarding the unbalancing mechanics of the summoner synthesist within the Pathfinder community, yet if they are anything like other corporate bigwigs than I don't anticipate any practical response. I think thus in the matter of the summoner: an once of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Cheers,
The best place to get their attention is here on the boards. Another issue is that what is an issue for one group is not an issue for everyone. Many people don't like the way the synthesis works because of all the rules exceptions, but they still don't think it is broken. Annoying is a good word to use to describe them.
The synthesist clearly outclasses *all other characters (and monsters for that matter).You're either exaggerating or have never played in games with properly designed paladins or wizards ;) For example, the synthesist will never be able to outdo the shear boss destroying power of a paladin using smite (even AFTER the smite nerf). I know this from in game experience. Sure, a synth can pass the paladins damage by a bit while he isn't using smite, but if he couldn't then eidolons would be underpowered.
Summoners and Sythesists are powerful, but are definitely not more powerful than every other class out there. I guess they could get scary in a 15 point buy game, but I would still expect paladins (and a few other classes) to often outshine them.
I have to agree. Once the paladin got boosted in PF my bosses starting playing keep away. It is a easier for me to own an eidolon than a paladin.