The original summoning abilities granted by the summoner class were good. Very, very good. Summoning spells that lasted for minutes, took only a round to cast, and which you get in numbers superior to other spellcasters. Quite the potent combination.
The response to that combination was easily foreseen. People freaked out, as they usually do whenever any powerful combination is put into play. They ran screaming up and down the boards about how overpowered the class was, how it broke the game, how it turned encounters into pushovers, and how as a result the sky was falling.
I'll be blunt, in my work with the class I saw none of these things. I've never seen any spellcaster (ans the summoner is a spellcaster) willing to nova out his resources when he wasn't sure a fight would be forthcoming, yet this was exactly the doomsday situation that others cried about. It is the same problem that many people have with spellcasting classes on the whole. This "if they" argument, is based on the idea of spellcasters burning through vast numbers of resources under ideal circumstances. "If they have multiple rounds to prepare for a fight, and if they cast all their spells before hand, and if they then charge through every room and the foes don't just withdraw until the spells expire, then a spellcaster can 'win' Pathfinder". I didn't buy the argument when applied to spellcasters, and don't buy it when applied to this class.
That said, the summoning abilities, combined with a fairly powerful spell list, and a powerful summoned creature might be too much. It is certainly too much as far as the usual (and vocal) chicken little crowd is concerned, and we've all seen how effective they can be at making their position appear to be that of the majority. See what happened to D&D when it became 4E (and the huge success of Pathfinder with the masses who were disgruntled with 4E) if you don't believe me. In the interest of seeing this ability and class remain useful (e.g. not nerfed into obscurity) I humbly offer this compromise on the summoning abilities.
Most people have suggested giving up the minute duration summons and retaining the ability to summon more than one creature, and to summon them each as a standard action. This is, on the whole, a fair compromise, and those screaming about how the problem is multi-minute duration summons should have no objection to it. Unfortunately, there is a problem with this, in that it renders summoning for the first several levels (call it 1-3 conservatively) virtually useless for a class themed on summoning.
My solution would be to let them add their charisma modifier in rounds to the duration of their summoning spells at first level.
The net result would be standard action summoning, not limited to a single creature, with a duration of 1 round/level + summoners charisma modifier.
If I seem sort of snarkly here, it's because I am. I really liked the idea of minute/level summons because they provide the potential to use them for things other than just combat. That they are almost certainly off the table at this point irritates me. Greatly.
I'm irritated that this is still going on after the balance babies who screamed about the power creep finally got their love child in the form of 4E, especially when you can see their hand all over 3.5 making much of the material published unplayable. Don't believe me? Take a look at Complete Arcane and Complete Divine, and tell me how many of the PrCs are considered powerful, useful, or even playable. I think the answer you'll get is very few on the whole, especially compared to the number that are absolutely worthless. Classes and concepts nerfed to the point of worthlessness.
Like the Acolyte of the skin, requiring (nominally) 5 levels in an arcane class, but only providing 1/2 spellcasting progression... and a bunch of worthless abilities on top. Yay glare of the pit for 16d6 1/day at 12th level, none scaling? How about the alientist which is actually the only summoning class I can think of that actually makes you worse at most things in exchange for benefits that are mechanically questionable at best. How about the elemental savant, who can forget that one. Trade two levels of spellcasting and the ability to use all other energy types in exchange for +4 vs. spell resistance, +2 save DC, 1 energy immunity, and the elemental subtype. Oh, oh, I know, the Wayfarer Guide, because enhanced teleporation abilities that have minimal impact on combat ability are totally worth a caster level!
Anyway, enough ranting. I just don't want to see the Summoner reduced to mediocrity, and as much as I trust Jason to make the right decision in a vacuum, I worry that when he catches a ton of flack from a tiny portion of the community on the whole he can be influenced into their way of thinking.
If you want to propose a new version of the summon spell-likes, sit down with your proposed version with the intent of wrecking the game and see if it's possible and how easy it is.
This is an horribly flawed way of designing, and I hope you know that and are simply using this as a red herring. Designing based on the idea that someone could, potentially, use something abusively leads to design that doesn't allow players to play characters with meaningfully different abilities, like 4th edition. You design for the 95% of the community that just wants to have fun, and who treat the game as an RPG rather than just a hack and slash, not for the 5% that doesn't.
I can see where your coming from Peter, and it's not a bad idea in practice, it just seems unnecessary.
The times a summoner will need more than one summon monster on the field are exceptionally rare indeed, and he has the spell for that.
My vote goes towards keeping the full SLA durations (because honestly dude, having a summon around for out of combat utility is just really really cool), standard action casting, so if it needs to be done in combat the creature is actually there the turn you cast it (as I've said in other threads, I would never play a character that expects to cast the summon monster spell every day if it can't cast it as a standard action), and simply nerf it by limiting it to one active SLA at a time.
Infact, I just had a really interesting thought, from a flavor perspective. Instead of 'dismissing and resummoning' during your turn should the creature you have on the field be about used up and there still be a major threat out there, you could burn another use of the SLA and the creature would have it's full health and all uses of it's limited use abilities back, for the cost of your action and sla use.
Sounds cool to me :)
The problem I have here is conceptual. I object to the idea of a summoning based class being a crappier summoner than a wizard or sorcerer.
What about giving them the option of maintaining either a single 1 minute/level summon, or multiple 1/round, on the fly? Maybe 1 minute/level could require 2 or 3 uses of the ability, and would negate the ability to summon additional creatures until it was dismissed.
|
My problem was never minute/level durations. My problem was multiple summons eating the precious play time of other players. It's inevitable that the Summoner will take more time than other players, but minimizing it to one summon SLA encourages other actions by the summoner.
I agree with Dudemeister here. I have experienced players who have premade summons and with only a couple on the board their part of the round already comes screaching to a halt. I love what was done with the summoner and it was a class and a concept that I really wasn't that interested in before. The Summoning is important to it. The problem that I have seen is that summon creatures can take so much more time to run.
Second, unlike other spellcasters, the summoner can wreck CR with prep time from level 1. Three or four riding dogs end all of CR 1 and 2 unless they have AOE save-or-dies or Protection from [alignment], and most of CR 3. Other spellcasters still lack the spells known or the spells available to do very much pre-combat.
Maybe that's why Summon Monster I was fixed. (Just waiting for the next published errata...)
|
The original Summoner and Eidolon weren't broken(and if the updates stick, I'll go back to calling my druid's eagle Pidgeotto). What the OP said in his first post about people running up and down the threads screaming "The end is here!" is true. When something new comes out, people will either criticize it, enjoy it, or try and get it nerfed. Even now there is a thread entitled: "Fighter, how is it better?"
Well I ran a game last night at level 5, my party included a summoner functioning under the new changes. He used his summons once in each of 2 fights. While the 3 giant spiders he summoned definately had an impact, they didnt have more of one then the raging barbarian or the smiting paladin. I'm going to post a more detailed playtest report tonight, but as it is I am ok with the summon abilitiy as it stands. I wouldnt mind a slight improvement in the number of rounds they last (+charisma rounds is nice), and the full round action to me isnt a big deal, as its still a very potent spell, and the summoner still has the eidolon's actions to consider on the turn he is summoning.
All in all, I agree that the sky is falling group could and should enjoy a nice massage and relax a bit. I also agree that designing with the intent of stoping powergamers and munchkins is a poor idea (i agree that the end result is 4E). The more you try to 'balance' the less interesting abilities get. There has to be a give and take. If you want abilities that are interesting and unique, they will not be unexploitable.
The whole 'if its in the rules then it should be totally fine' attitude is way off base to me. Your intent should be about you and your friends having fun at the table. If something is preventing that, you dont do it. If the summoner uses his minute duration summons to ferry the party accross a river, that is good. If uses them to crush an encounter meant to challenge the party, that is bad. I dont get why self restraint is completely out of the question here. I admit it is a extreme case, but to me it is along the same lines of why I as a dm dont drop a circle of death on the party as the walk into a room. People should be having fun, you should be acting to promote that.
|
RPG Superstar 2011 Top 32
|
The SLA as written is pretty stupid.
It is useless at level 1 mostly because summoning at level 1 is a pretty gimicky trick. This remains the case for a while.
Moreover, as it is now, the SLA is worse than spending a spell slot. My low level summoner would much rather just have more spell slots.
If the point of the SLA is to give the summoner the incentive to use summoning spells, the ability doesn't serve its purpose at low levels.
The sign of the ability runs counter to the design purpose of the starting SLAs that most other casters have. For example most of the cleric domain abilities and most of the wizard school abilities give something useful at low level and decreasingly useful at high level. The implied design purpose is to:
1) Link to the caster's theme...fire clerics shoot fire, lawful characters impose order...
2) Mitigate the fact that most low level casters can't last more than 4 combat rounds before using up all of their spells until level 3...later if they routinely cast buffs out of combat or use spells for non-combat purposes (you know, do their job).
3) Decline sharply in usefulness when casters have enough resources to fill combat rounds with spells.
The summoner's SLA doesn't really meet these goals so perhaps itis a central class feature like wildshape or channel energy.
If that is the case, perhaps the best analogue would be bardic music, an analogue that serves a specific point.
At low levels bardic music takes most of a character's turn, which is fine because he probably doesn't have anything better to do. However, as the bard gets more spells he has more to do and his class features (songs and spells) need some level of interplay to make the class work. Thus the time he spends each round on singing decreases.
I think the summoner would work if the same mechanic applied.
Put the standard action cast time and minute per level duration back. Keep the one SLA at a time rule
At level 1: Controlling the SLA is a standard action.
At level 7: Controlling the SLA is a move action
At level 13: Controlling the SLA is a swift action.
This option does a couple things:
1) The summoner scales better. At low level he actually summons. The ability scales so that at high level his action economy is more sensible.
2) It gives an in-game mechanical reason for the mechanical limit on the number of creature summoned as opposed to just fiat requiring one SLA at a time.
3) Spell slots and the SLA do separate things. Spell slot summons act without your influence, but blink out...however you can get lots of summons this way. SLA summons can do all of the out of combat stuff one might think a summoner should be able to help with and last until they die.
4) It mitigates against showing up to a fight with 10 summons at low level. (Frankly not having a couple summons active at high level is just plain fail).
5) At low to mid level it keeps the summoner from having so many turns in combat and gumming things up. He has one move action more than a druid...so not so bad.
-James
PS: You might wish to work with your players to come up with ways to quicken their turns. I know I've run combats where I had 8+ critters to control and my turn went faster than the wizard's did and that was without area effect control spells out there (ie evards making grapple checks, zones like entangle requiring multiple saves, etc).
+1 to this. Your problem is player inspired, not game inspired. I regularly run 3-5 creatures in combat using my Conjurer in my Saturday night game, without taking any noticeably longer amount of time than the other PCs. Last Saturday I ran 23 creatures at once and took only a nominally longer amount of time (before you ask, no they were not all summoned creatures).
The key point is that if you are going to run more than one creature you have to be prepared when your turn comes up. You have to have the stats for your creatures on hand and ready, and their actions planned out. Like any complex class it takes preparation. If you aren't willing to put forth the effort then you should probably stick to playing a fighter.
-James
PS: You might wish to work with your players to come up with ways to quicken their turns. I know I've run combats where I had 8+ critters to control and my turn went faster than the wizard's did and that was without area effect control spells out there (ie evards making grapple checks, zones like entangle requiring multiple saves, etc).+1 to this. Your problem is player inspired, not game inspired. I regularly run 3-5 creatures in combat using my Conjurer in my Saturday night game, without taking any noticeably longer amount of time than the other PCs. Last Saturday I ran 23 creatures at once and took only a nominally longer amount of time (before you ask, no they were not all summoned creatures).
The key point is that if you are going to run more than one creature you have to be prepared when your turn comes up. You have to have the stats for your creatures on hand and ready, and their actions planned out. Like any complex class it takes preparation. If you aren't willing to put forth the effort then you should probably stick to playing a fighter.
Last night a summoner with 3 giant spiders out, an eidolon and ofcourse his own actions took less time then the wizard to sort out his turn. Its all a matter of preparation and what you are trying to do.
My biggest problem with the original SLA was the extended duration, quickened casting, and no limit on how many could be out at a time. It allowed the summoner to do what everyone else could at a much lower level when no else could effectively counter it with virtually no cost to the summoner. To me, and I said this from the very beginning, what was needed was the removal of one of these factors, preferably the no limit on # of active SLA, to keep it getting out of line. With that simple change, the summoner can still spam just like anybody else with his regular spell slots, but he still uses about the same amount of resources to do so, and by the time he can really hit his spamming potential, it can be countered by others reasonably effectively. To me it wasnt that it was overpowered as a whole, it was just that the power needed to be scaled down just a hair for the first few levels. I can understand why the changes went beyond what most people were saying needed done though; this is a playtest, and the best way to find the middle ground is to define the two extremes first.