My thoughts on the summoner


Round 2: Summoner and Witch


While I haven't had a chance to playtest the class, in either the old form or the new form, I do have a fair bit of experience playing with pet classes and the summon spells, so while not perfect, I do believe that my thoughts have at least some basis on actual experience.

First, the eidolon, aside from from minor tweaking, seems pretty good. Only major change I could see is reduce the natural armor to be more inline with that of a typical animal companion, and allow any equipment that fits onto the chosen form and that the summoner can afford, treating all gear on the eidolon as counting towards the total amount of wealth the summoner possesses, or not allow any gear at all, and make evolutions that allow the eidolon to emulate all kinds of magical items (at appropriate cost and level of course). Otherwise, only issue I can see is some tweaking of evolutions, which I would be surprised to not see happen, given the fact this is a playtest form still. I would like to see a few more options for non combat and smaller eidolons, but even in its current form, its entirely possible to play the eidolon as support for the summoner rather than summoner being support for the summoner.

The SLA is 99% perfect in my opinion. It allows the summoner an edge over other spellcasters in the summoning department, and with just a few minor adjustments, is just fine. The only adjustments I would recommend from the original writeup is limit the # of active of SLA's to one, and push either the extended duration or the quickened casting time back to level 5. I really like the fact that a summoner could use a summon spell out of combat with these methods, but having both at level one could overwhelm a low level party. As this does weaken the summoning aspect of the class a bit, I would add the summon spells as bonus spells, and perhaps even give augment summoning and extend spell(for summon spells only) as free bonus feats. This allows the summoner to maintain an edge in the summoning department, while not overwhelming a low level party with too many summons.

Other things I noticed was that something needs to be done with the skills. Either add a few charisma based skills to the class list or increase the number to 4+int. As it is, the summoner seems just a little too weak in most non combat encounters, and a skill like Diplomacy would make sense for someone who as dedicated his life to asking others to do the heavy lifting for him.

I apologize if these suggestions have been made elsewhere, and I know I've commented on many of them elsewhere on the board, but I wanted to try to put them all into a single cohesive thought.

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