I'm currently playing an Antipaladin in a campaign. I'm no expert, but at a glance, the Fiendish Boon ability appears to favor the summon. At level 5 with the weapon bond, you may either add a +1 to your weapon, or add the flaming, keen, or vicious properties. I truthfully probably wouldn't bother with vicious at the moment.
So, another +1 to hit and damage, a 17-20 crit range on my sword or an extra d6 of damage. Not bad. When you consider the price of the weapon you're temporarily creating compared to the character level, it seems quite funny.
But then I look at the ability to simply permanently cast Summon Monster III. If at level 5 I, say, took a fiendish leopard, it would have the potential to full attack (on a charge as well, due to pounce) with 5 attacks, one of which is 1d6+3 to begin with (the rest are 1d3+3), never mind the part where hopefully the leopard is grappling someone, and also makes an attractive target for damage that might have otherwise found its way onto a player character.
I was confident that the summon was the correct choice until I read a side comment in a thread that stated that the weapon bond was demonstrably superior. As it was something of a side comment, no actual numbers were given. The poster seemed well-informed and its shaken my belief in the hands down superiority of the summon bond. But for the life of me, I can't understand why.
The only two things that come to mind are survivability and damage reduction. Survivability of course being an issue because the summon bond can be attacked and killed. But even so, it seems like you ought to be able to dismiss it if it were endanger of dying and giving you a month long -1 penalty to attacks, and it only really needs one full attack to do enough damage to put the weapon bond to shame for the rest of the fight. Unless possibly what you were fighting had damage reduction and multiple natural attacks aren't going to phase it much...unless once again, the enemy was good, because then the leopard could smite it to overcome the DR. And even so, once again, the benefits of being a meatshield/potentially grappling dangerous enemies should not be scoffed at even in lieu of damage.
I've gone on long enough at any rate. The point of this post is that, even after dwelling on the issue, I couldn't see why the weapon bond would be any better than the summoning despite its championing by someone whose system mastery is surely far greater than mine. If anybody could supply me with the math and reasoning behind either argument, I would be much obliged.
Thank you.
