I hear what your saying... but what I am saying is that is not what summoners are supposed to be about.
its about summon your own monster. not summon your own anything.
Im not saying it should not be possible... I am just saying that the reason it is the way it is for balance and play ability.
besides... summons DO get relatively good skills. I mean... MOST classes get only 2 or 4 base skills right? summons get 6? (ok 4 after int mod but that can be remedied) so you can make a stealthy, perceptive, device disabling, diplomatic, instrument crafting, professional dancing summon that looks like a beautiful woman with a foxes head, long sword and bow if you really wanted to.
is it that you want a summoner to have to option to make a Edilon thats BETTER at skills than a ranger or rogue, BETTER at casting than a sorc or wiz or BETTER at tanking than a tank AND have the option of tossing it into dangerous situations while you hide in the back safely?
If so why would any one play anything other than a summoner?
Eidolons are simply not bad at skill use/range. Particularly at lower levels, they're almost the best thing in the game at skill use, and if you take the summoner into account, you're rivaling some of the best classes in the game for range. At higher levels, actual party members will catch up with and overtake your class feature, but the eidolon will still always be better than half the party at skills. The class feature will be better than many of the actual characters.
If so why would any one play anything other than a summoner?
To be fair, as things are now, from an extreme optimization standpoint, we're already most of the way there. People aren't kidding when they call "four summoners" one of the stronger possible party makeups.
I just want an Eidolon that can take Combat Expertise at level 1 (as opposed to having to wait until level 11 by the current rules), but apparently that's too much to ask for because 3 more skill points means it will suddenly replace the group Rogue somehow (which speaks more of how easily-replaceable the Rogue is than how OP the Summoner is if you ask me).
/shrug/ ask the GM for a special summon. offer sufficient negatives in exchange for the bonuses where you want them.
a good GM should be able to work something out if its THAT important to the player.
I understand how edilons work. I want to play a summoner and am GMing a game in which some one is playing one.
what I am saying is that if you chould essentially do anything you imagine with an edilon you would have groups in which one player has a dedicated Hulksmash edilon and another guy would make a dedicated ranged edilon, and some one else makes a dedicated skill monkey edilon and maybe a last person makes an edilon that casts spells well.
suddenly you have a group of nothing but summoners with specialized edilons that can entirely avoid putting themselves in actual danger the majority of the time.
I am not saying its a horrible thing... I just think that every class has to have limits from a RAW point of view.
I can probably make a wizard that is a decent melee fighter... but it should not be easy and the game should not cater to it.
Once again... if its THAT important to you ask your GM for a minor alteration. I once allowed a Sorcerer to chose a collection of benefits and drawbacks in order to essentially emulate Toph from Avatar: the last airbender. it was pretty cool but one of the end results was an inability to pinpoint targets in the air and a 50% miss chance on rays beyond a certain range.
that does not mean that Paizo should start providing rules for such a character in a grand sense. Work with your GM on this one. I believe in player choice but I think what your asking for is a bit much as a core ruleset.
Perhaps it's time to publish an intelligent, noncombat eidolon?I have a player with a Summoner in my Kingmaker campaign and I have to say it's been very disruptive.
Adding a high intelligence is out of the question without nerfing other abilities.If I ever run another AP, Summoner, as written, will be banned.
I would be the aforementioned disruptive summoner, so I thought I'd add in my take on the class and the characters involved.
My summoner is presently level 12, has a high intelligence, and has feats & skills focused towards construct and magic item creation that the Eidolon doesn't benefit from. That given, the character is very support driven and relies on her party, eidolon and constructs for offense and defense. Most summoners strike me as this way, mortals who support the actions on their eidolons and party and are themselves not at all impressive in combat alone with no summons available.
My eidolon on the other hand not fully min/maxxed is roughly equivalent to the party fighter(archer) in ability to wreck single targets on the battle field. My eidolon's AC, saves, and hit points however don't compare to the fighter's or paladin's so there is somewhat of a trade off.
Now that I have the Greater Evolution Surge spell though, is where the eidolon is prone to stealing the spotlight, when suddenly I can give him effectively 2 evolutions that he didn't have before to accomplish most any skill based task I want, and address creature vulnerabilities and DR (change claw to slam attacks to deal with blunt weak DR for example).
I find that now we are in the higher levels the party wizard has the ability to end what should be long drawn out fights in a single round with the use of Baleful Polymorph or his new favorite spell Flesh to Stone. Throw in fireballs that rip apart large forces of minions, and the ability to teleport away with contingency when things get ugly, makes him rather effective at making most challenges subdued. This is something I can't do with my summoner or eidolon presently (yes I know I can get baleful polymorph, but that spell ticked off the DM so the wizard shied away from using it often.)
In all though, I think the eidolon as a summoner class ability could benefit from being toned down slightly (perhaps 1 less max attack, and only 1 evo. point a level instead of the occasional 2 point increase), but shouldn't be toned down severely.
Just my 2 cents...
Oh and for those poor rogues that feel cheated by eidolons, just remember you can still disarm magical traps, which no other class can do.
I don't mean "it's a terrible class feature", I mean the eidolon is almost as dumb as your average ogre.
Why? Aren't the vast majority of outsiders at least average human level intelligence?
I figured it was because they were a small fraction of a larger more powerful outsider. Thus only a limited amount of their vast intellect could be placed into such a fragile material vessel.
I agree that there int should have been 10(wis12 cha13) especially for those of us you would have liked a magic based or skill monkey Eidolon instead of being stuck with combat monster as the only real option.That strikes me as something done by design.They get 6+mInt skills per level out of the gate. This already puts them as skill monkeys. The -2 (one point to Int will make it just -1, giving 5 skills) just puts them as half-way decent skill monkeys.
And quite frankly, their Skilled Evolution more than makes up for it.
This.
And really, when you can spend 1 evolution point to get a +8 racial bonus to Use Magic Device how many more skills do you need? A 1st-level eidolon makes UMD skill checks with a +12 bonus (+15 with Skill Focus), which makes it - at Int 7 - a perfectly viable skill monkey.