This is a very good question. Do your weapon proficiencies go out the door? Since normal eidolons could take a martial or exotic weapon proficiency, could such feats still count if your class proficiencies don't? If your proficiencies do count, would be it like you already took weapon training and you could add more evolution points to get all martial weapons while fused with your eidolon?
From a GM's perspective, it would just be easiest to simply say that you use the summoner's proficiencies and forget weapon training ever existed for simple ease and balance, but with everything that you could do with the fused body, I could almost as easily hear out the argument for the opposite.
The Eidolon as a separate entity from the Summoner receives feats as the summoner's level increases, those are the feats that the statement is referring to. That statement also refers to the skills that the Eidolon gets as the summoner increases in level. The synthesist summoner receives all of the benefits of the eidolon's evolutions therefore if the weapon training evolution is chosen the summoner has that evolution while he is fused with this eidolon.
If it helps I'm currently running a synthesist summoner and have recently poured over all of the rules and forums on any questions that I had upon character creation.
Why would your weapons change size when you "join" with it? Is your character changing size?
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Unlike enlarge where gear is altered, I do not see weapons automatically changing size for a synthesist.
Your going to have to buy large or huge weapons and deal with teh burden of carrying them.
The synthesist retains his feats and skills while fused. He also benefits from any evolutions the eidolon posses. In the case of Weapon Training, I would say you still need to purchase it twice to gain full martial weapon proficiency while fused. You way want to pick a single weapon type and use a feat to gain proficiency.
Yeah, the summoner is not the one that is a larger size category, it is the eidolon. This is not so much a change in size as a soul jar with your body kept conveniently within the possessed body.
Personally for a synth I would focus on using its natural weapons and amassing non-weapon magic items, but depending on how your game is being run that may not be in your control.
True, I didn't think of that.
The Eidolon must be the same size as the synthesist. Soooo that means if you wanted large weapons you already have them because your already large. Note that means that if you are large you MUST have the large eidolon evolution.
Whoa you need to be the same size as your eidolan to be a synth? thats news to me, off to pour over my books before work, as that messes up my build O.o
EDIT: aw I think I found the mistake, Your Eidolan needs to be at LEAST the same size as the summoner, it can be bigger, it just can't be smaller than your summoner.
Yeah, otherwise gnomes and halflings could not be synthesists unless they made their eidolons small as well. And that would just suck out all the joy of being a synthesist in the first place.
Quite honestly a lot of the 'joy' of being a synth has been sucked out already. Way too many corner cases and FAQs make the thing a nightmare to run. It really should be written over so it 'works.' As it is, the synth is horribly underpowered in comparison to a normal summoner. You lose skills, feats and action economy but keep all the restrictions. All so you can run around pretending to be a melee combatant (whose temp hit points cannot be healed normally). Not saying some builds aren't effective, but I am saying a pure summoner would have done it better.
If people are really interested in the synth archtype I'd suggest looking at the Aegis class from Dreamscarred Press. It's what the synth should have been in most cases. A class built on a custom build 'suit' with very few of the balance issues of the synth.
^ This. Synthesist sounds like a fun archetype, but holy hell, it seems like there are way too many oddities in its ruleset to make sense out of running one :/
normal summoners make the rest of the party a null point. they are a one person party which is no fun for anyone else.
I disagree on that honestly. Summoners are good, sure, but any class can be overpowered if they are optimized and the rest of the party isn't.
I get that summoners can be versatile, but I don't feel they deserve all the complaints they get about being able to solo everything. If that's the case, the rest of the party must have done a terrible job on building their characters.
Maybe I'm just biased because I like the class, though. To each their own, I suppose.
What level are we talking about for 300 DPR? Also, I can't say that sounds like it would be a good judge of what constitutes a one-person party. If someone can consistently hit 1000 damage in the first round, that'd be awesome, but if they immediately get slaughtered when all the enemies they didn't kill attack back, well... that wasn't a very effective way to solo an encounter.
On a similar note, by the time a mage is dishing out 300 damage in a round, I think they'd be getting a lot more traction from massive buffs/debuffs/battlefield control/save or die/whatever else you want. Then again, I do like blasters, so hey.
At any rate, what numbers are you thinking that has a summoner (or rather, I assume you probably mean the eidolon), being so much more effective than the other martials? I admit, I really haven't compared any such damage output before, so maybe you're right on that. I'm still not sure that counts as overshadowing the rest of the party either, but I'll withhold a conclusion on that 'til I see some numbers.
Sythesist needs to be its own class with a cleaned up ruleset.
or be an alternate class of the summoner, like the samurai/ninja/antipaladin.
Okay... seeing as that's completely specced out to be able to put out the single highest damage in a round that it can do, I find it hard to consider that 'consistent' DPR. Not to mention with a buffed AC of 22 at level 10, that summoner would be taking quite a few hits, and if they get knocked out, that eidolon goes poof.
I admit though, off the top of my head I can't figure an easy way to hit those kinds of numbers with other classes, so I'll give you credit for that.
But like I said, if you're optimizing classes, it'll obviously show up the rest of the party if they aren't built to their full potential too. In a party of moderately equal build power, a summoner is not going to make a one-person group, unless the GM is giving them poor challenges (of course, differing power levels are a whole different issue. If the summoner is min-maxed and no one else is, then yes, that'll cause problems). I don't see that a summoner needs to 'gimp' themselves to play on level with an unoptimized party though. They just need to... not be optimized... you know, like the rest of the party.
'Course, just my opinion. I could be wrong.
Just to point out an error in your build, AMoF wouldn't modify gauntlets.