I've searched quite a bit for this question, and all I've found so far is that Synthesist has all kinds of confusing rules and disagreements surrounding it.
I'm DM'ing my first campaign soon. One of my players wants to play a synthesist summoner. He wants to use one pair of arms of the eidolon to wield a greatsword, and take reach to allow him to threaten 10 feet.
My question is, will this result in the greatsword functioning as a reach weapon, disallowing strikes into adjacent squares, or will it simply allow him to hit 5 feet further with the greatsword while also being able to use it normally?
A reach greatsword with no downside seems like a terrifying addition to an already fairly beefy class.
There was a ruling that the Reach evolution can only be applied to natural attacks, and then only to one specific natural attack, IE one claw or one bite.
Bite ,Rech(bite), Trip , Pull.
Feat (combat reflexes)
Pick the sword level 9 , when you get -2 only on natural (and will be large most likely) for using weapons.
They said it only works on one claw of the pair, quite certain.
Yeah, there's a reason why most GMs just ban the Synthesist. The rules are confusing and the archetype is really broken. I've known several first-time GMs who had their campaigns wrecked by synthesist summoners.
But yeah, the reach evolution only applies to natural weapons.
If youre a new gm, tell him not to play a summoner.
Synthesist. Vanilla summoners are no more difficult to adjudicate than a druid--trade the wild shape shenanigans for having to remember how evolutions work.
Master Summoners aren't difficult to adjudicate, but they are excruciatingly slow if either GM or player is new. Similarly, Broodmaster, but to a lesser extend.
If they want to play a regular old summoner, I don't see why not.