Advice / Thoughts on Evolved Summoned Monster?

[DefaultResponse]

Greetings!

I'm working on a Conjurer build and I'm curious if anyone has any experience with Evolved Summoned Monster?

At first glance, it seems decent, but I am not sure how much it helps or when you could actually fit it into a build since it requires Augment Summoning.

Any thoughts?

[Jeff Morse]

attacks equal magic is a good one.

[kestral287]

Very solid. You can multiply the danger of brute summons tremendously by something as simple as giving them Pounce, Reach, or more natural attacks. Mount can be situationally useful, as can a great many others. It's the ability to swap capabilities on the fly that makes it really awesome.

[Blakmane]

DefaultResponse wrote:

Greetings!

I'm working on a Conjurer build and I'm curious if anyone has any experience with Evolved Summoned Monster?

At first glance, it seems decent, but I am not sure how much it helps or when you could actually fit it into a build since it requires Augment Summoning.

Any thoughts?

You should be picking up augment summoning anyway, so you could pick it up as early as 3rd level. It's a fantastic feat if you are going to be mostly summoning monsters rather than using crowd control: an occultist arcanist or master summoner could make a whole build out of it.

Exactly how fantastic depends a lot on how your GM interprets this line:

The summoned creature must conform to any limitations of the evolution.

The pounce evolution requires a quadruped base form. If your GM rules that as long as your summoned creature is a quadruped it can take pounce, ESM becomes and absolutely outstanding feat. Pounce increases many monster's damage outputs significantly. If your GM rules that even quadruped summons don't have a 'quadruped base form' RAW, and you can't take pounce, the feat becomes less interesting. It still isn't bad though: a lot of the bonuses are really solid including magic attacks, reach, and skilled (free skill monkey of your choice at early levels!).

If you have enough feats in your build to take ESM more than once, you can start getting into crazy combinations which would take a whole guide to explore. It's a big investment, though.

[Renegadeshepherd]

This is what I would call a luxury feat. It's uses are fairly obvious, diverse, and are worth the feat itself BUT its ultimately not needed and is psuedo buried under a pile of better summoning feats. Most that pursue this will get those "better" summoning feats for free or reduced cost though.

Bottom line: not needed and debatable on its optimization level but not a respectable (green) choice and if you want it go for it.

[Avoron]

I enjoy using this feat with the Skilled evolution. A +8 bonus to a skill chosen upon summoning can make a summoned creature very versatile at overcoming challenges for you both in and out of combat.

[neeknikker]

I got a question about this feat. I'm a level 10 master summener and got acces to the summon monster VI list. In this list I can choose the Triceratops (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monster-listings/animals/dinosaur/tricera tops)

Whit evolved summons I can anhance the damage with one step. What is the damage the triceratops is going to deal? And does this also goes for the powerfull charge and trample?