I'll make this short and sweet. Say a Master Summoner already has Augment Summoning, Superior Summoning, and Evolved Summoned Monster...what's a better choice, to grab Summon Neutral Monster, or to get Evolved for every feat over and over again?
Also, what can you do with Summon Neutral Monster's list that you can't do with the regular list? (I know there's a whole list of monsters added you can summon, but why would I choose them instead of the standard?)
Nothing on the Summon Neutral Monster list particularly stood out to me, but Evolved Summon Monster seems not as awesome as you would think at first glance. I guess there's Pounce, but you can summon your creatures next to the enemy. Besides that a lot of the options seem meh, especially as you can't stack the points up for something higher costing, but I guess picking up a set of claws on something could be cool.
Summon Evil Monster though... that has Pugwampis. Now there's something worth a feat to summon.
Is it worth giving up summoning celestial creatures to smite and get around damage reduction? Cause evil summoners can't summon celestial creatures...
Is it worth giving up summoning celestial creatures to smite and get around damage reduction? Cause evil summoners can't summon celestial creatures...
I hadn't considered the use of the celestial template, but doesn't that only apply to animals? I'm not much of a summon monster user, but I always thought that the main awesomeness of the spell was being able to call in outsiders with useful buffs/debuffs whether through spells, spell like abilities, or innate abilities as opposed to being primary combatants but I suppose it depends on what you want your focus to be. If you want to use your summons in a more support type capacity, it's hard to beat dropping 1d4+2 of the little unlucky bastards on the field to ruin your enemy's day... it makes me wonder if the auras stack, because it would be even meaner if they did.
Evolve Claws on earth elementals. Summon down. Profit. ESM may be the most broken feat to come out of ACG excluding divine protection.Nothing on the Summon Neutral Monster list particularly stood out to me, but Evolved Summon Monster seems not as awesome as you would think at first glance. I guess there's Pounce, but you can summon your creatures next to the enemy. Besides that a lot of the options seem meh, especially as you can't stack the points up for something higher costing, but I guess picking up a set of claws on something could be cool.
Summon Evil Monster though... that has Pugwampis. Now there's something worth a feat to summon.
That seems kind of iffy to me. If the Earth Elemental has a humanoid shape the claws have to go on arms (as per a FAQ about trying to get claws on your feet being no good), which would preclude the use of slams as you can only use one nat attack per limb.
ESM is great, but I'm not sure how many times you should actually take it. Could see the use in more than one.
So there's no real point in taking Summon Neutral Monster, then? Because I wanted the character to be neutral to have access to both good and evil monsters for versatility, and the only add-to-the-list feat with that is SNM, but if there's no monsters on that list that outweigh the traditional set, it doesn't seem worth a feat.
I just want to point out, that the stirge's melee touch attack, and latch on ability is actually going to be really gross at high levels. summoning 5 of those onto a target and draining their con by double digits each round is not good for them.