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To be honest, this is why I think I'll kinda pass on playing future APs that start at level 1. The damage / HP math is so absurdly bad that it's just not fun once you learn that your are one zero-agency 5% chance roll away from Dying 2 at all times.
Level 1 is brutal. There's cases in the first chapter of APs where if you follow RAW, you can literally kill a character outright in one attack from full HP.
Extinction Curse has one with a Creature 3 NPC with 2nd level Shocking Grasp. Crit that (which given the NPCs stats is not that unlikely), and a good damage roll is going to invoke the massive damage instant death rule.
I house rule that way because it basically can only happen at level 1 and I hate that, but it is a symptom of how swingy level 1 combat is. In general I don't think any Creature 3 should be used at level 1 as their crit rate is too high and it just feels bad when even the toughest character in the party can't take a single attack.
I think the mitigating factor on timber sentinel is that it is fully two actions, which prevents you from using any other two-action activity and generally just leaves you with one. Like I'm playing a wood kineticist now, and I genuinely find that I don't want to spam it because then I don't get to do anything else really. Like you want to be able to land Hail of Splinters early, throw up some jagged berms or a wall or a sanguiviolent roots. "Stand there casting Tree" is really very boring!
The Summoner is specifically the place where you can snag it via the Kineticist Archetype and "Act Together" still leaves your Eidolon two actions to do things. So I think it's a more potentially problematic thing to bolt onto a Summoner than in its original context. It is potentially super-thematic though- my Strength of Thousands character was a Leshy Plant Summoner with the Druid (Leaf Order) archetype, so I wish the kineticist existed so I could have grabbed Infinitree.
This hyperbole is simply untrue. If your Summoner is attacked 3 times between heals then even a mob of L-1's can do more HP damage with the 15% greater chance to hit than you get HP from your bonus Con.
Ok, we won't get an agreement.
Your model is, from my point of view, completely flawed. My model is, from your point of view, completely flawed.And trying to convince the other that he doesn't understand math well enough to modelize the game will only get us angry.
So it's a case where we can only agree to disagree.
I generally value Con over Dex on a summoner. The former helps both the eidolon and the summoner whereas the latter only helps the summoner.
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I generally value Con over Dex on a summoner. The former helps both the eidolon and the summoner whereas the latter only helps the summoner.
I tend to prefer Dex over Con. HP is something that is easier to compensate for in the game, whether with feats, items, or spells, while the options to compensate for a lower AC are a bit more restricted or expensive.
For example, you can easily get more HP with Toughness with an increase equivalent to +1 in Con, besides temporary HP from various sources like elixirs and spells, besides heals not caring about your maximum HP (I always thought that healing effects should receive a Con bonus to make Con a more relevant attribute, it would have been much more interesting if healing spells received this bonus per die, for example in heal instead of receiving +8 they could receive +4 and the rest as Con bonus, and soothe could have been 1d10+Con, besides other skills like Treat Wounds which could receive Con x 2 at DC 20, Con x 6 at DC 30 and Con x 10 at DC 40. But I digress). While to compensate for the lower Dex with an unarmored character you need to take armor proficiency feats, and deal with all the drawbacks of using them such as weight, strength requirements and skill penalties or resort to Drakeheart Mutagen using an alchemist MC and deal with its drawback.
And the last point that makes me prefer to invest in Dex are the skills, which OK the eidolon can also use, but it can't use them with tools (at least not in RAW), so having a high Dex allows the summoner to benefit from thievery, stealth and acrobatics skills and their feats, which is very useful in exploration, in addition to counting on the Aid of your eidolon (since Aid doesn't need tools to help with something that requires tools).
A sentence fragment that says "For Dex to matter more than Constitution the Summoner needs to be nearly the only one attacked" is not a model. Its just a bald assertion. Describe your model behind this, and we can see if I agree.
Look I'm not close minded about this. When you described your "keep the summoner and eidolon together" advice in greater detail, I did agree that what you meant was good and that the issue was more a communication one. So maybe this is like that, and giving a more detailed explanation of "For Dex to matter more than Constitution the Summoner needs to be nearly the only one attacked" will end up with us in agreement.
I can try.
If your Summoner is attacked 3 times between heals then even a mob of L-1's can do more HP damage with the 15% greater chance to hit than you get HP from your bonus Con.
This is untrue. A +1 to hit (or -1 to AC) is between 5% more chance to hit and sometimes (if it's a first attack with enough bonus to hit) a 5% more chance to crit. As we are speaking of 3 attacks, it's between 15 and 30% of the damage of a single attack.
Taking level 5 for example, a level 4 creature high damage is 14. 15% of 14 is 2, 30% of 14 is 4. A +1 to Con would give you 5 extra hit points so more than the damage a higher dex would prevent.But that's irrelevant, actually, because 3 attacks from a L-1 creature won't put you down even if they all hit. Same goes from 10 attacks from a L-1 creature which would put down a Champion, and as such your Summoner would be eating the dirt long before you reach the 10th attack.
On average, your Summoner will eat 4-5 attacks before going down, any other number of attacks will either end up being too low or overkill. The number of attacks you can take before going down is actually what we try to calculate: If I have this AC and this HP pool, how many attacks put me down? And if I have this other AC and this other HP pool, how many?
That's why I say your model is flawed, it won't lead to any usable conclusion, it doesn't answer our the question. The question being (at least for me): Between high Dex and high Con which one will ensure a higher survivability on a Summoner?
And that's why the Eidolon is important, as the Eidolon is maxed in AC. So, for example, if half of the attacks are against the Eidolon and half against the Summoner, the impact of higher AC is twice reduced (because you benefit from the higher AC only against half of the attacks). And considering that the Eidolon will be attacked more often than the Summoner, the Summoner AC is rather irrelevant to its survival compared to the Summoner hp pool size.
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I generally value Con over Dex on a summoner. The former helps both the eidolon and the summoner whereas the latter only helps the summoner.I tend to prefer Dex over Con. HP is something that is easier to compensate for in the game, whether with feats, items, or spells, while the options to compensate for a lower AC are a bit more restricted or expensive.
For example, you can easily get more HP with Toughness with an increase equivalent to +1 in Con, besides temporary HP from various sources like elixirs and spells, besides heals not caring about your maximum HP (I always thought that healing effects should receive a Con bonus to make Con a more relevant attribute, it would have been much more interesting if healing spells received this bonus per die, for example in heal instead of receiving +8 they could receive +4 and the rest as Con bonus, and soothe could have been 1d10+Con, besides other skills like Treat Wounds which could receive Con x 2 at DC 20, Con x 6 at DC 30 and Con x 10 at DC 40. But I digress). While to compensate for the lower Dex with an unarmored character you need to take armor proficiency feats, and deal with all the drawbacks of using them such as weight, strength requirements and skill penalties or resort to Drakeheart Mutagen using an alchemist MC and deal with its drawback.
And the last point that makes me prefer to invest in Dex are the skills, which OK the eidolon can also use, but it can't use them with tools (at least not in RAW), so having a high Dex allows the summoner to benefit from thievery, stealth and acrobatics...
Oh yeah, particularly for cloth casters! My go-tos are Numbing tonic and Soothing Tonic in close quarters combats.
I generally value Con over Dex on a summoner. The former helps both the eidolon and the summoner whereas the latter only helps the summoner.I tend to prefer Dex over Con. HP is something that is easier to compensate for in the game, whether with feats, items, or spells, while the options to compensate for a lower AC are a bit more restricted or expensive.
Summoner is a bit of an odd beast that way though, because there's two of you that can get hit. Only one of those benefits from DEX in terms of how tough you are. Both benefit from CON.
You also have more control than some other characters in terms of "avoid getting hit", because you can build one of you to Trip/Grab/Be Really Big And Get In the Way and thus make it harder for enemies to get to the other one of you. That gives you some control over where attacks go that another class has to rely on other players for.
It's not foolproof and you don't want to just totally tank your AC, but it's extremely important for Summoner's ability to be effective that the Eidolon be able to withstand an assault and CON is the ability that actually helps with that.
Hell, the Summoner in my Ruby Phoenix game went so far as to make his Apex Item a CON one. Obviously trading Summoner offense for durability there, but wow was he hard to take down, especially when I would finally get him low.. and then he'd bust out Moment of Renewal, which is a heal that does scale with CON.
In your model:
(using 3 swings with crit chance but no fatal, etc.)
The +1AC is 3 instances of a 10% chance to avoid 1 full hit of 14 damage.
+1 HP/L (for a matching Lvl) of 4 would be +4 max HP.
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If you receive a hit where the last 1 HP is threatened (?Dying?) you have a +4HP margin to stay above 0.
If the avg hit is 14, then 4/14 --> 28.5% chance to endure 1 more hit.
The chance of at least 1 dodge is 1-(.9*.9*.9) --> %27.1
This seems super close, but it's only comparing the odds of occurrence as presented.
The outcomes are different, with the +HP version meaning the PC took another hit, which could have riders like poison or knockdown.
Additionally, while both sides have 1-13 HP remaining, the dodge side still has its improved AC to benefit its final 1 HP, while the +HP side does not.
So even when you get the chances to align that closely, the AC side's bonus defense on the new final hit (if the new last hit is AC!) gives it a comfortable tie-breaker lead.
Even when the odds math out to look this close at first glance, it's super easy to accidentally underestimate the AC side.
Another "problem" for the +maxHP is that of multiple dodges. Getting a slightly larger HP pool is a certain and non-variable benefit. But every single non-?Dying? AC dodge gives you another future bonus roll of *any* save/defense because you never lost that HP in the first place.
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Furthermore, this doesn't consider what happens after this single ?Dying? event.
After the ?Dying? chance, any amount of continued fighting and healing further skews in AC's favor. If you get the "one more hit" via maxHP, that benefit only happens once,* and returning to the ?Dying? range does *not* trigger another chance for maxHP to help, because it's already been spent.
*If there's an (AC side) overheal event, that is how you "refresh" maxHP's ability to gain another chance at benefiting the PC. (though you now have a larger HP pool to restore in the first place. More AC and mitigation means each 1 HP point is worth more [e]ffective-HP)
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I'll say that again, only if the maxHP passes the ?Dying? check, *and* is healed beyond AC's max, can you then possibly roll another "one more hit" chance.
Meaning the PC needs to drop almost Dying, but stay conscious and be fully healed, *and then* once again drop all the way down to almost dying a 2nd time to gain a 2nd benefit from maxHP.
In comparison, AC continues to get full-hit-damage avoidance chance with every invocation of that defense stat, and every non-?Dying? dodge adds one more bonus roll that maxHP lacks.
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If one presumes 3 AC triggers vs a matching Lvl foe, AC has a clear lead in your own example.
And I think players generally underestimate how many AC attempts foes make, though a lot of those are at high MAP and should be counted as 5% and not 10% chances.
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By luck, your presented scenario can be a helpful "break point" for players to keep in mind when trying to evaluate something as complex as this. The 28.5% vs (27.1% + 10%) odds are so close, they can use that as reference point.
If one guesstimates they will genuinely take 2 or few swings to their PC / SMN's AC, then more maxHP might* be a better pick for them. If they guesstimate they take 4 or more rolls to their AC, then AC is very safely the better choice.
*(assuming they understand the attack-rider malady & other caveat/wrinkles)