Summoner's Weighty Impact and Grasping Limbs

[Kakita Tatsumaru]

I'm not sure about what they do:
-Do they add the effect to try tripping or grappling FOR FREE (no action needed, build need another roll) on top of the usual effects of the attack (usually damages).
-Do they just gives you access to new actions which allow you to try to trip or grab (without MAP but still with an action cost).

Thanks in advance.

[shroudb]

They give you the Grab/Knockdown Action for that limb that you choose.

Grab:

Quote:

Requirements: The monster's last action was a successful Strike that lists Grab in its damage entry, or the monster has a creature grabbed or restrained;

Effect If used after a Strike, the monster attempts to Grapple the creature using the body part it attacked with. This attempt neither applies nor counts toward the creature's multiple attack penalty.

The monster can instead use Grab and choose one creature it's grabbing or restraining with an appendage that has Grab to automatically extend that condition to the end of the monster's next turn.

Knockdown:

Quote:

Requirements: The monster's last action was a successful Strike that lists Knockdown in its damage entry;

Effect The monster attempts to Trip the creature. This attempt neither applies nor counts toward the monster's multiple attack penalty.

It's still an Action to perform eithr of those (Improved Grab and Improved Knockdown instead are Free actions)

[Claxon]

Weighty Impact adds the Knockdown action (it requires the Eidolon to spend 1 action) to the limb. After a successful attack with the limb (that is required to have the trip trait) the Eidolon can then spend an action to do Knockdown. The main benefit of which is that action doesn't suffer from or increase MAP, meaning no attack penalty to the athletics check to trip nor does it increase MAP for other attacks.

So yeah, it's the second one.

[Trip.H]

One quick note is that when the Summoner was written, those monster abilities meant something else.

During the remaster, they edited monster Grab/Knockdown as a concept, downgrading / nerfing the originals.

The old version of those abilities used to still require an action, but would auto-success with no roll.

This change seriously hurts Summoner, as those feats used to be kinda the best in the class.
Not only in the direct manner of nerfing their best feats, but that auto-success had a big impact on SMN's skills. Previously, the PC could choose to leave Athletics at a low prof, and still be able to impose those conditions.

Now, the only way for an Eidolon to be able to use Athletic maneuvers is if the player invests 1/3 of the SMN's viable skills in Athletics. It's genuinely a big pain point of my L15 Summoner right now, who had to do retraining to squeeze Magical Crafting and Expert Craft.

____________

If your GM rocks, they will let you use the old versions of monster Knockdown & Grab, at least until Summoner gets remastered.

[Claxon]

It is true, that as written the summoner feats losing the autosuccess feature of those feats was a significant hit, especially since summoner and eidolon share skills.

I think originally that was done to prevent Summoner's getting effectively 6 maxed out skills compared to other characters which typically get 3, or the most skillful of classes which get 5.

I hope in the remaster we see Eidolons simply get assigned skills, or have a reduced set of skills to choose from.

I really like the assigned skill option though. For example, you could specify that an angel eidolon has Lore: Angels, Acrobatics, and Athletics.

I don't think Eidolons should ever add any kind of information based skills (mostly because its too powerful) nor do I think they should have access to diplomacy, and Intimidation shouldn't be able to coerce.

Anyways, I agree that summoner shouldn't have to spend their skill upgrades on athletics to enable their Eidolon to be good enough at it to make those feats worth having. And that probably means assigning skills, or at least assigning a group of options to be chosen from. Hopefully we'll see something like that in the remaster.

As a GM, I probably wouldn't let you use the old version of the feats (with the autosuccess) but I would let the Eidolon act as though it had proficiency in Athletics that scaled appropriate to the character level. Autosuccess was too good.

[Kakita Tatsumaru]

Thanks to both of you.

[Tridus]

As a GM I just use the old version of the abilities, since the feats are from that time and haven't been updated. That means they work as intended. It does make a Trip Summoner pretty good, but I'm totally fine with that.

It's also kind of funny because at least on monsters, the new version of Grab can be stronger than the old ones. Yes, they have to roll... but if it's a high power monster relative to the party, getting to roll Grab with no MAP means their odds of critical success are actually pretty decent. Restrained is WAY worse than Grabbed.

It's a bit of an unintended consequence because players felt like the auto-grab was unfair so they do have to roll now, but that particular ability wasn't actually weakened by it. (Knockdown got less out of it, since a critical success on trip isn't much different than a success.)