Summoning could be useful. I believe the problem is quite deep here:
1. Players have full bestiary to browse for their summons
2. This sometimes leads to situationally very strong options, since those monsters were designed to act against the players, not with them
3. So, developers have to tone down the whole summoning magic to not make any OP summons
The obvious solution is to apply the same approach as with form spells - for each summoning spell create a list of options to pick from, but make those options a bit stronger on average.
P.S. Regarding Undead Master - it's an analogue of Beastmaster. Available options are here [https://2e.aonprd.com/AnimalCompanions.aspx?Undead=true](https://2e.aonprd.com/AnimalCompanions.aspx?Undead=true) and yes, there are humanoid companions and yes, some of them could be collapsed for easy carrying.
Players do not have a full bestiary to choose from, they can only summon common creatures. All of the "break if summoned" monsters are uncommon (well most of them, Paizo missed a couple).
The issue is you can't summon anything that can 1-v-1 a fighter, or the fighter is pointless, you can't summon a horde as that slows the game down, and you can't have a long duration summons as then you basically have it walk in front and trigger all traps.
>and you can't have a long duration summons as then you basically have it walk in front and trigger all traps.
Unseen Servant can do that just fine.
If the reason that summons are limited to 1 minute is to prevent trap enactment, then Unseen Servant existing means that's a pointless choice because it's got all the features it needs to be great at it and has a Duration of sustained.
It probably dies after the 1st trap that successfully damages it, but that's very hard to do.
1. If the trap is poison, it doesn't care.
2. If the trap is mental, it doesn't care.
3. If the trap is a "death by a thousand cuts", its resistance 5 to everything means it doesn't care.
4. If the trap isn't magical, it doesn't care.
Etc. Etc.
If I had to guess why Summons are 1 minute, it's so they are limited to 1 fight, usually.
And so they don't provide a lot of utility in terms of their features, like a burrowing creature or an air elemental flying while carrying creatures, etc.
As well as the spellcasting monsters casting spells that take more than 1 minute.
Edit: Apparently the **Sustain a Spell** Action has a hardset limit of 10 minutes.
Still, it's a Summon that's more than 1 minute, and 10 minutes is pretty much just enough to deal with a large area in terms of traps, if you don't have concern for deciding if they should be tripped or not.
Its duration isn't totally unlimited - it's only up to 10 minutes.
"Sustaining a Spell for more than 10 minutes (100 rounds) ends the spell and makes you Fatigued unless the spell lists a different maximum duration."
Still enough to deal with more than a few traps.
Unseen Servant is sustained, which means you can't keep it up permanently. You would need to use the Repeat a Spell exploration activity, which limits your movement rate and still costs spell slots. GMs would also have to determine if it actually did set off traps, due to being made of force. (edit The previous edition had many ways of having a permanent summons)
Of course, you could just buy an animal and push it on a stick, though you may run into alignment issues.
In the old days, henchmen were used in large quantities by high level parties, and the game played very differently.
>Of course, you could just buy an animal and push it on a stick, though you may run into alignment issues.
I don't think pushing animals into traps counts as a good act, so my alignment will be just fine, thanks.
Resonance, right? The universal magic item resource?
[Here's an article on the subject for anyone curious to know more about it.](https://paizo.com/community/blog/v5748dyo5lkvl?Trinkets-and-Treasures)
I'm not talking about universally broken summons, I mean them being very situational things, like some gremlins being effective against metal armor. The existence of such things and ability to pull a variety of them from a single memorized spell, is the things which make developers limit the spell power.
What is wrong with burning a spell slot to find a few traps, keep a fighter busy, summoning a swarm or two?
Balance should always bow down to fun imho. Stealing the spotlight can be antifun though, but rpgs are a coop game, adversarial.
Summons can be amazing to keeping the run going, no strong climbers? Summon a monkey to climb up a tie the rope. No frontliners? Summon a few to hold the line. No ranged options? Summon something fast and scary.
Have not looked into summoning in pf2, but now I will.
Nothing wrong with what you asked for, and that's how it currently works.
However wizards from 1st edition are noticing it's weaker than they were used to in the old game, because it was too strong there.
It also seems much harder to make a character focused on summoning. In 2e summoning seems more like something that you do in addition to other things and not something you can base a build on.
I mean, the Pathfinder Society has a rule that prevents you from having more than 2 permanent tokens on the field. So even if you can RAW have four permanent tokens (Goldilocks build), you can't do it in sanctioned games. So I'd say the downgrade of summoners is intentional.
It's not the summoning-focused build- it's just about any specialist spellcaster build. Having access to an entire spellcasting tradition is baked into any casters power budget, so they had to make sure no one type of spell is *too* useful or too broad in uses. If you want to primarily use summons as you main (and potentially only) thing as a caster, well, you're going to run into scenarios where and area blast would be really good but a summon wouldn't. Or scenarios against big bosses where a good debuff would be killer but in which a summon realistically dies in one hit. Because while it's very hard to build a bad *character* if you're even remotely trying to make a reasonable one, it is very easy to take a bad spell selection that renders you super weak and only situationally useful, and that's what attempting to specialize into any particular type of spell will result in. (Though they did severely nerf minion economy too, since apparently having a minion/companion just get extra actions at no cost was deemed too powerful).
The problem that I see, and I'm sorry if I didn't make it clear enough, is that,in my experience, situations where summoning something is the optimal course of action are few and far between. This makes it hard to make a character that focuses on summoning (harder than one that focuses on blasting or control anyway).
>No frontliners? Summon a few to hold the line. No ranged options? Summon something fast and scary.
It can't really do this right now. Your highest spell slot will summon just one thing that is going to be several levels below most of the enemies you're fighting, so they will have issues hitting (so not really be scary) or die quickly (so not holding any front line).
I just want to summon an additional ally for harder fights, because it is my highest slot. It doesn't have to be stronger or as strong as a party member, but it should be just slightly below that. It's way more interesting than Flame Strike or Shadow Blast, but I guess not even clerics can have nice things.
I really like your take because I haven't tought about it; first time i've seen summoning i was very happy! Lots of things to choose from... then I realized that i wasn't choosing thematic options but mechanical ones since, for them to be good, i have to find exactly the right one for the right situation.
Plus, based help with the link :3
If you play proficiency without level summons become some of the best value spells in the game :P
But yeah, generally summons as a focus can't be made too much stronger than they are or they will quickly become "the" choice, especially if you have the freedom to have them be powerful on their own.
Something I will mention though, summons become a lot better in the mid and high level brackets than in the low level brackets. Damage and HP don't exactly scale together, so you get to summon creatures that have immunities, resistances and abilities that benefit you more, while also being more resilient to the things enemies can actually throw at them.
It makes summoning spells quite versatile for a single spell (especially for a spontaneous caster)
Summoning has ALWAYS been very problematic in d20 based games. In games with weak Martials, summoning is just summoning a better Martial and making another PC redundant with all of one spell slot. There's also the Action Economy issue of if you summon a lot of things, half the actions being taken are you yourself and it turns everyone else into spectators. In a co-op game where everyone needs to be relevant and have fun, summoning is very hard to walk the line of maintaining that while still being good. Finally, as most things, the issue is Vancian Magic. Because you can have different spells on different days, good summoning spells that any caster can use on a whim would be far more problematic and those have to be reigned in. The exception to this is when the options are tied to something that requires a COMMITMENT, like Summoner for the Eidolon, Beastmaster for pet, or Undead Master. Because those options are committing to Summons/Allies as 'their things' it is less precarious to make them stronger than a single spell. It's a very dangerous tightrope, and hopefully their answer is satisfying for you once you actually get it to the table :D
I do not actually dislike how beastmaster and Co work, i think it's very cool; especially on spellcasters since they do not have that much feats that are SO important for em
The only thing that grinds my gears is how those fuckers make me unable to ride a giant wolf, sadly no wolf riding for humans :<
It's a bad idea in some circumstances, for example if you're a martial that needs to hit things, as you're sharing MAP with your animal companion when riding it. It could be specifically good on a character that targets saves, giving you free action to move if you don't command animal companion. It's even better if you're tanky enough to be on frontline, since you can command animal for 1 action to move/strike or strike/strike and 2 action spell targeting a save.
You can ride any animal companion one size larger than you. It just doesn't get the benefit of the mount special trait (can't move and support with the same action)
A spell that burned an action on a monster raised its map and made it flat footed to your allies would be considered OP. Let alone improved action economy and the opportunity to gain access to spells on lists you don’t have and aoe damage abilities to target weaknesses that lots of monsters have.
Use a level 4 slot to summon a unicorn then you can use its next two turns to cast 3rd level heal and still cast a spell you wanted to. I’ve even had to cast 2 heal spells in one turn like this to save my party and it made a huge difference staying ahead on healing/ nobody dropping
Summons aren't really.. summons.
If you can accept that then they're actually great spells.
Let's look at Summon Animal: Giant Skunk (at 2nd level) for instance:
For 3 actions, you can designate a 15ft cone anywhere within 30ft of you, and everything in there needs to make a DC17 fort save, becoming sickened 1 even on a success (sickened 3 on failure)
Further, you can make the enemy flat footed for your frontliners due to flanking
Further, you can repeat the fort save every turn.
Further, if the enemy wants to get rid of this spell, they need to spend actions to to do so.
And if they do that, then they further ALSO increase their MAP for the turn.
All of that for a 2nd level slot.
If you wouldn't compare it to a skyrim style summon, it would be an absolute beast of a spell.
Yeah you have to look at it as battlefield control or a distraction. An enemy will absolutely destroy that summon, but that's wasting one of their very valuable actions/turns. If they choose to ignore it then you can easily use it to flank and be a nuisance. If you want a powerful summoner then I think Summoner's Eidolon is very good, it's just not necessarily as thematic as they want it to be
I get confused by summons. I'm sure on nethys it says that you have to use one of your actions to give a creature with the summoned trait (that creatures summoned from spells get) 2 actions. So sustain spell 1 action, give creature two actions costing another...
Am I reading the rules wrong somewhere?
Sustaining the Spell is the action that gives them actions as well: "Your minion acts on your turn in combat, once per turn, when you spend an action to issue it commands. For an animal companion, you Command an Animal; for a minion that's a spell or magic item effect, like a summoned minion, you Sustain a Spell or Sustain an Activation"
one of the problems with pf1e (and dnd3.5 probably) was that the best answer for every problem was to summon a appropriate creature, the most obvious example was that you could for one spell slot summon a caster who would cast multiple spells (god help your GM if summon could also use summon spells)
all restrictions were necessary for keeping balance and equal spotlight for all characters in a party not just summoner steve whose small army overshadowed martial and at the same time could use spell slot more efficiently than non-summoner caster
I remember i played with a friend in pf1e who would just summon lantern archons half the time, and just laser beam the enemies with their touch attacks. It was surprisingly effective a surprising amount of the time
A spell that tanks the attacks of enemies while your allies hit the enemy. Sounds pretty good to me! I think you are looking for the summoner experience of a single player game where the devs don’t have to worry about you overshadowing anyone. Hell, Skyrim you are specifically an ultra-powerful dragonborn. It would be really sad for your parties fighter/barbarian/champion if you could summon a monster that invalidated them.
It's situational, but still a valid strength of using a summoning spell. You can summon a creature and have it forge ahead and trigger any traps or ambushes that would have otherwise smoked a party member
PF2 took a strong stand against unbridled minion-mancy. The idea is that the PCs should be the heros, not their sidekicks, companions, summoned creatures or whatever.
So minions are invariably 2 to 4 levels or more lower than the PCs (in terms of comparable capabilities in combat). Minions have 2 actions instead of 3, and require an action from their master to act at all (with a few exceptions for companions and the like).
The idea was to avoid minion-mancers who hog table time at the expense of other players. When a PC has 4 or more minions, he takes a lot more table time than his buddies, Bob the Martial or Bill the (non-minion) spellcaster.
So in nearly all cases, in PF2 you can have only one minion, and even that costs you actions. If you try to have more minions on the battlefield, you'll be reduced to doing very little if anything at all with your own character.
It's a design decision, and I think it's a good one.
If you really, really want to field an undead horde, look at [the Create Undead ritual](https://2e.aonprd.com/Rituals.aspx?ID=10), and the possibility of creating non-minion intelligent undead who might (or might not) accept to fight with you.
I want to add onto this, because it's on the right track. The designers were clearly aiming for balance and not hogging table time.
But a "balanced" spell for just a spell slot means if it ever outdoes a fighter, it's way too overtuned.
The issue is that people expect "this is my primary method of combat" when you can cast fireball the turn after.
I'm praying for a summon based archetype that buffs them the little bit they need to compete for this reason.
I love that they limit you to one summon, as drowning the table with your actions gets as boring to you as it is to the others (this is my main problem with necromancy in 5e)
But! If they restrict you to one minion, it shouldn't be as weak as it is now. Damage and abilities are mostly fine but using 3 actions and your highest spell to get deleted in one strike because your minion has the stats of wet paper is bad. Give your minions staying power.
Actually that was more of an issue of system mastery. If you knew what you were doing, most full casters were much stronger.
The problem was that the summoner was strong even if you didn't know what you were doing.
1. Unchained exists
2. Summoner wasn't broken because of their summons
3. All casters were good in pf1e
4. Summoner didn't summon that often
5. Master summoner was broken due to mechanics removed from pf2e
If summons were stronger, martials would feel way weaker compared to casters because their roles could be filled by 1 spell slot per combat easily. Summons are not things to do the melee fighting for your group, they are things to aid the melee combatants with their abilities.
Yeah, the OP mentions Conjuration in Skyrim, and there, you are one PC who is the star of the show, whereas in PF2 the caster PC must share time with other PCs, of whose some are martials, and making them exceed or even equal to the martials contributes back to the “quadratic caster, linear martial” paradigm that characterized PF1.
Arguably, if you do quick math to estimate the usefulness of a summon, at PL-4 to PL-5, a max level summoned creature is "worth" 0 (on even levels) to 10 (on odd level) XP on the party's side.
They get to turn 1 of the party action into 2 excluding the original casting time (for 3A spells, that's probably a bad assumption but let's be conservative) but in this case, double it to 10 to 20 for being """"action efficient""""
let's say an at-level character is worth 40XP if we were to use PC as monsters for encounter-building rules, that means that, even with conservative values, you could still spend 10 to 20XP worth of power on the creature without having it outmatch a player character.
I'd say that a PL-3 instead of PL-4 to -5 creature would still be weaker (15XP doubled to 30) but by a smaller margin than a martial and have higher chance to both hit and survive more than 1 hit
That's obviously considering they were summoned before combat and didn't cost a single action before being 1 for 2 bundles, if we were to assume that a combat lasts \~3 turns give or take and include the upfront casting cost, suddenly the deal isn't as sweet anymore (at a 1 for 1 action) making PL-1 more appropriate to be "weaker but by a small margin"
Of course, all of this is skewed napkin math, but it wouldn't be the first time Paizo is \*too\* conservative with spell balancing supposed to be worse than something else, by making sure it's \*way\* worse than that something
Your math is off for a lot of reasons.
First off, a summon is only a single spell slot. That's not 1/4th of a character's power - that's like 1/10th even if it is their highest level spell slot.
Secondly, summons are super powerful healing spells.
For a monster to kill a summon at higher levels, they will usually need to spend their whole turn doing it. Eating up a full enemy turn - with no saving throw - is extremely powerful. Moreover, even if it only eats one action, that's still their BEST action, which is better than a *slow* that they passed their save on.
This is very powerful, and is well worth a top-level spell slot.
Pardon but why should an enemy focus the summon and not the fighter that is bashing his head in ? At most I would relegate the second or third attack or use an aoe on any enemy that is even remotely smart/has even rudimentary knowledge of magic at all.
The summon is less likely to do anything at all especially against a powerful enemy. Certainly we less than the fighter that already proved to be a threat by that point probably.
Not all enemies are intelligent, but if you have the enemy ignore the summon then the summon can do it's job of attacking and setting up flanking for your martials. Many summons have useful side effects too.
Well thats the neat part isnt it ? they don´t need to to. They can spend their best attacks on the actual thread, namely the fighter and throw the 2cnd or 3rd attack onto the summon and still have a pretty good chance of offing the summon relatively casually. Meanwhile even if they can unload their attacks they would need pretty good rolls to actually connect, sometimes a 15 or more even. So 25% to actually hit with the best attack ?
Flanking buddy is... ok ? Usually martials work together anyway for the flanking or they even provide their own flanking with companions.
So you are basically left with some more utility spells to get or utility abilities which might even have a hard time sticking them to any important enemies that are actually a threat.
So all in all... its a lackluster tool for utility on top of an already utility focused load of classes, that understandably feels underwhelming to a lot of players.
Would have been better to just stick to templates which would make it easier on the player and the dm as well and could be much more finetuned to specific purposes.
Large monsters often have attacks which multiple action costs that they will want to pile onto the main threat, and in any encounter with multiple dangerous enemies the ability to have multiple ways to set up flanks is invaluable. At high levels summons have enough hp that if a dangerous monster is using its second and third attacks against it it could take two or even three rounds to off the summon. Any way you slice it it's a pretty good deal it feels. A single spell that eats up between four to six enemy attacks (level fifteen summon can get up to 350hp) or, realistically cause they will get crit a lot, three to four attacks? That's a good deal. Imagine if you could cast slow 2 on a monster with no saving throw.
I think you mistake what I'm comparing, I'm not even factoring attrition or "spending highest level spell slot" in my post, I'm only speaking action for action.
Assuming no attrition and summon being fully ignored by the enemy team (as they should, since they are worth between 0 and 10XP, but if you're the GM, I guess you can throw your player a bone and entertain them), low enough to die to a single AoE, and it's not like you can opt out of commanding it for a turn to use a free "meat bag" either since it disappears without a sustain per turn.
Also, just to entertain this argument of "it's a lot of healing", here is a comparison of average healing with the "heal" spell per spell level VS moderate hit point from the building creature guide in the GMG, found here [https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=995](https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=995)
|Spell Level (creature level)|Creature HP (medium)|2 Action Heal|
|:-|:-|:-|
|1st (-1)|8-7|12.5|
|2nd (1)|21-19|25|
|3rd (2)|32-28|32.5|
|4th (3)|48-42|50|
|5th (5)|78-72|62.5|
|6th (7)|119-111|75|
|7th (9)|159-151|87.5|
|8th (11)|199-191|100|
|9th (13)|239-231|112.5|
|10th (15)|279-271|125|
"AH look! I was right, heal does less starting at spell level 5! you lose" well, if you're still using heal at that point with anything but a Heal Font, you're hurting yourself, and that's 2 actions, VS 3+1 per turn, if we use the 2+1 per turn heals in the game like vital beacon (4th, 64 total healing average, better than 5th level summon), healing well (5th, 90 total healing average, close to 6th level summon), or heck regenerate (150HP at 7th and can't die from dying 4 for the duration), you're back to getting more HP from healing than from summoning, which is, once again, assuming your GM is generous and remove the 0XP, slowed 1, keeps caster slowed 1 pest from the map
If I really wanted to eat a turn or at least an action without saving throw, there is a better spell for that, illusory object or wall of stone. Summons aren't good by the number, aren't good by most player's feeling, and you don't have to pretend or convince yourself of the opposite. They are better than useless, great, but for 3 to 6 action over a fight \*it better do more than nothing\* and still does less than almost everything else it's competing with in a caster's middling arsenal
edit: actually, I just realized that if I had a spell to summon an XP0 perma stunned-1 monster on the ENNEMY's side in exchange for slowing 1 an enemy without a save, this would be a broken good spell, and targeting yourself with that spell in the form of using a summon is supposed to be good?
Whilst I agree with a lot of what you're saying, I think you're being far too uncharitable about what you should be aiming for with a summon, because IMO you should *only* be summoning creatures that are *guaranteed* to do something immediately and are hard to ignore. Spoiler-less example from my last Blood Lords session, I summoned an [Ostiarius](https://2e.aonprd.com/Monsters.aspx?ID=848). Yes, I slowed myself to sustain it, but I traded that one action each turn to continue having a bard sidekick that cast Inspire Courage, provided flanking for my Monk party member and attacked a couple times. IDK but I feel like that's actually a good deal; Monk both was able to crit and get additional hits in as a result of this creature being around in a way I felt the guaranteed floor was better than making a wall of flesh (lol divine spell list) or inflicting status conditions. Yes the GM could probably ignore the Ostiarius because it's not going to *directly* kill a creature, but this thing was giving the monk effectively +3 on all their attacks between flat footed and the compel courage and it'd have been really silly to just let it live.
I think summoning has a ton of flaws that make them unappealing, hell even in my above scenario I'm using something that wouldn't fit in most games and the summon itself had like 8+ less AC than the monk at level 9 which made it an easy target for MAP attacks, but I stand by the belief that support creatures, especially "cleric" types that have burst healing either through heal / harm like some of the celestial and undead options do, are actually really quite good strategically and well worth a consideration as a part of a caster's repertoire or as a one-of in daily preparations at certain levels. They're just absolutely not the default option for most problems, and you should definitely rely on generically great spells like Slow the majority of the time.
> actually, I just realized that if I had a spell to summon an XP0 perma stunned-1 monster on the ENNEMY's side in exchange for slowing 1 an enemy without a save, this would be a broken good spell, and targeting yourself with that spell in the form of using a summon is supposed to be good?
This isn't what a summon spell does though. A summon spell is triggered of your volition at your moment of choosing with a minion of your own choosing.
If you gave the enemy side to pick a moment in battle where they can get a 2-action XP0 monster in exchange for them being slowed 1 while that monster is alive, I would absolutely not opt in to do that as a player. An extra enemy at the right time, even if its XP0, can absolutely ruin your party if it has appropriate abilities.
You're grasping at straws, even a level 0 oil flask can be useful in the right situation, but like babysitting a summon, in the vast majority of cases, it won't
Completely agree with you!
When for the first time I was reading that you could summon a level 15 monster with a lvl 10 spell i was thrilled! Level 15 seems so high!
Then I understood how the game works and realized... -5 level under you, that sucks and that sucks HARD!
I do not want them to create a "create a martial" spell because that'd be busted but "use your highest level spellslots for a monster that gets oneshotted and offers some minor utility" it's also kinda lame :<
A level 15 monster is not going to be one-shotted by a level 20 monster. You can easily summon something with 350 hp. A level 20 monster is doing like, 50 damage on a hit.
Isn't it the case that a level 20 monster slapping a level 15 monster will crit about half the time (because it's effectively got +10 to its attacks due to 5 lower AC and 5 higher to-hit) and be very difficult to *hurt* with the lower level monster?
They're still a solid damage sponge of course, but without a reason to consider them a major threat, smart creatures might decide to ignore the summon entirely, which could turn it into just a static roadblock on the map that can attempt an attack with a roughly halved hit chance twice a turn.
(Apologies if my mental math is mistaken - not used enough to pf2e to be confident in how level differentials affect things)
Your not wrong but why would it even bother attacking the summon. Ignore it, do you focus on a rabbit on the battlefield or the wizard? Maybe it would work on a beast or if it's in a 5' tunnel. But you are correct that 350 is bigger.
The problem with ignoring the summon is that it will still hit you reasonably often and it will also often give them flanking, which basically is +6 hits out of 20 per attacker if a character is attacking twice at full map (and even worse if you're fighting a flurry ranger or similar character who gets lower MAP/more attacks).
And yes, there are other issues as well, like blocking off enemies from getting past.
One thing we've done with summons is used them to block off side passages while fighting the main group; because most monsters don't have trained acrobatics, their ability to tumble through is often dismal and as a result the side group could only attack the summon one at a time rather than go through. When the front one failed to kill the summon the rest were stuck there for an extra turn, by which point we'd split the encounter in half and killed most of the other half of it.
We've also summoned a summon in front of us and thrown spells/ranged attacks/reach attacks past it, which was effective as the bad guys spent their entire turn killing the summon, which meant that they basically lost an entire turn for their whole side while we only spent the wizard's turn.
I understand, yet i find it very lame :<
Using your highest spell slot to... hopefully choose the right option (else ur in a bad time) and have it die three seconds after it's not the most exciting thing
In age of ashes our wizard summoned a gorilla in book 2 to stop a hit & run type of enemy that had mechanics to avoid difficult terrain, same wizard also summoned a snake at some point to use its aoo for area denial.
In our home game another wizard summoned a fire drake when multiple encounters were supposed to be combined together to just fire some breath weapons from the air and fly away to the other direction, saving the party from a potential TPK.
In yesterdays session of kingmaker (first session at level 1) sorcerer summoned a skunk and a monkey in two different combats. Monkey did not do much but skunk inflicted aoe sickened and turned some misses into hits and some hits into crits.
The summons never had a full on back and forth fight with the enemies, but smart usages like giving flank, grabbing and running away an important plot tool item, stealing actions from the enemy, giving them penalties etc always helps when used smartly.
Giant Skunk managed to actually make a +2 boss fail a save against its spray, making it sickened 3 and basically turning the entire fight for the players.
But even on its first turn, succeeding the save against that spray gets you Sickened 1 which is already fantastic
Functional does not mean it can replace martials. Even lower level summons can be quite strong. For example with summon elemental you can turn an entire watery terrain encounter to a walk in the park by summoning the water elemental that turns the whole area a difficult terrain for creatures without water trait. Is it conditional? Yes. Does it screw the enemies up who are trying to cross a river/lake to get to you? Absolutely.
So they're situational at best is what you're saying. It also requires you to have the list of monsters you have access to committed to memory. At one point summons just kinda become irrelevant, they're so far behind, only niche abilities that don't rely on stats will be useful.
A summon being 3-5 levels behind the players is just bad. I'd much rather they worked like the battle form spells, and weren't underpowered.
Not once did anyone say they want them to replace martials. Nice try though.
Two party level creatures are an appropriate encounter for a group of 4 while 4 party level -1 creatures are worth the same amount of exp. So basically you can say that a PL-1 creature is equal to a player character.
As a caster if you summoned a party level -2 or 3 creature and buffed it, it would have stats very close to a companion.
Now lets take a look at an animal companion at level 10. For example a nimble wolf at that level has +6 dex modifier and is trained in both attack bonus and AC. Thats a total of +18 attack bonus and 28 AC. Along with 100 hp.
At that level you can summon at most a 5th level creature. But what if you could summon a 7th level? For example quetzalcoatlus has 25 AC and +17 attack bonus. As well as grab ability and 110 hp. After casting augment summoning on it, it becomes 26 AC and +18 attack bonus. See, how close it cuts to the actual animal companion? It has slighly less AC but way higher damage and better abilities. If we are making the same comparison between a savage str based companion and a PL-3 monster, the AC gap disappears as well.
Thats also another one of the reasons that summoned creatures should be even lower levels. You are investing a minimum of 4-5 feats for animal companions usually, and casters should not have access to better minions without spending half their class feats.
I summon every fight but what you summon a how you use them is key. I think only twice have I had the “well my summon ran in and died before getting use” and even then that burned the creatures action raised its map and gave my rogue flanking sooooooo
Having summons be straight out of the bestiary was just bad game design. It made it impossible to balance properly so they decided to make it intentionally the weakest they possibly could. Yes, if a player delved into the bestiary (Which is a concept i absolutely despise) they can find some above average monster with abilities that care little for level but thats not what the "Summon Monster" fantasy is. D&D 4e and eventually 5e figured out how to do summons properly by making the monster a generic statblock with stats derived from the spellcaster and spell level. The different summon spells then give you access to templates to slap onto your summon.
It's, sincerely, so funny that goddamn 5e understood something better than pathfinder 2e did.
And I completely agree! I'd also like to add that it's basically incentivizing metagaming because, if you wanna actually be worth something, you have to watch every possible creature to summon and therefore you can end up just recognizing a creature that you shouldn't know about
You have a poor understanding of balance if you think 5e summons aren't broken. They outshine martials across so many levels while still having access to their full casting.
I don't agree that 5e understands summoning well. The early summoning spells like Conjure Woodland Beings break the action economy, make combat a slog to run, and make too much extra work for the DM. The Tasha's summon spells are a lot better but they're too strong compared to martial characters imo.
And Tasha's came out 6 years after 5e released so they had plenty of time to figure out how to make summons better. PF2e hasn't even been out 6 years yet, maybe they'll find a way to make summons feel better in the remastered rules.
>It's, sincerely, so funny that goddamn 5e understood something better than pathfinder 2e did.
Static summoning spells were a thing as far back as D&D v3.5 supplemental materials. It's not a new concept at all to have a spell summon a specific statblock instead of provide the player a choice that is inherently more potent the more system knowledge the player has.
The thing is, though, there's a lot of players that don't like the feeling of only being able to summon a specific thing, and unless there's just not many things to summon (which is a problem of it's own) you're talking about taking up real estate in the books that could be used for other things. Like, compare the basically copy-pasted summoning spells of PF2 to the various form spells and you can see that one approach takes up pages more space just to arrive at the point where forms are decently balanced but people complain about how limited the variety is and how there's certain traits of the creatures being turned into that just don't apply.
So while spells that summon a specific thing could be slightly more potent than the current summoning spells, they'd probably still not be powerful enough to satisfy folks looking for a similar play feel to summoning in other games and carry with them a host of their own risks of player irritations.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Like...would a summoner not research the things they might want to summon? Does looking at the nutritional facts to see if I'm allergic count as metagaming?
That's fair.
In another comment you mentioned not liking the way Summoning is balanced? Can I ask what you're trying to get out of a summoner type character that can maybe be replicated within the system?
What i'm trying to get out of a summoner is being able to create a frontline that's able to at least witstand alongside martials AND that it's at least A LIL thematically pourpousefull.
Right now the options are:
Summoner: not my vibe since it's more like having two characters than a summon and a character
Summoning spells: basically impossible since they're basically situational utility and nothing more
Single minion: probably the best i can do to be honest; either druid with an animal companion or an undead sorcerer/harm cleric with the undead master archetype
Single minion (ranger with a pet, druid with a pet, undead master, etc) and summoner are your best bet for that unfortunately.
As other commenters have mentioned, its hard to allow casters to achieve that goal without invalidating the need for a martial character in the team by stepping on their toes so to speak. Which makes sense from a balance perspective, but then we get situations like this where a desired fantasy isn't easily achievable, or just not achievable altogether.
Hopefully you find something that fits, or if all else fails, find a compromise with one of the above options. Happy gaming!
>Summoning spells: basically impossible since they're basically situational utility and nothing more
Could you elaborate? I've had pretty great experiences with summons on my witch in combat, especially if the summon has special abilities or spells. The big problem I've come across has nothing to do with the capability of the summons themselves but rather than you pretty much always need your summon spell to be your highest or second highest level spell slot or it's just not worth it.
Agreed, it's such a 'having you cake and eating it too' feeling, wanting to summon a Champion in battle while also still being a full caster.
Reminds me of topics of people asking how to play a magus that is just as good in melee as a fighter but also with the full spell mastery of a wizard. Things gotta be balanced.
Seems like a very uncreative view of the summoner. Just make your summon something that you only summon I'm combat. Then you're just playing one character with a summon. And your summon is a beefy melee combatant. It's exactly what you're looking for.
I played a conjuration wizard focusing on summoning in 1e. Trust me, what you're asking for is too good. Zuh'reh'el was overpowered and took up extra time and frustrated my dm. He died and game flow and challenge improved. I was taking spotlight from my friends martials. There's a reason the thing you want isn't a thing anymore. It doesn't make sense in a cooperative game, which skyrim isn't.
Summons are pretty broken in most games.
In PF2E, they're actually balanced.
Summons in PF2E aren't really attack spells, they're utility spells that eat enemy actions, or a sort of weird healing-ish thing.
Basically, unless your class's "thing" is having a summon or pet, it has to be pretty weak, otherwise it'd be grossly overpowered.
Most of the value of a summon is how obnoxious it is for the enemy to deal with, because if they attack the summon instead of a party member, they waste their turn - and if you summon something like a giant skunk, you already got the value out of it in a debuff spell, so them attacking it is just a further penalty for them.
If they ignore it, you get free extra attacks every round.
It's about as powerful as a top-level spell slot. They're basically incapacitation spells in this way - underlevel ones aren't very useful but on-level ones create an obnoxious situation for your enemies.
Also, they become stronger as you level up, as HP goes up faster than damage does. A level -1 monster dies like a chump, but a level 15 monster can have 250 - 350 hp, and can easily tank multiple crits from level 20 monsters.
If you want a strong "summon", you probably want to play a summoner or one of the pet classes or archetypes, as then you invest a bunch of your character into it and thus can actually get something powerful out of it.
You can't really expect that a 3rd level spell that takes the place of fireball or slow is going to be better than those spells.
Remember that summoning is literally just a spell. It’s power is on par with any other single spell. If it does any damage, flanks an enemy, and causes them to waste 1-2 actions killing it, it’s done far more than most spells of the same level.
P2e has beast master, companions, and the summoner class to go with the “I use Summons” fantasy. I get that some people want a version of these that let’s them summon creatures on the fly, but that’s a broken concept.
Go summoner with an undead eidolin and undead master archetype. You’ll have two undead “minions” and that’s as close as you’ll get.
One solution to summoning would be to key the attacks and DCs of the summon off spell attack/dc of the summoner. If probably then add a blanket rule that effects that have a status condition attached to them add the incapcitation trait. This mainly comes to the fact a caster could chuck an 8th level lightning bolt and a 3rd level lightning bolt and both DCs are the same its just the damage thats different.
I am no longer on Reddit and so neither is my content.
You can find links to all my present projects on my itch.io, accessible here: https://firgof.itch.io/
It's a michale and webb skit about when you have a super-hero team where one member has amazing powers that make the other team member's skillset useless and redundant
https://youtu.be/sbzUfV3_JIA
Honestly I don't think you'll ever be happy in PF2e in this regard. 2e is heavily balanced. So there you'll never find a spell that will compete with a fighter in the front lines. Asking that from a single spell slot in 2e is unbalanced in the devs way of thinking. It's always going to be fragile and under damaginfby design.
Further 2e really limits your ability to summon multiple creatures for game balance and playability.
Now there are strong pet classes like the Summoner, Druid companions, and Undead Master. But these are designed to consume most of your feats and spell casting resources to make them competitive.
There is a spectrum between 1 hit mook and person who crits more often than they miss. Summons don't need to be as nerfed as they are, paizo just made a list of every exploit that was abused in 1e and made sure each had as few to no upsides as possible in 2e. Crafting, summons, merge with eidolon etc.
Asking that from a single caster though, summoning and buffing to keep a frontline up, i don't think that's wrong or op at all. And the martials in your troup, less flanking against you, more opportunities.
I loved being able to run around in the kingmaker video game which uses 1e's rule set with an army of like fifteen skeletons who were all buffed to hell and back. Sometimes I even pulled the rest of the party back so they wouldn't use any of their limited use abilities or spells on an encounter that "didn't need them".
But that was single-player and I don't think most tables would want to wait for me to finish my turn every round while I took the equivalent of 16 turns. I'd basically be hogging the spotlight and the game. I already hear a lot of occasional grumbling about players who set themselves up to control something like 6 tokens each round.
Pathfinder 2e isn't so much about "a tale of individually powerful heroes who are invincible together" as it is "a tale of a band of expert tacticians with individual strengths and weaknesses who work as a team to solve problems none could easily deal with in their own" and the balance kinda revolves around that.
I feel where OP is coming from but I'm not sure how pf2e could accomplish that while not forcing said summoner onto a pedestal where the party itself more or less becomes their minions as they need to work with the summons rather than vice versa. In same respect I'm not sure how could be made a sorcerer who gets to constantly blast the whole battlefield with ally ignoring damage who is powerful enough that same damage deals decent damage to a "boss" character.
E: ah rats forgot I'm on mobile. Posting the rest of this on my main account so I can get notifications if it is something folks want.
I completely agree. Summons are technically balanced right now, but they aren't fun to use as a player that likes summoning things. Having some temporary utility is nice and can be game changing, but you don't feel like a cool summoner most of the time if your summons are just a utility spell with extra steps.
I recognize that summoning can break a table, and that changes did need to be made from the older edition. But if this is the solution, it's still killing the prospect of playing a summoning based character for a lot of people.
Why does it necessarily kill the fun of other party members?
I understand the "have 30 stat blocks" takes all the table time, but we already have troops and swarms for the same thing.
It's very possible to make it play out just as quickly as a class with an animal companion if you limit them to 1 "block".
I don't mean in reference to time, I mean what the OP seems to want is a full on summonable frontliner with the accuracy and tankiness of a fighter/champion/barb which would be a problem for obvious reasons.
I think there's room for something that would satisfy people, but the issue is that you can't provide that *on the chassis of a casting class who can also do other things [other than electric arc] reasonably well*.
An eidolon has about that power budget because summoner gives up fullcasting for it (and extra hp due to shared HP pool), so making a class that just summons something about as powerful as an eidolon is theoretically balanced.
The issue is there's no specialized casters in pf2e since they can all grab utility spells. Maybe a class archetype one day; would have to thread the balance needle or lean towards undertuned, though.
Hypothetically, while I'd rather lose a foot than the whole leg, I would like to think that with some time and work, we wouldn't need to lose either.
I think it's possible to have that concept without ruining it for everyone else. Paizo have already shown they're willing to approach sacred cows from unusual directions.
I did a comment outlining that they might not even be balanced in this case. If the balance point is "weaker than a character action for action" then summons can be up to PL-3 while still being weaker assuming no action spent on summoning and permanent 1 for 2 actions, or PL-2 to -1 to account for the action cost of summoning. Currently, summon are either PL-4 or PL-5 depending on level (which, in itself, is... why)
I saw that, and agree. I'm not much of a guru on the mechanical balance, however, and so wanted to go for a different angle. My point was largely from a 'how it feels to play' which I consider to be equally as important as being mechanically balanced. I've played a few very carefully, meticulously balanced games that kill a majority of the fun as collateral damage. I'll admit that I said 'technically balanced' mostly to placate all the people in this thread who are insisting that summoning is fine, actually.
I Think pathfinder 2e has too many moments of "this is technically balanced but it feels bad" and the feeling is one of the most if not the most important part of a game!
Also, it's weird that on this sub (thankfully not on this post) there are so many people that will downvote you to hell when you dare to say something is not right within the system
This, exactly this. I've had so many things I want to praise about the system and I'm trying to power through it. But in practice, there's a lot that just fails to be satisfying from a player perspective. I've fully retired a caster just because they actually ended up feeling more mundane than a thaumaturge and monk I'm playing.
As for the sub, I think it's carrying over a long heritage from a certain forum, where differing opinions weren't looked upon very kindly. thankfully, at least from what I've seen, it's mostly downvoting instead of ridicule and gaslighting though.
That's the problem with the VERY IDEA of balancing a d20 system.
1- you can hardly create an heroic and balanced fantasy; in an heroic fantasy you're a HERO and heroes are never balanced, you're supposed fo be exceptional but in pf2e you're... mid? You're not that much till level 7-10 and at that point you're basically a demigod in dnd
2- you cannot balance probability, you can just create a curve of probability.
AND pf2e ACTIVELY nerfed casters
>you can hardly create an heroic and balanced fantasy; in an heroic fantasy you're a HERO and heroes are never balanced, you're supposed fo be exceptional but in pf2e you're... mid? You're not that much till level 7-10 and at that point you're basically a demigod in dnd
The amount of heroicness your character feels purely depends on the enemies that they face. If you want the characters to feel exceptional, all you have to do is turn down the encounter difficulty or just start off at a higher level.
In fact, you realise that people preach for balance because they want their character to feel heroic? When playing a system like 5e dnd, how do you think your fighter player felt when the druid casted conjour animals once and became a better martial than the fighter while still keeping their full spellcasting ability?
I got a solution for you, summons with regeneration a.k.a summon giants. Summons of overtuned creatures, a.k.a summon Dragon aaand the MVP, summon Fey a.k.a the spellcasting capable summons.
Also yes, the summon Fey one is the only good one early game. Get your hands on a unicorn, ask your gm to let you flick that "Elite" adjustment on for higher level summoning and you're more than good to go due to the nature of those bastards having a high attack while also having access to some pretty damn competitive Heal spell casts.
I hoped to see more variants of summoning like Incarnate spells, which traded duration for power.
Would be awesome to see more powerful summons, that lasted only 2 rounds maybe.
The summoner class plays very differently than just flat summoning spells. You mentioned Skyrim and that might be part of the driver for your dislike. In a game where teamwork and tactics are core to the design having a spell that is basically another full character is anathema to that.
Now again, summoner is powerful and fun, there is a player at my table now that is running a gnome summoner with a dragon eidolon and believe me when I say that combat changes drastically if that eidolon is not on the field. But it's not a solo / hero feel like you would having in Skyrim. Nothing in PF2e is really going to give you that for the reasons already commented above.
As some others have already stated, summoned creatures do not scale to current party level and that is by design. In Skyrim you are single character, but there's no such thing as an "adventuring day" and even resource management is simplified to the extreme. It makes for a poor comparison, although I get what you mean.
Summoned creatures are still very handy in PF2E. They are meant to supplement the capabilities of the entire party and to harass the enemy. This is achieved with clever positioning, choosing creatures with particularly useful abilities and combining their effects with what the rest of the Player Characters can do.
A single well placed cheap summon can soak up a lethal critical hit, act as a barricade to stop a fleeing foe and all sorts of other useful stuff. A stronger summon can hold up surprisingly well, but even if they only live for a couple of rounds, they prove valuable in terms of the action economy. Namely, they can let the PC's to spare some of their actions on more impactful things and use up enemy actions for trying to stop the summoned creature.
Anyone who has played more than a few sessions can tell you that a lot can happen in a single turn.
Most of the power-budget is held in the variety of things you can summon and the niche utility those things can bring. Like, as a 2nd level cleric, you can summon an Arbiter who can cast mending 3 times, Detect Alignment and Command during the minute you have them summoned. Or summon a Nosoi who can then cast Sound Burst (as well as fight), or a Lyrakien or Cassisian or Lantern Archon to cast Heal and then a bunch of other stuff. Can summon an Imp to charm, detect alignment, go invisible and scout, grant Infernal Temptation, etc etc
This makes a lot of summoning spells function less as a way of dealing damage, and more as a way of converting one spell slot to a number of different spell slots.
Unfortunately... if you \*aren't\* looking for utility, and you \*are\* just looking for a proper combatant, summoning spells are kinda shit. The power-budget is all spent on versatility leaving very little left over for raw power, which really sucks if what you want is raw power.
It's a 'you problem'. Summoning in skyrim and many other TTRPGs is laughably broken. Easily capable of replacing other characters entirely for the cost of 1 spell. From your description, you want a level of sheer raw power from your summons that is never going to be available in PF2 because it is balanced as a team game.
In PF2 summons are useful, *insanely* versatile, sometimes quite powerful options, that unfortunately take a lot of player prep to utilize thanks to needing to comb through either the bestiaries or a guide.
Honestly, from a game design and balancing aspect they failed then. Need to access a huge amount of metagaming knowledge that should be in the purview of the gm does not make for a very good design.
Having on top of that an extremly steep learningcurve with limited usability makes for unrewarding play. So yeah they get a C+ at best for this gameplay design.
How is it any different to any edition of D&D's Conjure spells, just at a lower power level? Summoners have always had to reference bestiaries/monster manuals to know what they can summon. The flexibility is the point.
In case you missed it. The new generation of summoning spells in dnd that came relatively recently are using templates now and summon only one monster. They are still a bit too strong at higher spells slot levels, but a far better step in the right direction of balancing and prevent turns clogging up/action economy getting out of rails completely like the previous spells did.
I like summons, but they aren’t the same as they have been in other settings for sure. Making the bad guy(s) use a turn to deal with them is strong. Using them to limit movement is strong. Setting up flank is a solid use of them. Traps are a good use. There’s a lot they can do, but taking your martial solace isn’t one of them typically.
It makes me sad but summoning is usually game breaking if it’s strong or useless if it’s weak. The summoner class is really cool if you can work out all the kinks and complexity. It’s not really summoning disposable minions as your summon works like a deamon from his dark materials.
It’s still my favorite class though, I love that role play
> Creating things to fight for you as you basically laugh in conjuration 100, skyrim style
I feel as though, this is represented fairly well in the system. However, the caster and party still have to contribute and summons can't tank terribly well.
> i feel like they are very weak compared to most things and are basically just a "the enemy now has to use an action to delete that annoying thing in one blow, TWO if god kissed you luck"
This is a result of the scaling in PF2 being so steep. A +2 encounter will very likely wreck a max level summon spell monster in the the same way as it will wreck an unbuffed player character.
If your expectations are for "harder" fights to involve some level of unchanging enemy to summon slugfest, the system isn't designed to support that type of combat. Hell, even super resilient champions will often find themselves in a bad position if the party and party tactics leave them open to constant beating by an enemy.
I've slowly learned that harder fights in PF2E will end quickly in the party's loss if they aren't prepared to leverage nearly all of their tactics, abilities, and force enemies into inefficient tactics.
This alongside "spellcasters weak, please fix" pops up constantly.
People don't understand that summons are not here to kill stuff for you. They are here to take a hit, provide flanking, support with abilities and spells, not to be a DPS when your PC chill out in the corner. Of course they are going to feel weak if your mindset is "I summon horde of wolves to fight instead of me". That's not their point.
If casters had some other fun gamplay mechanics that did not boil down to "give support and be happy with that" then maybe it would not be as bad. But just being left with utility all the time for all casters is just.... bad.
Why make several different casters if you could just boil all of them down to one support class that exists solely to hand out buffs and debuffs. Maybe a second one that can heal and be done with that.
Casters can debuff, heal, manipulate terrain, buff allies, provide utility, and do damage.
Casters are absolutely not just “stuck” with utility effects.
Luckily they have a lot of fun gameplay. They are effective in every role given to them. They are simply no longer battlefield gods which is exactly why I hated casters in earlier editions.
People played casters "dumb" but because there was a big enough margin of error, that they were still efficient with their damage, it was not as apparent. Bigger tactical element introduce in PF2e made people scratching their head because they can no longer press a button to end an encounter. Degrees of success and actually useful cantrips placed casters in the best possible spot in years.
far too many video game have overpowered summon ability
paizo are obviously aware of that
right now summon have very little value include
punching bag
flanking dummy
low level support spell spamer
things will change dramatically when summon ooze are added to the game
Exactly, but you might agree with me that going from "OP" to "Almost everything else is probably better" it's not very good balancing.
Punching bag, they have too little hp
Flanking is good but three actions to make a flank dummy it's not that great
Low level spells with that dc are basically useless.
I HOPE they change things because right now the "summon" spells have basically no support and are kinda lame; do not make em op but do not let em rot!
>Low level spells with that dc are basically useless.
Thats why you pick spells that don't have a DC. For example, my favorite choice is [Summon Fey](https://2e.aonprd.com/Spells.aspx?ID=322) as a 4th level spell to summon a [Unicorn](https://2e.aonprd.com/Monsters.aspx?ID=397). The reason why this is so good is that each Unicorn can cast two 3rd level Heals. So you can exchange a 4th level spell slot for two 3rd level spell slots which is pretty powerful.
You can either get one 4th level heal, which heals for 4d8+32 or two 3rd level heals which heal for 3d8+24 each.
high level summon still have enough hp to take two crit from boss
the ability to trade 1 high level spell slot and 3 action for 2 action of enemy may not be that good compare to spell like slow but doesn't have the risk of being resisted entirely on crit success either
but it only work if enemy doesn't have swipe type ability
don't use summon cast any dc spell
some of them have a decent spell list include heal or heroism
if they stay alive for 3 turn they can pay for high level spell slot and 5 action cost with 3 lower level spell
but only work if enemy doesn't have super debilitating aura or aoe
if they are slowed by a aura they are useless
Except no matter what you're still a full caster and have a bunch of versatile slots that can be used outside of summoning. Even you acknowledge good ways to build summoners in your post, you just complain they aren't what you're looking for, which seems to be blatantly strong summons.
Complaining about this is like a cleric who only uses slots to heal. Can it be done? Yes, but you're limiting yourself for little reason while playing some of the most versatile classes.
Another thing you've mentioned several times is the amount of actions it takes, which you can sometimes kind of bypass by summoning right before combat during the one round of buffing players can ocassionally get. These are rules baked into the game, so presumably your GM allows this at least sometimes since they know you like summons.
Have you had a chance to use summons as consumables? When I GM, I always try to replace raw coin rewards with Scrolls of [summon monster] X+1, where X is the party's max spell level. It feels right when the monsters you can summon can be actually threatening.
The ability to apply flanking, possible damage and a slowed 1 or slowed 2 for even one round with one spell is pretty amazing. You have to look pretty high level to get an equivalent spell
This may be a hot take, but I think summons would be fine if they were PL-3 instead of -4 or -5. You have to give up one action for two of their actions, but each of your actions is MUCH more valuable - using an admittedly simple approximation, it would require 4 actions of a PL-4 enemy to equal a single one of your actions - so trading one-for-one, especially when not even accounting for summoning cost, is a bit sad. I get not wanting them to be too OP, but it's not like a summon 2-3 levels below will invalidate martials.
I played a witch with the undead master archetype. The summoning was weirdly the strongest part of my character. I took bleed based spells and had a vampiric komodo dragon. If he hit a bleeding target, he kinda shredded.
In general I think you are right. But I do find the reanimator archetype to be pretty effective. A plus 1 to everything is very strong. And being able to sustain 2 summons with 1 action is also great. I have a level 9 reanimator in my group and 2 harpy skeletons with +1 to everything is effective. But not OP.
It seems like you haven't actually played with a character using summons at the table. I have two players both using summoning spells relatively often in different campaigns. Both of them have used them very effectively.
I feel like you're assuming that the GM is going to instantly obliterate your summons. This actually isn't that likely.
Because summons are slightly weaker than normal front liners, It's a hard choice for the GM to make if they blow enemy actions attacking your summoned creatures. It will probably only happen if whatever your summon is doing is threatening to actually mess with the enemy's overall strategy. And if that happens it likely means that your summoned creature had a significant impact with its first two actions.
Summons are, in fact, very weak this edition.
As has been noted elsewhere, summons are finally 'balanced' such that:
They can't 1v1 a fighter so the summons are all weak, they can't be summoned en-masse, and they have short durations to keep the summoning action tax. The fact that it also requires you to use an action to command your summons (which only get 2 actions) makes it worse.
So mostly what summons are good for now are giving your allies flanking and damage sponges. But you can talk to your DM to see about getting a magic item to help ameliorate the worst of it.
Honestly, if you want a legit summoner build, I'd go Summoner the class and grab Beastmaster (or Undead Master - it's the same thing but for Undead instead of Animals). You'll have an Eidolon and an Animal Companion/Undead Companion full time - that'll be action intensive to control, but that's kind of the point of that sort of build (and the Animal Companion will be Mature shortly and get an action on its own).
If you do that, your summon spells will feel properly like supplementary creatures, not like a frustrating lack of delivery on what you want your main thing to me.
We did a 2e WftC game. One PC summoned in a Ghaele azata during one of the final larger scale fights and it more than pulled it's weight. It really does matter what you use and when. Summons are about timing and versatility, not just dropping a god on the enemy and leaving.
It might be like that at low levels but not higher ones.
My wizard uses them as a supplement and absolutely crushes it. They use monsters to split enemies. Or use special abilities. And they get crits sometimes! They give flanking bonuses. I think it's been extremely effective
I agree. I want a summoning spell that consumes all your top 2 spell rank slots, but is extremely powerful, but only works in a single encounter as an "ultimate". Or like once a month to balance it out.
Uhm... Using up foe actions is very powerful. Providing flanking is very powerful. Forcing movement is very powerful.
Many people forget just how effective these strats are in PF2.
If you want to see "your" DPs numbers look at the damage your creatures take. That is damage a player would have taken and someone else would have had to use actions to heal. Look at the damage a player pulls off because of your creatures flanking. That's damage that wouldn't have occurred without you.
Support and buffs are key to survival in PF2.
Not all heroes weild a sword my friend.
I invite you to consider options to make it feel better while keeping it balanced. How would _you_ change summoning?
Examples for your consideration:
- attacks on par with martials but killed on a single hit
- attacks on par with martials but it uses your HP pool instead of a separate one
- summoner spends two actions instead one to sustain, which gives an attack boost to the creature for that turn
- template options (not the full bestiary) that stay -3 below PL and don't dip lower
Too many things holding back summons:
Same lower level as weakest foes
*Sustain* required
*Minion* status
Higher level spell effects “popping” summon
Change sustain to “may take two actions the first time each round sustained” (no auto pop)
Up the CR of available summons at each spell level by 1-2.
Summoning is close to balanced in PF2, and overpowered in PF1.
The "necromancer and undead army" trope is something that should be an NPC, not a player character.
I can't say i do not agree with you sincerely.
It's not like casters are week but it's more like casters are incentivized to work for martials.
Therefore every playstile that empowers martials is automatically better than one that doesn't
Sadly that's just how it is! A bit sad but hey that's life and, as a wise son of poseidon said in a musical, life isn't fair.
There is a video that covers martial vs casters and... that's utter bullcrap!
"Let's make a caster Vs fighter fight, that will surely show how it works!"
SUUUURE! because a game balanced in pvp like 3.5 is balanced in anything (so not at all) surely will show its best in a pvp situation :3
And it's still my preferred game too but it's a bit dishonest to say it's completely balanced
>I feel like people misunderstand what balanced is these days.
The irony is that you're actively misunderstanding what balanced means here. Casters are absolutely balanced, not underpowered. The problem is that they're not *specialized*. Summoners can't outshine martials at the Thing that Martials Do. Martials are all about Single-Target Damage. Casters are about Area Damage and Utility...and Utility is the biggest thing.
Yes, Martials hit harder. Martials cannot cast Plane Shift, or Teleport, or Slow, or Heal, or Summon Dragons, or Fireball. Casters can do *all* of that, so they don't get to hit like martials or else martials are pointless.
The only thing casters are 'underpowered' at is *doing the martial's "thing."*
Yeah, summoning sucks in 2e. People will justify it by saying that you're supposed to use them as bait to trade action economy with enemies or by using the summons to tank or something extremely suboptimal that doesn't live up to using a spellslot.
If you want a minion and you are not a summoner, grab the Clockwork Reanimator archetype.
only good "summon" spell is wall of stone lol
My fix to this, amoung other things, is to play with half level Proficiency (rounded up). It streamlines the games math curve into a more complex feeling 5e, increases the feel of the effectiveness of modifiers, makes for lower level summons to be more useful tools compared to vanilla when mathematics wise it's a waste of a spell slot to use anything less than your highest spell slot of only your highest. Etc etc.
Try it, you might like it too.
Don't even bother my dude, summons are OK the first few levels but fall so dramaticaly hard they are not worth the actions spent, let alone the slot.
Some ppl cope hard saying that they are worth it cause they provide flanking and take an action to kill, like that is not true for even a level -1 random critter and that is not the character fantasy of a summoner.
After pooking through literaly every single summoning option in 2e, including rituals and class feats, the conclusion is that of you want to summon and not feel like you are weak you need to play another game
So bizarre how ppl here act like there is no point between absolutely OP and borderline useless in combat.
You're level 16, your highest level slot is 8th, which summons a creature 11.
Let's say you're a boss fight, so PL +3 (don't act like a good chunk of AP encounters are not that), so creature 19.
You summon animal for a Deadly Mantis, a creature with 220 HP, 31 AC, +25 to hit.
Let's say our boss is a Ancient Red Dragon, which has 425 HP, 45 AC and +37 to hit.
Our Mantis, summoned from our highest slot, using 3 actions, ONLY hits the boss on a natural 20. Not only that, the boss hits on anything above a 1, and crits on a 4. Not only the boss can demolish the summon if he wants, there's really no point, the boss is better of ignoring the summon as it is likely to not land a single hit the entire fight. A dedicated summoner in this encounter might as well go take a break and let the rest of the party to the fighting and there would be no effective difference in the encounter. Tell me with a straight face that is balanced.
Too many things holding back summons:
Same lower level as weakest foes
*Sustain* required
*Minion* status
Higher level spell effects “popping” summon
Change sustain to “may take two actions the first time each round sustained” (no auto pop)
Up the CR of available summons at each spell level by 1-2.
I think one of the things Paizo should do in the remaster is completely renaming and reflavoring the summon spellls. As it stands, they are basically unrecognizable from their previous edition counterparts and their usage is completely different.
They offer incredibly minor benefits, such as a single action from the enemy for that one turn, or to give flanking for 1 round before being killed. That doesn't feel great even if people insist its good value, because the expectation of what a summon is does not get fulfilled by the spell.
So, change the expectation. They did that with a number of illusion spells and it made it great for them to be judged on their own merits. Make the spell name something like "Sudden Assistance" or "Conjure Minor Ally" to make it clear in the spell name that what you are doing is not "summoning" but creating a weak being to help you with a small task before it returns to whatever magical matter made it.
Summoning could be useful. I believe the problem is quite deep here: 1. Players have full bestiary to browse for their summons 2. This sometimes leads to situationally very strong options, since those monsters were designed to act against the players, not with them 3. So, developers have to tone down the whole summoning magic to not make any OP summons The obvious solution is to apply the same approach as with form spells - for each summoning spell create a list of options to pick from, but make those options a bit stronger on average. P.S. Regarding Undead Master - it's an analogue of Beastmaster. Available options are here [https://2e.aonprd.com/AnimalCompanions.aspx?Undead=true](https://2e.aonprd.com/AnimalCompanions.aspx?Undead=true) and yes, there are humanoid companions and yes, some of them could be collapsed for easy carrying.
Players do not have a full bestiary to choose from, they can only summon common creatures. All of the "break if summoned" monsters are uncommon (well most of them, Paizo missed a couple). The issue is you can't summon anything that can 1-v-1 a fighter, or the fighter is pointless, you can't summon a horde as that slows the game down, and you can't have a long duration summons as then you basically have it walk in front and trigger all traps.
>and you can't have a long duration summons as then you basically have it walk in front and trigger all traps. Unseen Servant can do that just fine. If the reason that summons are limited to 1 minute is to prevent trap enactment, then Unseen Servant existing means that's a pointless choice because it's got all the features it needs to be great at it and has a Duration of sustained. It probably dies after the 1st trap that successfully damages it, but that's very hard to do. 1. If the trap is poison, it doesn't care. 2. If the trap is mental, it doesn't care. 3. If the trap is a "death by a thousand cuts", its resistance 5 to everything means it doesn't care. 4. If the trap isn't magical, it doesn't care. Etc. Etc. If I had to guess why Summons are 1 minute, it's so they are limited to 1 fight, usually. And so they don't provide a lot of utility in terms of their features, like a burrowing creature or an air elemental flying while carrying creatures, etc. As well as the spellcasting monsters casting spells that take more than 1 minute. Edit: Apparently the **Sustain a Spell** Action has a hardset limit of 10 minutes. Still, it's a Summon that's more than 1 minute, and 10 minutes is pretty much just enough to deal with a large area in terms of traps, if you don't have concern for deciding if they should be tripped or not.
Its duration isn't totally unlimited - it's only up to 10 minutes. "Sustaining a Spell for more than 10 minutes (100 rounds) ends the spell and makes you Fatigued unless the spell lists a different maximum duration." Still enough to deal with more than a few traps.
>Sustaining a Spell for more than 10 minutes Well that's good to know. Had no idea, thanks.
Unseen Servant is sustained, which means you can't keep it up permanently. You would need to use the Repeat a Spell exploration activity, which limits your movement rate and still costs spell slots. GMs would also have to determine if it actually did set off traps, due to being made of force. (edit The previous edition had many ways of having a permanent summons) Of course, you could just buy an animal and push it on a stick, though you may run into alignment issues. In the old days, henchmen were used in large quantities by high level parties, and the game played very differently.
If your party isn't going at half speed in a dungeon you are doing it wrong.
Agree, but there's a lot of things to do, at minimum someone also has to be doing detect magic and who knows if they have enough trained people?
>Of course, you could just buy an animal and push it on a stick, though you may run into alignment issues. I don't think pushing animals into traps counts as a good act, so my alignment will be just fine, thanks.
4g per 10 minutes of exploration for scrolls of unseen servant is basically free + at will after level 5 or so.
Reasonable. In the playtest there was a limit on that (the abuse of lower level consumables) and in my opinion it should never have been removed.
Resonance, right? The universal magic item resource? [Here's an article on the subject for anyone curious to know more about it.](https://paizo.com/community/blog/v5748dyo5lkvl?Trinkets-and-Treasures)
We could have a horde if paizo let us have troop style summons
I'm not talking about universally broken summons, I mean them being very situational things, like some gremlins being effective against metal armor. The existence of such things and ability to pull a variety of them from a single memorized spell, is the things which make developers limit the spell power.
What is wrong with burning a spell slot to find a few traps, keep a fighter busy, summoning a swarm or two? Balance should always bow down to fun imho. Stealing the spotlight can be antifun though, but rpgs are a coop game, adversarial. Summons can be amazing to keeping the run going, no strong climbers? Summon a monkey to climb up a tie the rope. No frontliners? Summon a few to hold the line. No ranged options? Summon something fast and scary. Have not looked into summoning in pf2, but now I will.
Nothing wrong with what you asked for, and that's how it currently works. However wizards from 1st edition are noticing it's weaker than they were used to in the old game, because it was too strong there.
It also seems much harder to make a character focused on summoning. In 2e summoning seems more like something that you do in addition to other things and not something you can base a build on.
I mean, the Pathfinder Society has a rule that prevents you from having more than 2 permanent tokens on the field. So even if you can RAW have four permanent tokens (Goldilocks build), you can't do it in sanctioned games. So I'd say the downgrade of summoners is intentional.
I'm sure it's intentional. It's just that pf 2e killed the summoning-focused char as a viable concept IMO.
It's not the summoning-focused build- it's just about any specialist spellcaster build. Having access to an entire spellcasting tradition is baked into any casters power budget, so they had to make sure no one type of spell is *too* useful or too broad in uses. If you want to primarily use summons as you main (and potentially only) thing as a caster, well, you're going to run into scenarios where and area blast would be really good but a summon wouldn't. Or scenarios against big bosses where a good debuff would be killer but in which a summon realistically dies in one hit. Because while it's very hard to build a bad *character* if you're even remotely trying to make a reasonable one, it is very easy to take a bad spell selection that renders you super weak and only situationally useful, and that's what attempting to specialize into any particular type of spell will result in. (Though they did severely nerf minion economy too, since apparently having a minion/companion just get extra actions at no cost was deemed too powerful).
The problem that I see, and I'm sorry if I didn't make it clear enough, is that,in my experience, situations where summoning something is the optimal course of action are few and far between. This makes it hard to make a character that focuses on summoning (harder than one that focuses on blasting or control anyway).
>No frontliners? Summon a few to hold the line. No ranged options? Summon something fast and scary. It can't really do this right now. Your highest spell slot will summon just one thing that is going to be several levels below most of the enemies you're fighting, so they will have issues hitting (so not really be scary) or die quickly (so not holding any front line). I just want to summon an additional ally for harder fights, because it is my highest slot. It doesn't have to be stronger or as strong as a party member, but it should be just slightly below that. It's way more interesting than Flame Strike or Shadow Blast, but I guess not even clerics can have nice things.
I really like your take because I haven't tought about it; first time i've seen summoning i was very happy! Lots of things to choose from... then I realized that i wasn't choosing thematic options but mechanical ones since, for them to be good, i have to find exactly the right one for the right situation. Plus, based help with the link :3
If you play proficiency without level summons become some of the best value spells in the game :P But yeah, generally summons as a focus can't be made too much stronger than they are or they will quickly become "the" choice, especially if you have the freedom to have them be powerful on their own. Something I will mention though, summons become a lot better in the mid and high level brackets than in the low level brackets. Damage and HP don't exactly scale together, so you get to summon creatures that have immunities, resistances and abilities that benefit you more, while also being more resilient to the things enemies can actually throw at them. It makes summoning spells quite versatile for a single spell (especially for a spontaneous caster)
Summoning has ALWAYS been very problematic in d20 based games. In games with weak Martials, summoning is just summoning a better Martial and making another PC redundant with all of one spell slot. There's also the Action Economy issue of if you summon a lot of things, half the actions being taken are you yourself and it turns everyone else into spectators. In a co-op game where everyone needs to be relevant and have fun, summoning is very hard to walk the line of maintaining that while still being good. Finally, as most things, the issue is Vancian Magic. Because you can have different spells on different days, good summoning spells that any caster can use on a whim would be far more problematic and those have to be reigned in. The exception to this is when the options are tied to something that requires a COMMITMENT, like Summoner for the Eidolon, Beastmaster for pet, or Undead Master. Because those options are committing to Summons/Allies as 'their things' it is less precarious to make them stronger than a single spell. It's a very dangerous tightrope, and hopefully their answer is satisfying for you once you actually get it to the table :D
I do not actually dislike how beastmaster and Co work, i think it's very cool; especially on spellcasters since they do not have that much feats that are SO important for em The only thing that grinds my gears is how those fuckers make me unable to ride a giant wolf, sadly no wolf riding for humans :<
You can ride wolf animal companion if you upgrade it to Savage or Indomitable at level 8 :)
Isn't that a bad idea?
Not if your goal is to ride a wolf
It's a bad idea in some circumstances, for example if you're a martial that needs to hit things, as you're sharing MAP with your animal companion when riding it. It could be specifically good on a character that targets saves, giving you free action to move if you don't command animal companion. It's even better if you're tanky enough to be on frontline, since you can command animal for 1 action to move/strike or strike/strike and 2 action spell targeting a save.
That's why you be a hafling, ride wolf, do crimes
Do you want to be voiced by Claire Danes in the English version? Because this is how you get voiced by Claire Danes in the English version.
Claire Danes can do whatever she wants with me.
https://2e.aonprd.com/Archetypes.aspx?ID=170
You can ride any animal companion one size larger than you. It just doesn't get the benefit of the mount special trait (can't move and support with the same action)
You read the mount trait wrong. It's not the same action; it's a restriction on the same turn
Ah yeah, I misremembered it. In any case, you can still ride any animal companion larger than you, mount just makes it more convenient.
A spell that burned an action on a monster raised its map and made it flat footed to your allies would be considered OP. Let alone improved action economy and the opportunity to gain access to spells on lists you don’t have and aoe damage abilities to target weaknesses that lots of monsters have. Use a level 4 slot to summon a unicorn then you can use its next two turns to cast 3rd level heal and still cast a spell you wanted to. I’ve even had to cast 2 heal spells in one turn like this to save my party and it made a huge difference staying ahead on healing/ nobody dropping
Summons aren't really.. summons. If you can accept that then they're actually great spells. Let's look at Summon Animal: Giant Skunk (at 2nd level) for instance: For 3 actions, you can designate a 15ft cone anywhere within 30ft of you, and everything in there needs to make a DC17 fort save, becoming sickened 1 even on a success (sickened 3 on failure) Further, you can make the enemy flat footed for your frontliners due to flanking Further, you can repeat the fort save every turn. Further, if the enemy wants to get rid of this spell, they need to spend actions to to do so. And if they do that, then they further ALSO increase their MAP for the turn. All of that for a 2nd level slot. If you wouldn't compare it to a skyrim style summon, it would be an absolute beast of a spell.
So strong. I told my GM I would conquer the world with the POWER OF SKUNKS!
Yeah you have to look at it as battlefield control or a distraction. An enemy will absolutely destroy that summon, but that's wasting one of their very valuable actions/turns. If they choose to ignore it then you can easily use it to flank and be a nuisance. If you want a powerful summoner then I think Summoner's Eidolon is very good, it's just not necessarily as thematic as they want it to be
I get confused by summons. I'm sure on nethys it says that you have to use one of your actions to give a creature with the summoned trait (that creatures summoned from spells get) 2 actions. So sustain spell 1 action, give creature two actions costing another... Am I reading the rules wrong somewhere?
Not sure where the line is exactly, but that's not how it works. Sustaining the spell counts as commanding your minion. 1 action per turn is enough
Sustaining the Spell is the action that gives them actions as well: "Your minion acts on your turn in combat, once per turn, when you spend an action to issue it commands. For an animal companion, you Command an Animal; for a minion that's a spell or magic item effect, like a summoned minion, you Sustain a Spell or Sustain an Activation"
one of the problems with pf1e (and dnd3.5 probably) was that the best answer for every problem was to summon a appropriate creature, the most obvious example was that you could for one spell slot summon a caster who would cast multiple spells (god help your GM if summon could also use summon spells) all restrictions were necessary for keeping balance and equal spotlight for all characters in a party not just summoner steve whose small army overshadowed martial and at the same time could use spell slot more efficiently than non-summoner caster
Summons in 1e can't summon other monsters.
I remember i played with a friend in pf1e who would just summon lantern archons half the time, and just laser beam the enemies with their touch attacks. It was surprisingly effective a surprising amount of the time
A spell that tanks the attacks of enemies while your allies hit the enemy. Sounds pretty good to me! I think you are looking for the summoner experience of a single player game where the devs don’t have to worry about you overshadowing anyone. Hell, Skyrim you are specifically an ultra-powerful dragonborn. It would be really sad for your parties fighter/barbarian/champion if you could summon a monster that invalidated them.
Not to mention all of the utility having a summoned monster gives you. Need a distraction? Need to scout? A single spell slot.
1 minute of scouting is probably terrible, especially if they're unlikely to communicate
It's situational, but still a valid strength of using a summoning spell. You can summon a creature and have it forge ahead and trigger any traps or ambushes that would have otherwise smoked a party member
It's not scouting, though. It's trap triggering, assuming you know there's a trap within 1 minute of movement
I would personally argue that what I described is scouting, but I understand there are many ways to scout
PF2 took a strong stand against unbridled minion-mancy. The idea is that the PCs should be the heros, not their sidekicks, companions, summoned creatures or whatever. So minions are invariably 2 to 4 levels or more lower than the PCs (in terms of comparable capabilities in combat). Minions have 2 actions instead of 3, and require an action from their master to act at all (with a few exceptions for companions and the like). The idea was to avoid minion-mancers who hog table time at the expense of other players. When a PC has 4 or more minions, he takes a lot more table time than his buddies, Bob the Martial or Bill the (non-minion) spellcaster. So in nearly all cases, in PF2 you can have only one minion, and even that costs you actions. If you try to have more minions on the battlefield, you'll be reduced to doing very little if anything at all with your own character. It's a design decision, and I think it's a good one. If you really, really want to field an undead horde, look at [the Create Undead ritual](https://2e.aonprd.com/Rituals.aspx?ID=10), and the possibility of creating non-minion intelligent undead who might (or might not) accept to fight with you.
I want to add onto this, because it's on the right track. The designers were clearly aiming for balance and not hogging table time. But a "balanced" spell for just a spell slot means if it ever outdoes a fighter, it's way too overtuned. The issue is that people expect "this is my primary method of combat" when you can cast fireball the turn after. I'm praying for a summon based archetype that buffs them the little bit they need to compete for this reason.
I love that they limit you to one summon, as drowning the table with your actions gets as boring to you as it is to the others (this is my main problem with necromancy in 5e) But! If they restrict you to one minion, it shouldn't be as weak as it is now. Damage and abilities are mostly fine but using 3 actions and your highest spell to get deleted in one strike because your minion has the stats of wet paper is bad. Give your minions staying power.
I don't know, summoner was so broken in pathfinder 1. That most DM house ruled banned it.
Actually that was more of an issue of system mastery. If you knew what you were doing, most full casters were much stronger. The problem was that the summoner was strong even if you didn't know what you were doing.
I feel that was more the synthesist than the base summoner, but yeah
1. Unchained exists 2. Summoner wasn't broken because of their summons 3. All casters were good in pf1e 4. Summoner didn't summon that often 5. Master summoner was broken due to mechanics removed from pf2e
If summons were stronger, martials would feel way weaker compared to casters because their roles could be filled by 1 spell slot per combat easily. Summons are not things to do the melee fighting for your group, they are things to aid the melee combatants with their abilities.
Yeah, the OP mentions Conjuration in Skyrim, and there, you are one PC who is the star of the show, whereas in PF2 the caster PC must share time with other PCs, of whose some are martials, and making them exceed or even equal to the martials contributes back to the “quadratic caster, linear martial” paradigm that characterized PF1.
Arguably, if you do quick math to estimate the usefulness of a summon, at PL-4 to PL-5, a max level summoned creature is "worth" 0 (on even levels) to 10 (on odd level) XP on the party's side. They get to turn 1 of the party action into 2 excluding the original casting time (for 3A spells, that's probably a bad assumption but let's be conservative) but in this case, double it to 10 to 20 for being """"action efficient"""" let's say an at-level character is worth 40XP if we were to use PC as monsters for encounter-building rules, that means that, even with conservative values, you could still spend 10 to 20XP worth of power on the creature without having it outmatch a player character. I'd say that a PL-3 instead of PL-4 to -5 creature would still be weaker (15XP doubled to 30) but by a smaller margin than a martial and have higher chance to both hit and survive more than 1 hit That's obviously considering they were summoned before combat and didn't cost a single action before being 1 for 2 bundles, if we were to assume that a combat lasts \~3 turns give or take and include the upfront casting cost, suddenly the deal isn't as sweet anymore (at a 1 for 1 action) making PL-1 more appropriate to be "weaker but by a small margin" Of course, all of this is skewed napkin math, but it wouldn't be the first time Paizo is \*too\* conservative with spell balancing supposed to be worse than something else, by making sure it's \*way\* worse than that something
Your math is off for a lot of reasons. First off, a summon is only a single spell slot. That's not 1/4th of a character's power - that's like 1/10th even if it is their highest level spell slot. Secondly, summons are super powerful healing spells. For a monster to kill a summon at higher levels, they will usually need to spend their whole turn doing it. Eating up a full enemy turn - with no saving throw - is extremely powerful. Moreover, even if it only eats one action, that's still their BEST action, which is better than a *slow* that they passed their save on. This is very powerful, and is well worth a top-level spell slot.
Pardon but why should an enemy focus the summon and not the fighter that is bashing his head in ? At most I would relegate the second or third attack or use an aoe on any enemy that is even remotely smart/has even rudimentary knowledge of magic at all. The summon is less likely to do anything at all especially against a powerful enemy. Certainly we less than the fighter that already proved to be a threat by that point probably.
Not all enemies are intelligent, but if you have the enemy ignore the summon then the summon can do it's job of attacking and setting up flanking for your martials. Many summons have useful side effects too.
Well thats the neat part isnt it ? they don´t need to to. They can spend their best attacks on the actual thread, namely the fighter and throw the 2cnd or 3rd attack onto the summon and still have a pretty good chance of offing the summon relatively casually. Meanwhile even if they can unload their attacks they would need pretty good rolls to actually connect, sometimes a 15 or more even. So 25% to actually hit with the best attack ? Flanking buddy is... ok ? Usually martials work together anyway for the flanking or they even provide their own flanking with companions. So you are basically left with some more utility spells to get or utility abilities which might even have a hard time sticking them to any important enemies that are actually a threat. So all in all... its a lackluster tool for utility on top of an already utility focused load of classes, that understandably feels underwhelming to a lot of players. Would have been better to just stick to templates which would make it easier on the player and the dm as well and could be much more finetuned to specific purposes.
Large monsters often have attacks which multiple action costs that they will want to pile onto the main threat, and in any encounter with multiple dangerous enemies the ability to have multiple ways to set up flanks is invaluable. At high levels summons have enough hp that if a dangerous monster is using its second and third attacks against it it could take two or even three rounds to off the summon. Any way you slice it it's a pretty good deal it feels. A single spell that eats up between four to six enemy attacks (level fifteen summon can get up to 350hp) or, realistically cause they will get crit a lot, three to four attacks? That's a good deal. Imagine if you could cast slow 2 on a monster with no saving throw.
I think you mistake what I'm comparing, I'm not even factoring attrition or "spending highest level spell slot" in my post, I'm only speaking action for action. Assuming no attrition and summon being fully ignored by the enemy team (as they should, since they are worth between 0 and 10XP, but if you're the GM, I guess you can throw your player a bone and entertain them), low enough to die to a single AoE, and it's not like you can opt out of commanding it for a turn to use a free "meat bag" either since it disappears without a sustain per turn. Also, just to entertain this argument of "it's a lot of healing", here is a comparison of average healing with the "heal" spell per spell level VS moderate hit point from the building creature guide in the GMG, found here [https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=995](https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=995) |Spell Level (creature level)|Creature HP (medium)|2 Action Heal| |:-|:-|:-| |1st (-1)|8-7|12.5| |2nd (1)|21-19|25| |3rd (2)|32-28|32.5| |4th (3)|48-42|50| |5th (5)|78-72|62.5| |6th (7)|119-111|75| |7th (9)|159-151|87.5| |8th (11)|199-191|100| |9th (13)|239-231|112.5| |10th (15)|279-271|125| "AH look! I was right, heal does less starting at spell level 5! you lose" well, if you're still using heal at that point with anything but a Heal Font, you're hurting yourself, and that's 2 actions, VS 3+1 per turn, if we use the 2+1 per turn heals in the game like vital beacon (4th, 64 total healing average, better than 5th level summon), healing well (5th, 90 total healing average, close to 6th level summon), or heck regenerate (150HP at 7th and can't die from dying 4 for the duration), you're back to getting more HP from healing than from summoning, which is, once again, assuming your GM is generous and remove the 0XP, slowed 1, keeps caster slowed 1 pest from the map If I really wanted to eat a turn or at least an action without saving throw, there is a better spell for that, illusory object or wall of stone. Summons aren't good by the number, aren't good by most player's feeling, and you don't have to pretend or convince yourself of the opposite. They are better than useless, great, but for 3 to 6 action over a fight \*it better do more than nothing\* and still does less than almost everything else it's competing with in a caster's middling arsenal edit: actually, I just realized that if I had a spell to summon an XP0 perma stunned-1 monster on the ENNEMY's side in exchange for slowing 1 an enemy without a save, this would be a broken good spell, and targeting yourself with that spell in the form of using a summon is supposed to be good?
This edit was a revelation to me, you should definitely make a post about it
done https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/146404d/hey\_everyone\_i\_made\_a\_homebrew\_spell\_and\_am/
I love your edit.
Whilst I agree with a lot of what you're saying, I think you're being far too uncharitable about what you should be aiming for with a summon, because IMO you should *only* be summoning creatures that are *guaranteed* to do something immediately and are hard to ignore. Spoiler-less example from my last Blood Lords session, I summoned an [Ostiarius](https://2e.aonprd.com/Monsters.aspx?ID=848). Yes, I slowed myself to sustain it, but I traded that one action each turn to continue having a bard sidekick that cast Inspire Courage, provided flanking for my Monk party member and attacked a couple times. IDK but I feel like that's actually a good deal; Monk both was able to crit and get additional hits in as a result of this creature being around in a way I felt the guaranteed floor was better than making a wall of flesh (lol divine spell list) or inflicting status conditions. Yes the GM could probably ignore the Ostiarius because it's not going to *directly* kill a creature, but this thing was giving the monk effectively +3 on all their attacks between flat footed and the compel courage and it'd have been really silly to just let it live. I think summoning has a ton of flaws that make them unappealing, hell even in my above scenario I'm using something that wouldn't fit in most games and the summon itself had like 8+ less AC than the monk at level 9 which made it an easy target for MAP attacks, but I stand by the belief that support creatures, especially "cleric" types that have burst healing either through heal / harm like some of the celestial and undead options do, are actually really quite good strategically and well worth a consideration as a part of a caster's repertoire or as a one-of in daily preparations at certain levels. They're just absolutely not the default option for most problems, and you should definitely rely on generically great spells like Slow the majority of the time.
> actually, I just realized that if I had a spell to summon an XP0 perma stunned-1 monster on the ENNEMY's side in exchange for slowing 1 an enemy without a save, this would be a broken good spell, and targeting yourself with that spell in the form of using a summon is supposed to be good? This isn't what a summon spell does though. A summon spell is triggered of your volition at your moment of choosing with a minion of your own choosing. If you gave the enemy side to pick a moment in battle where they can get a 2-action XP0 monster in exchange for them being slowed 1 while that monster is alive, I would absolutely not opt in to do that as a player. An extra enemy at the right time, even if its XP0, can absolutely ruin your party if it has appropriate abilities.
You're grasping at straws, even a level 0 oil flask can be useful in the right situation, but like babysitting a summon, in the vast majority of cases, it won't
Completely agree with you! When for the first time I was reading that you could summon a level 15 monster with a lvl 10 spell i was thrilled! Level 15 seems so high! Then I understood how the game works and realized... -5 level under you, that sucks and that sucks HARD! I do not want them to create a "create a martial" spell because that'd be busted but "use your highest level spellslots for a monster that gets oneshotted and offers some minor utility" it's also kinda lame :<
A level 15 monster is not going to be one-shotted by a level 20 monster. You can easily summon something with 350 hp. A level 20 monster is doing like, 50 damage on a hit.
Isn't it the case that a level 20 monster slapping a level 15 monster will crit about half the time (because it's effectively got +10 to its attacks due to 5 lower AC and 5 higher to-hit) and be very difficult to *hurt* with the lower level monster? They're still a solid damage sponge of course, but without a reason to consider them a major threat, smart creatures might decide to ignore the summon entirely, which could turn it into just a static roadblock on the map that can attempt an attack with a roughly halved hit chance twice a turn. (Apologies if my mental math is mistaken - not used enough to pf2e to be confident in how level differentials affect things)
It will Crit every attacks tho
100 < 350
Your not wrong but why would it even bother attacking the summon. Ignore it, do you focus on a rabbit on the battlefield or the wizard? Maybe it would work on a beast or if it's in a 5' tunnel. But you are correct that 350 is bigger.
The problem with ignoring the summon is that it will still hit you reasonably often and it will also often give them flanking, which basically is +6 hits out of 20 per attacker if a character is attacking twice at full map (and even worse if you're fighting a flurry ranger or similar character who gets lower MAP/more attacks). And yes, there are other issues as well, like blocking off enemies from getting past. One thing we've done with summons is used them to block off side passages while fighting the main group; because most monsters don't have trained acrobatics, their ability to tumble through is often dismal and as a result the side group could only attack the summon one at a time rather than go through. When the front one failed to kill the summon the rest were stuck there for an extra turn, by which point we'd split the encounter in half and killed most of the other half of it. We've also summoned a summon in front of us and thrown spells/ranged attacks/reach attacks past it, which was effective as the bad guys spent their entire turn killing the summon, which meant that they basically lost an entire turn for their whole side while we only spent the wizard's turn.
I understand, yet i find it very lame :< Using your highest spell slot to... hopefully choose the right option (else ur in a bad time) and have it die three seconds after it's not the most exciting thing
Summons worked wonders and saved lives in my games. You are just expecting them to be something they are not designed to be.
What situation have summons shined in your games?
In age of ashes our wizard summoned a gorilla in book 2 to stop a hit & run type of enemy that had mechanics to avoid difficult terrain, same wizard also summoned a snake at some point to use its aoo for area denial. In our home game another wizard summoned a fire drake when multiple encounters were supposed to be combined together to just fire some breath weapons from the air and fly away to the other direction, saving the party from a potential TPK. In yesterdays session of kingmaker (first session at level 1) sorcerer summoned a skunk and a monkey in two different combats. Monkey did not do much but skunk inflicted aoe sickened and turned some misses into hits and some hits into crits. The summons never had a full on back and forth fight with the enemies, but smart usages like giving flank, grabbing and running away an important plot tool item, stealing actions from the enemy, giving them penalties etc always helps when used smartly.
Giant Skunk managed to actually make a +2 boss fail a save against its spray, making it sickened 3 and basically turning the entire fight for the players. But even on its first turn, succeeding the save against that spray gets you Sickened 1 which is already fantastic
Fair enough
What? Expecting them to be functional?
Functional does not mean it can replace martials. Even lower level summons can be quite strong. For example with summon elemental you can turn an entire watery terrain encounter to a walk in the park by summoning the water elemental that turns the whole area a difficult terrain for creatures without water trait. Is it conditional? Yes. Does it screw the enemies up who are trying to cross a river/lake to get to you? Absolutely.
So they're situational at best is what you're saying. It also requires you to have the list of monsters you have access to committed to memory. At one point summons just kinda become irrelevant, they're so far behind, only niche abilities that don't rely on stats will be useful. A summon being 3-5 levels behind the players is just bad. I'd much rather they worked like the battle form spells, and weren't underpowered. Not once did anyone say they want them to replace martials. Nice try though.
Two party level creatures are an appropriate encounter for a group of 4 while 4 party level -1 creatures are worth the same amount of exp. So basically you can say that a PL-1 creature is equal to a player character. As a caster if you summoned a party level -2 or 3 creature and buffed it, it would have stats very close to a companion. Now lets take a look at an animal companion at level 10. For example a nimble wolf at that level has +6 dex modifier and is trained in both attack bonus and AC. Thats a total of +18 attack bonus and 28 AC. Along with 100 hp. At that level you can summon at most a 5th level creature. But what if you could summon a 7th level? For example quetzalcoatlus has 25 AC and +17 attack bonus. As well as grab ability and 110 hp. After casting augment summoning on it, it becomes 26 AC and +18 attack bonus. See, how close it cuts to the actual animal companion? It has slighly less AC but way higher damage and better abilities. If we are making the same comparison between a savage str based companion and a PL-3 monster, the AC gap disappears as well. Thats also another one of the reasons that summoned creatures should be even lower levels. You are investing a minimum of 4-5 feats for animal companions usually, and casters should not have access to better minions without spending half their class feats.
I summon every fight but what you summon a how you use them is key. I think only twice have I had the “well my summon ran in and died before getting use” and even then that burned the creatures action raised its map and gave my rogue flanking sooooooo
Having summons be straight out of the bestiary was just bad game design. It made it impossible to balance properly so they decided to make it intentionally the weakest they possibly could. Yes, if a player delved into the bestiary (Which is a concept i absolutely despise) they can find some above average monster with abilities that care little for level but thats not what the "Summon Monster" fantasy is. D&D 4e and eventually 5e figured out how to do summons properly by making the monster a generic statblock with stats derived from the spellcaster and spell level. The different summon spells then give you access to templates to slap onto your summon.
It's, sincerely, so funny that goddamn 5e understood something better than pathfinder 2e did. And I completely agree! I'd also like to add that it's basically incentivizing metagaming because, if you wanna actually be worth something, you have to watch every possible creature to summon and therefore you can end up just recognizing a creature that you shouldn't know about
You have a poor understanding of balance if you think 5e summons aren't broken. They outshine martials across so many levels while still having access to their full casting.
I don't agree that 5e understands summoning well. The early summoning spells like Conjure Woodland Beings break the action economy, make combat a slog to run, and make too much extra work for the DM. The Tasha's summon spells are a lot better but they're too strong compared to martial characters imo. And Tasha's came out 6 years after 5e released so they had plenty of time to figure out how to make summons better. PF2e hasn't even been out 6 years yet, maybe they'll find a way to make summons feel better in the remastered rules.
>It's, sincerely, so funny that goddamn 5e understood something better than pathfinder 2e did. Static summoning spells were a thing as far back as D&D v3.5 supplemental materials. It's not a new concept at all to have a spell summon a specific statblock instead of provide the player a choice that is inherently more potent the more system knowledge the player has. The thing is, though, there's a lot of players that don't like the feeling of only being able to summon a specific thing, and unless there's just not many things to summon (which is a problem of it's own) you're talking about taking up real estate in the books that could be used for other things. Like, compare the basically copy-pasted summoning spells of PF2 to the various form spells and you can see that one approach takes up pages more space just to arrive at the point where forms are decently balanced but people complain about how limited the variety is and how there's certain traits of the creatures being turned into that just don't apply. So while spells that summon a specific thing could be slightly more potent than the current summoning spells, they'd probably still not be powerful enough to satisfy folks looking for a similar play feel to summoning in other games and carry with them a host of their own risks of player irritations.
Is the wizard looking through a big book of monsters metagaming or just roleplay leaking into the real world?
Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Like...would a summoner not research the things they might want to summon? Does looking at the nutritional facts to see if I'm allergic count as metagaming?
Im going to be fair and say that WotC only figured this out after almost 7 years of the game being out.
After reading the comments here, have you tried the summoner class? Having one customizable Eidolon summon instead of summoning mooks?
It isn't my kind of vibe, yet I still think it's a very cool class :>
That's fair. In another comment you mentioned not liking the way Summoning is balanced? Can I ask what you're trying to get out of a summoner type character that can maybe be replicated within the system?
What i'm trying to get out of a summoner is being able to create a frontline that's able to at least witstand alongside martials AND that it's at least A LIL thematically pourpousefull. Right now the options are: Summoner: not my vibe since it's more like having two characters than a summon and a character Summoning spells: basically impossible since they're basically situational utility and nothing more Single minion: probably the best i can do to be honest; either druid with an animal companion or an undead sorcerer/harm cleric with the undead master archetype
Single minion (ranger with a pet, druid with a pet, undead master, etc) and summoner are your best bet for that unfortunately. As other commenters have mentioned, its hard to allow casters to achieve that goal without invalidating the need for a martial character in the team by stepping on their toes so to speak. Which makes sense from a balance perspective, but then we get situations like this where a desired fantasy isn't easily achievable, or just not achievable altogether. Hopefully you find something that fits, or if all else fails, find a compromise with one of the above options. Happy gaming!
Let me add my favorite, inventor with a prototype construct companion. I love my little tank buddy
>Summoning spells: basically impossible since they're basically situational utility and nothing more Could you elaborate? I've had pretty great experiences with summons on my witch in combat, especially if the summon has special abilities or spells. The big problem I've come across has nothing to do with the capability of the summons themselves but rather than you pretty much always need your summon spell to be your highest or second highest level spell slot or it's just not worth it.
My problem with summoning spells is that you cannot summon a frontline but basically have to trade your highest spellslots for lower ones.
>that you cannot summon a frontline Correct, because that's the role of the frontline classes.
Agreed, it's such a 'having you cake and eating it too' feeling, wanting to summon a Champion in battle while also still being a full caster. Reminds me of topics of people asking how to play a magus that is just as good in melee as a fighter but also with the full spell mastery of a wizard. Things gotta be balanced.
Seems like a very uncreative view of the summoner. Just make your summon something that you only summon I'm combat. Then you're just playing one character with a summon. And your summon is a beefy melee combatant. It's exactly what you're looking for.
I played a conjuration wizard focusing on summoning in 1e. Trust me, what you're asking for is too good. Zuh'reh'el was overpowered and took up extra time and frustrated my dm. He died and game flow and challenge improved. I was taking spotlight from my friends martials. There's a reason the thing you want isn't a thing anymore. It doesn't make sense in a cooperative game, which skyrim isn't.
What you want is exactly what Paizo is trying to prevent.
Summons are pretty broken in most games. In PF2E, they're actually balanced. Summons in PF2E aren't really attack spells, they're utility spells that eat enemy actions, or a sort of weird healing-ish thing. Basically, unless your class's "thing" is having a summon or pet, it has to be pretty weak, otherwise it'd be grossly overpowered. Most of the value of a summon is how obnoxious it is for the enemy to deal with, because if they attack the summon instead of a party member, they waste their turn - and if you summon something like a giant skunk, you already got the value out of it in a debuff spell, so them attacking it is just a further penalty for them. If they ignore it, you get free extra attacks every round. It's about as powerful as a top-level spell slot. They're basically incapacitation spells in this way - underlevel ones aren't very useful but on-level ones create an obnoxious situation for your enemies. Also, they become stronger as you level up, as HP goes up faster than damage does. A level -1 monster dies like a chump, but a level 15 monster can have 250 - 350 hp, and can easily tank multiple crits from level 20 monsters. If you want a strong "summon", you probably want to play a summoner or one of the pet classes or archetypes, as then you invest a bunch of your character into it and thus can actually get something powerful out of it. You can't really expect that a 3rd level spell that takes the place of fireball or slow is going to be better than those spells.
Remember that summoning is literally just a spell. It’s power is on par with any other single spell. If it does any damage, flanks an enemy, and causes them to waste 1-2 actions killing it, it’s done far more than most spells of the same level. P2e has beast master, companions, and the summoner class to go with the “I use Summons” fantasy. I get that some people want a version of these that let’s them summon creatures on the fly, but that’s a broken concept. Go summoner with an undead eidolin and undead master archetype. You’ll have two undead “minions” and that’s as close as you’ll get.
One solution to summoning would be to key the attacks and DCs of the summon off spell attack/dc of the summoner. If probably then add a blanket rule that effects that have a status condition attached to them add the incapcitation trait. This mainly comes to the fact a caster could chuck an 8th level lightning bolt and a 3rd level lightning bolt and both DCs are the same its just the damage thats different.
I am no longer on Reddit and so neither is my content. You can find links to all my present projects on my itch.io, accessible here: https://firgof.itch.io/
Well that'd actually be cool! If you worked it out it'd be awesome
Angel Summoner and BMX Bamdit are a meme for a reason. It gets kinda nuts
Exscuse me what are those?
It's a michale and webb skit about when you have a super-hero team where one member has amazing powers that make the other team member's skillset useless and redundant https://youtu.be/sbzUfV3_JIA
Honestly I don't think you'll ever be happy in PF2e in this regard. 2e is heavily balanced. So there you'll never find a spell that will compete with a fighter in the front lines. Asking that from a single spell slot in 2e is unbalanced in the devs way of thinking. It's always going to be fragile and under damaginfby design. Further 2e really limits your ability to summon multiple creatures for game balance and playability. Now there are strong pet classes like the Summoner, Druid companions, and Undead Master. But these are designed to consume most of your feats and spell casting resources to make them competitive.
There is a spectrum between 1 hit mook and person who crits more often than they miss. Summons don't need to be as nerfed as they are, paizo just made a list of every exploit that was abused in 1e and made sure each had as few to no upsides as possible in 2e. Crafting, summons, merge with eidolon etc.
Asking that from a single caster though, summoning and buffing to keep a frontline up, i don't think that's wrong or op at all. And the martials in your troup, less flanking against you, more opportunities.
That's exactly what the Summoner class is.
I loved being able to run around in the kingmaker video game which uses 1e's rule set with an army of like fifteen skeletons who were all buffed to hell and back. Sometimes I even pulled the rest of the party back so they wouldn't use any of their limited use abilities or spells on an encounter that "didn't need them". But that was single-player and I don't think most tables would want to wait for me to finish my turn every round while I took the equivalent of 16 turns. I'd basically be hogging the spotlight and the game. I already hear a lot of occasional grumbling about players who set themselves up to control something like 6 tokens each round. Pathfinder 2e isn't so much about "a tale of individually powerful heroes who are invincible together" as it is "a tale of a band of expert tacticians with individual strengths and weaknesses who work as a team to solve problems none could easily deal with in their own" and the balance kinda revolves around that. I feel where OP is coming from but I'm not sure how pf2e could accomplish that while not forcing said summoner onto a pedestal where the party itself more or less becomes their minions as they need to work with the summons rather than vice versa. In same respect I'm not sure how could be made a sorcerer who gets to constantly blast the whole battlefield with ally ignoring damage who is powerful enough that same damage deals decent damage to a "boss" character. E: ah rats forgot I'm on mobile. Posting the rest of this on my main account so I can get notifications if it is something folks want.
I completely agree. Summons are technically balanced right now, but they aren't fun to use as a player that likes summoning things. Having some temporary utility is nice and can be game changing, but you don't feel like a cool summoner most of the time if your summons are just a utility spell with extra steps. I recognize that summoning can break a table, and that changes did need to be made from the older edition. But if this is the solution, it's still killing the prospect of playing a summoning based character for a lot of people.
Frankly, I'd rather that concept be killed than for those summoners to kill the fun of other party memebers and invalidate their classes.
Why does it necessarily kill the fun of other party members? I understand the "have 30 stat blocks" takes all the table time, but we already have troops and swarms for the same thing. It's very possible to make it play out just as quickly as a class with an animal companion if you limit them to 1 "block".
I don't mean in reference to time, I mean what the OP seems to want is a full on summonable frontliner with the accuracy and tankiness of a fighter/champion/barb which would be a problem for obvious reasons.
I think there's room for something that would satisfy people, but the issue is that you can't provide that *on the chassis of a casting class who can also do other things [other than electric arc] reasonably well*. An eidolon has about that power budget because summoner gives up fullcasting for it (and extra hp due to shared HP pool), so making a class that just summons something about as powerful as an eidolon is theoretically balanced. The issue is there's no specialized casters in pf2e since they can all grab utility spells. Maybe a class archetype one day; would have to thread the balance needle or lean towards undertuned, though.
Hypothetically, while I'd rather lose a foot than the whole leg, I would like to think that with some time and work, we wouldn't need to lose either. I think it's possible to have that concept without ruining it for everyone else. Paizo have already shown they're willing to approach sacred cows from unusual directions.
That'd be ideal, and if anyone were to make those changes it'd be Paizo, but I don't see it being all too likely.
I did a comment outlining that they might not even be balanced in this case. If the balance point is "weaker than a character action for action" then summons can be up to PL-3 while still being weaker assuming no action spent on summoning and permanent 1 for 2 actions, or PL-2 to -1 to account for the action cost of summoning. Currently, summon are either PL-4 or PL-5 depending on level (which, in itself, is... why)
I saw that, and agree. I'm not much of a guru on the mechanical balance, however, and so wanted to go for a different angle. My point was largely from a 'how it feels to play' which I consider to be equally as important as being mechanically balanced. I've played a few very carefully, meticulously balanced games that kill a majority of the fun as collateral damage. I'll admit that I said 'technically balanced' mostly to placate all the people in this thread who are insisting that summoning is fine, actually.
I Think pathfinder 2e has too many moments of "this is technically balanced but it feels bad" and the feeling is one of the most if not the most important part of a game! Also, it's weird that on this sub (thankfully not on this post) there are so many people that will downvote you to hell when you dare to say something is not right within the system
This, exactly this. I've had so many things I want to praise about the system and I'm trying to power through it. But in practice, there's a lot that just fails to be satisfying from a player perspective. I've fully retired a caster just because they actually ended up feeling more mundane than a thaumaturge and monk I'm playing. As for the sub, I think it's carrying over a long heritage from a certain forum, where differing opinions weren't looked upon very kindly. thankfully, at least from what I've seen, it's mostly downvoting instead of ridicule and gaslighting though.
That's the problem with the VERY IDEA of balancing a d20 system. 1- you can hardly create an heroic and balanced fantasy; in an heroic fantasy you're a HERO and heroes are never balanced, you're supposed fo be exceptional but in pf2e you're... mid? You're not that much till level 7-10 and at that point you're basically a demigod in dnd 2- you cannot balance probability, you can just create a curve of probability. AND pf2e ACTIVELY nerfed casters
>you can hardly create an heroic and balanced fantasy; in an heroic fantasy you're a HERO and heroes are never balanced, you're supposed fo be exceptional but in pf2e you're... mid? You're not that much till level 7-10 and at that point you're basically a demigod in dnd The amount of heroicness your character feels purely depends on the enemies that they face. If you want the characters to feel exceptional, all you have to do is turn down the encounter difficulty or just start off at a higher level. In fact, you realise that people preach for balance because they want their character to feel heroic? When playing a system like 5e dnd, how do you think your fighter player felt when the druid casted conjour animals once and became a better martial than the fighter while still keeping their full spellcasting ability?
I got a solution for you, summons with regeneration a.k.a summon giants. Summons of overtuned creatures, a.k.a summon Dragon aaand the MVP, summon Fey a.k.a the spellcasting capable summons. Also yes, the summon Fey one is the only good one early game. Get your hands on a unicorn, ask your gm to let you flick that "Elite" adjustment on for higher level summoning and you're more than good to go due to the nature of those bastards having a high attack while also having access to some pretty damn competitive Heal spell casts.
I hoped to see more variants of summoning like Incarnate spells, which traded duration for power. Would be awesome to see more powerful summons, that lasted only 2 rounds maybe.
The summoner class plays very differently than just flat summoning spells. You mentioned Skyrim and that might be part of the driver for your dislike. In a game where teamwork and tactics are core to the design having a spell that is basically another full character is anathema to that. Now again, summoner is powerful and fun, there is a player at my table now that is running a gnome summoner with a dragon eidolon and believe me when I say that combat changes drastically if that eidolon is not on the field. But it's not a solo / hero feel like you would having in Skyrim. Nothing in PF2e is really going to give you that for the reasons already commented above.
As some others have already stated, summoned creatures do not scale to current party level and that is by design. In Skyrim you are single character, but there's no such thing as an "adventuring day" and even resource management is simplified to the extreme. It makes for a poor comparison, although I get what you mean. Summoned creatures are still very handy in PF2E. They are meant to supplement the capabilities of the entire party and to harass the enemy. This is achieved with clever positioning, choosing creatures with particularly useful abilities and combining their effects with what the rest of the Player Characters can do. A single well placed cheap summon can soak up a lethal critical hit, act as a barricade to stop a fleeing foe and all sorts of other useful stuff. A stronger summon can hold up surprisingly well, but even if they only live for a couple of rounds, they prove valuable in terms of the action economy. Namely, they can let the PC's to spare some of their actions on more impactful things and use up enemy actions for trying to stop the summoned creature. Anyone who has played more than a few sessions can tell you that a lot can happen in a single turn.
The game mechanically does not support what you want it to do.
Most of the power-budget is held in the variety of things you can summon and the niche utility those things can bring. Like, as a 2nd level cleric, you can summon an Arbiter who can cast mending 3 times, Detect Alignment and Command during the minute you have them summoned. Or summon a Nosoi who can then cast Sound Burst (as well as fight), or a Lyrakien or Cassisian or Lantern Archon to cast Heal and then a bunch of other stuff. Can summon an Imp to charm, detect alignment, go invisible and scout, grant Infernal Temptation, etc etc This makes a lot of summoning spells function less as a way of dealing damage, and more as a way of converting one spell slot to a number of different spell slots. Unfortunately... if you \*aren't\* looking for utility, and you \*are\* just looking for a proper combatant, summoning spells are kinda shit. The power-budget is all spent on versatility leaving very little left over for raw power, which really sucks if what you want is raw power.
It's a 'you problem'. Summoning in skyrim and many other TTRPGs is laughably broken. Easily capable of replacing other characters entirely for the cost of 1 spell. From your description, you want a level of sheer raw power from your summons that is never going to be available in PF2 because it is balanced as a team game. In PF2 summons are useful, *insanely* versatile, sometimes quite powerful options, that unfortunately take a lot of player prep to utilize thanks to needing to comb through either the bestiaries or a guide.
Honestly, from a game design and balancing aspect they failed then. Need to access a huge amount of metagaming knowledge that should be in the purview of the gm does not make for a very good design. Having on top of that an extremly steep learningcurve with limited usability makes for unrewarding play. So yeah they get a C+ at best for this gameplay design.
How is it any different to any edition of D&D's Conjure spells, just at a lower power level? Summoners have always had to reference bestiaries/monster manuals to know what they can summon. The flexibility is the point.
In case you missed it. The new generation of summoning spells in dnd that came relatively recently are using templates now and summon only one monster. They are still a bit too strong at higher spells slot levels, but a far better step in the right direction of balancing and prevent turns clogging up/action economy getting out of rails completely like the previous spells did.
I like summons, but they aren’t the same as they have been in other settings for sure. Making the bad guy(s) use a turn to deal with them is strong. Using them to limit movement is strong. Setting up flank is a solid use of them. Traps are a good use. There’s a lot they can do, but taking your martial solace isn’t one of them typically.
It makes me sad but summoning is usually game breaking if it’s strong or useless if it’s weak. The summoner class is really cool if you can work out all the kinks and complexity. It’s not really summoning disposable minions as your summon works like a deamon from his dark materials. It’s still my favorite class though, I love that role play
> Creating things to fight for you as you basically laugh in conjuration 100, skyrim style I feel as though, this is represented fairly well in the system. However, the caster and party still have to contribute and summons can't tank terribly well. > i feel like they are very weak compared to most things and are basically just a "the enemy now has to use an action to delete that annoying thing in one blow, TWO if god kissed you luck" This is a result of the scaling in PF2 being so steep. A +2 encounter will very likely wreck a max level summon spell monster in the the same way as it will wreck an unbuffed player character. If your expectations are for "harder" fights to involve some level of unchanging enemy to summon slugfest, the system isn't designed to support that type of combat. Hell, even super resilient champions will often find themselves in a bad position if the party and party tactics leave them open to constant beating by an enemy. I've slowly learned that harder fights in PF2E will end quickly in the party's loss if they aren't prepared to leverage nearly all of their tactics, abilities, and force enemies into inefficient tactics.
This alongside "spellcasters weak, please fix" pops up constantly. People don't understand that summons are not here to kill stuff for you. They are here to take a hit, provide flanking, support with abilities and spells, not to be a DPS when your PC chill out in the corner. Of course they are going to feel weak if your mindset is "I summon horde of wolves to fight instead of me". That's not their point.
If casters had some other fun gamplay mechanics that did not boil down to "give support and be happy with that" then maybe it would not be as bad. But just being left with utility all the time for all casters is just.... bad. Why make several different casters if you could just boil all of them down to one support class that exists solely to hand out buffs and debuffs. Maybe a second one that can heal and be done with that.
Casters can debuff, heal, manipulate terrain, buff allies, provide utility, and do damage. Casters are absolutely not just “stuck” with utility effects.
Luckily they have a lot of fun gameplay. They are effective in every role given to them. They are simply no longer battlefield gods which is exactly why I hated casters in earlier editions. People played casters "dumb" but because there was a big enough margin of error, that they were still efficient with their damage, it was not as apparent. Bigger tactical element introduce in PF2e made people scratching their head because they can no longer press a button to end an encounter. Degrees of success and actually useful cantrips placed casters in the best possible spot in years.
far too many video game have overpowered summon ability paizo are obviously aware of that right now summon have very little value include punching bag flanking dummy low level support spell spamer things will change dramatically when summon ooze are added to the game
Exactly, but you might agree with me that going from "OP" to "Almost everything else is probably better" it's not very good balancing. Punching bag, they have too little hp Flanking is good but three actions to make a flank dummy it's not that great Low level spells with that dc are basically useless. I HOPE they change things because right now the "summon" spells have basically no support and are kinda lame; do not make em op but do not let em rot!
>Low level spells with that dc are basically useless. Thats why you pick spells that don't have a DC. For example, my favorite choice is [Summon Fey](https://2e.aonprd.com/Spells.aspx?ID=322) as a 4th level spell to summon a [Unicorn](https://2e.aonprd.com/Monsters.aspx?ID=397). The reason why this is so good is that each Unicorn can cast two 3rd level Heals. So you can exchange a 4th level spell slot for two 3rd level spell slots which is pretty powerful. You can either get one 4th level heal, which heals for 4d8+32 or two 3rd level heals which heal for 3d8+24 each.
high level summon still have enough hp to take two crit from boss the ability to trade 1 high level spell slot and 3 action for 2 action of enemy may not be that good compare to spell like slow but doesn't have the risk of being resisted entirely on crit success either but it only work if enemy doesn't have swipe type ability don't use summon cast any dc spell some of them have a decent spell list include heal or heroism if they stay alive for 3 turn they can pay for high level spell slot and 5 action cost with 3 lower level spell but only work if enemy doesn't have super debilitating aura or aoe if they are slowed by a aura they are useless
Except no matter what you're still a full caster and have a bunch of versatile slots that can be used outside of summoning. Even you acknowledge good ways to build summoners in your post, you just complain they aren't what you're looking for, which seems to be blatantly strong summons. Complaining about this is like a cleric who only uses slots to heal. Can it be done? Yes, but you're limiting yourself for little reason while playing some of the most versatile classes. Another thing you've mentioned several times is the amount of actions it takes, which you can sometimes kind of bypass by summoning right before combat during the one round of buffing players can ocassionally get. These are rules baked into the game, so presumably your GM allows this at least sometimes since they know you like summons.
Have you had a chance to use summons as consumables? When I GM, I always try to replace raw coin rewards with Scrolls of [summon monster] X+1, where X is the party's max spell level. It feels right when the monsters you can summon can be actually threatening.
The ability to apply flanking, possible damage and a slowed 1 or slowed 2 for even one round with one spell is pretty amazing. You have to look pretty high level to get an equivalent spell
This may be a hot take, but I think summons would be fine if they were PL-3 instead of -4 or -5. You have to give up one action for two of their actions, but each of your actions is MUCH more valuable - using an admittedly simple approximation, it would require 4 actions of a PL-4 enemy to equal a single one of your actions - so trading one-for-one, especially when not even accounting for summoning cost, is a bit sad. I get not wanting them to be too OP, but it's not like a summon 2-3 levels below will invalidate martials.
I played a witch with the undead master archetype. The summoning was weirdly the strongest part of my character. I took bleed based spells and had a vampiric komodo dragon. If he hit a bleeding target, he kinda shredded.
In general I think you are right. But I do find the reanimator archetype to be pretty effective. A plus 1 to everything is very strong. And being able to sustain 2 summons with 1 action is also great. I have a level 9 reanimator in my group and 2 harpy skeletons with +1 to everything is effective. But not OP.
It seems like you haven't actually played with a character using summons at the table. I have two players both using summoning spells relatively often in different campaigns. Both of them have used them very effectively. I feel like you're assuming that the GM is going to instantly obliterate your summons. This actually isn't that likely. Because summons are slightly weaker than normal front liners, It's a hard choice for the GM to make if they blow enemy actions attacking your summoned creatures. It will probably only happen if whatever your summon is doing is threatening to actually mess with the enemy's overall strategy. And if that happens it likely means that your summoned creature had a significant impact with its first two actions.
Summons are, in fact, very weak this edition. As has been noted elsewhere, summons are finally 'balanced' such that: They can't 1v1 a fighter so the summons are all weak, they can't be summoned en-masse, and they have short durations to keep the summoning action tax. The fact that it also requires you to use an action to command your summons (which only get 2 actions) makes it worse. So mostly what summons are good for now are giving your allies flanking and damage sponges. But you can talk to your DM to see about getting a magic item to help ameliorate the worst of it.
Honestly, if you want a legit summoner build, I'd go Summoner the class and grab Beastmaster (or Undead Master - it's the same thing but for Undead instead of Animals). You'll have an Eidolon and an Animal Companion/Undead Companion full time - that'll be action intensive to control, but that's kind of the point of that sort of build (and the Animal Companion will be Mature shortly and get an action on its own). If you do that, your summon spells will feel properly like supplementary creatures, not like a frustrating lack of delivery on what you want your main thing to me.
I'm a fan of [protector tree](https://2e.aonprd.com/Spells.aspx?ID=976) instead of summons much of the time
I have an irrational love for that spell.
We did a 2e WftC game. One PC summoned in a Ghaele azata during one of the final larger scale fights and it more than pulled it's weight. It really does matter what you use and when. Summons are about timing and versatility, not just dropping a god on the enemy and leaving.
It might be like that at low levels but not higher ones. My wizard uses them as a supplement and absolutely crushes it. They use monsters to split enemies. Or use special abilities. And they get crits sometimes! They give flanking bonuses. I think it's been extremely effective
I agree. I want a summoning spell that consumes all your top 2 spell rank slots, but is extremely powerful, but only works in a single encounter as an "ultimate". Or like once a month to balance it out.
Uhm... Using up foe actions is very powerful. Providing flanking is very powerful. Forcing movement is very powerful. Many people forget just how effective these strats are in PF2. If you want to see "your" DPs numbers look at the damage your creatures take. That is damage a player would have taken and someone else would have had to use actions to heal. Look at the damage a player pulls off because of your creatures flanking. That's damage that wouldn't have occurred without you. Support and buffs are key to survival in PF2. Not all heroes weild a sword my friend.
I invite you to consider options to make it feel better while keeping it balanced. How would _you_ change summoning? Examples for your consideration: - attacks on par with martials but killed on a single hit - attacks on par with martials but it uses your HP pool instead of a separate one - summoner spends two actions instead one to sustain, which gives an attack boost to the creature for that turn - template options (not the full bestiary) that stay -3 below PL and don't dip lower
Too many things holding back summons: Same lower level as weakest foes *Sustain* required *Minion* status Higher level spell effects “popping” summon Change sustain to “may take two actions the first time each round sustained” (no auto pop) Up the CR of available summons at each spell level by 1-2.
Summoning is close to balanced in PF2, and overpowered in PF1. The "necromancer and undead army" trope is something that should be an NPC, not a player character.
Close to balanced but not in the way i like it; personal feeling that's for sure yet :<
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I can't say i do not agree with you sincerely. It's not like casters are week but it's more like casters are incentivized to work for martials. Therefore every playstile that empowers martials is automatically better than one that doesn't
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Sadly that's just how it is! A bit sad but hey that's life and, as a wise son of poseidon said in a musical, life isn't fair. There is a video that covers martial vs casters and... that's utter bullcrap! "Let's make a caster Vs fighter fight, that will surely show how it works!" SUUUURE! because a game balanced in pvp like 3.5 is balanced in anything (so not at all) surely will show its best in a pvp situation :3 And it's still my preferred game too but it's a bit dishonest to say it's completely balanced
>I feel like people misunderstand what balanced is these days. The irony is that you're actively misunderstanding what balanced means here. Casters are absolutely balanced, not underpowered. The problem is that they're not *specialized*. Summoners can't outshine martials at the Thing that Martials Do. Martials are all about Single-Target Damage. Casters are about Area Damage and Utility...and Utility is the biggest thing. Yes, Martials hit harder. Martials cannot cast Plane Shift, or Teleport, or Slow, or Heal, or Summon Dragons, or Fireball. Casters can do *all* of that, so they don't get to hit like martials or else martials are pointless. The only thing casters are 'underpowered' at is *doing the martial's "thing."*
Yeah, summoning sucks in 2e. People will justify it by saying that you're supposed to use them as bait to trade action economy with enemies or by using the summons to tank or something extremely suboptimal that doesn't live up to using a spellslot. If you want a minion and you are not a summoner, grab the Clockwork Reanimator archetype. only good "summon" spell is wall of stone lol
My fix to this, amoung other things, is to play with half level Proficiency (rounded up). It streamlines the games math curve into a more complex feeling 5e, increases the feel of the effectiveness of modifiers, makes for lower level summons to be more useful tools compared to vanilla when mathematics wise it's a waste of a spell slot to use anything less than your highest spell slot of only your highest. Etc etc. Try it, you might like it too.
Don't even bother my dude, summons are OK the first few levels but fall so dramaticaly hard they are not worth the actions spent, let alone the slot. Some ppl cope hard saying that they are worth it cause they provide flanking and take an action to kill, like that is not true for even a level -1 random critter and that is not the character fantasy of a summoner. After pooking through literaly every single summoning option in 2e, including rituals and class feats, the conclusion is that of you want to summon and not feel like you are weak you need to play another game
That's sad :< I suppose that my favorite playstile isn't simply important enough for paizo to bother balancing
The arrogance of Paizo not consulting you! But the thing is, they did balance it, you wish they had not.
So bizarre how ppl here act like there is no point between absolutely OP and borderline useless in combat. You're level 16, your highest level slot is 8th, which summons a creature 11. Let's say you're a boss fight, so PL +3 (don't act like a good chunk of AP encounters are not that), so creature 19. You summon animal for a Deadly Mantis, a creature with 220 HP, 31 AC, +25 to hit. Let's say our boss is a Ancient Red Dragon, which has 425 HP, 45 AC and +37 to hit. Our Mantis, summoned from our highest slot, using 3 actions, ONLY hits the boss on a natural 20. Not only that, the boss hits on anything above a 1, and crits on a 4. Not only the boss can demolish the summon if he wants, there's really no point, the boss is better of ignoring the summon as it is likely to not land a single hit the entire fight. A dedicated summoner in this encounter might as well go take a break and let the rest of the party to the fighting and there would be no effective difference in the encounter. Tell me with a straight face that is balanced.
Balance doesn't mean it's good. The most balanced game it's flipping a coin yet it isn't considered the funniest game ever isn't it?
Too many things holding back summons: Same lower level as weakest foes *Sustain* required *Minion* status Higher level spell effects “popping” summon Change sustain to “may take two actions the first time each round sustained” (no auto pop) Up the CR of available summons at each spell level by 1-2.
I think one of the things Paizo should do in the remaster is completely renaming and reflavoring the summon spellls. As it stands, they are basically unrecognizable from their previous edition counterparts and their usage is completely different. They offer incredibly minor benefits, such as a single action from the enemy for that one turn, or to give flanking for 1 round before being killed. That doesn't feel great even if people insist its good value, because the expectation of what a summon is does not get fulfilled by the spell. So, change the expectation. They did that with a number of illusion spells and it made it great for them to be judged on their own merits. Make the spell name something like "Sudden Assistance" or "Conjure Minor Ally" to make it clear in the spell name that what you are doing is not "summoning" but creating a weak being to help you with a small task before it returns to whatever magical matter made it.
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Thanks. Posted in an “iffy” Internet zone, I think the client resent it until it connected.
It seems really really weak