ModelCitizen wrote:TheFlatline wrote:
How does this equate to Pathfinder sucking? Well, apparently it's really fucking easy to make completely worthless and inefficient characters, which was the main complaint in 3.x. I mean, in a party of six, four of them were combat ineffective. Of those four, one was forced by the DM (summoner), one is playing a diplomancer bard, one is an idiot when it comes to games like this, and one loves to come up with weird character ideas that rarely are very efficient (In this case, a force mage that only casts force spells).
If that mage sucks he built it wrong. I'm pretty sure I could build a force/telekinesis themed sorc that would make your DM cry.
Yeah that was my friend's original intent, then at level 5 the DM ruled that he couldn't use any 3.x books, and had to pull out any 3.x material used in his character. We never actually got a reason why beyond "Well, I don't want to play 3.5, I want to play pathfinder". So he got kneecapped there, but instead of saying fuck it and making an effective mage he kept on the theme.
Actually, I think a summoner is better if he take the master summoner archetype, use a skill-based eidolon (eg a face eidolon or a trap-disabler eidolon) that he doesn't summon except when he needs the skill, and spams standard actions augmented summon monsters.
Actually, this is the conclusion the summoner, fighter, and myself came to. The eidolon is at it's best as an odd utility creature (we figured in a city/multilayered/dense environment it'd actually kick 12 kinds of ass), but in a barren room with a straight up fight it's just not that useful compared to the rest of the party. Once we got to sit down and actually *read* the summoner class (because there was only one copy of the book and the DM bull rushed the summoner down the eidolon path), we respecced his character to an equal level with the master summoner path and his efficiency went up by about 500%. I mean, his summons last minutes per level instead of rounds, allowing you to basically quickly become an armchair general. However, it still was overkill because the DM apparently can't run combat with more than one NPC/monster. It's just too much to keep track of or something.