The Gaming Den

I have no idea why they would nerf summoner.

I mean, the only reason to play a summoner over a wizard with Acadamae Graduate or an Occultist Arcanist is the Eidolon feature but with Evolved Summoned Monster/Evolved Animal Companion in play the Eidolon isn't even that dominating. Two celestial/fiendish/etc. $MONSTER with the claws evolution from that feat will do more damage than an Eidolon ever will. I mean, yes, the Eidolon offers an action advantage and several other tricks but it's not worth the reduced functionality spellcasting despite being the best reduced functionality spellcasting list in Paizo.

As long as wizards remain crazy-town powerful as they do in Pathfinder, it's a waste of time. All of the abusive-non-infinite loop tricks in Pathfinder still exist, just turbocharged; and Pathfinder even added a few more viable wizard builds. Like the summoner wizard and an actually useful blaster wizard.

* Start with 1d3 earth elementals for SM3, dire boars for SM4, tigers for SM5, dire tigers for SM6, ankylosaurs for SM7, then t-rexes for SM8.

I mean, they nerfed it because lots of people on their forums wanted them to nerf it. For a game company that is generally enough. As to why people wanted it nerfed I think it is because an Eidolon is individually, obviously, and persistently better than a Fighter or a given combat summon.

People suck at tacking overall damage, so when you summon a handful of Augmented Evolved Celestial Dire Whatevers each doing X dpr with Y HP they can still "feel" weaker than one critter with 1.75x DPR and 1.75 Y HP, even though that one being is doing less damage and worse at vital jobs like "standing in the way" and "not losing to one spell." They also have lower numbers (even if greater efficacy), whereas the Eidolon can compare stat line to stat line with a PC. Finally people try to defend against summons in this comparison with "well, you only get them so long per day," regardless of whether or not that is more than long enough to do everything you want. So with an Eidolon that can sit at camp and waste time just as well as the "always on" Fighter, it is a more obvious issue.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:It just sounds like Pathfinder is trying to puff up their version of Unearthed Arcana. Big deal. 3E D&D made it part of the SRD; how many alternate class versions of the core classes did you see in games? If Pathfinder Unchained goes over like UA did, people are just going to cannibalize the mechanics that they like (which was pretty much just gestalt classes and flaws) and ignore all of the nerfs.

If Pathfinder wants to nerf shit in a manner more definitive than and less passive aggressive than the FAQ, they need to do it Orwellian 4E D&D style.

Actually, I've never been in a group that play gestalt. And flaws are usually nerfed before allowed in play. But I see the alternate class features quite often (only because they are on the SRD though).

Jason Buhlman wrote:As per usual, we can never please everyone...

Couple of notes folks.

1. The summoner spell list has been a problem for years. It was supposed to be swapped out back before the book came out and at the time, we were not doing any spot erratas so the wrong list has stuck around. This is our chance to fix it along with the other problems of the class.

This is our chance to fix (read: nerf the shit out of) the summoner reads as very 4e style (buy the books for our errata/nerfs)

I'm surprised anybody buys Bulmahn's party line. All you have to do is take a critical eye to anything he's written to realize he is clueless.

Summoner isn't even as broken as core classes but it gets so much hate simply because it makes martial combatants that don't cast spells look bad and its like, no shit. Pathfinder is 3.5 Houserules and a Summoner is a d8, 3/4 BAB full caster in disguise with a Druid's Animal Companion.

I wonder what their 3.5 Unearthed Arcana 14 Years After Unearthed Arcana Came Out will do to fix Monks. Probably give them something worse than d10 and full BAB and go, "problem solved!"

Calling it now: the only significant change to the barbarian will be that rage cycling is banned.

The Summoner is broken. In the sense that if the average Timmy who plays the Summoner has trouble keeping track of all his class features and will slow the game to a crawl at least once a combat to summon some novel monster. So the fix will be to nerf it by reducing its options. Pathfinder is not made for us, so the fixes will never make us happy. It should keep the Timmy's under control.

As for the Barbarian, banning rage cycling is a good call. I will also predict that, similar to the Summoner they will reduce each rage power to one bonus. So woot, you get a climb speed when you are really angry.

As has been said the Summoner can't actually do much summoning in combat, considerably less than the Wizard. He probably slows the game down slightly just because he's two characters but I really doubt people are having lots of problems with Summoners flooding the field with mobs because they aren't actually good at that.

The Summoner is only "broken" due to the hilarious meta around him. No class makes the Caster/Fighter disparity more obvious than the Summoner. By being obviously worse than full casters while having a class feature that single-handedly obsoletes the Fighter they make balance issues too apparent. No amount of cognitive dissonance is enough. By making Summoners do literally everything the fighter does better while not being quite as good as the party Wizard they've become the target of a lot of hate. The really funny part about it is that Paizils don't want the problem fixed, they want the messenger shot.

Dean wrote:By making Summoners do literally everything the fighter does better while not being quite as good as the party Wizard they've become the target of a lot of hate. The really funny part about it is that Paizils don't want the problem fixed, they want the messenger shot.

That's as good a summary as any. It's just really fucking weird all around. You can seriously get some large subset of the Pathfinder community to tell you that
1) martials aren't as good as the ubercasters, and
2) summoners aren't as good as the ubercasters, and
3) the summoner needs nerfed.

Sure, there are the idiots who don't think there are any major balance problems because reasons, but I'm not even talking about them. I'm talking about the startlingly huge number of people who will agree with you about the inherent martial vs caster balance gap, agree that the summoner does not expand that gap, and still want the summoner nerfed.

"Balance? Who gives a fuck about balance? I just want to make sure that the only good classes are the only ones that have ever been good; wizards, wizard reskins, clerics, cleric reskins, and druid. If your class does something relatively different instead of the same shit that has been at the top for fifteen goddamn years well fuck you we're balancing it to the martials."

The weirdest part for me is how they act when I bring up Druid. I've had entire discussions about why should they nerf Summoners when Druids exist.

Some people eventually say that 'both' should be nerfed.

Some will insist that Summoner is broken in a different way that's totes not the same as how the Druid is broken (which then lads into a conversation about how the Druid is way better than a summoner but whatever)

One person asserted that the problem was that the player gets full control of the Eidolon.

One person claimed that no one should be able to summon anything.

Now the best part of it is that one of the people in a Facebook group I am in even went as far as to want to know who 'specifically' designed the Summoner so that he could ask how it got so 'fucked up'. Half of the people in that thread I could actually get to acknowledge that the Summoner just isn't nearly as bad as existing king of the hill classes so that was good but what surprised me is that Jason actually showed up to the thread and sputtered some half-hearted statement about the class being troublesome (though gave no details as to how or why) before plugging unchained and leaving. Got to admit the whole thing made me laugh.

Dean wrote:As has been said the Summoner can't actually do much summoning in combat, considerably less than the Wizard. He probably slows the game down slightly just because he's two characters but I really doubt people are having lots of problems with Summoners flooding the field with mobs because they aren't actually good at that.

Technically, they can. Remember they are minute/lv, so prior to a battle they can spell-like cast and then rush rough a dungeon.
They can't do this with eidolon (unless Master Summoner and a few other archetypes), but the can do it.

Someone will mention it eventually in every thread I've read in the PF forums.

I know all that, it doesn't change anything I said. It's not summoning in combat, they do it worse than Wizards or Clerics even when they do it, and it doesn't matter anyway because summoning dozens of minions before you go into a combat you have lots of time to prepare for is just called "Buffing". Any real class that is told that there will be a combat in exactly 5 minutes with a waiting, immobile enemy will win. The fact that Summoners do it with hordes of celestial bison is just flavor, every caster can do it.

A Summoner I played got very minimal use out of summons. If your Eidolon dies in combat allowing you to mid combat summon it's usually better to summon your Eidolon back than use regular summons. There was a move I called the "Pokeball" where I would summon my Eidolon while I was behind the party, have it charge something nasty, get killed, and then repeat next round. Throwing me Eidolon at something over and over again was the closest I came to in combat summoning.

I recall I did once get to use the summon rush you're talking about. We were outside a Dragon cave and I popped out like 8 Dire Tigers before we rushed in. The tigers fought a bunch of demons the Dragon had binded and we brawled the Dragon which turned it from an encounter that would have killed us into one we won. That's probably the only reasonable way to do encounters where the party has all the buff time in the world. Have the enemy have massive home turf advantage such that the party at their best is what the encounter is balanced for.

Except, you can't do that with the summoner's sp summon; it doesn't overlap. So they can't go the hordes of minions route without using their spells, and again they're worse than a summoning-focused wizard or cleric.

The problem is pointed out very well here. With the increasing love and consistent splat support for Sorcerers, I think they in the Pathfinder Big Leagues now. The game has also introduced Arcanists, Oracles and Witches who are kind of playing the big leagues, now, too. They might not be the Red Sox, Yankees or Cardinals, but they're still right there.

I don't know if a summoner is as strong as ANY of those classes, much less stronger than ALL of them. The problem is that it seems so obviously inferior to a full casting class but casually obsoletes any martial class, especially the ones that don't cast spells.

I don't think the designers thought Summoners were all that powerful. To me, they're strictly AAA ball with other things in the game that are Strong But Not Full Casters like well-constructed Paladins, smartly played rage-cycling Barbarians, Instant Enemy Rangers and Quinggong Zen Monks if permitted.

So I didn't get an answer in the other thread. What's the problem with Paizo's FAQ? What's the issue with it?

Wiseman wrote:So I didn't get an answer in the other thread. What's the problem with Paizo's FAQ? What's the issue with it?

Basically that the FAQ is treated as errata, is usually used for stupid stuff like nerfing monks, and nobody has the time or inclination to sort through all of the bullshit in it.

My favorite example of the shittiness of the FAQ and errata is the reach weapon fiasco.

In 3.5, diagonals are counted as one square for reach weapons. Eventually someone realized that in PF that was omitted (most likely by accident), and reach weapons defaulted to the "the first diagonal is two squares" rule. They asked for clarification on the forums, and one of the devs said, "yep! That's how it is. You only threaten one square diagonally."

Everyone immediately realized this was fucking stupid, and that it meant you could approach someone with reach on their diagonal without provoking an AoO. Instead of reversing the decision, SKR said, "no, no no. There's a line around your character with a 10ft, and people can't move two squares away (15ft) to one square away (5ft) without crossing the line at 10ft. Anyone who crosses that line provokes an AoO. All those rules about threatened squares? That's bullshit."

If that sounds pointlessly complicated backpedalling to you, it is. If you immediately realize there are situations where you would provoke an AoO using the threatened squares rule but not the 10ft radius circle rule, then you're cleverer than SKR. Eventually (read: December of last year) they just caved and went back to the 3.5 way. But the point is: The Pathfinder devs are idiots and insecure manchildren. They will give a bad answer to a simple question, and when they do it will be years before they quietly back down when no one's looking. Fuck the FAQ and fuck the errata.

Everyone's still waiting on a straight answer about how all the weapons that modify your unarmed strike work with monks (gauntlet, brass knuckle, cestus). The devs have made vague, contradicting posts on the forums and subtly modified the rules without actually saying they were doing so in ways that still don't clear up the original question.

The FAQ system has several problems:

1-Paizo's unclear on what the FAQ actually is. Sometimes it's a clarification of an existing rule and sometime it's literally a change in rules.

2-What it covers is erratic at best. Really important issues get ignored for years, while some border cases get revised revisions of the initial rule in a matter of weeks.

3-The FAQ team is terrible at answering direct, obvious rules queries. You FAQ a very clear, one line question of something that is clearly ambiguous, and you'll get a "no response required" automatic message (but no answer to your actual question.)

EDIT: and 4-FAQs are generally not publicized and are horribly organized, so if you're not constantly keeping an eye on it, something major will change and you won't be aware of it.

It isn't intended to be official errata, its just some dickhead's opinion on a messageboard spouting off on how you should make house rules for a set of 3.5 house rules. Some of the rulings are hysterically bad, and most of them involve martial feats and classes that the develops hate, like Fighters, Monks and Rogues.

One thing that really pisses me off about the Paizo devs is that they repeat well-known mistakes from 3.5 with their sloppy-ass writing.

"Does this metamagic cost reducer let me reduce the actual spell level?"
"Does this weapon-x-feats-to-weapon-y mean things like weapon focus, or am I looking for a hilarious exploit with Rapid Reload (Greatsword)?"
"Does this feat for mounted combat go on the horse, the rider, both, either?"

Latest FAQ is about precision damage and concealment. Not "what is precision damage" but instead "yes, concealment stops precision damage". With a cute little note saying "unless you buy our new splat with a rogue that is only boned by total concealment".

They also posted a preview blog that basically says "pay half of your feats up front for another classes abilities" and "remember Monte Cook's Experimental Might? We took that and renamed feat boosts as stamina points". Oh, and another house rule is "everyone gets two more skill points to put in profession or perform or Knowledge (mother may this thing be relevant to my job as a meatshield)".

I'm involved in an argument with someone who claims that "infinite resources" totally can't exist in pathfinder at all. I am 99% certain that it is possible without binding or using wish. Can someone educate me so that I can educate him?

Hard criteria:

Doesn't involve any easy way to be dicked by the DM. (the outsider remembers you and kills you in your sleep, you cant sell that in this town, etc). Takes off relatively easy, at a relatively low level. Doesn't use simulacrum or blood money (because those are obviously broken and aren't allowed of course). And preferably can be set up to not use spell slots, such as crafting a magical trap or something similar.

Basically I am saying that the current pathfinder world doesn't make sense when wizards can cast teleportation circle, but he says that it costs a lot and a wizard would "run out of money".

Sorry, but your request is impossible. Infinite resources is way too much of a weasel word. If I'm a subsistence farmer over a large enough timeframe, I have access to infinite resources. If I have a decanter of endless water, I have infinite resources.

Forget the decanter. Cleric Orison. Cast at-will. Create Water. 2 gallons (per level) every standard action (6 seconds).

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Sorry, but your request is impossible. Infinite resources is way too much of a weasel word. If I'm a subsistence farmer over a large enough timeframe, I have access to infinite resources. If I have a decanter of endless water, I have infinite resources.

Well..infinite resources you can actually use for something. The holy grail would be some way to create infinite X, and then some way to turn X into anything you want.