Creature Summoning Discussion.

[BRESTON]

The following is my personal opinion and hope that it may spark further observation, thought and reevaluation of the summon creature line of spells.

As it stands, within what I have seen, Summons have been weakened immensely in the effort of making them more scripted quest friendly.  It is my personal belief that making all summoned creatures level one(with exceptions, perhaps oversights like the ghost theme) severely weakens their usefulness to the point of not being a worthwhile investment.

All high level creature summons I have used have had no second attack, because they are level one. I don't feel they are effective in any measure in real combat because of this crippling fact. I realize this has been done to enhance synergy with scripted quests. I have noticed some feats certain summons used to have are also missing, though that is a less serious problem within my own mind.

I would wonder if its possible to implement a toggle within the crafting menu to allow a PC to switch to whether they wish to use a weaker level one version or the true summon.

I sincerely apologize for being horrendous at any kind of programming and putting that opinion out there without any background knowledge.

But I wholeheartedly think that there are so many cool summoning themes that just are not worth using because they cant be effective with one attack.

~~Please don't flame me~~

[Howlando]

The character sheet lies.

 Summons have their BAB/attack per round set by scripts (although this is not seen purely from the character sheet). Many level 3 summons and I think all level 4 summons have 2 (or more!) attacks/round.

[Juzza]

The only problem I see is level drain on summons will kill them if they fail once. Unless that is also handled by scripts. :s

[BRESTON]

Oh, I had not noticed my 4th circle summon attacking twice.

Ill have to pay closer attention and then amend my statements.

[SilentSouth]

There was a post about this a while back, its not your fault if you didn't exactly know though, i do remember one of your summons having 2/3 attack per round. Don't sweat it :)

[Paha]

Their levels were simply changed and the respective statistic and abilities modified via scripts to remove the insane spawn issues in quests. They were not "weakened" in any way. And indeed, it is possible to add attack rounds to beings without it showing in the sheet.

[MrGrendel]

I think this is unrelated but I'm pretty sure that the creature summoned from "shadow conjuration" is tons weaker than it normally is. Used to be at least the summon out of the list of possible effects was on par with a level IV spell and fairly useful.