Author Topic: Manyfold Summoner - A PrC wholly devoted to improving summoning and summonlings!  (Read 1929 times)

Offline Endarire

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Greetings, all!

I felt especially inspired recently and made the Manyfold Summoner, a D&D 3.5 PrC (that could probably easily be ported to Pathfinder) that focuses on summoning.  To my knowledge, no 3.x PrC that (almost) fully advanced casting focused entirely on summoning.  The summon boosts were just part of a package that sometimes involved calling creatures (Malconvoker, Thaumaturgist) or doing casting stuff in general (Master Specialist, Paragnostic Apostle).

The overall goals of this PrC were thus:

-Improve summoning and summonlings without making them too strong.

-Combine and refine the official summoning abilities from 3.5.

-Add enough original content to make it worthwhile.

-Stick to theme.

-Avoid ambiguities.

I acknowledge this PrC may seem or be strong.  However, it does what it does well, or at least it should.  Is it better than Planar Shepherd, Incantatrix, or/and Dweomerkeeper?  Almost certainly not, but such isn't the point.  Is it better than the other PrCs that are at least somewhat summoning-related?  Quite likely, and that's intentional, due at least in part to a general lack of purely summoning-focused PrCs.

Thankee for your consideration!

Offline Stratovarius

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It's pretty damn strong. It can basically bury people in summons then wait till they die from reflected damage. You can also stack abilities to be summoning two levels higher than the spell slot, with piles of extra hit points.

Given how strong certain summons are, this is basically a tier 0 class.

Offline Endarire

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Thankee Strat for your quick reply!

Your response was quite different from another I got which said that Master Specialist (Conjuration) was notably better.

While I'm not yet persuaded this is a tier 0 class, what abilities and combos do you believe should change and how to better balance this PrC?

Offline Stratovarius

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Conservative + Improved Elemental + Healthy + Talents + Retributive + Rift. You can turn a single Level 7 spell into 3 level 9 spells, for instance, and every bit of damage dealt to all those summons ricochets back to the enemy who hit them. The core of it is definitely Conservative + IE + Rift, the rest is just gravy. But it's basically consistently turning 1 spell slot into 2-3 of 2 higher levels.

And I wouldn't exactly trust those folks over on GitP. I've had them tell me things like some stat boosts were worth +2 LA, basically without class features.

Offline Endarire

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Updated with tweaks after reading Strat's concerns.