How do people feel about using the summoning spells on this server? My impression is that they are not worthwhile at all given their relative weakness and their extremely short durations. I notice that the Planar Binding spells (summon version) have also had their durations limited.
Does anyone have much experience with summons, low level and high, that can shed some light on this for me? If the summoning spells truly aren't viable, should we change them so they are?
My initial suggestion would be to either buff them a little, or increase their durations. However, I expect that has already been suggested and shot down before.
Keep in mind this is just my opinion, based only on past experiences with other servers. To be fair though, the spawns on this server are much more challenging from what I remember. If the summons are still the same as they are in vanilla, than I expect they are quite weak in comparison.
In any case, I don't want any trouble. I just always thought summoning was one of the coolest parts of being a spellcaster, whether you are a druid, sorcerer, cleric, or wizard, and it's unfortunate how underrepresented it seems to be.
I've played a conjurer wizard to level 13, and also a cleric to level 13, so my experience is limited to low-mid levels.
Summon spells are quite powerful, as is. When a wizard heavily invests in summons, they can often (but not always!) substitute the need for tanks entirely. People mainly have a bad impression of summons because the dire badger and the dire boar always waste the time to activate their rage/ferocity after being summoned. This which means they don't work well for "Oh ****!" moments, and it's not uncommon to see them just stand there and watch you die during especially laggy sessions. (The best use I found for badgers was actually to summon them as bait to get enemies to group up for an evard's black tentacles spell.) However, the dire wolf and on are all pretty nasty customers.
Before I get into the normal summons, I need to devote an entire paragraph to the hound archon. The hound archon, summoned by good-aligned planar ally and planar binding, is a god damned
monster, with built in ethereal visage, fire shield, a magic weapon for beating DR, good ab/damage and 3 attacks per round. Just stop and think about that for a moment. It's a level 6 spell that summons a very strong monster who also casts a level 6 defensive spell, and a level 5 damage sheath spell on itself. Basically a three for one spell. The only negative(?) it has is that it sometimes wastes time casting lightning bolts, and sometimes those are stupidly aimed so that they hurt your allies. When I got access to that spell, a couple castings of it was powerful enough to solo entire dungeons intended for parties of characters of that level. Holy crap, that thing is insane.
When I played my conjurer, I heavily invested in multiple castings of summon monster across 3 or so levels of spells, and used them as disposable meat shields and/or damage sources. Defensively, consider that many mages use stoneskin on themselves as a precaution. When you compare it to the 100 damage that stoneskin absorbs, you start to realize that the 54 hp on a dire wolf is pretty nice for a level 3 slot. (especially when it eats a crit that would've one shot your mage through stoneskin) Also, summons are insanely useful when a fight starts going badly. A summon can be left to die while you and your party puts some distance between you and your targets. (and if you're lucky it'll split up the enemies enough that you can fight smaller groups of them at a time) Offensively, summons can put out far more single target damage over their life than an equal level spell. Hell, a single power-attack hit from a dire wolf does more single target damage than a level 5 fireball. And (unlike that fireball) the direwolf will spam those attacks for several round. Are they ideal in every fight? No, but that doesn't make them bad. Saying that would be like claiming that fireballs are useless, because some enemies have high reflex and evasion.
Honestly, the main reason that a lot of people seem to hate the spells is that they expect them to function like they did in base nwn. (as godly replacement tanks) On this server, one summon monster spell is about as useful as 1 fireball. Sure, it might win you a fight, but the enemy might also save against it. (or crit it to pieces) When that happens, you better have extra castings prepared, and a solid escape plan in mind.
The only change that I'd like to see for summon spells would be to change the dire boar and dire badger's, rage/ferocity ability to not eat up their whole turn. Update them to work like the PC versions of rage, where they function like a free action. If that can't be implemented, I'd rather have those abilities removed entirely, because they just delay the response time on those low level summons.