Suggestion to improve summoning builds
kenawyn
Member Posts: 8
Introduction
Summoner - the summoner is a spell-caster that mainly relies on summoned monsters to win the encounter. Most of the spells in his/her repertoire is made up of summoning, buffing, divination, control and counter spells to support the summons.In the original Neverwinter Nights it was really hard to build a powerful summoner.
This was even more difficult at epic levels, since the only epic summon available for casters is the Dragon Knight and you had to rely on prestige classes like Pale Master (various undead summons) or Blackguard (Epic Vrock) to keep up with the opponents.
And even then this was an inferior option.
In this post i am going to argue to improve the summoner play-style in favor of play-style diversity.
Important! - I am not arguing for OP summons. A well built combat type character with good items should still be a match for a summoner, but if done right the summons should not die off in the 2nd or 3rd round.
So lets discuss the problems and my proposed solutions.
Reasons the summons were bad
Party size penalty - active summons reduce the experience received. Because of this feature a lot of people were discouraged from using them.Number of Summons - only one summon can be active at any given time. Summons are already weak, so limiting their number is like a wasted spell slot. Also ironically having active summons does increase the encounter CR (probably to offset the EXP penalty) thus increasing the difficulty as well.
Effectiveness - the summons become weak really fast and there is no way to make them stronger other than investing in heavy buffing, which takes up additional spell slots, that could have been used for control, counter or damage spells. They are weaker than cohorts - so a lot of people use cohorts instead (if they want to put up with the party size penalty).
Feats - no feats exist to improve the summons (other than the ones for the prestige class summons - at epic levels)
Good is better than Evil - the good planar binding spells were demonstrably better than the others.
Bugs - some of the summons had bugs like incorrect skills, not implemented abilities... etc (these will probably be fixed, so this is just here for completeness sake)
Some ideas to enhance them
Party size penalty - remove the experience penalty for summons/charmed creatures. My argument for this is that casting a summoning or charm spell is similar to casting a fireball. You do not get an experience penalty for using the fireball, why should you get an experience penalty for using summons or charms?Feats - introduce feats that improve the summoning play-style (see examples below)
Effectiveness - re-balance the summoning spells - especially the planar binding spells
Add new stuff - introduce additional summons / epic summons
Some feat ideas
Extra Summon - increase the summon cap by oneI would suggest that only one planar binding summon can be active at the same time. The other summoning slot should have a different monster.
Augment Summoning - improve the summoned monsters attributes
Empower Binding - if applicable (planar binging spells) increase the summoned monsters level and CR
Enhance Summon - the summon gets more spells, better DC's, better skills... etc
Epic Planar Binding - summon some big nasty dude based on your alignment and level
good - Planetar (CL21-30) or Solar (CL 31+)
neutral - White Slaad (CL 21-30) or Black Slaad (CL 31+)
evil - Marilith (CL 21-30) or Balor (CL 31+)
The planar binding spells should be updated
lesser planar binding (6HD or less)good - Lantern Archon or Hound Archon (a real hound archon is only CR4)
neutral - Mud Slaad or Red Slaad (this is a little too strong being CR7, so maybe nerf it a bit)
evil - Quasit (since all the other evil bindings were demons) or Babau
planar binding (12HD or less)
good - Legion Archon or Shield Archon
neutral - Blue Slaad or Green Slaad
evil - Succubus or Vrock
greater planar binding (18HD or less)
good - Trumpet Archon or Astral Deva
neutral - Gray Slaad or Death Slaad
evil - Glabrezu or Nalfashnee
Note: the summons should be leveled to equalize the CR.
Note: some creatures selected are weaker than the allowed max HD, this is intentional, so the feats could empower them up to the spells allowed HD.
Note: alternatively you could specify summons for each alignment combination... but that would probably be too much work.
Gate - the Gate Spell Should be updated to gate in devils (Cornugon or Pit Fiend) instead of demons, since we used the Balor in the Epic Planar binding spells.
The Epic Spell: Dragon Knight and Mummy Dust should be updated to benefit from the feats above (better stats, higher CR up to Caster Level)
Re-balance summons
In the original game most of the summons were combat summons.My suggestion is to have a number of different monsters suited for different tasks. Even a low level monster can be useful if it possesses some ability that can solve a problem.
For example:
- summon a combat type monster to act as a tank or damage dealer
- summon a rogue type monster to deal with traps
- summon a support type monster to buff up your other summon / familiar / party members
- summon a scout monster if you need to detect invisible creatures
- summon a counter-spell monster if you expect to encounter spell-casters
The real power of a PnP summoner is that he/she has the right summon for each problem.
All right that's it for my summoner ideas.
I did not focus on undead and shadow summons because those are mainly used by necormancers and illusionists... but maybe someone can come up with enhancements for those spells and play styles as well.
Please let me know what you think.
4
Comments
@Shadooow He requested the ability to summon multiple creatures at once up above. Is this possible to create in single player while still keeping them as summons rather than just friendly NPC's?
To better understand my position here are some additional thoughts
- I saw a stream where it was mentioned that any suggestions should be posted to this thread, so that's why i made the topic
- It was also mentioned that not every suggestion will be implemented. I am a software developer myself and choosing the right features is always tough. Especially when it comes to a creative medium like game development (i work in a more regulated industry so i have little insight into the game development processes but i can imagine the challenges). And most importantly - there is never enough money and time to do everything. So i do not expect that any of this will be implemented in this form.
Maybe it would have been better to ask - improve the summoner play-style.
- In my opinion an enhanced edition should do at least 3 things:
1) fix the remaining bugs
2) update the game to today's standards (support modern operating systems, improve the interface to be more user friendly... etc)
3) update the game-play experience
Updating the game-play
In my opinion this can be accomplished in at least two ways:
- adding characters and quests to the modules and/or
- improving the game mechanics.
While I would welcome more quests and content, this topic was about improving game mechanics.
So, in my opinion the original game is somewhat unbalanced - some builds perform amazingly well, but others are barely playable (enter the summoning focused wizard).
To me this looks like a design problem - why have feats / spells / build options that do not work? Either fix them to be viable (by changing the mechanics and/or adding more stuff to make them useful) or remove them, if they are not going to be used either way.
About 3rd party content
I trust Bioware / Beam Dog that the game does not do any damage / harm to my system - since they must have done proper testing (for example in the industry i work we have to cover at least 90% of the code using unit tests and our testers do extensive testing to make sure everything is working fine...), but i do not trust 3rd party programs (modifications) or packages since i do not have any guaranty that the same type of rigorous testing was performed with those as well.
Of course if Beam Dog can guarantee that the custom content is safe, than i might change my mind.
Finally, I am only playing the official campaigns in single-player.
The multiplayer component of this game does not interest me at all.
Again, thanks for the feedback.
We could make an inventory item trigges a conversation where you pick a summon archetype (tank, rogue, healer etc) for each summon (1-9, shadow, planer etc) then set a variable on the PC that will be taken into account when the spell hook script overrides the summon creature spell.
I might give this a try over the weekend. I've been working on summon creature replacements for Hammervale Frontier. Let me know if you want me to share some of my scripts and give you instructions on how to add them to a singleplayer module..
Some feats like augmented summoning enhance monsters with +4 to strength and constitution and should be pretty trivial to add in with a custom feat and custom spell script.
Generally the relative power of a summon still depends on the module of pw creator. If the npc monsters have been improved to be more challenging but the summons haven't been scaled then there's nothing you can do with any extra features.
Like rogue traps and wizard DC spells, how useful they are all depends on who designed the areas.
A wizard can never give up divination to fulfill this requirement.
This would help with the problem, but might scare a lot of people away from the specialist, since giving up 2 schools is harsh. I would prefer the improvements, since that way the balance in the Official Campaigns could be tested.
For example NWN2 had a mod where you could summon an unlimited number of creatures. It messed up the balance and in some cases killing a mob gave an unreasonably high amount of experience points. Yes, that's an option.
On the other hand I was hoping to get a configuration panel where you could set the AI behavior of your characters, party members and summons,
or get the ability to drag commands to the hot-bar,
or get full control over the summons. I think there was a suggestion asking for a fully controllable party. Thanks for the offer. I would be interested in something like this, but at the moment i am swamped in work... I barely got time to read the forums.
If you could create a how-to wiki entry about it, that might be even better, since other people could also benefit from the tutorial. Exactly.
That's why I think the summons should be improved. The official campaigns will be enhanced as well, so enhancing the summons will make the play-style of the summoner playing these campaigns more rewarding. Cool
In this post i already suggested a couple of ways we could get around this.
Improving the AI with options to set an AI profile for the summon, or getting better tools to command the summon.
Thanks for all the feedback!