I think this has been brought up before but Mord's Sword and Persistent Blade suck right now. Like, really bad. You used to be able to get a lot of mileage out of Mord's Sword even as a not-so-great summon because you could just pump that thing up with so many spells, including GMW. But now that you can't it's uh objectively worse than every other summoning spell of a comparative level.
Considering Mord's Sword is turns/level, it feels like a spell that really got left behind in the summon buff changes. It'd be nice to either see it nixed from the spell list entirely, or brought up to par.
Summon Buff Changes
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In Sorrow We Trust
- Posts: 1365
- Joined: Tue Nov 19, 2019 7:10 am
Re: Summon Buff Changes
I've got an idea for how to fix this.Paint wrote: Wed Aug 03, 2022 11:56 am I think this has been brought up before but Mord's Sword and Persistent Blade suck right now. Like, really bad. You used to be able to get a lot of mileage out of Mord's Sword even as a not-so-great summon because you could just pump that thing up with so many spells, including GMW. But now that you can't it's uh objectively worse than every other summoning spell of a comparative level.
Considering Mord's Sword is turns/level, it feels like a spell that really got left behind in the summon buff changes. It'd be nice to either see it nixed from the spell list entirely, or brought up to par.
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TurningLeaf Online
- Arelith Gold Supporter
- Posts: 222
- Joined: Sat Sep 11, 2021 4:22 am
Re: Summon Buff Changes
When my BG got the fiend summon and threw the lesser druidic sequencer on it, it ran around killing everything level appropriate with little troubles and hardly taking any damage. Next level the new fiend gets 4 attacks kd cleave and stun, and my BG hasn't even finished using the charges on the first sequencer he made. He has fully charged 2 sequencers in reserve and enough in his pack to make another 2 or 3 whenever he wants. Feeling pretty confident about his ability to handle content 3-4 levels above, in what vanilla NwN would term the "Overpowering" range.
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Party in the forest at midnight
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Re: Summon Buff Changes
Sorry I'm a bit behind, starting to feel a bit burnt out. Today I'll be testing the dire tiger on a non-conjuration focus cleric, I'll be doing the gnolls, gathering tribes, and the master of monsters.
Gnolls:
The tiger did surprisingly well against them, I was expecting it to run into trouble. I remembered the writ being hard, but I think it's because of archers that I couldn't easily get to that were shooting at me rather than the summon, that character was a div specialist and couldn't cast invisibility. Fortunately I've got invisibility to help out this time. The displacer beast with the boss ripped the tiger up a lot, but otherwise I didn't run into difficulty.
Oh good lord the displacer beasts aren't part of the boss spawn, 2 attacked me on my way out. They're absolutely ripping the tiger up, I had to healkit spam and then quickly apply a sequencer. The divine sequencer did nothing, I immediately switched to arcane. The arcane sequencer helped a lot, the displacer beast hit a lot less. And when it did hit it did enough damage I had to heal it immediately. They're harder than anything else in the writ.
Gathering tribes:
I went from the top down in this dungeon.
In the first group my summon engaged it started getting hit right away, so I applied the divine sequencer.
This is going so slowly, everything takes so many hits. I'm doing a lot of passive healing on the tiger, which means less inflict minor wounds to help with damage.
This writ is difficult due to all of the enemies that crowd around on the 3rd floor, I need to deal with several groups as soon as I entered the area. I had to manage healing my summon and also moving it around in ways to try and make sure I didn't get targeted by archers.
Master of monsters:
It's apparent going in the divine sequencer isn't going to be enough, applying the arcane one.
I'm glad I made a breach wand. I don't remember anything in this dungeon, I wonder if I abandoned this the first time I tried it.
Having to do a lot of heal kit spam as well. The enemies are very challenging.
The only reason I killed the boss was because of magic missile spam, the summon was doing nothing to it. I had to breach the boss 4 or 5 times too. It hit very hard, so I was alternating healing the summon and casting breach or magic missile. The encounter was really challenging.
Overall summary of the tiger:
It's really hard to judge the effectiveness and if it's overpowered. On anything lower level, the tiger absolutely rips it apart. It's a very strong summon that deals a lot of damage. But when it came to the displacer beast, ogres and the master of monsters, it was running into trouble and was killing things slowly. More than any of the other summons I've used this one feels the most polarized in how when it's effective, it's very effective. But when it's not, it needs a lot of tending to because it's getting wrecked. So I don't know if I can say that it's dealing too much damage, when there's a lot of content that it's not dealing too much damage to.
Because of faster leveling, I'm actually ahead of where I was the last time I did a Skal start caster. Without spell focus conjuration I'm using the same tier of summons I was using on that character because I'm a higher level. So conjuration focus characters could probably rip everything apart even easier than I'm doing right now.
So far my assessment of summons is they're balanced pretty well if you remove the conjuration focus bonus from summons. The difficulty is comparable to playing a conjuration focus spellcaster before sequencers and the summon buff went in. Instead of nerfing summons, I recommend removing the conjuration focus bonuses from summons, give conjuration another benefit instead. As it is it's very strong, not only is it strong in PVE, it lets you summon other players which is also a huge benefit. It's a must-have on caster characters, and even if summon bonuses are removed people will take it for player summoning alone.
With that said, I'm also expecting summon effectiveness to diminish in epic levels, I'll review that more when I get there. An idea is to give all casters ancient elementals sometime in their epic levels, so summons scale with epic levels better.
Gnolls:
The tiger did surprisingly well against them, I was expecting it to run into trouble. I remembered the writ being hard, but I think it's because of archers that I couldn't easily get to that were shooting at me rather than the summon, that character was a div specialist and couldn't cast invisibility. Fortunately I've got invisibility to help out this time. The displacer beast with the boss ripped the tiger up a lot, but otherwise I didn't run into difficulty.
Oh good lord the displacer beasts aren't part of the boss spawn, 2 attacked me on my way out. They're absolutely ripping the tiger up, I had to healkit spam and then quickly apply a sequencer. The divine sequencer did nothing, I immediately switched to arcane. The arcane sequencer helped a lot, the displacer beast hit a lot less. And when it did hit it did enough damage I had to heal it immediately. They're harder than anything else in the writ.
Gathering tribes:
I went from the top down in this dungeon.
In the first group my summon engaged it started getting hit right away, so I applied the divine sequencer.
This is going so slowly, everything takes so many hits. I'm doing a lot of passive healing on the tiger, which means less inflict minor wounds to help with damage.
This writ is difficult due to all of the enemies that crowd around on the 3rd floor, I need to deal with several groups as soon as I entered the area. I had to manage healing my summon and also moving it around in ways to try and make sure I didn't get targeted by archers.
Master of monsters:
It's apparent going in the divine sequencer isn't going to be enough, applying the arcane one.
I'm glad I made a breach wand. I don't remember anything in this dungeon, I wonder if I abandoned this the first time I tried it.
Having to do a lot of heal kit spam as well. The enemies are very challenging.
The only reason I killed the boss was because of magic missile spam, the summon was doing nothing to it. I had to breach the boss 4 or 5 times too. It hit very hard, so I was alternating healing the summon and casting breach or magic missile. The encounter was really challenging.
Overall summary of the tiger:
It's really hard to judge the effectiveness and if it's overpowered. On anything lower level, the tiger absolutely rips it apart. It's a very strong summon that deals a lot of damage. But when it came to the displacer beast, ogres and the master of monsters, it was running into trouble and was killing things slowly. More than any of the other summons I've used this one feels the most polarized in how when it's effective, it's very effective. But when it's not, it needs a lot of tending to because it's getting wrecked. So I don't know if I can say that it's dealing too much damage, when there's a lot of content that it's not dealing too much damage to.
Because of faster leveling, I'm actually ahead of where I was the last time I did a Skal start caster. Without spell focus conjuration I'm using the same tier of summons I was using on that character because I'm a higher level. So conjuration focus characters could probably rip everything apart even easier than I'm doing right now.
So far my assessment of summons is they're balanced pretty well if you remove the conjuration focus bonus from summons. The difficulty is comparable to playing a conjuration focus spellcaster before sequencers and the summon buff went in. Instead of nerfing summons, I recommend removing the conjuration focus bonuses from summons, give conjuration another benefit instead. As it is it's very strong, not only is it strong in PVE, it lets you summon other players which is also a huge benefit. It's a must-have on caster characters, and even if summon bonuses are removed people will take it for player summoning alone.
With that said, I'm also expecting summon effectiveness to diminish in epic levels, I'll review that more when I get there. An idea is to give all casters ancient elementals sometime in their epic levels, so summons scale with epic levels better.