Arelith

Removing word of faith was a great call from deva and the hound archon, given it was often better to cast a deva than use a word of faith spell yourself, since it'd add an extra body and cast it's own word of faith.

I can also agree with removing the stun, as while easy to counter for most, it isn't easy to counter for low will characters that also tend to lack long mind blanking.

However, this leaves Deva/White Slaad in a rather sad state as almost all the other summons are head over heels better. For example, while a deva averages 70 damage per round at 50AC and 175 damage per round if all attacks his, the Verdant prince averages 159 damage per round at 50AC and 322 if all hit. Only the Gear Golem has worse stats, and the deva/white slaad are firmly in the bottom two now.

Attacks calculated from the combat log, damage/ac/hp/saves from the character sheet, and average damage per round from normalizing critical hit damage and multiplying that against chance to hit (after dropping damage from essences).

Deva:
Attacks: 42/37/32/27/42
Damage: 1d6+2d6 divine + 2d6 positive + 5 bludgeoning + 11 (17-20x3)
Average Damage Per Round if all hit: 175
Average Damage Per Round against 50AC: 70
AC: 45
HP: 479
Saves: 29/21/26

White Slaad
Attacks: 41/36/31/26/41
Damage: 1d6 + 1d6 divine + 2d8 sonic + 1d6 Positive + 3 Bludgeoning + 3 Slashing + 11 (16-20x3)
Average Damage Per Round if all hit: 188
Average Damage Per Round against 50AC: 67
AC: 46
HP: 479
Saves: 27/21/28

Pit Fiend
Attacks: 41/36/31/26/41
Damage: 4d10 + 2d8 acid + 1d6 divine + 1d6 negative + 5 slashing + 3 bludgeonining + 9 (13-20x3)
Average Damage Per Round if all hit: 399
Average Damage Per Round against 50AC: 142
AC: 43
HP: 479
Saves: 27/21/26
(Also has improved invisibility)

Ultroloth
Attacks: 42/37/32/27/42
Damage: 1d8 + 2d8 acid + 1d6 divine + 1d6 negative + 3 bludgeoning + 1 slashing + 11 (13-20x3)
Average Damage Per Round if all hit: 232
Average Damage Per Round against 50AC: 92
AC: 42
HP: 479
Saves: 27/21/26
(Also has improved invisibility)

Balor
Attacks: 42/37/32/27/42
Damage: 1d10 + 1d6 divine + 2d8 fire + 1d6 negative + 5 slashing + 3 bludgeoning + 9 (13-20x3)
Average Damage Per Round if all hit: 257
Average Damage Per Round against 50AC: 103
AC: 45
HP: 479
Saves: 27/21/26

Gear Golem
Attacks: 41/36/31/26/41
Damage: 4d8 + 3 bludgeoning + 14 (20x2)
Average Damage Per Round if all hit: 174
Average Damage Per Round against 50AC: 62
AC: 48
HP: 508
Saves: 28/24/21
(Also has spell immunity for low level spells and higher SR)

Verdant Prince
Attacks: 42/40/40/35/35 (Consistently got this in the combat log, not sure why even with it using a double sided weapon)
Damage: 1d6+2d8 acid + 1d6 divine + 1d6 positive + 5 slashing + 3 bludgeoning + 12 (10-20x3)
Average Damage Per Round if all hit: 322
Average Damage Per Round against 50AC: 159
AC: 42
HP: 387
Saves: 19/25/27
(Also has nature's blessing, but seems to intentionally miss)

The data shows it very clearly, the verdant prince and pit fiend are as good as having two devas, and the balor and ultroloth aren't far behind.

If we're going to remove the only real purpose to summon a deva (being WoF/Stun), can we bring down the evil summons to match? Slaad and deva are bout equal, gear golem needs a big boost, but the evil ones need significant offensive nerfs themselves.

Specifically giving them all equal crit range and base damage would be a huge change, there's no reason the verdant prince should have 10-20x3 while the deva has 17-20x3, or that that the pit fiend should have 4-40 base damage while the slaad has 1d6.

Personally I like the suggestion of giving them equal stats, and the form is just a skin change. It would make balancing the spell easier and would make sure no form is left behind.

IMO, it’s time summons were adjusted across the board (summons, not undead, undead are fine as is).

Gate should be the PvP/Boss Fight summons choice. Make their stats identical, give them all decent SR, decent defense, solid attack. Enough to be a threat, but not so much as to replace a PC.

Greater Planar Binding and Summon Monster IX should be the PvE summons of choice, or Planar Conduit for those who can access it. More variation is fine, but why there’s no evil options for Planar Conduit, I still don’t get.

Re-tool Dragon Knight to be an actual half-Dragon Knight who IS a stand in for a PC. High SR, great stats and AC, Fighter 30… but running under AI without consumables, it won’t be as truly dangerous as a PC is. The dragon streams can let you change its elemental immunity, so if your opponent uses acid sheathe, summon a black dragon knight, or a red dragon knight for those using wall of fire, etc.

I'm always in the favor that Summons (including Undead) needs more nerfing.
If there's a need to equalise all Summons of similar spell type (which i personally find it distasteful even though it belongs to balancing), it should only be downscale and not upscale.

In a nutshell, Summons are a headache to touch.

If we're gonna keep nerfing summons, then we should make all spellcasters infinite casters, because it's simply not feasibly to do anything as a non-infinite caster without summons.

Seriously, my Sorcerer can clear maybe two ships if their out sailing on a single rest (While burning 20+ Spell components mind you per ship) before their out of spells and completely useless to do anything but spam flare. While infinite casters get to do 100+ damage, endlessly to massive groups of enemies without any issue, and martials just get to endlessly swing their blades doing 100+ damage a blow as well.

Any spellslot based caster is effectively completely SoL doing anything without Conjurations, and those conjurations have to keep up with the damn mobs that are scaling upwards higher and higher to keep somewhat pace with the ridiculous Spellswords Weapon Masters, and whatever else martials that tend to just sweep through them.

It's honestly ridiculous that people complain about summons so much but absolutely refuse to address the root cause of what summons are in the state they are to begin with.

While looking at the stats is important, lets not forget the social RP issues of summons as well. Using any form of "evil" summon on the surface is an automatic Pariah/Exile from most surface settlements. For this reason I have always supported the idea that "evil" summons should be of a slightly better quality then thier good counter parts. That's not even mentioning the general numerical disparity between "good" and "evil" PC factions. If the server wants conflict and story telling around such, it needs to allow for it. Summons is one such way to do so.

As far as nerfing summons? Well I agree with the above. If we make summons any worse then they already are, please improve casters first. They are simply useless and unfun without a summon to serve as front line. Infinite cast perhaps? I'm not sure.

Not sure a simple reskin is ideal, hopefully alignment, voicing and weapons will differ? Seeing devas spamming harm wouldn't be great for flavour.
I haven't ever used summons heavily (used to use domination of NPCs instead during dungeon crawls), is the proposed nerfing on PvP grounds?

Oxtail_Soup wrote: Wed Aug 30, 2023 11:31 am

is the proposed nerfing on PvP grounds?

Other than the motivation to dispel the Lore tax altogether, I don't see how it could be.

Edens_Fall wrote: Wed Aug 30, 2023 1:59 am

While looking at the stats is important, lets not forget the social RP issues of summons as well. Using any form of "evil" summon on the surface is an automatic Pariah/Exile from most surface settlements. For this reason I have always supported the idea that "evil" summons should be of a slightly better quality then thier good counter parts. That's not even mentioning the general numerical disparity between "good" and "evil" PC factions. If the server wants conflict and story telling around such, it needs to allow for it. Summons is one such way to do so.

As far as nerfing summons? Well I agree with the above. If we make summons any worse then they already are, please improve casters first. They are simply useless and unfun without a summon to serve as front line without some sort of change. Infinite cast perhaps? I'm not sure.

Erm. Team evil also has undead at their disposal and is a lot less restricted in terms of what they bring to the table (aside from all the other cool stuff they get) so I deeply disagree that evil summons should be anywhere stronger.

Evil surfacers have options to use neutral and good summons though so they really only have to out themselves if they want to or aren't careful. I realize you can make yourself a pariah easily by showing all of your cards but I'm not sure that should be a mechanical consideration because you can be blatantly evil in the Underdark, Sencliff, Shadow Plane etc.

And if it's about the idea that evil characters have to be loners and outcasts, I don't know that this is true. "Good" surface and Cordor factions and cliques are a lot more exclusionary to new members than underdarkers or surface evils are in my experience. That's probably not universal, I know, but that's kind of the point-- there are no universal truths about how players will RP so mechanics should just be agnostic and treat everyone the same as much as possible.

Practically, for balance, making all of the summons the same is the easiest way to ensure that summons are properly balanced. Is it boring? I don't think so - it's an RP server after all. Just because my pitfiend is the same strength as your deva doesn't ruin the RP of it.

I also disagree that evil summons should be more powerful. Evil and morally grey already have a lot of more powerful options, like PM, BG, warlock and dirgesinger, and undead are generally stronger than anything good gets. The T5 Frost Revenant is already better than Deva, no matter T6 - and you get two of them.

IMO Gate needs an overhaul and a power bump. It's a short duration spell meant to call "PvP grade powerful" summons.
Let's face it, up until now people mostly used Gate for the deva and used the Deva mostly as an action economy net positive WoF delivery system.

With WoF gone Gate seems rather mediocre, especially since ...as already pointed out, a necromancer can get two better summons at one lower spell level and a conjurer can get a comparably powerful summon at the same spell level - both being hr/lvl duration as opposed to the Gate's fleeting round/lvl duration.

The only thing that Gate now has going for it is native SR vs WoF scrolls, but I wouldn't say that a single gate summon represents a level of threat that would warrant WoF scroll expenditure in most PvP scenarios.

The pit fiend and verdan

-XXX- wrote: Wed Aug 30, 2023 8:50 pm

I wouldn't say that a single gate summon represents a level of threat that would warrant WoF scroll expenditure in most PvP scenarios.

I certainly would. Not all pvp is done in the arena with free time to ward. I see stuff like 142 average damage per round against 50 ac. Throw that as an opener on someone that isnt fully warded and they're really screwed. Deva wasnt just used for it's WoF cast. We can just throw a WoF too. Deva and gate summons in general, but even more so Deva because of the extra wof cast, were already fine, and are still fine.

WanderingPoet wrote: Wed Aug 30, 2023 8:09 pm

Practically, for balance, making all of the summons the same is the easiest way to ensure that summons are properly balanced. Is it boring? I don't think so - it's an RP server after all. Just because my pitfiend is the same strength as your deva doesn't ruin the RP of it.

I also disagree that evil summons should be more powerful. Evil and morally grey already have a lot of more powerful options, like PM, BG, warlock and dirgesinger, and undead are generally stronger than anything good gets. The T5 Frost Revenant is already better than Deva, no matter T6 - and you get two of them.

Would it be balanced to make all gates same though? as necromancers have variety for tools for different options where dedicates summoners use their alignment divergence protection summoning simply for aesthetic appearance of RP oppurtunity?

Summoning specific things for their specific abilities/spells is very DnD and I'm not sure "RP server" is any more of an argument of making everything the same than it is making everything different.

I havent played really at all in a while though. So i got no skin in the decisions being made; but it would seem to me having a variety of abilities options to tap into would be more fun, even if harder to balance between gates. Not sure how perfect said balance needs to be even since both alignment 'sides' could access neutral and not have much RP consequences. So you could just rebalance it all with that in mind in terms of giving various tools. Like more than one stream might have a certain tool, etc.

malcolm_mountainslayer wrote: Sat Sep 09, 2023 3:07 am

Summoning specific things for their specific abilities/spells is very DnD and I'm not sure "RP server" is any more of an argument of making everything the same than it is making everything different.

Technically, we could have a set of pets with the same stats but different sets of elemental resistances and damage bonuses.
However, the way Arelith PvE is set up puts a strong emphasis on fire/cold DI and makes damage bonuses in the same damage types relevant, while the rest of the damage types generally don't matter all that much.

malcolm_mountainslayer wrote: Sat Sep 09, 2023 3:07 am

WanderingPoet wrote: Wed Aug 30, 2023 8:09 pm

Practically, for balance, making all of the summons the same is the easiest way to ensure that summons are properly balanced. Is it boring? I don't think so - it's an RP server after all. Just because my pitfiend is the same strength as your deva doesn't ruin the RP of it.

I also disagree that evil summons should be more powerful. Evil and morally grey already have a lot of more powerful options, like PM, BG, warlock and dirgesinger, and undead are generally stronger than anything good gets. The T5 Frost Revenant is already better than Deva, no matter T6 - and you get two of them.

Would it be balanced to make all gates same though? as necromancers have variety for tools for different options where dedicates summoners use their alignment divergence protection summoning simply for aesthetic appearance of RP oppurtunity?

Summoning specific things for their specific abilities/spells is very DnD and I'm not sure "RP server" is any more of an argument of making everything the same than it is making everything different.

I havent played really at all in a while though. So i got no skin in the decisions being made; but it would seem to me having a variety of abilities options to tap into would be more fun, even if harder to balance between gates. Not sure how perfect said balance needs to be even since both alignment 'sides' could access neutral and not have much RP consequences. So you could just rebalance it all with that in mind in terms of giving various tools. Like more than one stream might have a certain tool, etc.

It would be balanced, by the definition of it, yes. Since anyone can summon any variant of the planar summons, the choice comes down purely to the RP of things.

Summons are very hard to balance because the tools that good/evil have available, and that PVP/PVE have available can differ so wildly. Uniformity is useful just simply to make the focus for balance more on PCs rather than their pets. A barbarian WM with a gate summon is far more deadly than a wizard with a gate summon. The same can't be said for creating undead, or elementals.

Even if all gate summons were the same and all greater planar conduit summons were the same, we'd still have all the undead, all the elemental variants, all the dragons, animal companions, tribal barbarians, etc to balance against.

We also already see problems with balancing, where like earth elementals are by far the worse elemental. From memory, only Wights/Skeletons/Abomination are worth using from the undead streams.

Also I only said that it being an RP server is why it isn't -boring-; the mechanical whacking ability of a summon doesn't affect the RP. It doesn't really make sense to ICly say "Yes, I know I'm an evil blackguard murderer but I summoned a deva specifically because they'll use Word of Faith" - which was the case often; because Deva was typically mechanically better.

WanderingPoet wrote: Sun Sep 10, 2023 2:44 am

Also I only said that it being an RP server is why it isn't -boring-; the mechanical whacking ability of a summon doesn't affect the RP. It doesn't really make sense to ICly say "Yes, I know I'm an evil blackguard murderer but I summoned a deva specifically because they'll use Word of Faith" - which was the case often; because Deva was typically mechanically better.

It makes perfect sense to me. This is why you have to have Protection From-- spells cast when summoning outsiders of an opposing alignment.. To emulate the RP of doing whatever ritual lets you control them and protects you from their wrath. To me that means the blackguard would be summoning a hostile angel and forcing it to do their bidding, which seems like a perfectly evil blackguard thing to do. A good caster doing the same of course had better have a very good reason.

Spriggan Bride wrote: Sun Sep 10, 2023 7:45 pm

WanderingPoet wrote: Sun Sep 10, 2023 2:44 am

Also I only said that it being an RP server is why it isn't -boring-; the mechanical whacking ability of a summon doesn't affect the RP. It doesn't really make sense to ICly say "Yes, I know I'm an evil blackguard murderer but I summoned a deva specifically because they'll use Word of Faith" - which was the case often; because Deva was typically mechanically better.

It makes perfect sense to me. This is why you have to have Protection From-- spells cast when summoning outsiders of an opposing alignment.. To emulate the RP of doing whatever ritual lets you control them and protects you from their wrath. To me that means the blackguard would be summoning a hostile angel and forcing it to do their bidding, which seems like a perfectly evil blackguard thing to do. A good caster doing the same of course had better have a very good reason.

-Because it casts Word of Faith- is the not-make-sense part. ICly there is no guarantee that the deva you happen to get will cast that spell. So choosing to bring one in specifically for -mechanical benefit- is silly.

Now if all of them were the same and the evil murderous blackguard wanted to force an angel to do it's bidding? That's interesting RP, but it's not mechanically driven RP.

I don't think it's silly to think a summoner would know what the creature they summon is capable of. They could observe it themselves or it could be learned knowledge from the Arcane Tower or it could possibly be information in the books we use to learn streams... But I mean unless a DM comes in and says we are supposed to play dumb and be surprised every time a Gate spell is cast I am going to assume my own characters can figure out things like "slaad regenerate quickly" and "deva can blind opponents with a word"

-XXX- wrote: Sat Sep 09, 2023 4:14 am

malcolm_mountainslayer wrote: Sat Sep 09, 2023 3:07 am

Summoning specific things for their specific abilities/spells is very DnD and I'm not sure "RP server" is any more of an argument of making everything the same than it is making everything different.

Technically, we could have a set of pets with the same stats but different sets of elemental resistances and damage bonuses.
However, the way Arelith PvE is set up puts a strong emphasis on fire/cold DI and makes damage bonuses in the same damage types relevant, while the rest of the damage types generally don't matter all that much.

I still think undead and their streams would be several times more interesting though?
IDK.. i think mechanically pushing people to use different streams is kind of cool. Like an evil person risking the wrath of the angels and vise versa.

It's the everpresent struggle between mechanically optimal choices and choices that make sense for a particular character and their story.