gnorman wrote:From what I can tell, Thaumaturge class itself is fine (I've been testing builds w/ Augment Summoning, and the bonuses are applying correctly), but the summons themselves need some work. I'm going to piggyback on Valefort's last post, noting that the good epic gate summon is slightly stronger than the balor.
Major issue to me seems to be the marked disparity between good and evil summons - erinyes, for example, pales in comparison to elemental and celestial dire bear; likewise succubus compared to regular celestial bear. And I've heard than angel is significantly better than horned devil, though I don't have personal experience with that one so I can't say.
About the only justification for this that I've seen so far for evil summons being weaker is "RP potential," but that strikes me as running afoul of the Stormwind Fallacy (the theory that power and RP are mutually exclusive, opposing forces). Evil summons should be on par with good summons (esp. given the heightened difficulty of playing an evil character on most RP servers). I hope the scaling idea gets implemented soon, and is applied evenly. I'm not saying that each summon should just be a reskin with the same stats, but summons should be very close to the same power level regardless of alignment.
I know, I know, evil characters can just use CGU instead. But some of us want to fulfill our fiendish desires without being put at a mechanical disadvantage as compared to another character with the exact same stats & build, just with "LG" on their character sheet instead of "CE."
End rant, thanks for reading.
Hi Gnorman,
sorry for the late reply, I did not notice your post.
Evil wizard have extremely strong options at their disposal that good aligned ones do not. Aside from PrCs like Blood Magus, Pale Master, Shadow Adept and the likes (one could say Red Wizard, but that is not especially powerful, it's an RP class), there is a significant and intrinsic SPELL ADVANTAGE:
-) Vampiric Feast is the strongest spell in the game bar none, and one of the best feats in the game. Only evil.
-) Avasculate is another fantastic spell that no serious good character would ever use
-) Undead summons are extremely good, even more so the Pale Master ones.
I could go on for a bit, but let's instead check which kind of mechanical advantage the good mages have:
-) Angel and Thaumaturge PrC and summons.
-)...that's it.
The only reason there is no problem with this IS the setting, aside from the fact a good mage is still extremely powerful and can be played easily to success.
Good mages don't need buffs. But thinking evil ones do is a serious misconception.
Have fun!
Especially for a summoner!
