Ewe wrote: ↑Mon Sep 01, 2025 11:30 pmThe vague details I was referring to weren't about how to open a character sheet or use the quickbar, that's all basic UI. What's still missing are the actual tactical specifics on how to clear epic-level dungeons while significantly underleveled. That's the core question, and instead of addressing it directly, you've sidestepped it with a theatrical answer to something I didn't ask. It's starting to feel more like political deflection than genuine explanation.
First of all, if you RCR to level 20, or potentially straight to level 30 as that has happened once every now and then, you just get to pick all the spells you want and that is that. You choose your chosen summons, your role-play limitations, and then you proceed to play on the server by buffing up your summons and potentially finding them to be lacking, or simply unable to get the job done.
Yet at the same time other players of this server have reported them to be endlessly beneficial, and for merely for the argument's sake, they might just as well be playing as those "
EDM Thaumaturge Techpriests of Gond", with that Summon Slot, Cohort Slot, Swarm Slot, and Animal Slot filled. Therefore, you might see an Elemental, an Angel, a pack of Undead, and a Gondsman running behind our character in question. The primary source of DPS for this character is still the EDM, and the player simply decides who to attack with it, where as the small army of summons is merely there to absorb the hits and provide additional DPS here and there. One of the complaints uttered in this thread was that in order to properly play as a Summoner character, you had to be a Gish of some kind, just to have that directed DPS to get the job done.
So, what is the core issue for a Summoner who happens not to be a Gish, what is the problem with the Summoner that lacks a direct source of self inflicted DPS? Well, if you simply summon a creature or two, buff them up, and then expect these summons to just get the job done... You are not going to succeed. You are just not. And the simple reason why you can only expect failure from this mental exercise is because of the default NWN AI, which determines the default behaviour of your summons. So let us image that you are limited to just one summon and you wish to defeat a group of three goblins. By default your summon will attack the nearest enemy, but then your summon keeps switching its target to whichever goblin manages to land a hit, potentially running around every now and then and wasting rounds, and woe and behold, your summon is now surrounded by three goblins that are all "Near Death" and then your summon either perishes at the Goblin hands or simply de-spawns because its duration ran out. At this point it is entirely fair to point it out how the summons are garbage and would actually need more AC, AB, and Damage, which they will unfortunately never get because of the aforementioned "
Gondian Army Commanders."
So what can be done now? Well, I would like to remind of this server's ancient complaint that the Druid's Animal Companions were just utterly useless, and how that was the case even after those were fully buffed up. Yet, some Druid players protested and rightly claimed that the Animal Companions were in fact something over powered. So what was the difference between these two groups? The first did not use the "Voice Commands" which you can conjure up by hitting the... I think it was the "V" key on the keyboard... and then proceeding through the dialogue options to choose one of the following "Attack, Defend, or Stay" while having a singular enemy selected. This way, you could have at least some control over who and what your Animal Companion was attacking. As a result, the Animal Companion would focus its DPS towards a single target at a time, and once you bring one enemy down, your Animal Companion then takes less damage because there are less attacks done against it. The Druid in question could even have a splash of Shadowdancer for HiPS and therefore avoid all danger entirely.
And this brings us to the "
Control Henchmen" feat, because it is something you can place on your quickbar for that great and tremendous ease of use. You just need to get a hang of using it, and all of a sudden you can command your summons to take choke-points, to attack and keep attacking at a specific enemy. The greater you are at this kind of micro-management, the easier time you will actually have. This is what allows a non-Gish Summoner to succeed with his summons. And if you stop and think about it, it also enables you to be very selective when you try to aggro only one or two enemies at time, because you can command your summon to approach, and then run back at you while drawing a more limited number of enemies back at you. Even if the rest of the enemies turn aggressive once the actual combat starts, it can still be a round or two before they actually reach your summons, and ergo, your summons might have already taken down one or two of them. Therefore, instead of having to fight a group of four to six enemies, you get to fight against less, which means that there are less attacks done at your summons.
And were I to judge the screenshot that was posted of that buffed up Qorrashi, what sticks out to my eyes is the fact that it has not been buffed up with "
Ghostly Visage" and "
Stone Skin." The 10% Concealment from Ghostly Visage is in practice just extra AC for your summon, and the immunity to level one spells can protect against some magical nuisances such as Magic Missiles and Lesser Orbs, and unless an enemy creature was given "magical weapons" in the toolset, then the damage reduction provided by Ghostly Visage actually works. Now, it is basically better to just have wands of Stone Skin, but if you cast the spell yourself, then your summons can in practice have additional +100 hit points as opposed to just having +70 from the wand. This is a question of whether you have the in game gold and feat to craft your own wands. If you cannot have the feat, and lack the connections, you could just have a side character for that very purpose and just sell wands for yourself through some hoops. This would then let you have those wands of Haste and Displacement, which would be additional boons to your Summons.
There are two Augment Summoning feats, first one the server has and the second is
this. Then there is the
Augment Elemental feat for little bit more AB and damage,
Demon Mastery could be changed to grant +1HD,
Dragonmarked Summoner could grant up to +3 AC,
Icy Calling would be +4 strength and dexterity in cold areas, and finally there is the
Stalwart Planar Ally that grants +4 to AC and saves.