I am totally loving the use of Find Familiar and Summon Companion, but as it stands there is one summon in each that feels out of balance. Both the Spider from Find Familiar and the Giant Spider from Summon Companion have an unusually high amount of health compared to all others of its type, deviating wildly from not only 5E HP stats both from common sense.
In the case of Find Familiar, most of the standard animal forms you can summon for your familiar have either 1 or 2 HP, which seems appropriate for a small familiar pet. But then you get to the Spider which somehow has 6 HP and it just feels out of place how a lone Spider can be somehow sturdier than say a Cat or Crab. If we compare it to the enhanced version of Find Familiar that the Pact of the Chain Warlock gets, where the Quasit has only 7 HP and the Imp has 10 HP, it feels even more out of place, since these unique Warlock familiar options are supposed to be more powerful and far sturdier than the typical animal familiar. However with the current setup, the Spider familiar is only 1 HP short of the Quasit, meaning it has more in common with the unique Warlock familiar group than with the standard group its supposed to belong to. The way I see it, the Spider should have similar HP to its other animal familiar counterparts, so I would say the devs should decrease the Spider's health to 1 or 2 HP tops, and increase the AC from 9 to something more appropriate like 12.
(On a side note, I enjoy the implementation of the Warlock Pact of the Chain familiars, and I hope the Pseudodragon is added to the game to finish out the selection of the 3 Warlock unique familiars. I expect the Pseudodragon would have an HP similar to that of the Quasit already in game if 5E is used as the basis.)
In the case of the Summon Companion, apart from the Raven which is a bird and has 1 HP, the Wolf and Boar have 11 HP and the Bear has 19 HP, so far so good, but then we get the Giant Spider with a whopping 32 HP, giving it more HP than most player Classes have at Level 3 (and even more HP than the base average HP of a Giant Spider in 5E)! This means that the Giant Spider is effectively hands down the optimal choice for a Ranger animal companion practically every time, making it an even better damage soaking companion than the Bear which is meant to be the tanky companion as made evident by its Roar aggro ability. I feel like the HP of the Giant Spider needs to be tweaked down, and/or possibly the HP of the other Ranger animal companions needs to be brought up.
Hopefully, adjustments can be made, cause as it stands, when playing with other players, I am pretty much EXPECT to summon Giant Spider as a Ranger all the time, and that just feels wrong. Companion/Familiar choice should be about its tactical abilities too, not just how overwhelmingly OP its HP is to the point that I'm essentially summoning a Level 3 Fighter healthwise.
