Huh, from my experience summoning as it currently stands is a bit over tuned for a variety of reasons:

Totems do get attacked and thus can be used as a sort of psuedo mitigation, this isn't a bad thing and you can intentionally place totems in a manner where this happens. For example in a door or sometimes at the top of a ladder. In the case of the door example the opponent is forced to use resources to get past the entry way, think of this as less damage dealt to allies.

Summoners are also, in my opinion, the best source of hybrid damage due to being able to provide physical or magical damage depending on the terrain the summons were placed on. In the same vein they get access to a good number of utility abilities based on where they summoned the incarnate allowing them to respond to unexpected events that may arise over the course of a fight.

Hydrosophist and Summoning both benefit from scaling only off of themselves which means you have so much more freedom with stat distribution effectively allowing you to do something like pure Con with a shield. I had a buddy do this starting with elf allowing him to have a free first aid. He ended up playing in a manner where he was the tank for his totems.

The summoner is one of the few classes that benefits from set up prior to a fight starting. Note things like buffing up a snipe doesn't count here, those are more like fight openers. Summoner actually gets to earn themselves turns worth of efficiency by pre-placing totems.

If the enemies blow resources to kill the totems it's a win.
If the enemies don't kill the totems they get continual damage out its a win.
If the enemies hit the totems with "Collateral damage" it's not the totems fault that they were placed to close to an ally.

Do summoners pull the highest numbers? No, but their damage values are quite nice if the totems do avoid the gaze of opponents. The perk of the archetype is that each point of ap spent on a well placed summon is immediately worth it regardless of what happens to it. Couple this with the extra utility provided through built in hybrid damage and their incarnates abilities make me feel them to be a bit too strong.


Last edited by Addendum; 22/07/17 06:04 PM.