AMIA ARCHIVE • View topic

I haven't seen one of these on the forums and adamantly believe these summons serve as a sort of hidden power given their lack of transparency and variance over the alignments.

I think it would be of great benefit of the community to provide the stats of the various summons on the server, and if possible their level ranges. I understand this is a bit daunting but for building it is invaluable. For scholarly value I believe these are best documented unbuffed.

Things needed:
BG epic fiends for each alignment,
Summons 1-9 with each of their alignment variants.
Epic mummy dust, with alignment variance
Epic dragon knight with alignment variance
Ranger companion
Druid summons
Cleric domain modified summons.

I can post the epic fiend LE later tonight.

Sure, I can write down the epic NE fiend stats when I've got the time.

They're not very good.

I'll handle CE later tonight as well, as an edit to this post.

I might be able to squeeze out some of the 1-9 summons, depending on my time constraints.

I believe the stats are specifically not supposed to be on the forums?

Hrm. Maybe the BG stats. Knowing what does what, though, would be pretty helpful for building purposes. I'm not sure.

Yeah I would wait on this for a DM to say it's okay. Pretty sure it's been said in the past that we won't be posting them.

Casvenx wrote:

I believe the stats are specifically not supposed to be on the forums?

This is and has been the case, yes.

This should probably be locked, then. Before anyone gets a wild hair and doesn't read the responses to the OP.

Main issue with not posing them is some of them is much stronger then the others, since blackblade is now more or less worthless people need to know a decent replacement until they can get epicsummon.
I mean even some of the epic mummy dust is worthless. Its why so many take the golem, because the golem atttributes are too useful, weapon or not, to chose anything else unless its a dragonknight summon.

BBoD is not worthless... and I can verify that the Summon Creature spells are highly effective. I use SC9 in the high level areas all the time until EMD is available.

BBoD is just no longer OP.

I don't see how it was OP before? It required the mage to do absolutely nothing and most people &creatures on this server(Unless its very low level) Could make the fort save unless their a mage, but mages get a bonus due to spellcraft against its effects. I reccomend testing the old BB and new BB against beholders and see what happens.

Does this mean I won't get to rant about how useless the NE epic fiend is after all?

Larsaan wrote:

Does this mean I won't get to rant about how useless the NE epic fiend is after all?

Feel free! They need to know if certain things are useless/dont get used. IF they don't get used they can make them better, it's what they do after all.

BB was overpowered, IMO, because it was invulnerable. The concentration thing didn't matter, because what else does the mage have to do after casting invisibility and BBoD? You just sit back and let the invulnerable thing kill everything you come across, and the opposition can, literally, do nothing.

Where it seems to have become useless though, very notably in beholders, is in the fact that it can now be dispelled. That doesn't seem to me to be in the spirit of the spell.

Casvenx wrote:

BB was overpowered, IMO, because it was invulnerable. The concentration thing didn't matter, because what else does the mage have to do after casting invisibility and BBoD? You just sit back and let the invulnerable thing kill everything you come across, and the opposition can, literally, do nothing.

Where it seems to have become useless though, very notably in beholders, is in the fact that it can now be dispelled. That doesn't seem to me to be in the spirit of the spell.

While understandable, they made it easy to hit, dispellable, and weaker damage. For being a ninth level spell... anything else is better. I understand the want to make it not invunerable, but at least make it break even rather then just nerfing it to all hell. The -only- place i've ever seen the spell useful for its intended purpose was beholders, since it was immune to their bullcrap, but ever since the change its either auto dispelled or auto killed and every other summon is the same.... Makes me with the beholders were the ones killed off and not the squid heads nearby.

kalcibone wrote:

Larsaan wrote:

Does this mean I won't get to rant about how useless the NE epic fiend is after all?

Feel free! They need to know if certain things are useless/dont get used. IF they don't get used they can make them better, it's what they do after all.

Well then.

I mean, first of all it's a full caster, and caster AI in this game makes a mess of things even it's got something good to work with. I have often seen my summon open with Improved Invisibility, which it would refresh between each casting of a combat spell. It spawns with a crossbow that it almost never uses. Should it run out of spells (and it will), it will run into melee and swipe at enemies with unarmed attacks. Now, it does have an on-hit poison, but it's statistically a level 25 sorcerer, which would make it hard for it to hit even without Improved Expertise, which it never fails to use, regardless of whether it's being targeted or not. Why does a level 25 sorcerer have Improved Expertise, you ask? That's a very good question, one I won't answer because I'm more preoccupied trying to figure out why it has Dirty Fighting.

But Larsaan, I hear you say, surely the firepower of a level 25 sorcerer makes up for that! Well, no. Because you see, it's wearing leather armour (despite this actually reducing its AC) and toting Still Spell, which means no 9th level spells for you. No, when our trusty arcanaloth decides to bring out the big guns, he'll cast... Incendiary Cloud. An 8th level spell that does 4d6 damage per round. I'll ask you to compare this with Horrid Wilting, another 8th level spell that does 25d8 damage in one go. You'd have to stand in an incendiary cloud for a full minute for it to do more damage, and that's assuming you don't have evasion, which makes it about as harmful as a warm beach.

Once it's used all its 9th level spell slots spamming that, likely destroying nothing but your loot bags, it will switch to Delayed Blast Fireball, which actually does decent-ish damage, assuming it hits a living enemy. Unfortunately, if it hits the target after it has expired, it will merely simmer on the ground, waiting for someone to walk over it (they never, ever will). Because of the way caster AI queues spells, this will happen far more often than you'd like.

Once these too have been depleted, the arcanaloth will fall back on acid spray, black tentacles and magic missiles. Oh, and lesser dispel. It will, in fact, spam lesser dispel on enemies that didn't have any buffs to begin with. Sometimes this will be interspersed with a few castings of invisibility, just to mix things up. In fact, the only actually useful spell used by this summon is Bigby's Interposing Hand, because -10 attack on a single enemy at least changes the battle in some small way.

The one actually nifty part of the arcanaloth is that talking to it gives you access to infinite castings of Improved Invisibility, Flame Weapon and Freedom. That said, all of these buffs are readily available from NPC merchants as scrolls and potions, so it's really just a bit of gold saved. Besides, the flame weapon it gives you is 1d6, while the scroll version is 1d8.

It's so, so bad.

/rant

Uh. I've seen (and used) BBoD effectively in more areas than just beholders. And the claim that it was 'intended for them' is just false.

as promised:

http://imgur.com/N2DmiVY

the str is automagically buffed

Mercedes wrote:

Casvenx wrote:

I believe the stats are specifically not supposed to be on the forums?

This is and has been the case, yes.

Is there any genuine reason for this? All other class mechanics are listed OOCly, so I don't see the big deal here.

...

Mercedes wrote:

Casvenx wrote:

I believe the stats are specifically not supposed to be on the forums?

This is and has been the case, yes.

sorry didnt see, wulfurt has a good point imo.

In before it's locked and those stats are removed.....

OpenTheRift wrote:

Is there any genuine reason for this? All other class mechanics are listed OOCly, so I don't see the big deal here.

Because you take summons for the role play, not mechanical power.

Solvaras wrote:

In before it's locked and those stats are removed.....

OpenTheRift wrote:

Is there any genuine reason for this? All other class mechanics are listed OOCly, so I don't see the big deal here.

Because you take summons for the role play, not mechanical power.

No wizard in their right mind will summon a incredibly weak summon just because it is sparkly. Would you take a pixey against a dragon?

Solvaras wrote:

In before it's locked and those stats are removed.....

OpenTheRift wrote:

Is there any genuine reason for this? All other class mechanics are listed OOCly, so I don't see the big deal here.

Because you take summons for the role play, not mechanical power.

wolfurt wrote:

Solvaras wrote:

In before it's locked and those stats are removed.....

OpenTheRift wrote:

Is there any genuine reason for this? All other class mechanics are listed OOCly, so I don't see the big deal here.

Because you take summons for the role play, not mechanical power.

I have to agree with the above. Maybe in an ideal server we take summons for RP, but even I would go for mechanical power over RP value if I had the choice.

Anyway, as an alternative to OPs idea, why not just have a list of gimped summons with a reason their classified as gimped? I know the NE Gate for 28th level is butt naked. Or the Death Domain for 27th level is just piss weak in both defence and attack.

Richard_Edmund wrote:

I have to agree with the above. Maybe in an ideal server we take summons for RP, but even I would go for mechanical power over RP value if I had the choice.

Voila, an excellent reason why we don't provide stat sheets for summons.

why do the summons have different power based on alignments in the first place?

They don't intentionally have different effective power based on alignment. Summons vary in abilities based on alignment primarily because they fit varied archetypes. For example, the Epic Fiendish Summon. The LE one fits the warrior/bruiser archetype, the NE fits the caster archetype and the CE one fits the sneak/rogue archetype.

A disparity of effective power between alignments is likely due to some archetypes not being easily represented through NPCs and due to summons being difficult to balance. It has nothing to do with the alignments themselves, and we don't have any ulterior motive like making evil summons weaker than good ones or vice-versa.

It would be nice to see what those archetypes are at least, on the forums. It sucks when you build for something, then find out at level 30 that it totally doesn't work the way you wanted. Just something basic, like the bruiser/caster/sneak bit mana just said, so people don't hope things are what they are not.

That said, it seems like the neutral summons stuff in general is all a bit weak. Is that intentional?

Manarethan wrote:

They don't intentionally have different effective power based on alignment.

LE Gate 27CL: -

NE Gate 27CL: -

TN Gate 27CL: -

[DM EDIT]: You were told not to post stats.

I think it's very arbitrary to base it on alignment, to be honest. It essentially rewards and punishes personalities at random, regardless of those characters' preferences. The extreme power difference wouldn't be as bad if it was a choice, like with Mummy Dust and Summon Creature.

Manarethan wrote:

A disparity of effective power between alignments is likely due to some archetypes not being easily represented through NPCs and due to summons being difficult to balance. It has nothing to do with the alignments themselves, and we don't have any ulterior motive like making evil summons weaker than good ones or vice-versa.

If this is true, there's no reason to hide the stats from the player base. All you're doing is preventing the average player from selecting a desired summon which'll fit their play style. Determined players will just figure it out anyway.

It was stated by two DMs in this thread that we don't post stats for summons, along with our reason for that decision. Our reasoning was also beautifully justified right here by people clearly stating that they would choose power over RP if they had the ability to do so.

You disagreeing with our decision doesn't mean you can just go ahead and ignore us to post the stats anyway. If you disagree with it, this is not the way to go about expressing that.

And for the last time,

Manarethan wrote:

They don't intentionally have different effective power based on alignment.

Archetypes =/= power. If one of the summons isn't working properly or is unintentionally weak due to their archetype not functioning properly, we'll try and fix that, but summons are hard to properly balance particularly when you throw different class/ability combinations for every one. Could we make all the summons the same across every alignment to ensure perfect balance? Yes. Will we? No, because that would make them incredibly boring and you'd complain about that instead.

No, we're preventing players from looking at stat sheets and going "Hm, the LE summon seems to be the strongest, but the RP for my character makes NE the best fit for my alignment. I'll just make her LE for the summon and play her NE instead so I can get both."

Does this suggest we don't trust you to pick RP over power? Yes, because people consistently do exactly that and even admit it. It's exactly the same situation whereby people make characters Neutral instead of Evil for mechanical benefits despite their characters being openly evil, or people take alignments to avoid class restrictions then ignore that alignment in their RP. Happens frequently, and we're not going to allow something that would make this happen even more.

That is our reason for not letting you post summoned creature stats.

Alright, message heard loud and clear.

Feel free to PM your researched summons, I will compile a list that I won't post.

Do you remember the days before internet strategy guides, before secrets and cheat codes were found out before the game was released? ... do you remember mystery? Why do you hate fun? :cry:

Applicable Edit: This is turning sour very quickly, as well. We have a very long-standing server rule and our reasons for upholding it. Please understand and do not use it as a new forum battlefield.

Since I am the one who changed BBoD I will let you in on a few things...

1. It most assuredly is not useless.
2. It has a higher AB than it previously did
3. It is capable of dealing huge amounts of damage, on par with an epic WM... that is well over 100
4. There were new minor tweaks put in again today ... specifically is has better saves now.
5. In the right place it can be better than Summon IX or Gate, but not always.

The Sidebar wrote:

Black Blade of Disaster
The Black Blade of Disaster is no longer invulnerable, but has high resistance and immunities to most forms of damage. It also no longer has the planar rift ability (on hit kill), but does deal significantly more damage than previously. Lastly the concentration check has been removed.

And you getting rid of the dispellable thing?

Manarethan wrote:

No, we're preventing players from looking at stat sheets and going "Hm, the LE summon seems to be the strongest, but the RP for my character makes NE the best fit for my alignment. I'll just make her LE for the summon and play her NE instead so I can get both."

Does this suggest we don't trust you to pick RP over power? Yes, because people consistently do exactly that and even admit it. It's exactly the same situation whereby people make characters Neutral instead of Evil for mechanical benefits despite their characters being openly evil, or people take alignments to avoid class restrictions then ignore that alignment in their RP. Happens frequently, and we're not going to allow something that would make this happen even more.

That is our reason for not letting you post summoned creature stats.

Perhaps just make everything dull and the same is the best idea then, because no offence it still happen wither you like it or not. I mean people already change alignments to NN for the pristmatic dragon. heck you all let it happens in a request.

Manarethan wrote:

Archetypes =/= power.

I get that, but I still don't see why lawful blackguards can only ever get a bruiser, neutral blackguards only get mages, etc. What if you have a lawful blackguard of Gargauth who'd enjoy having a fiendish assassin, or a chaotic blackguard of Talos that would relish the firestorms conjured by an unholy sorcerer?

kalcibone wrote:

Manarethan wrote:

No, we're preventing players from looking at stat sheets and going "Hm, the LE summon seems to be the strongest, but the RP for my character makes NE the best fit for my alignment. I'll just make her LE for the summon and play her NE instead so I can get both."

Does this suggest we don't trust you to pick RP over power? Yes, because people consistently do exactly that and even admit it. It's exactly the same situation whereby people make characters Neutral instead of Evil for mechanical benefits despite their characters being openly evil, or people take alignments to avoid class restrictions then ignore that alignment in their RP. Happens frequently, and we're not going to allow something that would make this happen even more.

That is our reason for not letting you post summoned creature stats.

Perhaps just make everything dull and the same is the best idea then, because no offence it still happen wither you like it or not. I mean people already change alignments to NN for the pristmatic dragon. heck you all let it happens in a request.

A rather bold statement when you have no proof. Please lets not make this thread into something worse. As far as making the summons dull and all the same. I personally enjoy not only the differences in each of the summons but also the interesting dynamics and rp it creates. Trust me, as an oldie, standard summons with no variables are terribly boring and doesn't help the Amia setting.

Larsaan wrote:

Manarethan wrote:

Archetypes =/= power.

I get that, but I still don't see why lawful blackguards can only ever get a bruiser, neutral blackguards only get mages, etc. What if you have a lawful blackguard of Gargauth who'd enjoy having a fiendish assassin, or a chaotic blackguard of Talos that would relish the firestorms conjured by an unholy sorcerer?

The issue is we'd have to make a new custom summon for every archetype and every alignment, which is time intensive for our developers, and also presents a challenge in conceptualizing, making and balancing what would be 9 summons just for the Epic Fiendish Servant, let alone all the other summons that work with archetypes.

kalcibone wrote:

Perhaps just make everything dull and the same is the best idea then, because no offence it still happen wither you like it or not. I mean people already change alignments to NN for the pristmatic dragon. heck you all let it happens in a request.

We can't make everything dull and the same. That would be really boring and uninspired. No developers want to make cookie-cutter NPCs with no interesting qualities, and no players want to play a boring game, so it'd be a lose-lose situation. We can't completely stop people from choosing power over RP, but we can mitigate it by making it harder to do so.

Yeah okay, that's reasonable.

... But really, Dirty Fighting on a sorcerer?

Some of the summons never got finished, either. So there has been backlog with fixing/rebalancing them sadly

Oh. Well, okay then.

...

*cracks whip*

Manarethan wrote:

Richard_Edmund wrote:

I have to agree with the above. Maybe in an ideal server we take summons for RP, but even I would go for mechanical power over RP value if I had the choice.

Voila, an excellent reason why we don't provide stat sheets for summons.

Why can we do it via PMs but not post it public?

Before I even start to contribute to this conversation, I'm going to politely ask everyone to keep this civil or I'll be locking this thread. You guys know better than that, be nice. There are reforms to the module and staff already in place with more in the works and dumping on the team when they're working for our benefit isn't cool.

That said, I'm going to respectfully disagree with the stance on keeping summons a secret here because if you pick the wrong epic summon you are literally wasting a feat, this is especially important for classes like Blackguard who have literally no other reason for taking epic levels as it is.

And before you state again that it is an issue of in and out of character knowledge, I'm going to interject with the fact that we're playing a video game, and even in basic D&D you generally know what your summoned creatures capabilities are before you summon them. Some basic elements of game design are important to acknowledge when doing this stuff.

It needs to be fun, and it needs to be accessible. Taking a pointlessly weak summon for an entire epic feat could actually ruin your build, and the fact that that information isn'tt available makes an aspect of the game no longer fun because the necessary information wasn't accessible.

Letting the player base gather this collective knowledge also means we can collectively organize it so you do not have too. If we're allowed, I'll even make a separate thread dedicated to organizing this information into an accessible format so we can reference it with no trouble.

For me BBOD was one of my favorite spells in PvE. I admit, I did a lot of beholder runs. But when your build is limited to not have improved invisibility, which is pretty much a must to survive PvE, your kind of limited to certain options. In addition, divination school focuses does nothing to to increase your abilities to win PvE/PvP. Now the BBOD was changed, I can't do beholder runs anymore, it can't stand the anti-magic cone attack, which beholders can just spam away and do every battle. While it is true that its attack got increased and some other minor aspects, in my opinion, the very core of that spell was the invulnerability, concentration check and death attack. Some say it is OP but to be fair, you could just outrun it to avoid hit, have high enough AC/Fort easily, cast Mordenkainen's on it, or just head for the mage and beat the shit out of it. In PvE the spell was excellent due to the stupid AI and I for one don't care to say I am taking advantage of that. Everyone is.

If you want to choose your summon correctly in RP sense, yes, you pick what feels right. I had an option to choose from three conjuration based epic summon spells. Of which two are alignment based and means that everyone can just watch you tell your alignment, the summoning system should never been build like this in my opinion. When your character gets an alignment change and starts suddenly summoning Celestials that she never would, is great too. I chose the outsider based and got a monk. While, it was great in RP sense, mechanically, I watched it die almost constantly. Sneaks and crits are simply too much for it and it can't do much damage, decent damage yes. The dragons are great in RP sense, but breath attacks, being vulnerable to crit and sneaks make them a bit useless. Now, we could all just go for the transmutation summon with its immunities that outrank most of the summons and has rather nice damage as well. I just find it curious that transmutation school has a better summon than any of the conjuration school summons. Especially since conjuration is the school of summoning and calling. So, while we are discussing having players choosing summons based on RP, what I am all for, shouldn't it lore-wise be that conjuration based caster are actually the summoners? And yes, transmutation can create golems and whatnot, but when we are working with NWN that is so limited anyway, I do believe we should focus on the cores of the schools and their intentions.

Had I known the monk was that weak, or my character known that the epic summon she was going to have could not protect her, there would have been no IC sense of picking such. I don't think any mage goes for a summon that can't do the intended purpose of their, protect the caster or take the tanking position which caster can't take.

I see little point in keeping the summon information held from viewing. Sure, some will try to take the advantage as you said Manarethan, but I do believe you have the tools to sort those people out if need be. And to Mercedes, sure we test things when we first try new stuff or play a new game. But once we have done it more than once, I don't think we would keep repeating the same mistake. Not to mention that caster would tend to know what creatures to summon for what tasks. IC:ly the casters are developing these spells and binding a certain creature that they would have information on. Not just randomly summoning a creature and see what comes up.

Just had an great idea of someone compiling IC book of summons, researching the strengths and weaknesses that way. But in Amia, if you breath the same air with evil necromancer, you're as evil as him.

EDIT! I just realized I sound far too aggressive again, I am sorry Manarethan and developers. The summoning system is great with its options available and I do love it. Having chosen the RP choices fitting for my character usually. But, I dislike the fact that BBOD was nerfed as my specialized wizards life just got a bit more difficult again.

A compendium of summon stats

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