Things he considers overpowered/broken:
- High damage threshold for the spirit, combined with no effect if it's not met.
- Spirit OA grants free healing as an effect--since I'm tricked out for healing, it heals a lot. My DM dislikes provoking this even less than the fighter's OA/Combat Challenge.
- By RAW, the spirit floats in the air, so you can stick it next to a flying enemy without hover and get free OAs on it. This got houseruled pretty quick, now he makes it stay on the ground.
- Long-range melee presence with instant repositioning ability, and few or none of the risks of actually being in melee.
Essentially, he dislikes the effects of the class having such a mobile, potent conjuration 24/7.
Ah well. One of those "don't give the PCs swords they might hurt someone" arguments.
The damage threshold is necessary, because the Shaman himself has a pretty low defenses, which also makes the spirit easy to hit. If the damage threshold was lower, we'd see a lot of dead shamans. My monsters would usually try to attack the spirit once or twice, but when they see it's pointless they'd go for something else. Most monsters aren't stupid.
The spirit OA didn't trigger even once in my campaign, so that was a non-issue.
Floating spirit is also a non-issue, especially at higher levels when all PCs have some kind of flight ability.
As for the long range, well, other leaders have ranged attacks, which is even better. Ranged attacks don't eat up minor actions to set up. And being in melee backfired once, when the spirit got caught and killed in a friendly-fire area attack.
All in all, the spirit has some advantages, and some disadvantages over how other leaders work. It probably surprised your DM with a few unexpected events, but that doesn't mean it's broken. PCs pull unexpected stunts all the time. In the worst case, that means they kill your monsters and win the fight (but weren't they expected to do that in the first place?)
