Shaman Spirit Companion Problem?

[Alabast]

If this has already been addressed to death on the board, I apologize.
Everyone knows a shaman gets lousy AC, which is fine, because they stay at range while their spirit companion does the up-close dirty work. Except that the spirit companion, being a conjuration, has the same defenses as the shaman, so it is really easy to hit in combat. Not a huge deal at low-level, since it's tough for low-level enemies to beat the damage threshold necessary to destroy the SC. But it seems that once you get to about 5th level or so, it gets ridiculously easy for enemies, especially brutes and artillery, to destroy your poor spirit companions, since they will generally do more damage on per strike than the SC's threshold can handle and the SC's AC will generally be low. The SC can be conjured at will with a minor action, so this wouldn't be a huge deal except for the damage the Shaman takes every time the SC is destroyed. I've heard stories of a group's shaman going down constantly because the enemies gang up on the SC every time it's summoned.

Am I missing something?

 

[Akaiku]

Well, to be fair, the shaman's spirit takes more damage to make it pop then it does to the shaman. Thusly, it's always a net gain from the choices between a shaman taking the hit and their spirit. Occasionly the enemy misses and sometimes it hits and does less then threshold damage. That attack just did NOTHING. Also also, no status effect that lands on your spirit, including horrible ongoing damage, actually did anything. It it immune to multi-targeting.

So actually that happening isn't all that bad.

 

[Stalker0]

A couple of other things:

1) The companion doesn't get hurt by area attacks. That means someone has to consciously attack it.

2) No matter how much damage the spirit companion takes, you only take a set amount. So if a brute gets a huge crit and does 50 damage, you still only take a small amount.

One of my groups just got an 11th level shaman and the companion was doing just fine against brutes. Once in a while they would take it down, but other times there action was wasted. And if the shaman takes a little pain, he can always summon his buddy back to him, heal a friend, and get that wisdom bonus to his own health to top him back off.

 

[jbear]

I haven't played or seen the shaman in action at any level past first so I can't really comment. It does seem like the Monsters are going to have to invert a serious amount of damage into the spirit companions to drain the shaman, far more than if they were hitting the shaman directly.

The damage taken has a maximum and its half the amount necessary to kill the spirit. This means minions are pretty much unable to affect it. The big guns have to go after it. I'd much rather have the brutes pounding on the spirit than on the PC's. That's a lot of HP that won't have to be healed. I guess this is meant to compensate.

As far as ganging up is concerned; The spirit is only killed if the DMG threshold is surpassed by a single attack.

If the Shaman is suffering he can always withdraw the spirit and keep it close by to heal him/herself before sending it back into battle.

I'm not sure if I'm saying anything you don't know though.

In any case maybe the low AC of the Spirit is a valid point that will be addressed by feats in Primal Power.

Edit: Argh! Ninja'd by Stalker0!

 

[Mr. Teapot]

Keep in mind that the spirit companion can only be targeted with ranged and melee attacks, not with close or area attacks. This means the enemies actually have to devote resources to hurting the spirit companion, rather than just hitting it with a blast while trying to take out the PC rogue that's nearby.

It's also generally inefficient for the enemies to target the spirit companion.


Finally, AC only sucks for the Bear shaman, and only if you choose to make it suck. The other shaman build has Int as secondary stat, so should have a decent AC from that. So if you are going Bear Shaman, you should just come up with some plan for keeping you AC up somehow (buy feats up to Chain, perhaps, or shield proficiency or something).

 

[Eric Finley]

There may be a "death valley" for the shaman characters. That's what my gut says, based on the way they built the thing. At very low levels, enemies have trouble beating the threshold of damage. At very high levels, the damage inflicted (5+1/2lvl) is not very high compared to what the monster could have been inflicting on you. But in the middle somewhere, when the monsters can fairly reliably down the companion, yet you can't afford the lost HP, is it a problem?

I would say that the answer is still no. Imagine if the shaman were simply put into melee, with his AC, and two rules: one, he doesn't provoke OAs with ranged/area effects; two, he ignores all damage up to X points per hit, ignores all close and area attacks completely, and if he takes damage above X, he suffers only (X-5) of it, regardless of how far above X the damage total went. You could certainly argue that this puts the Battlerager to shame...

 

[blargney the second]

Would a shielding swordmage be able to reduce damage the spirit companion takes?

 

[Alabast]

Would a shielding swordmage be able to reduce damage the spirit companion takes?

I don't think conjurations can count as allies for that sort of purpose.

 

[lukelightning]

One funny thing is with the back to the wall feat, no matter where it is your spirit is harder to hit if you are against a wall.

 

[Hammerhead]

And if you're a Bear Shaman who worries about AC, you could just take chainmail proficiency. Problem solved.