Felon said:
Your dismissal of the orbs, arc of lightning, and blast of flame is kind of puzzling. You think that because they were added at "the same time" as assay resistance removes them from consideration. That's a bit of a non sequitor, as it actually strengthens the design decision behind introducing assay resistance. The net effect is that with the induction of those conjuration heavy-hitters, assay resistance shored up the stuff that came before it.
My argument is that their introduction to the game later indicates that SR was not initially intended to be largely inconsequential--nor was it initially inconsequential. Only the advent of the orbs and arc of lightning (and to a lesser degree, blast of flame), along with assay resistance made it easily bypassed by many groups. And of that group of spells, I think arc of lightning and the orbs are by far the most significant. Even without assay resistance, the conjurations alone make it relatively easy to bypass SR.
But the fact that the conjuration spells already do that doesn't mean that assay resistance won't do it.
To refer to summon monster as "limited" due to the selection of monsters is also kind of odd. The summon monster spell is in fact as open-ended and flexible as a single offensive spell can get. If you want a weapon for every occasion, you'd be hard-pressed to beat SM's.
Yes and no. It is a very flexible spell, but you don't always have the option to summon something that will be useful. For instance, this weekend, I was playing my cleric (who doesn't quite have the flexibility of an arcane summoner, but still has a lot of flexibility (being neutral good). Even so, with two summon monster VIIs prepared, I looked through the list and, when it came to fighting the advanced ice devil or the marilith that our party faced, I realized that there wasn't much of anything on the summon monster list that would be a helpful summon. Everything had either too low an attack bonus or had spell like abilities that would most likely fail against its spell resistance.
And last of all, saying assay resistance does "nothing" for lightning bolt is flat-out incorrect. It will help penetrate the SR of the creature you're assaying. That you deem it an inefficient use of a spell does not equate to it doing "nothing".
OK, it doesn't do absolutely nothing for lightning bolt. However, in the cases where you would use assay resistance with a lightning bolt, your caster is much more likely to simply use an orb spell or arc of lightning. Since my experience is that most casters will generally have orbs or an arc of lightning prepared as well as the lightning bolt, fireball, etc, assay resistance generally doesn't increase the use of arc of lightning in practice, even if, in theory, it would benefit.
Melf's arrow is not the damage-dealer that scorching ray is, to be sure. But it is a long range spell, which wizards are lacking at that level, and of course it was at one time a good spell for beating SR, before the lesser orbs came along. The damage always was a little too low, and I suspect that the general disfavor for it and other "damage-over-time-spells" was one of those lackluster conjuration attack spells that nudged the designer's towards giving conjuration spells a bit more "oomph". Of course, they over-oomphed in many people's opinions.
Maybe. Of course, they haven't been consistently over-oomphing everything. For instance, I used to like the vitriolic sphere spell even though it was damage over time. When they de-oomphed it in the spell compendium, that was when I stopped liking it.
