I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on whether the Eidolon is the core of the class.
As long as you realize you're disagreeing with the
expressed intent of the designer of the class, I'm fine with that.
As for economy of actions: the Summoner doesn't have an awful lot of economical action choices of his own. He has very, very few offensive spells (which are at low DC thanks to his Bard spell progression and the general disincentive to pump casting stat for a partial caster without a lot of DC-based spells) and the
summon monster SLAs. He's also got medium BAB, but only light armor and no shield. He's not likely to be up in melee (although I'm playtesting a Summoner who does just that), and his spells are mostly of the "cheerleader" type. It's the Eidolon who has the significant actions.
The
summon monster abilities -- which I've already stated I'd just as soon see disappear, including the spells in his spell list -- aren't as hot as most people are making them out to be. Summoned monsters are generally of a CR significantly below the party level, fighting against monsters equal to or
higher CR than the party, except in the first few levels when there isn't that much range of CR yet. SM6, which the Summoner gets at 11th level, summons at best a single celestial dire tiger, which is CR 9, and probably not as good a choice as a CR 7 huge air elemental in many situations. At 11th level, the Summoner is likely to be fighting monsters in the CR 13-15 range like iron golems, adult dragons, and fairly powerful outsiders. Dire tigers have jack squat against anything that flies or anything that has DR 10+, and air elementals have significantly less offense than the tigers do. <I use SM6 as an example because the Summoner I'm playtesting is level 12, so I've recently looked through that list>
The point of the Summoner is to allow people to play a common fantasy archetype that
has never existed in playable form in D&D before: that of the guy who specializes in summoning or controlling one unique fantastic creature (or a small number of them). Examples of this archetype are all over literature and popular culture -- Belgarath's demon summoning in the Belgariad, Summoners in the various Final Fantasy games, Dr. Frankenstein and his monster, Shinigami Captains and their Bankai in the anime Bleach, and, yes, Pokemon/Digimon/etc -- but D&D has never allowed you to play it.
That is the point of the class. Personally, I'm of the opinion that all the
summon monster stuff detracts from the point and the focus of the class, and possibly over-powers it, but as Jason said in this thread, he aims high for playtest versions of classes and trims back what seems to be too much.
) is that the summoner's "consciousness" is split between himself and his eidolon. The summoner suffers a -X penalty to this, that, and the other thing any round the eidolon functions at full capacity. The eidolon suffers this same penalty any round the summoner functions at full capacity.
