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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Buugipopuu" data-source="post: 5858890" data-attributes="member: 41173">Oh, we're doing this again are we?  You talk big, but the numbers disagree with you quite hard.  Summon Monster V is a 5th level spell which is a risky proposition since you stand a reasonable chance of wasting it if you cast it and get hit before the start of your next go.  You use it and summon a Fiendish Dire Crocodile, against the CR 9 monsters you'll be likely encountering in a best case scenario.  Of the 40 CR 9 monsters in the SRD, 11 can fly and will laugh at your silly crocodile.  The average AC of a CR 9 monster is handily 21, and so your crocodile has a 50% hit chance, or a 60% hit chance if you burned two feats on Augment Summoning.  The average grapple modifier of said monsters is 24, so if you hit, you have a 35% chance of grappling, or 45% with Augment Summoning.  So for your risky full-round-action spell, you get yourself a 17.5% chance of disabling an enemy each turn, or a 27% chance with Augment Summoning.  Game breaking, that is not.  Haste makes things significantly better, upping the percentages to 28%/39%, but that's still two actions and two spell slots for an attack with a worse than evens chance of success, and that's assuming your crocodile gets to full attack.You're also overstating Confusion, it only works against things with bad Will saves, it's an Enchantment, which many things get a bonus to saves against, and it's Mind-Affecting, so a whole bunch of targets are non-starters before you look at the numbers.  Then you can eliminate targets with decent SR, for whom its success rate is highly spotty.  Its range is also a 15 foot burst.  If you fire it off, chances are you are the 'nearest creature', and targets actually have a 50% chance of being able to gank you on their go.  As an attack, it's really rather situational.  You have to put yourself in harm's way, it only works on a subset of creatures, and its tiny range makes it not really that effective as a lockdown attack against anything that's actually a threat.  Fear is similar, in that not only is it Mind-Affecting and allows SR, bonuses to saves vs. Fear and Immunity to Fear aren't uncommon, and its short range makes it a risky proposition even in situations where it works, it's good, but in order for it to end an encounter you need a quite a few things to go your way.  And even then, neither actually do any damage, so you're relying on other people to actually do the work.Said reason being that it doesn't matter how powerful the majority of spells are if a few of them can one-shot encounters.  The reason has nothing to do with the system and everything to do with the spell descriptions.</blockquote>

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