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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pickaxe" data-source="post: 2966994" data-attributes="member: 10812">I've seen summoners played pretty effectively in a couple of campaigns. One was a cleric 1/conjurer N with the Good domain, to squeeze an extra round from summoning celestial creatures; the same campaign had a druid as well. In another campaign, the gnome cleric uses SM all the time.It's versatility is what makes it particularly useful. When the rest of the party was incapacitated, the gnome cleric was effectively able to summon a new party of creatures to occupy some yellow musk creeper zombies while she revived the PCs. In the first campaign, we had an encounter with some ogres on the far side of a river. The ogres tried walking across the bottom, to give themselves concealment. The druid summoned a couple of porpoises, which pounded the snot out of the ogres. Battlefield control, flanking, creating diversions, and threatening foes using ranged attacks are all good uses for SM and SNA. I still don't consider it one of the more powerful spells, but it certainly is useful.Remember that you can summon monsters and stay invisible, and that they are not affected by spell resistance.As far as comparing SNA and SM, the celestial/fiendish templates of SM monsters are why they are generally available later than comparable ones are for SNA. SM IV is when you see celestial creatures with DR and other meaningful abilities, and that IMO is when the discrepancy becomes at least somewhat justified. Thus, for the first three spell levels, SNA is superior.Druids are almost certainly the best summoners, although, when you consider Augment Summoning as well, there's a pretty good balance between druids, clerics, and wizards. Wizards have the feats to invest in Augment Summoning, and they have a number of DC-based conjurations that benefit from Spell Focus (Conjuration). Druids can spontaneously summon, but they have few feats and get essentially no benefit from SF (Conj), until they get Fire Seeds, so getting Augment Summoning is costly. Clerics are somewhere in the middle; they can't spontaneously summon, but they can burn summons for cures, and they don't have to invest in putting summoning spells in spellbooks, like a wizard. Plus, they can get a little more out of celestial creatures with the Good domain. With few feats and few known spells, it's tough for a sorcerer to go the summoning route.--Axe</blockquote>

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