D&D 4E summoning experience for 4e

[kodyboy]

I recently played a game with a character who could summon a standard monster of his level as a daily, with a sustain standard. Basically the monster's abilities replaced the characters while the monster was in play. My 3rd level warlock summoned an imp, and there were no problems with it. The imp was actually a pretty poor combatant compared to my warlocks abilities. Blocking was not an issue, the imps HPs were not an issue in fact summoning seems far better for 4e than it was for 3e, if you stick to equal level monsters, sustain standard and use a healing surge to summon.
Next time I am going to try a better combatant, like a goblin hexer or goblin skullcleaver and for 4th level I am going to try a deathjump spider. I will post how it works out.
In my opinion summoning was left out only to help sell the PHB2, not because it is too hard to use in 4e.

 

[guybrush]

I just bumped this thread detailing some homebrew summoning powers which I quite liked. As I said there, I like this system of using a Standard Action sustain, though I don't think expending a healing surge is necessary. Summoning a monster of your own level seems a little underpowered, too - a monster of a given level is never quite as powerful in terms of damage output as a PC of that level, though they usually have more hit points.

 

[Raven Swords]

I think a lot of features possible have been left for later books in order to save space and keep sales up, all the powers take up a huge amount of room. I'm expecting most of the old wizard specialists to get featured one at a time and summoning (and necromancy) is bound to be there... They effectively only built invokers into the phb.

Its so easy to add to this game!

 

[Hawke]

I think specifically tailored summoned creatures is going to be needed. Looking at monster levels, abilities, etc. seems needlessly complex to summon an imp that comes in does some damage and dies. A naturey druid summoner could be pretty awesome...

And I agree... this game its so easy to add to.

 

[kodyboy]

I agree with both of you, this game is very easy to add to because it has such a obvious power progression. From what I have seen summoning is fairly simple because the monsters scale better than in 3.5 and having one for a short period of time is not really a big deal (if your actions become the monsters of course). I have noticed that lots of people like to make things for 4e that are little more than the same powers already available, but with different names and fluff. To me it seems that new stuff should be new, not just variations of what is already available.