How does summons work?

[Livy]

Just picked up this game and decided to go with Herald for the Summons, and for the intro my experience with the 3 few dogs i could summon was, 1 killed the enemy then despanwed, 1 bit the enemy once and despawned and one was summoned on a dying enemy and despawned.

So are they going to last longer and more spammable later on?

[ComradeBender]

If you want to play as a summoner i recommend you to play as inquisitor monster tactician.
He summons for 1 min*lvl instead of 1 round (6 sec)*lvl so you will be able to base your class on summons since lvl 1. If you are Russian - i can send you 1 awesome guide that will help.

[Shadenuat]

Cause they're 1 round/caster level.

[ComradeBender]

Basicly your comrades (bard and gnome) will be able to summon some decent power after lvl 7. Before that - 30 sec is not seriuos for wasting spells. Master tactician has his own resourse for summons that does't affect other spells. 7 times before resting.

[Livy]

Thanks
So can you mix Herald and Monster Tactician?

[Autocthon]

Originally posted by MrFox1231:

Thanks
So can you mix Herald and Monster Tactician?

Not really well. Respec or hold the course until you have enough caster levels to get decent summon durations.

Summoning is of minimal usefulness in the early game simply because the summons don't last long enough to be meaningful.

[Livy]

Cheers!

[dulany67]

Monster tactician can only have one summon at a time. The herald can summon as many as he has spells for.

[Balekai]

Originally posted by dulany67:

Monster tactician can only have one summon at a time. The herald can summon as many as he has spells for.

This. Monster Tactician isn't really a summoning class as it is a "summon a pet or a few pets" class. Your one summon at a time gets teamwork feats and it lasts 1 minute per level if I remember correctly. The duration has no effect on summons from other classes. They will still be one round per level.

A Herald on the other hand is the non-druid divine summon spammer. It gets to replace any spell with a summon spell in addition to cure spells, at the expense of one domain, less BAB, and proficiencies. You get more feat flexibility overall than other clerics trying to summon and more skill points. I only play arcane summoners though and many people use Ecclesitheurge instead for divine summoning. Probably because of more spells overall and they focus on undead summons which don't get anything from augment summoning anyways.

The one round per level duration of summons isn't an issue later. Normal summons last 1 minute at level 10 which is more than enough time to faceroll a boss encounter with an army of them. The best thing to do as a Herald Caller or any summoner is to focus on support at earlier levels until you get extend metamagic or just level up a few times. On a sorcerer, I start using summons when I get access to animate dead (4th level spells).