- bombard
In my experience the knockback is often a disadvantage and rarely an advantage (that you need). In situations that are important, it tends to mess with your positioning.
On spellforged servitor the knockback is quite a nerf, often it pushes the servitor out of range and it wastes turns walking back in range. At other times it ruins the cover provided by the servitor. There is a perverse incentive to have it use stone arrow instead.
Suggestions: Put knockback on the lvl 3 spell instead, it might be more of an advantage early game. Maybe differenciate LCS by letting it pierce through multiple enemies.
It was a deliberate design choice for the poison school to be less useful later in the game. That’s still listed as a reason why adding acid spells to poison magic is a Won’t Do.
The gameplay themes of alchemy aren’t exactly a good concept as a whole (poison, exploding objects, and random multischool spells that would be sufficiently characterized by just the other school) so I really don’t see how this improves the tmut situation enough to justify completely cutting the original concept of the poison school. Alchemy would provide a similar future design space without including poison.
- inugami
It’s much better than the randomness of the previous familiars. Call Canine Familiar already stood out as the starting book summon with sInv, so there wasn’t really a need for the new gimmicks. But they’re very thematic.
There’s a mild tedium because you need to attack your inugami to poof it after every fight.
Because, if you explore with an active inugami,
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you may want to resummon the inugami when the next fight starts, because it’s about to time out (healing doesn’t extend the time, at least not like recasting), or
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you might be seperated by a tele trap, and then you can’t summon it to the new location.
It has anti-synergy with other summon spells, exploding other summons fighting alongside you if you use it to it’s potential.
Previously, guardian golem could be a bomb or an unstable protector depending on the situation. That’s how a bomb summon could become part of the summoning starter book in the first place. I don’t think summoners would’ve ended up with blazeheart golem if it wasn’t for the bias created by guardian golem. Explosions are fun, sure, but gimmicks like this tend to get old, so it’s not really relevant.
Injury bond is the part that made sense for summoners. I usually only use guardian golem as a bomb when I don’t have lightning spire, and the explosion is OP for it’s level anyway. Later, lightning spire can accomplish the same more silently.
Lightning spire is very much used as a tank because of it’s low EV and lack of movement, you absolutely shouldn’t assume it to be “out of enemy range”. The injury bond is very much relevant to keep the lightning spire or a different midgame summon alive when it’s used as cover, particularily against ranged enemies. Because recasting generally means giving up the cover.
Suggestions: Put a different spell in the summoner starting book instead. Maybe put blazeheart golem in a different start, like fire elementalist, conjurer, or a new alchemist that isn’t about poison but about exploding objects.
For a replacement, Martyr’s could work. But the flavor is too “necromancy” for regular summoners. (Speaking of flavor, it doesn’t fit that the only protective summon is incompatible with the good gods, anyway.)
Martyr’s Knell is a powerful minion protection spell made for necromancers, but it also happens to be a spell protecting summons. The balance of summoners is different from the balance of necromancers, so I think it’s desirable to have two different spells offering protection to only one of undead minions or summons respectively.
Inugami design can easily become something that needs protection even more than other summons, by giving it less health (and more attack to compensate). Then you can just keep the regular guardian golem. Maybe nerf the explosion damage and/or only make it explode if it got enough damage via injury bond.
Alternatively, you could give the inugami’s mechanisms to a non-explosive guardian golem.
