Undead Summons flaws

shadows of · Post by **shadows of** » Mon Sep 18, 2006 11:41 am

I apologize in advance if this has been posted about already. I was wondering why none of the undead summons have a weapon equiped? I have looked at the feats that they posses including the epic spell mummy dust and they have weapon specs in various weapons but none in unarmed. These summons are therfore much less useful on the combat side than a traditional summon. I dont know if this is on purpose or just has been overlooked.
Thankyou,
Haro

Post by **Amoenotep** » Mon Sep 18, 2006 11:44 am

all undead have creature weapons. they are specifically designed for that particular undead. they have weapon feats because the bioware default lvl up script makes them take it anyway.

Post by **Binkyuk** » Mon Sep 18, 2006 11:45 am

they have custom weapons of the 'creature' type, which is how they do their elemental damage. the weapon focus feats are a bit pointless (a side effect of the NWN auto-level script i believe), but their AB has been tuned to the right value without them.

shadows of · Post by **shadows of** » Mon Sep 18, 2006 11:49 am

ook thankyou that makes sense. another question is Mummydust supposed to be a tanking summon because i have epic necro and am lvl 23 but his ab is not as good as my lvl 8 greater planar binding who also has one more attack per round. Will my mummy ever reciev more attacks per round and a higher ab?

Squikker2001 · Post by **Squikker2001** » Mon Sep 18, 2006 12:27 pm

I have a shadow dancer toon, and his Shadow avatar does very low damage, something like 1-3 + 4 or 5 I think, has the aforementioned weapon feats, has low HP, low AC, and low AB.

Im just wondering here, but why does the shadow summon have to suck so badly? Im willing to wait for Epic Shadowlord and hope that it makes the shadow usefull.

Post by **Binkyuk** » Mon Sep 18, 2006 12:41 pm

undead summons (and other summons) won't be great generally unless you put something extra into them, like necro spell focus, cleric death domain, blackguard or PM levels.
your shadow is also a fairly low level summon (you can get it by 13 or 14). also remember the SD class just isn't a summoner, i'd concentrate on the class' raison d'etre - hiding.

the undead summons tend not to have as good raw stats as the monster and planar summons, but they have immunity to crit, death magic, sneak attack etc that boosts their staying power a lot. so yes, on balance undead summons are generally better tanks than others at the cost of AB.

P. Fricebottle · Post by **P. Fricebottle** » Mon Sep 18, 2006 10:18 pm

One of our favorite sayings here at NS4 along with "soon" is...

"Blame Bioware."

disastro · Post by **disastro** » Fri Oct 20, 2006 12:13 pm

interesting. I was looking at going high SD for a nice summon, but if the sd shadow doesnt have at least good survivability/tankability then there's probably no point in pursuing a mega SD build. unfortunately the sd test toon i rolled is all melee... no caster levels so no focus/domain buffs.

Post by **Lokey** » Sat Oct 21, 2006 12:20 am

Amoenotep wrote:all undead have creature weapons. they are specifically designed for that particular undead. they have weapon feats because the bioware default lvl up script makes them take it anyway.

Full story is there's an annoying set of dependencies among the 2das for giving them a specific list of feats to take at whatever level. Wasn't worth the time to deal with when it was straightforward to script bonuses for them.

Cthulhu Drega · Post by **Cthulhu Drega** » Sat Oct 21, 2006 4:40 pm

i allwase saw the SD summons as a decoy nothing more let the summons go in first and get mobbed while you start the sneak pwnage if he dies well then you still have HIPS. it will just take a bit longer to kill said mob