Why are Incarnates so bad?

[Stardusk78]

I have never understood why a level 9 avatar of your god should A) strip you of your power levels, B) have a fairly limited duration and C) and most importantly not actually be that good...

Does anyone have any ideas?

[Elric Galad]

I've checked most stats of all summons (googlelize thread "summoner's tables" from a while ago) and the general rule is that most summons aren't properly balanced. 

Some great (Phantoms, Twins, Primordials, Ancient Weapons) some are bad. 

The most common trait is that even if their level scales with the summoner's, their weapons and armor do not. So you're stuck with whatever the game gives you. 

 

For incarnates, they are either Superb Quality or normal quality. Really it depends. The Fighter part of Berath Incarnate has a normal Greatsword...

Which leads to penetration issues for most...

Meanwhile Ancient weapons or Ranger Companion all end up with legendary quality weapons...

Spellcaster ones are good though, basically providing a level 20 caster fellow. 

 

One of Eothas Incarnate acts only once. It has a freaking infinite recovery. Not joking. 

Basically they were poorly tested, and their design was probably too hasty.

Then since the malus is so big, no one used them... So not much people actually complained. So their correction wasn't prioritarized by the devs, leading to current situation. 

Finally the malus applies instantly, reducing the actual duration of the summons... Yeah

 

It's a shame because even with the malus, they could have been somewhat decent without the Eothas bug and random level of quality of weapons. Priest does not have many summons (bar your healer/tank spirit ally) so it could have worked. How good/bad they are currently greatly depends on whichh one we are Talking about. 

The most balanced one is Rymrgand's, which has basically an "infinite" health pool and a PEN 12 AoE attack. 

Edited April 10, 2023 by Elric Galad

[thelee]

1 hour ago, Elric Galad said:

The most balanced one is Rymrgand's, which has basically an "infinite" health pool and a PEN 12 AoE attack. 

it's funny though because incarnates suffer both from being underpowered, but also because spiritual ally is essentially overpowered. like arguably in a vacuum the incarnate summons (except maybe wael) still are servicable use of your action economy in keeping enemies occupied and dealing a bit of damage. but b.c. of the same design oversights, spiritual ally comes with infinite uses of healing, which is ordinarily limited by an AI script, but which you can spam endlessly. compared to that, even Rymrgand is a hard sell, since they both compete for the "summon slot" that you're allowed to have.

[Elric Galad]

27 minutes ago, thelee said:

it's funny though because incarnates suffer both from being underpowered, but also because spiritual ally is essentially overpowered. like arguably in a vacuum the incarnate summons (except maybe wael) still are servicable use of your action economy in keeping enemies occupied and dealing a bit of damage. but b.c. of the same design oversights, spiritual ally comes with infinite uses of healing, which is ordinarily limited by an AI script, but which you can spam endlessly. compared to that, even Rymrgand is a hard sell, since they both compete for the "summon slot" that you're allowed to have.

To say it in another way,

Summons are so good that even a bad summon could be good enough if it was the only summon.

I don't think that Spiritual Ally is so great. The Robust inspiration it can cast is short lived and it has a significant recovery. You cipher buddy will do much better with Pain Block, and Spiritual Ally healing does not stack with it (or the "most cost efficient/action economy efficient" healing in the game, Nature's Balm). Not to say it is bad, but it is not that much superior to everything. (but I pick it on every MC Priest in existence, of course).

Anyway Spiritual Ally is well-rounded (also controllable), Incaranates are not (not even Rymrgand), so I would inclinate toward the Ally most of the time.

Edited April 10, 2023 by Elric Galad

[thelee]

i guess an open question is - what CRPG has done summons generally very well across the board?

i'm not sure i have a good answer to that. I've been trying Solasta of late, and even with extremely rigid adherence to 5e SRD, there are some way too good summons and a lot of garbage, because the tabletop game itself doesn't seem to have put a lot of consideration into making summons work well, even though it has stronger restrictions than Deadire on how it copy-pastes monsters (challenge rating?)

[Shai Hulud]

5 minutes ago, Elric Galad said:

To say it in another way,

Summons are so good that even a bad summon could be good enough if it was the only summon.

I don't think that Spiritual Ally is so great. The Robust inspiration it can cast is short lived and it has a significant recovery. You cipher buddy will do much better with Pain Block, and Spiritual Ally healing does not stack with it (or the "most cost efficient/action economy efficient" healing in the game, Nature's Balm). Not to say it is bad, but it is not that much superior to everything. (but I pick it on every MC Priest in existence, of course).

Anyway Spiritual Ally is well-rounded (also controllable), Incaranates are not (not even Rymrgand), so I would inclinate toward the Ally most of the time.

If it isn't so great why did you nerf duration?

IMO there are a number of examples where lower level summons are better than higher level. Like essential phantom > substantial phantom, instruments of death are best chanter summon etc..

And IMO spiritual ally is one such example, able to compete with level 9 spells at level 6. It is super useful when soloing not just for healing but also for priest multiclasses to proc certain effects. Like the tactician / skaen deification process pretty much requires the ally to proc the nice things like blade cascade in safety. Also shadowing beyond -> one cast of spiritual ally can heal you continuously, get rid of tactician accuracy and pen debuffs. In a party one ally could heal everyone. Also I think spiritual ally lasts longer accounting for power level...and not gimping yourself 5 power levels for a summon is kind of nice. His infinite heals which are better than priest heals also mean the priest doesn't really need to take healing spells.

I haven't messed with pure priests much (mostly because the high level spells are very meh) but I think the incarnates would be fine if you removed the power level gimping entirely vs reducing it to -3 in bpm. They're level 9 spells after all. Rymrygand summon is better but you can't make a priest of rymrygand so seems fine if it is relatively OP.

 

[Elric Galad]

4 minutes ago, Shai Hulud said:

If it isn't so great why did you nerf duration?

Because I buffed its weapon, shield and armor to harmonize scaling rules.

4 minutes ago, Shai Hulud said:

IMO there are a number of examples where lower level summons are better than higher level. Like essential phantom > substantial phantom,

Substancial phantom has better stats in addition to its spells. Sometimes it justifies tier 7, sometimes not.

4 minutes ago, Shai Hulud said:

instruments of death are best chanter summon etc..

Indeed

4 minutes ago, Shai Hulud said:

And IMO spiritual ally is one such example, able to compete with level 9 spells at level 6. It is super useful when soloing not just for healing but also for priest multiclasses to proc certain effects. Like the tactician / skaen deification process pretty much requires the ally to proc the nice things like blade cascade in safety. Also shadowing beyond -> one cast of spiritual ally can heal you continuously, get rid of tactician accuracy and pen debuffs. In a party one ally could heal everyone. Also I think spiritual ally lasts longer accounting for power level...and not gimping yourself 5 power levels for a summon is kind of nice. His infinite heals which are better than priest heals also mean the priest doesn't really need to take healing spells.

I haven't messed with pure priests much (mostly because the high level spells are very meh) but I think the incarnates would be fine if you removed the power level gimping entirely vs reducing it to -3 in bpm. They're level 9 spells after all. Rymrygand summon is better but you can't make a priest of rymrygand so seems fine if it is relatively OP.

 

It is not OP with BPM, barely middle of the incarnate road. Still super high health pool summon is a special trick that only SC Chanter can mimic.

BPM Eothas has the best summon (bot the subclass is meh otherwise). You get 2 Lvl 20 casters (and all their spell slots) and 1 lvl 20 fighter for its price, worth even the PL malus (which can be decreased by Resolve in BPM, a max Res/Int priest build could be worth considering). One can even make an argument for it being stronger than Ancient Weapons when they start spamming Symbols.

That is a bit the point of Incarnate to provide above the (non-chanter) curve summons, but not controllable and with a workable downside.

Still Incarnates are kind of committing, so priest getting a super well rounded summon at tier 6 is nice.

[Stardusk78]

I think the Incarnate of Skaen is pretty good?