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I really like what they did with unchained Eidolons - it didn't make much sense before, it was just this "thing" that didn't come from anywhere.
It came from the Summoner's subconscious, at least in my games. A manifestation of their will, possibly molded by their hopes, fears, and dreams, given physical presence by shaping planar essence.
You know it was just 30 years ago that these boards were full of complaints about how OP the new "Barbarian" class was. "A D12 HP?!?! That's INSANE! He even loses his magic restrictions at high levels! No way am I allowing that kind of power at my table!" If only we had known.
30 years ago i ditent have internet so i wouldent know;)
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No, it doesn't make it sound like that at all. It makes it sound like I feel like my preferred style of game is under attack by a pervasive mentality that I find more or less distasteful. I'm especially tired of the rhetorical victory laps people take about the "fixes", and it drives me crazy that Paizo empowered that perception by talking about the lack of a flavor straitjacket on the APG Summoner as if it was a bug, not a feature, and most especially by treating the Unchained Summoner as official "errata" for PFS.
The fact is, as I pointed out (and you conceded), the APG Summoner wasn't even the most powerful, game breaking class in the game (pretty decent, as you put it, and I agree with that assessment), and aside from getting rid of the weird bug with making cheaper wands of some good spells (which I couldn't possibly care less about), the Unchained Summoner doesn't even fix the complaints about how hard the class is to manage at the table with action economy etc. Instead, all it did was gut the flexibility of the class while leaving the complaints about how hard the class is to manage (and even audit - having to check to make sure the base form and individual evolutions are legal for the subtype doesn't seem like less work than the APG system). Yet still we have people talking about how great the new version is. As I said - it's ludicrous.
I'm not sure what forums and arguments you are referring to, but almost all I've ever seen tended towards to opposite, with most people agreeing that the class was ridiculously broken for multiple various reasons. The Spell list was one, the fact that it essentially made other classes/players irrelevant, that Standard Action Summon Monster is ridiculous, and that the freeform Eidolon was just way over the top,(even if cool and fun). The counter arguments basically boiled down to, but in my games, typically from the person actually playing the Summoner, not the other players or DMs of those games), it's just fine. Ignore your experiences and just take for granted mine are ok. The Summoner is ok. They also try to pin all the anti-Summoner fault on other people not understanding the class or a few bad apples "making mistakes", which I don't thing is accurate at all. The fact is, and I'm sorry if you (general you for all that do not agree or accept it), do not like it, but it really does seem like a lot of people "voted" against the Summoner. There is good reason it was so banned, and from the PFS perspective at the least, I know there was a lot, and I mean a lot of DMs and players petitioning to have the entire class removed from legal play because it was so disruptive.
As for "not being the most broken class", that's very debatable. People still say things like "Full Casters", like it's an I win button. In a lot of ways, the Summoner is like a Full Caster on steroids. It can do just about everything that a "Full Caster" can, but it also has a second character that's even stronger or can fill in all the Summoner's weakness like going skill monkey. The other side of the Early access to spells is that it's pretty obvious the APG spell list was cherry picked for most of the "best spells in the game", and this was actually confirmed to be true. Being that most games end near or prior to when Full Casters actually start to really pull ahead, (again this is debatable, but more or less true), the fact that Full Casters do better outside those levels does not help balance the Summoner. It also doesn't help that I've seen people test how effective a Base Summoner is by refusing to even use their Eidolon (self-imposed restriction) and still find it to be a powerful class.
Now, as for the complaint that somehow this is killing your preferred play style, I really do not understand what you mean by this, so I can not say. It sounds like your preferred style is something like the old Godzilla/Cheater of Mystra/Pun-Pun, in that it' a legal way to break the game, except it's not a myth. If so, and there's nothing wrong with that per se, but it's also pretty self evident why so many others are so against even the base Summoner, If not, please explain. It seems like your argument is that the nerfed the class about half as bad as they did the Cleric, and enforced certain rules along the same lines, but they still left a lot of room for personalization and reflavoring, unlike the Cleric as a class.
The problem with the original was that GMs didn't like it, so the solution is to work with the GM, and we should blame the GM for not being willing to make the APG Summoner work? I don't even... Actually, that's not true, I do know where to begin. At the end - I concede your last point - the problem is not (and has never been) with the class, it's been with GMs and players, which is just shows that there was no need for the fix in the first place. It wasn't a problem with the class, it was a problem with how people perceived the class. Before Unchained debates about APG Summoners all more or less followed the same pattern - someone would assert that they were too strong, followed by a discussion in which it would generally be agreed that the problem was really just that Summoners had a higher optimization floor than other classes, and that they were hard for new players to manage effectively. The darkly hilarious thing is that the Unchained Summoner probably doesn't solve either of those problems (it's certainly not easier to manage given the need to now navigate the interplay between the various restrictions on base forms and evolutions per subtype, in addition to the restrictions which people already felt made it tough to build an eidolon correctly). The fact that many people demonstrably feel better about the Unchained Summoner is pretty strong evidence that it has always been about perception, not about any real mechanical problems with the class.
The perception is perhaps the least important reason so many feel the Summoner was pretty strong. At least in my case and most people I've talked to, it's all about their past experiences with it, both long and short term in actual play. It's also that the class has so much potential to just wreck the game single-handedly, and because so many people have seen it done. There is also the fact that it's not just DM's that are against it. I've had players decide to find other games when they found out that someone else was playing a Summoner, and they where polite about it. It's because they have already had experiences where the Summoner character made everyone else feel like ineffective NPCs just there to follow the Summoner and Eidolon. Again, this is not just perception, it's experience and directly tied to the Summoner Class. The funny thing is tat Summoner players also tend to use that same old tell-tail excuse that tends to come up when someone is trying to get something known to be an issue into a game despite the DM saying no; "But it's okay, I'll make sure I keep myself in check, and it's really not that powerful, I promise."
I'm sorry that kills your love the class. I really am. But if it isn't the god-wizard level of power, the broken spellcasting, and it isn't the flavor, what exactly is it about the APG Summoner that you miss? It seems pretty clear you can still do the vast majority of the same flavor/reflavoring with the Class. Have you honestly even attempted to play an Unchained one? I can say so far I have not seen any in actual play, (but also have not seen any of the APG ones being build in the last few months, either, so it's doubtful that not seeing any played is linked to disapproval of the Unchained Summoner directly), and I can't form an honest opinion on how the fixes actually are in play. Conceptually, and even thematically to the class, I do think from reading it that the Unchained does look a lot better overall. But I have not had hands on play experience yet.
I'd also say that doing exactly what they did and unofficially replacing the APG Summoner with the Unchained one IS actually trying to do best by everyone. Trying to make both sides happy. Both in PFS and in non-PFS, and you are probably, (probably) in the minority on this account. I also want to point out that the Unchained Summoner is probably better for everyone in that it's much more likely to be not auto-banned in most games, at the very least until it's play tested pretty well. Again, sounds to me like a win for "your" side.
