What's the deal with familliars?

[Kaeso]

If I'm correct there are two schools of thought concerning the familliar: some people consider them to be a level drain waiting to happen, while others praise them into Heaven. I personally belong to the first group, but I'd like to know why so many people consider familliars to be the greatest thing since sliced bread (and sliced bread is pretty damned awesome :smallamused:).

[Saintheart]

Three advantages I can think of off the top of my head:

(1) Free feats.
(2) Convey touch spells for you.
(3) Frequently so below the DM's notice they don't get targeted a lot. :smallbiggrin:

[Urpriest]

They've got your BAB and they share spells. On a gish, this means they pretty much double your actions.

Also, many Improved Familiars have powerful out of combat abilities, like the Imp's Commune.

[Togo]

The disadvantage is that they are small, weak, and die easily. These are solvable problems, but it's expensive in terms of feats, items and spells.

The advantage is that they can perform actions, breaking the action economy of one standard action and move action per round.

So, get them to feed people potions, retreive fallen items, ready actions for unusual circumstances. My old wizard had a high use magic device check, so his familiar could activate magic items for him. He also had master's touch, trollshape (both of which can be shared with the familiar) a +1 spear with the spellstoring enhancement, and a shrink itemed ballista.

I find the biggest problem is getting a familiar with actual hands.

[FMArthur]

You can also just grab a hummingbird familiar for always-active +4 Initiative. Or a compsognathus familiar in Pathfinder for that same benefit. Elven Generalists double that to get +8 Initiative. That's seriously awesome: going first is good, especially when you have the spell power to make your first turn the last turn of real combat.

They do supply a fair bit of flexibility with your combat actions, too. Lots of mundane stuff has already been mentioned. Familiars with hands can also make use of UMD to cast spells from wands and such.

So they can be dead useful, but the drawback, of course, is that they are not useful dead.

[Kaeso]

So the great advantage is getting a second mini-PC that can perform actions for you. I still don't see why it's so great, a druids/rangers animal companion can serve as a mount or be a good attacker/tripper, while a familliar is only useful if you have a high use magic device check (which will never be the case for a wizard/sorcerer, the archtypical familiar masters, unless you take a ton of cross class skills, which lower your overall skills like knowledges and spellcraft).

[Winds]

Well, the touch spell thing is useful. But beyond that, familiars are more useful than animal companions/mounts in that they are telepathically connected to the PC. A small/clever/agile familiar with high enough intelligence becomes a spy that can also cast the PC's spells. The passive bonuses for having the familiar nearby are handy, too. But it looks to me like your main beef with them would be solved by taking the combat guardian familiars out of Complete Warrior.

[Eldan]

Share Spell.

Make that two 12-headed, giant-sized, bear-strengthened Hydras, please.

[Viktyr Gehrig]

Dragon 280 has feats to improve your familiar. Extra Familiar and Enspell Familiar are nice and you can pick up a Construct Familiar or an Improved Familiar.

The familiar isn't optional for Witch, so I've been looking at ways to rock it out.

[Kantolin]

The 'imbue familiar with spell resistance' spell is ridiculously awesome.

[Thrawn183]

I really like them on Hexblades, as they use not only their BAB, but they also get half your HP.

[Vizzerdrix]

Duskblades make good use of a familiar as well.

[Jude_H]

They have your skills. That basically means +2 on every skill check you make by way of assistance.

For a skillmonkey or Loremaster, it also means you can have a raven or imp using the scrolls you've made during downtime for an extra action or two per round/

They have your spells. That means that your Gish can not only turn into a War Troll, but can turn into a Wartroll mounted on a dragon.

Imbue Familiar with Spell ability means they share your actions, allowing even further abuse of the action economy than a wizard is normally capable of.

They also often have very cool niche abilities like viper poison for low-level combats and hawk or owl vision for general scouting purposes.

[Ruinix]

improved familiar give options like beguiller from SS p60, wich can use his tail for grab things (multiattack feat) (wands) and speak in common wich allow to cast spells, as they share ur skills, so he can use 3 wands in your turn, and u still can cast your own spells. also while he is at 5' from u, you have free true sight.

Also, there some cheesy builds that stack familiar + animal companion + special mount and get a golden dragon (ancient) with all those tasty upgrades on it.

[Grendus]

A lot also depends on your class. With their higher BAB and HP, Hexblades and Duskblades can have freakishly powerful familiars, as do more complicated gish builds (though they'd do well to ACF the familiar and get it as a feat instead, so it can scale off caster level instead of wizard/sorc level). Dread Necromancers can grab an imp, which has half a dozen at will SLA's (useful stuff like Detect Good, Detect Magic, and Invisibility) as well as Commune 1/week. Goes great with their arsenal of touch based debuffs, since the imp can fly in and deliver them while still invisible, thus rendering their opponent flat footed. Beguilers and Warlocks have UMD on their skill list, which means if they grab a familiar with a decent charisma score their familiars turn into mini-rogues. Great for casting cheap crowd control spells or buffs.

Then there's the Psicrystal, which is unique. XPH forgot to detail anything about them, so in many cases you get one just for taking the feat and it regenerates the second it dies, which makes for great expendable scouts. Psi-gish builds often use Control Body and Solicit Psicrystal to shatter the action economy (combine with schism for double psi-gish pwnage), letting their psicrystal fight with their body while they manifest even more powers for buffing and blasting.

So yea, generally what makes a familiar good is that it either expands the spellcaster's already formidable abilities or it allows the spellcaster to break the action economy even further than it already does. Now you just need a way to keep the little buggers alive...