Quote Originally Posted by Kryzbyn View Post
That...is amazing. The "dial a class" feature is what I'm most looking forward to, tbh, and this seals the deal for me.
I don't envision the class having a "perma pet" but just "rounds per level" minions he calls upon each encounter, if he needs battlefield control/flanking, but what you've built is pretty much a shadow knight, which is also a win in my book!
Thanks for taking the time to show me that :)
Not a problem! Glad you enjoyed it!
As to a permanent minion, well the beauty of it is that if that's not for you, spend the talent to pick up a different class or different initial class option. Maybe rather than getting a dedicated familiar, the conjurer might get a summoned minion a few times per day appropriate for his/her level (kind of like the summoner feature).

Haven't decided exactly what we're going to do with summoning spells yet. Due to my trying to normalize the way monsters are built (they're built a lot more like PCs with clearer rules on exactly what is appropriate for what levels), there's been some discussion of setting a budget for spells like animate dead or summon monster where you're allotted up to X CR in minions that you can control at a time, so a summon monster spell that conjured a CR 1 encounter worth of creatures would let you call in either a single CR 1 critter, or a pair of CR 1/2 critters, or a trio of CR 1/3 critters (likely with a limit of 3-5 or something) which would last 10 rounds.

The benefit of this is that you'd have a lot of flexibility with summoning and you wouldn't have to revise the summon monster list when new content came out (nor would you just ignore all the new content). Also with this route, you'd still be capped in effective CR worth of creatures controlled at once, no matter how frequently you tried to cast the spell (so you'd only have a specific number of minions at once, which saves a lot of groups headaches, since vanilla conjurers can just flood ever more critters into a battle every round).

Alternatively I might go with something more akin to the astral construct psionic power where you build a few monsters from a list of options to be your minions. I'd like to try to make the former work before I fallback on this plan though.