Martial Power!!! (Give the martials something to do other than "attack again")

[strangebloke]

It was. Casting summon monster as a combat tool was a waste of your time. Getting a Vrock or Greater Elemental on a 15th level battlefield was not something anyone particularly cared about. planar binding was broken, but that's because it let you summon things that were individually stronger than your entire party. Once again, you don't seem to have any real understanding of how 3e worked in practice or what the dynamics of play actually were.

Planar binding is a summoning spell, the least version of which comes online at level 5 for wizards. I don't know why its irrelevant to discussion of the power of summoning in 3.5.

...And I don't claim to be an expert in "optimal(tm)" 3.5 play, but something can be "strong" and still be "not the best option for the strongest classes in the game."

Or . . .

People like the low level stuff too. They wanted and intended to have a complete game of 1-20 but real life got in the way. There's also the feeling that level 1 is the start of the game. A subset are willing to start at level 3 because they feel level 1 is too weak and don't want an unlucky crit to kill a PC. Even when levels 16-20 are played as one-shots they are in fact being played, and those players don't seem to mind wizards teleporting and polymorphing into dragons while the barbarian does "hulk smash".

My claim wasn't that players hated high level play, but that DMs do. It takes me 3-4 times as long to prepare for my 10th level group as it does for my 1st level group, and a lot of this is driven by me having to account for their numerous magic items and abilities. It's a lot harder to tune in the difficulty and manage rewards at that level, as well as manage the flow and information of the campaign.

You have not know true terror until a player just says "yeah, actually I have teleport lets just go to [place you haven't remotely prepared yet] right now."