Quote Originally Posted by strangebloke View Post
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.
The lesser version of planar binding comes online at 5th level (well, as a 5th level spell, but let's give you the credit for meaning that). And it's also not particularly broken in the sense of being mechanically overpowered. A 6HD outsider at 9th level is often not all that big of a deal. It's not until regular planar binding (where the HD threshold is higher than the level at which you get it) and greater planar binding (where just within Core, you can bind something that is stronger than your entire party at the level at which you get it) that the spells become problematic. And most uses of those spells aren't broken at all. Using planar binding to recruit outsiders as subcontractors is fine.

What is broken is specifically the fact that a spell allows you to get something that is intentionally and explicitly stronger than your entire party. But that's not really anything to do with summoning. It's like looking at the d2 Crusader and declaring "melee attacks are broken!". One overtuned thing does not make a category of options broken. When summoning is tuned appropriately, such that you are summoning things that are at a power level where they are "minions" and not "boss monsters", it is basically fine. Because having a bunch of extra dudes on your team is only broken when the game makes assumptions (*cough* Bounded Accuracy *cough*) that make having a bunch of extra dudes on your team an optimal strategy.

Where you do have a point is that minionmancy has basically always been very annoying to deal with because having one guy control a whole bunch of characters is a big time cost. That's totally an issue, and while you can mitigate it by having minions show up in small groups, I don't have a great solution to that problem.

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.
It sounds like you really would have benefited from a design process that aggressively tested and iterated to ensure that consistent balance targets were hit throughout the game and communicated those targets to players and DMs effectively.

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."
How is that different from "let's go poke at the bits of scenery in town that you haven't designed"? What happens when you thought the players were going to go deal with the Thieves Guild, but they decide that the Town Guard is the thing to interact with instead? teleport and plane shift open up vast new vistas of adventure, but even the vistas of adventure that exist in a small city are far vaster than any DM can explicitly prepare.

Quote Originally Posted by Slider Eclipse View Post
It's honestly a big part of why I loved Path of War and most other product lines that publisher did, they did a fantastic job accounting for Multiclassing in a fair and balanced way that I wish WotC would bring to 5e.
Not really. PoW/ToB multiclassing is better than general multiclassing, but it's still not great. Having a Warblade 6/Crusader 6 come in as a 9th level Warblade + a 9th level Crusader is better than having them come in as a 6th level Warblade + a 6th level Crusader, but it's still really hard to properly balance. Better, I think, to do one of two things.

First, embrace open multiclassing completely. Make classes extremely light and let people combine abilities basically however they want. Want to smite like a Paladin on eldtrich blasts like a Warlocks? Just take the "Smite" activated ability and the "Eldritch Blast" basic attack ability and go for it.

Second, remove open multiclassing entirely. Don't try to figure out how to make Sorcerer 4/Barbarian 3/Druid 3 balanced with Wizard 5/Fighter 5 or Rogue 10. People get a class, and multiclassing is accomplished through subclasses, with Feats and Backgrounds providing additional customization.

Personally, I lean towards the second one, because it's easier to preserve class identity and create evocative class fantasies if classes work in genuinely different ways, and that's incompatible with freely combining abilities between classes.

Quote Originally Posted by Jakinbandw View Post
What would people think of martial abilities like:
That seems like it would be really annoying to adjudicate. Also it seems weird that you only get flashes of insight from making proficiency checks? Do you never realize "hey, wait, the room behind this door is full of angry ogres, I shouldn't open it"?