Best Reasons NOT to Gish

[Gnaeus]

It's not about splitting rewards based on contribution, xp rewards are split based on who is in the party. Unlike summons, called creatures aren't a spell effect. They can act in any fashion they so choose as long as it fulfills the terms of the contract. If the DM is following only your orders and not giving the creatures personality and an independent thinking mind, that's on them. If the deva notices nice loot and decides to take it because it would help their cause, they can. A lot of times people boil binding and ally into being summon monster when it is so much more complex and varied than people make it out to be. Of course spells when used in their most permissive state are simply stronger than anything else. While a deva IS better than a fighter of equal level, the argument is dismissive of the costs that could be involved because they are unquantifiable. Saying these spells are worth more than a fighter is like saying you'll always have wind blowing into your sails on a ship. It might work because plot demands it, but it's not a guarantee.

In general, you are the ones writing the contract. You can write in the contract what their orders are. Yes, if you do a terrible job writing a contract some devas could steal your $. But a LG Trumpet Archon probably can't. Or a golem or a dragon skeleton or the meatshield you dominated, or the undead you rebuked. The Ravid or the Hellcat don't care about your stupid human gold. And thats without even considering the actual summons, or the druids pet. Or the biggest ? of all, planar ally, which generally gets you a pretty compliant ally since you are both members of your god's team but is kind of a DM choice on what you get.

Its less like you will always have wind blowing into your sails on a ship, than that a ship with sails and motor and a crew of oarsmen is always better than hiring one big dude with oars who will get paid even when the motor is going, even though it is obviously better than him, and who is going to feel bad if he isn't rowing. In any game I have been in, I would rather have planar binding than a fighter. But that argument is unnecessary. I would always rather have a CoDzilla who can pretend to be a fighter and in some cases better than a fighter but who isn't going to be outclassed when I cast summon monster 3 times or make some undead or any of the other fighter equivalents we can utilize. Like, in the most extreme examples, a wall. There is a significantly non 0 number of encounters where a muggle is flat out worse than a wall.

The muggle is never truly competing with planar binding. He is competing with someone who can cast spells that are individually comparable to a fighter, but who also has a bunch more tools at his disposal than the muggle ever will. And who may, build depending, be only slightly worse than he is at being a fighter. Or better, depending on whether being a fighter includes solving all those unusual combat circumstance issues that muggles have to solve with WBL.