A YouTube video I watched recently claimed that summoners might have been considered a bad class in second edition. However, it doesn't seem like that at a glance - there's opportunities for various creatures and beings to stand by your side, such as a plant monster kinda like Blossomon, a stegosaurus, dragons, and so on. Also they come with a nine level magic collection on top of the Eidolon - and the Eidolon can learn spells too with the correct feats. So you could make a druid like character with lots of magic but their main aspect being able to summon a giant sunflower, as a result of acquiring lots of Druid archetype feats for magic casting and feats related to the Eidolon casting magic themselves. Or you could make a stegosaurus man who summons a powerful stegosaurus that knows a lot about nature and fights for them. Sounds like a cool class to play, but I haven't tried the game much to see how any of this would work in gameplay.
Not sure what you mean by the "double skill item tax", seeing as eidolons get skill bonuses from the summoner's items.
Oh yeah, my bad, I meant as in, if you have an Eidolon like plant focusing on Athletic maneuvers, you'll have to get an athletic item for them (that you equip yourself) or the maneuvers won't do you much good and if you want to have a bon mot/demoralize build on the summoner, you'll need that intimidation/diplomacy item as well, in the end. Technically you could just not focus on too many skills at the same time, but summoner is very conductive for it, if it wasn't for the item cost
I guess so, but that's basically saying that if you want to do more things it costs more money. And the Summoner is uniquely good at doing more things because they have effectively more actions than everyone else, but that's certainly not a bad thing.
Oh yeah, not a bad thing! Just an expensive one, on a class that already has cash issues it can feel limiting that you're geared toward having more diverse skills but are too poor to. The core of the argument was for attack and spellcasting supporting item anyway