Well to be honest, I'm not a Pathfinder expert. I learned it to play a Skype game with Kuriin and some of his friends, and while I had played plenty of D&D over the years, Pathfinder was new to me. So I don't have tons of play experience to fall back on and give you good reasons. I just loved the different archetypes within the Summoner class, particularly the Synthesist. I can't remember the other names, but one allowed you to have a shitload of summons out at once, while the Synthesist you almost literally became the pet yourself. Like, the summoned pet surrounded your body and you got all sorts of melee bonuses associated with it, so it was sort of like an entirely different take on a melee class, while still having a little bit of casting ability.
For all I know, maybe that's one of the "broken" classes that was too powerful, but from seeing what one of the rangers (or whatever Pathfinder calls them) was able to do, I question where "overpowered" really lies. He was multi-critting for massive damage regularly, while I would occasionally, and could take some hits he couldn't. But he'd hit from so far away and so hard that he rarely got in trouble anyway.
I mean, they have a ton of interesting classes, don't get me wrong, but the Summoner just called to me as something unique in this type of game. Sure, it sounds a lot like a mage in EQ, but in terms of D&D? Not much of that going around, particularly when you toss Synthesist archetype onto it.
