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.
I don't think they need double gold, but at the same point, having the GM drop an extra Staff or skill item above and beyond the normal loot bounds could hit right.
More so than two full characters, Summoners have felt more like 2/3s of a fighter, and also 2/3s of a caster, and while that's a 'gut feeling' more than any kind of measurement, I do feel like they're closer to 'needing' 33% extra gold, rather than 100% extra gold, if that makes sense.
Not sure if that's including or excluding the action total since you only get 4 to split for 2 character (instead of 6 between 2 actual characters). Like, if your eidolon was a full fighter and your summoner a full sorcerer, you'd already "roughly" be worth 2/3 of each of them from action economy alone (modulo the fact that the last action is a bit weaker than the first one). I'd probably put them between 1/3 and 2/3 but definitely closer to 1/2 when considering the action economy
I meant more in 'opportunity'. Like, casters usually suck when they're in situations where they're just throwing out cantrips, and melee fighters suck at times when ranged combat is needed, or when utility/AOE/Elemental spells are needed.
So they can leverage their flexibility to throw 3 actions at the 'most relevant choice' between a 'fighter' and a 'wizard'. Granted, either form is going to be weaker than a PC Fighter or Wizard.
Add to that their occasional feats like 'Tandem Movement' that lets them kinda sorta cheese the action economy, and things like 'Eidolon's Opportunity', letting the Eidolon threaten spaces even while the summoner is acting more in 'Wizard mode', and I think an average effectiveness of 2/3s is fair. Yeah, they do lose out on 2 of 6 actions compared to two full characters, but that just means they dump the 2 'least useful actions' rather than straightforwardly being 2/6th worse.