Yeah, I'm with you on initial reaction. As I've played it, though, I've started liking it. They're decent without being on the level of "Rocket-Launcher Tag" that most magic-users reach at high levels. Just enough invocations to be versatile enough (if you're creative about how you use them, of course, and that includes using skill boosters properly), and they're really hard to kill if you build em right. And that's always something that draws me to a class. One of my DMs tends to improve enemies so that things of the appropriate CR actually ARE a challenge, and while this does result in occasional character death, it ends up being fun. And also leading to paranoia in my case, to the point where my character in the level 18 campaign that he ran was practically undetectable by anything but high-powered divinations. Also Devils, but meh. They didn't come up much, and when they did, the rest of the party did a decent job. But now I'm rambling.