(3.5/PF) Help with a player's homebrew: Guardian of the Filth

[Drothmal]

Long story short: We are playing a game of rotating DMs in pathfinder with other 3.5 sourcebooks available. I asked to play a homebrew class (the champion, which can be found in the gaming section of the playground). It turned out too powerful and I am considering retiring the PC. Now it's my turn to be DM and one of the other players (the one who raised the most arguments about the champion being too powerful) decided that he wanted to make his own class modeled after the Gaele Eladrin (one of the most broken things I've ever seen in my life).

This is a class/race (some of it paraphrased by me in more common terms). He cannot multiclass and he does not get any feats beyond the ones in the class (which hurts even more because we are using the pathfinder progression).

Fluffwise is fantastic, but even after considerable nerfing (and many, many fights to get there), I feel the result is still overpowered.

Thus, I submit this to people far more knowledgeable than I for opinion on balance.

Guardian of the Filth

d6
SP= 3+INT

{table=head]Level|Base Attack<br>Bonus|Fort Save|Ref Save|Will Save|Special|1st|2nd|3rd|4th|5th|6th|7th|8th|9th

1|
+0|
+2|
+2|
+2|Feat, Disguise Self (3+Cha)/day|1|-
2|
+1|
+3|
+3|
+3|+2 Dex|2|-
3|
+2|
+3|
+3|
+3|Feat, SR=lvl+6, Int+1 |2|-
4|
+3|
+4|
+4|
+4| +1 Str, +2 natural armor |3|1|-
5|
+3|
+4|
+4|
+4| +1 Wis |3|2|-
6|
+4|
+4|
+4|
+4| +1 Cha |3|2|1|-
7|
+5|
+5|
+5|
+5| +1 Str, Feat|3|3|2|-
8|
+6|
+5|
+5|
+5| +1 Int, +4 natural armor, Strength Domain power (+lvl to Str for lvl rounds/day)|3|3|2|1|-
9|
+6|
+5|
+5|
+5||3|3|3|2|-
10|
+7|
+5|
+5|
+5|DR 5/cold iron-magic, SR=lvl+8, +1 Wis|3|3|3|2|1|-
11|
+8|
+5|
+5|
+5| +1 Str|3|3|3|3|2|-
12|
+9|
+6|
+6|
+6| +1 Int, +6 natural armor, Polymorph self 1/day |3|3|3|3|2|1|-
13|
+9|
+6|
+6|
+6| +1 Str |3|3|3|3|3|2|-
14|
+10|
+6|
+6|
+6| +1 Cha |3|3|3|3|3|2|1|-
15|
+11|
+6|
+6|
+6| +1 Str, +1 Wis, Feat |3|3|3|3|3|3|2|-
16|
+12|
+6|
+6|
+6| +1 Con, Filthy Flames |3|3|3|3|3|3|2|1|-
17|
+12|
+6|
+6|
+6||3|3|3|3|3|3|3|2|-
18|
+13|
+7|
+7|
+7|+1 Str, +1 Cha|3|3|3|3|3|3|3|2|1
19|
+14|
+7|
+7|
+7|+1 Con, DR 10/cold iron -magic|3|3|3|3|3|3|3|3|2
20|
+15|
+7|
+7|
+7|+12 natural armor, Alternate form|3|3|3|3|3|3|3|3|3 [/table]


Special Traits

• Starting Ability Score Adjustments: None. While neonate guardians
are physically and mentally weaker than a
typical humanoid class, over time they become very powerful.
• Speed: additional 10 ft to the selected base race, accounting for their swiftness.
• Darkvision: Guardians can see in the dark up to 60 feet.
• Low-Light Vision: Guardians can see twice as far as regular humans
in starlight, moonlight, torchlight, and similar conditions
of poor illumination. They retain the ability to
distinguish color and detail under these conditions.
• Automatic Languages: Common, Filth.
• Bonus Languages: Celestial, Infernal, Draconic.
• Favored Class: Guardian of the Filth (secret language), multiclassing requires the use of epic level rules (see
Epic Level Handbook for more information).

Class Skills

The Guardian’s class skills (and the key ability for each skill)
are Spellcraft (Int), Use Magic Device (Int), Perception (Wis), Escape Artist (Dex),
Knowledge (planes, religion, arcana, history) (Int), Stealth (Dex), Diplomacy (Cha), Disguise (Cha) Sense Motive (Wis).


Class Features

Weapon and Armor Proficiency: Guardians of the Filth are proficient
with light armors and all martial weapons (or one exotic weapon of choice, if desired). Yet, they have severe contempt for simple weapons, shields and medium or heavy. They rather go by unarmed and unprotected than using any of the latter.

Filthy Flames (Su): At 16th level, as a standard action the guardian may choose to give into the esence of The Filth for as long as she wants to, allowing a frantic and vibrant black energy that flows deep from within her own body to consume her, almost as if she where burning in large black energy flames. While in this special form, the guardian can exercise true seeing, fly (100 feet, perfect) and spiderwalk at will, but can be easily spotted or sensed from afar because of both her ominous aspect and aura.
Alternate Form (Su): Upon reaching 20th level, as a standard action, a Guardian can assume the form of a black large Avatar of The Filth for up to five minutes. Without any nose, mouth, fangs, claws or distinctive features other than a single huge green and orange eye for a face, this smooth headless black humanoid energy blob cannot perform any normal attacks or cast spells, but may teleport without error at will with up to five people and their belongings, and use greater dispel and planeshift as touch attacks. It may also dispel proyectile-like spells; to do so, the Avatar of The Filth stretches its enormous and elastic hands to actually grab the magical attack. While in this form, the guardian may push it and channel enough energy from the Filth to cast Mage´s Disjunction, by overcoming a Concentration check DC 30. Doing so, whether the spell is effective or not, renders the Guardian unconscious for the rest of the day, and unable to become an Avatar of The Filth for seven days.

Spells

Taken from the Sor/Wiz list, knows 1/3 of sorcerer’s plus the ones in the following list
1st—true strike, 2nd—death knell, 3rd— dispel magic, 4th—enervation, 5th—slay living, 6th—harm, 7th—resurrection, 8th—polymorph any object, 9th—wish.

[Drothmal]

First, please let me ask you to be civil with the comments. If the concensus is that the class is OP, I'll direct the player to this thread, so don't make fun of him. I want to know your honest opinions


Besides any comments, please answer the 2 following questions:

Is this balanced with respect to the core PF classes?
Is this balanced with respect to the Champion of the Playground?

[DragoonWraith]

The core PF classes are not particularly well balanced. Are you comparing this to a Wizard or a Fighter? Biiiig difference there.

This has worse spell levels and spells per day than the Wizard, and worse spells known than the Sorcerer. Just from that fact alone... it's not as good as either. None of those abilities is so amazing that they're worth giving up that much spellcasting.

But then this is D&D 3.5 we're talking about. Arcane spellcasting is more powerful than all else, and therefore losing Arcane spellcasting for almost anything is a downgrade. This does not make for a very good balance point. And Pathfinder only exacerbates the issue by giving the Wizard and Sorcerer class features (which, while I agree they were desperately needed in the sense that the actual classes did nothing, also substantially improved their already-too-high power level, in some cases quite substantially)

Anyway, what are you getting for this?

Well, start by losing all your normal feats and gain four at different levels. Compared to the ten in normal PF? Ouch...

You get a d6 hit die. Yay, 1 average HP more per level. Nice, not incredible. Not enough for a gish, which is what this might be trying to be?

An extra skill point per level... which, by the way, is bizarre. Every class in the game uses 2, 4, 6, or 8, plus Int. Why is this different? Anyway, doesn't really make a difference.

You get perfect saves.... which are nice, in fact it strikes me as odd to have a full-caster with perfect saves at all. Still, perfect saves are not massively powerful, especially without multiclassing.

You get 3/4 BAB. Which is compensated for (compared to 1 BAB) by the Str, so that's pretty significant. Not enough health, though, for a proper Gish.

You get +5 to Str, +2 to Dex, +3 to Int, +2 to Wis, +3 to Cha, without class features to use them. I don't think that's much of a problem. They're fairly strong class features, and rather rare, too (only classes I can think of that give straight-up bonuses to abilities are the Paragon classes), but I don't think any of this is incredible or anything. The Str implies Gishiness, I suppose, but again, the HD's too low for it.

You get SR, and enough of it to be meaningful. Fairly powerful, not overwhelmingly so.

You get some Natural Armor. Again, enough to be nice. But you only have Light armor. Your AC will be high, but when you do get hit it's going to hurt a lot with that hit die.

You get DR/cold iron or magic, which is essentially meaningless. By level 10, almost everything meaningful overcomes DR/magic anyway.

You get Disguise Self 3/day and Polymorph Self 1/day. If those spells aren't OP in general, they're not OP as SLAs here. In 3.5, Polymorph is OP, but PF supposedly fixed that. If so, then this should be a non-issue.

You get the Strength domain granted power. Whoo. Nice, ish, but not amazing.

You get permanent Spider Climb, Fly, and True Seeing at 16th. The first two are nice but not that powerful, especially at that level; a Warlock gets the former at level 1 and the latter at level 10 or so. Permanent True Seeing... is really powerful. I'm averse to things like True Seeing, Freedom of Movement, and Mind Blank to begin with; I certainly don't like having them always on. Considering you cannot use Permanency with True Seeing, and it usually costs 250 gp (which is eliminated by it being an Sp or Su ability, whichever it actually is), I don't think it's a good idea to give that. Push it down to See Invisibility, perhaps? Of course, the Warlock's had that from level 1 also. Maybe Arcane Sight? The Warlock's had most of that since level 2. Not really sure what's appropriate here. Maybe the ability to reveal (as with True Seeing) the truth of a single target at-will, so it costs actions? That sounds reasonable.

The capstone's powerful, but it's level 20. I don't think it's overpowered.

Basically, this is trying to be a Gish. Parts of it are all there (Str bonus, Natural Armor, BAB), but I feel like with that hit die it's going to have a hard time. The spellcasting's pretty weak, too, even for a Gish - a Wizard/Fighter/Eldritch Knight will do a lot better. Is it better than a Fighter? Definitely. Is it better than a Wizard or Sorcerer. Not even remotely.

[Drothmal]

The core PF classes are not particularly well balanced. Are you comparing this to a Wizard or a Fighter? Biiiig difference there.

I agree that there's a big diference :smalltongue:. To be honest, I'm not completely sure what to compare it to... I agree that it has gish written all over it, so I guess it would be compared to a gish build (which you compared further down)


This has worse spell levels and spells per day than the Wizard, and worse spells known than the Sorcerer. Just from that fact alone... it's not as good as either. None of those abilities is so amazing that they're worth giving up that much spellcasting.

True that, but he still would get bonus spells for Cha, so it does reduce the impact of how many spells/day can be cast to 2/3. For spells known, it is true that it ends up with few, but the extra list was not a bad one by any means


But then this is D&D 3.5 we're talking about. Arcane spellcasting is more powerful than all else, and therefore losing Arcane spellcasting for almost anything is a downgrade. This does not make for a very good balance point.

Couldn't agree more


Well, start by losing all your normal feats and gain four at different levels. Compared to the ten in normal PF? Ouch...

You get a d6 hit die. Yay, 1 average HP more per level. Nice, not incredible. Not enough for a gish, which is what this might be trying to be?

One of my problems was that you can compensate for the low hit die with relatively low level spells, so once you've reached the lvl9-10, you can overcome your weakness by using spell slots you wouldn't be using that much on the first place. But I agree the feats hurt a lot: In fact, it is one of the reasons I allowed most of the other abilities


An extra skill point per level... which, by the way, is bizarre. Every class in the game uses 2, 4, 6, or 8, plus Int. Why is this different? Anyway, doesn't really make a difference.

Bizarre is the best word to describe it... but he dropped from 4 to 3 on his own accord


You get perfect saves.... which are nice, in fact it strikes me as odd to have a full-caster with perfect saves at all. Still, perfect saves are not massively powerful, especially without multiclassing.

Actually, the saves were one of the things that put me off the most when trying to grasp if the class was balanced or not... I feel is too high at low levels and too low at high levels... Is this normally considered to be a pro or a con?


You get 3/4 BAB. Which is compensated for (compared to 1 BAB) by the Str, so that's pretty significant. Not enough health, though, for a proper Gish.

You get +5 to Str, +2 to Dex, +3 to Int, +2 to Wis, +3 to Cha, without class features to use them. I don't think that's much of a problem. They're fairly strong class features, and rather rare, too (only classes I can think of that give straight-up bonuses to abilities are the Paragon classes), but I don't think any of this is incredible or anything. The Str implies Gishiness, I suppose, but again, the HD's too low for it.

I think its +6 Str (and you get +2 to con at the end), but that's besides the point. The whole idea of the stat mods is based on the Gaele Eladrin and the fact that the Champion had them too. The thing is that they end up adding to +18 overall (6+2+2+3+2+3), which is a lot considering no items...


You get SR, and enough of it to be meaningful. Fairly powerful, not overwhelmingly so.

Good to know, I though it was overpowered


You get some Natural Armor. Again, enough to be nice. But you only have Light armor. Your AC will be high, but when you do get hit it's going to hurt a lot with that hit die.

My concern is that, using special materials, he ends up using a medium or heavy armor. Combined with high NA and spells to boost hp, it could get out of hand


You get DR/cold iron or magic, which is essentially meaningless. By level 10, almost everything meaningful overcomes DR/magic anyway.

This is something I impossed. Did I make it to bad? Originally, he wanted cold iron or chaos, but I though that was too much (any NPC or monster with those had to be specifically tailored, which could lead to paranoia about the DM having something against the character).
As it is written, it is cold iron AND magic, so if only one is used, the DR goes to 1/2 (rounded down)


You get the Strength domain granted power. Whoo. Nice, ish, but not amazing.

Yeah, it can be abused, but that's something that is hard to see ahead of time


You get permanent Spider Climb, Fly, and True Seeing at 16th. The first two are nice but not that powerful, especially at that level; a Warlock gets the former at level 1 and the latter at level 10 or so. Permanent True Seeing... is really powerful. I'm averse to things like True Seeing, Freedom of Movement, and Mind Blank to begin with; I certainly don't like having them always on. Considering you cannot use Permanency with True Seeing, and it usually costs 250 gp (which is eliminated by it being an Sp or Su ability, whichever it actually is), I don't think it's a good idea to give that. Push it down to See Invisibility, perhaps? Of course, the Warlock's had that from level 1 also. Maybe Arcane Sight? The Warlock's had most of that since level 2. Not really sure what's appropriate here. Maybe the ability to reveal (as with True Seeing) the truth of a single target at-will, so it costs actions? That sounds reasonable.

I'll try talking to him about it. Maybe rounds/day = character level? And giving the other abilities earlier?


Basically, this is trying to be a Gish. Parts of it are all there (Str bonus, Natural Armor, BAB), but I feel like with that hit die it's going to have a hard time. The spellcasting's pretty weak, too, even for a Gish - a Wizard/Fighter/Eldritch Knight will do a lot better. Is it better than a Fighter? Definitely. Is it better than a Wizard or Sorcerer. Not even remotely.

Thank you so much for your help!

Also, how do you think it compares to the Champion class in the gaming section?

[Waargh!]

Quick answer is that compared to a champion it's ok. Nothing broken

But, why don't you quickly create two characters and post them to compare them better? A Guardian of Filth and a Champion. One at 8lvl, 14lvl and 20lvl lets say.

[DragoonWraith]

Mm. Another point here is, I'm really surprised you found the Champion over-powered. My assessment of that class was that it was a bit on the weak side, but that's made up for in pure awesome.

Anyway, the +2 to Con I'd missed; that's pretty significant. See, the main thing is that improving abilities doesn't help that much unless you use them. +5 Str is +3 to hit, +3 to damage (assuming an odd base). +2 Dex is +1 AC and +1 Init. +3 Int is maybe 2 skill points per level. +3 Cha, since he has Cha based spellcasting, is maybe +2 DC, and an extra couple of spells. +3 Wis is +2 to Will saves. +2 Con, though, is +1 HP per HD - that's a lot more significant than what you're getting from Dex, Int, and Wis, certainly.

Mostly, my reaction to the feats and the ability enhancements is why? Why not just use a normal race (or homebrew actual racial modifiers for your homebrew race), use the normal feat progression, and let the class do normal things (i.e. not ability enhancement)? That would make its balance much easier to judge, because its features can be directly compared to existing classes that have similar features. And the only one that strikes me as overpowered is the True Seeing. The rest is... well, you've got some powerful defensive abilities with the natural armor and spell resistance, but you have low HP.


Running some numbers, I'd say this is strictly better than Eldritch Knight. The ED loses 2 spellcasting levels, actually putting him behind the Guardian, and his infinite spells known help less than for the average Wizard because there are several spells he's pretty much got to cast (Mage Armor, True Strike, etc). They have the same AC but Guardian then gets +4 NA. He gets enough spells per day that he'll be using the same Mage Armor that the ED does, so it's not actively replacing anything, just an addition. SR 18 means a 40% chance of avoiding spells - and Core has fewer SR: No spells available, so that's pretty significant.

I'd lower the SR to 5+level starting at 10, I'd ditch one good save, I'd eliminate the ability and feat weirdness and just use normal stuff for that, I'd make the DR come earlier, but at much lower values, but be DR/cold iron, not DR/magic. Look at the Warlock for decent levels for that: DR 1/cold iron starting at 3 and +1/Cold Iron every 4 levels past that (7, 11, 15, 19, for a max of DR 5/Cold Iron), and I'd eliminate the True Seeing. The Natural Armor I'd halve compared to their current values. I'd also give him a d8 hit die, 4+Int skills, and then I'd give him some kind of ability to use spells in combat better (usually you have to divide your actions between them, which is bad). That would make a better gish, and avoid some of the dubious points of this.


That's comparing this to Eldritch Knight, though. In Core, that's about all you've got for an arcane Gish. Outside of Core, I'd call this underpowered compared to the good Gish classes like Abjurant Champion.