Optimizing Challenge: The Sha'ir

[YouLostMe]

Dragon Magazine #317 has a class from the campaign setting Al-Qadim (which apparently means "old" in Arabic), called the Sha'ir. It's has a unique method of spell preparation that allows it to prepare any spell it knows (it gets a small list of those) in 1d4+spell level rounds, any sorc/wiz spell it doesn't know in 1d6+spell level minutes, or any divine spell from a list of cleric domains in 1d6+spell level hours.

Now, having every spell on the sorc/wiz list is awesome, and the prep time is pretty short (depending on what spells you want to prepare during the day). However, I want to optimize this up the butt and get those spells as quickly as possible.

I want the Sha'ir's spell preparation time to be as small as possible. Right now, Dragon #317 also provides a Ring of Meditation, which cuts spell prep time in half, so a spell known now comes in 0-6 rounds instead of 1-13, and an unkown spell comes in .5-7.5 minutes instead of 1-15.

I want to give it access to the whole sorc/wiz spell list at will. Any ideas?

[Hazzardevil]

Well Sha'ir ir pretty weird all things considering, and really I think that keeping spells for 8 hours is long enough.
You sleep from 10pm to 4am, Adventure from 4am to 12pm, reprepare spells for an hour, and adventure until 10pm.

That works pretty well.
That leaves you with 12 levels to work with.
You don't need much else.

[YouLostMe]

Psh, I'm not talking about useful here. I'm talking about being OP.

[Hazzardevil]

Then Polymorph abuse is OP. Do that.

[Urpriest]

This is tricky...you'd probably have to do some sort of timescrew stuff. But your gen has to travel to different planes to make this work, which is a problem. Hmm...

Another tack would be to get the spells you need in advance. This could be done via divinations like the standard Batman, or via something exponentially cheesier like abusing negative craft DCs (probably with Sand Shaper) to write a note to yourself in the past telling you what you need.

[Hazzardevil]

How do people do this time traveling?

[Urpriest]

How do people do this time traveling?

Oh time travel itself is very difficult. By timescrew I meant messing with time traits mostly, using Genesis, Planar Shepherd et. al.

If you meant the crafting trick, it involves the fact that the time a Sandshaper takes to create something is proportional to the DC, and you can get negative DCs.

[gorfnab]

I don't suppose the Sha'ir Handbook (http://brilliantgameologists.com/boards/index.php?topic=10153.0) may be of some use here.

[Psyren]

Gorfnab beat me to it, but I just wanted to point out that the Sha'ir was reprinted in Dragon Compendium. I don't know if that version has any differences from the Dragon #317 version but the latter should be used if so.

[YouLostMe]

I don't suppose the Sha'ir Handbook (http://brilliantgameologists.com/boards/index.php?topic=10153.0) may be of some use here.

Thank you. I am a dumb.