Mango Eldar
2012-06-14, 06:39 AM
I have recently been playing around with some TO abuses which I thought would be nice to share. Let me know what you think.
Most of these abuses revolve around the Wu Jen spell Body Outside Body which creates several clones of you. The clones cannot cast spells but they can still use your other class features (SLAs, supernatural abilities etc). See last paragraph on interpreting Body Outside Body.
The abuses are created by giving the Wu Jen extra abilities (using prestige classes and the Archmage's SLA ability) which then transfer over to the clones.
Take the following prestige classes:
Wu Jen 5/Fatespinner 2/Divine Oracle 1/Incantatrix 3/Archmage 5/Void Disciple 4
And the following SLAs:
Body Outside Body, Shapechange, Transcend Mortality and Wish.
Use Body Outside Body to create X clones.
Here are some of the neat shenanigans you can pull off:
Free Wishes: Use your clones for X wishes per turn. Your clones pay the XP while you reap the benefits. Since Wishes can undo an event that happened in the previous round, your opponent needs to kill all your clones to kill you.
Multiple characters: You effectively play X characters. You make X initiative checks and take X actions per turn. Ever feel like giving a beholder mage an inferiority complex?
Force your opponent to fail any roll or pass any roll yourself: Use Fickle Finger of Fate (Fatespinner Ex ability) to force your opponent to reroll their saves (or other rolls) up to X times as an immediate action. This effectively guarantees a failed save.
Use Fickle Finger of Fate to reroll any roll you make X number of times as an immediate action. This effectively guarantees a successful roll.
Skill-scaling: Use Moment of Clarity (Void Disciple Su ability) to grant yourself AX feats (including epic feats) or skill points to any skill where A is your Int modifier. Use this to scale up your Spellcraft. The benefits of Moment of Clarity only last a couple of rounds, so if you are planning on using it offensively you need to plan ahead. Scry out your target (or Sense Void for fluff), put your Spellcraft through the roof, teleport in, stack up some serious metamagic (next section) and nuk’em up. Moment of Clarity also requires contact, so if you can’t fit X clones into the space around you, have them use their Wish SLA to reduce their size by replicating some polymorphing spell.
Metamagic stacking: Have your clones use Cooperative Metamagic (Incantatrix Su ability) to stack metamagic. How does a twinned, maximized, empowered Deadly Sunstroke sound? Since you can skill-scale to astronomically high numbers, the normal Spellcraft limits for Cooperative Metamagic all but disappear. Also, things like damage reduction and savings throws stop becoming relevant. You will be able to create spells that will kill even if the save is passed and the damage reduction is applied.
Mango’s guaranteed escape: Have all your clones Shapechange into a Psychic Sinew (Fiend Folio) and attach themselves to you. Cast Foresight (granted through Devine Oracle, Oracle Domain). Cast a Wish powered contingency to teleport away to safety and set the condition trigger to some immediate action (i.e the feather-fall effect from Heart of Air, Transcend Mortality cast by one of the clones etc). Finally persist all these buffs by using Metamagic Effect (Incantatrix Su ability).
The Share Spells ability of Psychic Sinew will transfer all the buffs to all your clones. This is a generally useful method to buff all your clones with single casts (method adopted from team Solars). You now have the ability to always escape. If you deem it necessary, cast your immediate action to trigger the contingency (and take all your clones with you).
You can always cast an immediate action, even during your opponents turn. You can even interrupt other actions with an immediate action which means that your contingency will always resolve first.
There are two ways to counter this. One is to catch you flat footed which robs you of the ability to use immediate actions. That’s what the Foresight is for. With Foresight you are never flat footed. The second way to counter an immediate action is with another immediate actions, but since there are X of you, you will always have more immediate actions than they do.
This is an exceptionally strong defensive mechanism. It doesn’t rely on initiative since you can act out of order and ignores the power of the attack since it resolves before the attack can affect you.
Apologies for the narcissistic subtitle; I was just very impressed with myself when I came up with this. Of course someone is now going to point out why this doesn’t work or link to a post where someone already invented this (readying action to facepalm).
Mango’s versatile contingency: If you want to take the above combo to the next level then here is an idea for you: use craft contingent spell to create a whole range of defensive and offensive actions, and have each of them trigger on a different immediate action. Since you have X clones you can have each contingency trigger on the action of a different clone (when clone 1 does Y trigger contingency Y’, when clone 2 does Y trigger contingency Y’’ etc). You will need to casts the contingencies independently.
Another way to get the same effect without clones is with the Initiate of the Seven Fold Veil. The Iot7FV can cast 7 different colors of veils as immediate actions, so each of these could trigger a different desired effect that can be executed out of turn. Furthermore, each veil can be cast in 3 forms (personal, wall, sphere) for a total of 21 different kinds of immediate actions. Finally, you could have contingencies go off for different veil combinations giving you more triggering options than you will ever need. Versatile contingency provides a very sophisticated response mechanism, it even provides a counter to some classic D&D infinity loops like the Synchronicity infinite turn loop (What… I don’t get a turn? That’s ok, I have no use for turns).
Clones galore: Cast Body Outside Body (as a spell), each clone can cast BOB as an SLA, each time dividing the HP of created clones by 4. Rinse and repeat until you can no longer create new clones (at some point the HP of newly created clones drops 0.5HP at which point I would rule that HP would need to be rounded to zero and no more castings are possible.
While the number of clones created in this fashion is limited, it is still very high. A 20th level character can create well over 1000 clones. The math behind this is semi-complicated but I’m happy to elaborate if asked.
Side notes on clone management
I like to divide clones into two categories. Tier one clones; those created through the spell, and tier 2 clones created through the SLA. Tier 1 clones can be persisted using Metamagic Effect. Tier 2 clones are not strictly speaking a spell so I would argue that they cannot be persisted. The vast majority of the clones created will be tier 2, and they will have a limited life span. This means you only get to play god in short bursts. At level 20 you can create 20 odd tier 1 clones, and much more if you start Twinning/Repeating your spells, so you’re still going to be punching well above most builds out there.
As clones use BOB to replicate themselves, they cut their HP in 4. After about 2 generations, your clones HP are very low. Furthermore any clone slain deals 10 damage to the caster. This can result in a nasty chain reaction where your enemy slays a handful of 1HP clones, these clone deals damage to their creators (killing them well) etc. A well placed AoE might result in you eating a lot of damage (if you created 20 clones yourself you are liable for up to 200 damage). For this reason you might want to include Transcend Mortality as an SLA in the build. Your clones can cast this as an immediate action to make themselves virtually indestructible, just make sure to dismiss them before the effects expire.
A strange phenomenon arises in this build right after you level up. A clone might ‘lose a level’ by draining themselves of XP using Wish. This results in a small loss of HP which for a 1HP clone means death. For this reason its important to make sure to gain a certain XP buffer right after leveling up (you need at least 10K XP for your clones to be able to withstand 2 wishes). With some careful planning, this shouldn’t be a problem.
Fluff and aesthetic: I don’t particularly like the idea of walking around town with 1000 clones. Have your clones Polymorph into a small creature that fits with your character concept. Wu Jen are eastern characters so you could have your clones polymorph into small invisible spirits which your character commands (perhaps have them stored in a gourd when they are not needed). I personally like to imagine this character surrounded by colorful dragonflies (if good aligned) or locusts (if evil aligned). Its important that you Polymorph rather than Shapechange for this effect as Shapechange robs you of your supernatural abilities.
Wrap-up: Well, that's it folks, I hope you got something from this. I am always looking for ways to improve the suggested build so suggestions welcome. High on my Wish list (badumdumpsshhh) is the ability to somehow use Celerity. While Wish can replicate the effects of Celerity, Wish is not an immediate action. Celerity + Timestop + Wish basically means the perfect response to any situation…. drool. There is a spare SLA that can be added to this build from the 5th Archmage level in case anyone figures this out. On the same note, if someone can figure out how to use Body Outside Body on the Wizards list then this class could be built on a Wizard base which unlocks Celerity and a whole lot of other cheese-balls. As it is the Wu Jen spell list is somewhat limited. As a Wizard you would lose access to Transcend Mortality though.
I have more ideas on how to abuse this build after Lv20 (as if Epic characters needed more breaking), but ill sit on this for a while. Let me know if you want to see this :smallsmile:.
Interpretation of Body Outside Body: These abuses revolve around the Wu Jen spell Body Outside Body. The spell creates several duplicates of you, all of which gain your feats, skills and class levels but which cannot cast spells. By my interpretation, this means that they can use any of your abilities so long as this ability is not a spell (so spell like abilities are in, supernatural abilities are in etc). The entire build revolves around this interpretation and I will concede that a different interpretation renders the build ineffective. I have found several posts on these forums that seem to agree (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=144226) with this interpretation but you are of-course welcome to challenge it (I can already see all the replies to this thread quoting this paragraph).
Most of these abuses revolve around the Wu Jen spell Body Outside Body which creates several clones of you. The clones cannot cast spells but they can still use your other class features (SLAs, supernatural abilities etc). See last paragraph on interpreting Body Outside Body.
The abuses are created by giving the Wu Jen extra abilities (using prestige classes and the Archmage's SLA ability) which then transfer over to the clones.
Take the following prestige classes:
Wu Jen 5/Fatespinner 2/Divine Oracle 1/Incantatrix 3/Archmage 5/Void Disciple 4
And the following SLAs:
Body Outside Body, Shapechange, Transcend Mortality and Wish.
Use Body Outside Body to create X clones.
Here are some of the neat shenanigans you can pull off:
Free Wishes: Use your clones for X wishes per turn. Your clones pay the XP while you reap the benefits. Since Wishes can undo an event that happened in the previous round, your opponent needs to kill all your clones to kill you.
Multiple characters: You effectively play X characters. You make X initiative checks and take X actions per turn. Ever feel like giving a beholder mage an inferiority complex?
Force your opponent to fail any roll or pass any roll yourself: Use Fickle Finger of Fate (Fatespinner Ex ability) to force your opponent to reroll their saves (or other rolls) up to X times as an immediate action. This effectively guarantees a failed save.
Use Fickle Finger of Fate to reroll any roll you make X number of times as an immediate action. This effectively guarantees a successful roll.
Skill-scaling: Use Moment of Clarity (Void Disciple Su ability) to grant yourself AX feats (including epic feats) or skill points to any skill where A is your Int modifier. Use this to scale up your Spellcraft. The benefits of Moment of Clarity only last a couple of rounds, so if you are planning on using it offensively you need to plan ahead. Scry out your target (or Sense Void for fluff), put your Spellcraft through the roof, teleport in, stack up some serious metamagic (next section) and nuk’em up. Moment of Clarity also requires contact, so if you can’t fit X clones into the space around you, have them use their Wish SLA to reduce their size by replicating some polymorphing spell.
Metamagic stacking: Have your clones use Cooperative Metamagic (Incantatrix Su ability) to stack metamagic. How does a twinned, maximized, empowered Deadly Sunstroke sound? Since you can skill-scale to astronomically high numbers, the normal Spellcraft limits for Cooperative Metamagic all but disappear. Also, things like damage reduction and savings throws stop becoming relevant. You will be able to create spells that will kill even if the save is passed and the damage reduction is applied.
Mango’s guaranteed escape: Have all your clones Shapechange into a Psychic Sinew (Fiend Folio) and attach themselves to you. Cast Foresight (granted through Devine Oracle, Oracle Domain). Cast a Wish powered contingency to teleport away to safety and set the condition trigger to some immediate action (i.e the feather-fall effect from Heart of Air, Transcend Mortality cast by one of the clones etc). Finally persist all these buffs by using Metamagic Effect (Incantatrix Su ability).
The Share Spells ability of Psychic Sinew will transfer all the buffs to all your clones. This is a generally useful method to buff all your clones with single casts (method adopted from team Solars). You now have the ability to always escape. If you deem it necessary, cast your immediate action to trigger the contingency (and take all your clones with you).
You can always cast an immediate action, even during your opponents turn. You can even interrupt other actions with an immediate action which means that your contingency will always resolve first.
There are two ways to counter this. One is to catch you flat footed which robs you of the ability to use immediate actions. That’s what the Foresight is for. With Foresight you are never flat footed. The second way to counter an immediate action is with another immediate actions, but since there are X of you, you will always have more immediate actions than they do.
This is an exceptionally strong defensive mechanism. It doesn’t rely on initiative since you can act out of order and ignores the power of the attack since it resolves before the attack can affect you.
Apologies for the narcissistic subtitle; I was just very impressed with myself when I came up with this. Of course someone is now going to point out why this doesn’t work or link to a post where someone already invented this (readying action to facepalm).
Mango’s versatile contingency: If you want to take the above combo to the next level then here is an idea for you: use craft contingent spell to create a whole range of defensive and offensive actions, and have each of them trigger on a different immediate action. Since you have X clones you can have each contingency trigger on the action of a different clone (when clone 1 does Y trigger contingency Y’, when clone 2 does Y trigger contingency Y’’ etc). You will need to casts the contingencies independently.
Another way to get the same effect without clones is with the Initiate of the Seven Fold Veil. The Iot7FV can cast 7 different colors of veils as immediate actions, so each of these could trigger a different desired effect that can be executed out of turn. Furthermore, each veil can be cast in 3 forms (personal, wall, sphere) for a total of 21 different kinds of immediate actions. Finally, you could have contingencies go off for different veil combinations giving you more triggering options than you will ever need. Versatile contingency provides a very sophisticated response mechanism, it even provides a counter to some classic D&D infinity loops like the Synchronicity infinite turn loop (What… I don’t get a turn? That’s ok, I have no use for turns).
Clones galore: Cast Body Outside Body (as a spell), each clone can cast BOB as an SLA, each time dividing the HP of created clones by 4. Rinse and repeat until you can no longer create new clones (at some point the HP of newly created clones drops 0.5HP at which point I would rule that HP would need to be rounded to zero and no more castings are possible.
While the number of clones created in this fashion is limited, it is still very high. A 20th level character can create well over 1000 clones. The math behind this is semi-complicated but I’m happy to elaborate if asked.
Side notes on clone management
I like to divide clones into two categories. Tier one clones; those created through the spell, and tier 2 clones created through the SLA. Tier 1 clones can be persisted using Metamagic Effect. Tier 2 clones are not strictly speaking a spell so I would argue that they cannot be persisted. The vast majority of the clones created will be tier 2, and they will have a limited life span. This means you only get to play god in short bursts. At level 20 you can create 20 odd tier 1 clones, and much more if you start Twinning/Repeating your spells, so you’re still going to be punching well above most builds out there.
As clones use BOB to replicate themselves, they cut their HP in 4. After about 2 generations, your clones HP are very low. Furthermore any clone slain deals 10 damage to the caster. This can result in a nasty chain reaction where your enemy slays a handful of 1HP clones, these clone deals damage to their creators (killing them well) etc. A well placed AoE might result in you eating a lot of damage (if you created 20 clones yourself you are liable for up to 200 damage). For this reason you might want to include Transcend Mortality as an SLA in the build. Your clones can cast this as an immediate action to make themselves virtually indestructible, just make sure to dismiss them before the effects expire.
A strange phenomenon arises in this build right after you level up. A clone might ‘lose a level’ by draining themselves of XP using Wish. This results in a small loss of HP which for a 1HP clone means death. For this reason its important to make sure to gain a certain XP buffer right after leveling up (you need at least 10K XP for your clones to be able to withstand 2 wishes). With some careful planning, this shouldn’t be a problem.
Fluff and aesthetic: I don’t particularly like the idea of walking around town with 1000 clones. Have your clones Polymorph into a small creature that fits with your character concept. Wu Jen are eastern characters so you could have your clones polymorph into small invisible spirits which your character commands (perhaps have them stored in a gourd when they are not needed). I personally like to imagine this character surrounded by colorful dragonflies (if good aligned) or locusts (if evil aligned). Its important that you Polymorph rather than Shapechange for this effect as Shapechange robs you of your supernatural abilities.
Wrap-up: Well, that's it folks, I hope you got something from this. I am always looking for ways to improve the suggested build so suggestions welcome. High on my Wish list (badumdumpsshhh) is the ability to somehow use Celerity. While Wish can replicate the effects of Celerity, Wish is not an immediate action. Celerity + Timestop + Wish basically means the perfect response to any situation…. drool. There is a spare SLA that can be added to this build from the 5th Archmage level in case anyone figures this out. On the same note, if someone can figure out how to use Body Outside Body on the Wizards list then this class could be built on a Wizard base which unlocks Celerity and a whole lot of other cheese-balls. As it is the Wu Jen spell list is somewhat limited. As a Wizard you would lose access to Transcend Mortality though.
I have more ideas on how to abuse this build after Lv20 (as if Epic characters needed more breaking), but ill sit on this for a while. Let me know if you want to see this :smallsmile:.
Interpretation of Body Outside Body: These abuses revolve around the Wu Jen spell Body Outside Body. The spell creates several duplicates of you, all of which gain your feats, skills and class levels but which cannot cast spells. By my interpretation, this means that they can use any of your abilities so long as this ability is not a spell (so spell like abilities are in, supernatural abilities are in etc). The entire build revolves around this interpretation and I will concede that a different interpretation renders the build ineffective. I have found several posts on these forums that seem to agree (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=144226) with this interpretation but you are of-course welcome to challenge it (I can already see all the replies to this thread quoting this paragraph).