living spell cohort

[killianh]

What leadership score would I need to be able to take a sphere of ultimate destruction as a cohort? is this even possible?

[DemonRoach]

Assuming you mean the "Living Spell" creature from MM3, I believe the answer is no, as it lacks an LA.

[Gotterdammerung]

You can't get it as a cohort. But you could get it as a trained pet.

Either track down the ooze yourself, or hire mercenaries to capture it for you. It will cost money. There is rules for it in the arms and equipment guide as well as the DMG. Your DM will probably Ad Hoc the cost to make it even more expensive given its dangerous nature increases the difficulty to capture.

Once you have it captured. Hire a spellcaster to experiment on it so that you can apply the Sentry Ooze template too it from dungeonscape. Now take the (ooze) trainer feat from the arms and equipment guide and if you want too you can also take a feat from dragon magazine that lets you pick a creature type to add to your wild empathy affected list. Play a class out of the Magic of Incarnum called a Totemist. It gets a couple of soulmelds that with the right feats can give you insanely high bonuses to your handle animal and wild empathy checks. Because of the previous 2 feats you can use handle animal and wild empathy on oozes, and thanks to totemist you can have high enough rolls to effect extremely high hit dice oozes. You still can't train mindless oozes but thats why you paid the wizard to make your ooze intelligent (not to mention gain feats and skills which make it much more potent in combat). Now train him with the tricks you want.

Sphere of Destruction living spell is one way to go, but there are many ooze options open. Other living spells for instance. A living spell can be made of multiple high lvl spells. A living spell with at least a 9th lvl spell & the sentry ooze template will have very high save DCs (sentry ooze gives a +10 bonus to charisma!). These templates together give a total stat array of
Str 19
Dex 22
Con 19
Int 2
Wis 26
Cha 29

And with save DC's based off of 19+ cha, and the new addition of feats, this means potent Save DC's for your special abilities (30ish).


Another option is a venom ooze with sentry ooze template. This ooze is found in the Drow of the Underdark. It has 2 very useful poison abilities with high save DCs. It has a few advantages over other oozes. According to its entry, it is very common in its environment. It is also easy to track because it leaves behind poison pools of water and a slime trail. It is also less problematic to capture, so cheaper costs for the mercenaries you hire.
I recommend capturing the fully advanced version and giving it ability focus and the virulent poison feats for a total poison DC of 48 for 2 different kinds of poisons. Another benefit of the venom ooze is they talk about how it advances based on the amount of food it gets. This means if you can't find a fully advanced one, just find a tiny one and train and rear it, then feed the crap out of it til its as big as it can get.

Anyway, have fun being the lord of the oozes.

[Andorax]

Dragon 357 has the Spell Sovereign prestige class, which lets you take on a living spell as a familiar, but it only ever gets up to a 4th level spell

[eggs]

Dragon Magazine 357's Spell Sovereign prestige class is all about living spells. Its permanent companion only gets up to 4th level spell effects, but the class gets the ability to temporarily create any living spell available as a standard action (with one or two spells' traits). It's not exactly what you're asking about, but it can pull many of the same tricks.

EDIT:
I'm going to pretend the ninjaing is just that class being to nifty to mention only once. :smalltongue:

[Venger]

(amazing stuff)

absolutely fantastic guide. comprehensive and thorough; 5 out of 5 stars.

One thing that makes that a little bit easier though is the "oozepuppet" spell from fiendish codex 1. it's a lvl 6 on the sor/wiz list or 5 on the ooze domain if you want to go that way with your character. from the prompt, I'm not sure if you're trying for heavy optimisation or just lulz. if you just want the handle animal trick from totemist, you only need 5 levels of totemist meldshaping progression to unlock the crown chakra for the beast tamer circlet, giving you a bonus to handle animal checks that goes up the more essentia you put in it.

if you need wild empathy boosted as well, you'll need 9 levels of meldshaping to unlock your totemist's arms chakra to get the riding bracers. it also provides a bonus to handle animal checks, but it is of the same type as the beast tamer circlet (insight) so the two will not stack with each other.

soulcaster (the theurgic arcane/meldshaping class from MoI) can be qualified for as early as level 5 (arcane casting 3, totemist 2, and incarnum spellshaping as a feat tax) to give you arcane spell progression (letting you cast the oozepuppet spell yourself if you want. it lasts 1 hr/lvl, which is pretty long, longer if you extend it, and easily enough to be effectively cast all day before too long) and the usual MADness associated with a theurgic class is not really true when your other half is meldshaping. everyone has at least a little con, especially arcane casters who do not have big HD, and it determines how many soulmelds you can have shaped at once, so that's nice.

[Gotterdammerung]

absolutely fantastic guide. comprehensive and thorough; 5 out of 5 stars.

One thing that makes that a little bit easier though is the "oozepuppet" spell from fiendish codex 1. it's a lvl 6 on the sor/wiz list or 5 on the ooze domain if you want to go that way with your character. from the prompt, I'm not sure if you're trying for heavy optimisation or just lulz. if you just want the handle animal trick from totemist, you only need 5 levels of totemist meldshaping progression to unlock the crown chakra for the beast tamer circlet, giving you a bonus to handle animal checks that goes up the more essentia you put in it.

if you need wild empathy boosted as well, you'll need 9 levels of meldshaping to unlock your totemist's arms chakra to get the riding bracers. it also provides a bonus to handle animal checks, but it is of the same type as the beast tamer circlet (insight) so the two will not stack with each other.

soulcaster (the theurgic arcane/meldshaping class from MoI) can be qualified for as early as level 5 (arcane casting 3, totemist 2, and incarnum spellshaping as a feat tax) to give you arcane spell progression (letting you cast the oozepuppet spell yourself if you want. it lasts 1 hr/lvl, which is pretty long, longer if you extend it, and easily enough to be effectively cast all day before too long) and the usual MADness associated with a theurgic class is not really true when your other half is meldshaping. everyone has at least a little con, especially arcane casters who do not have big HD, and it determines how many soulmelds you can have shaped at once, so that's nice.


Yeh, there is also a magic item that controls oozes somewhere.

Thanks for the nice words. I knew that you didn't need all the lvls of totemist to get the melds and essentia needed.

I used soulcaster b4 in IC for the cryokineticist challenge.

The only downside I can see of jumping out of totemist is you lose a lot of wild empathy by jumping out early.

But it is a neat idea, to have well behaved oozes following you around, and then you can pick which one you want to possess with Oozepuppet.

[Venger]

Yeh, there is also a magic item that controls oozes somewhere.

Thanks for the nice words. I knew that you didn't need all the lvls of totemist to get the melds and essentia needed.

I used soulcaster b4 in IC for the cryokineticist challenge.

The only downside I can see of jumping out of totemist is you lose a lot of wild empathy by jumping out early.

But it is a neat idea, to have well behaved oozes following you around, and then you can pick which one you want to possess with Oozepuppet.

I remember that one, but I didn't remember the name or book, so it wouldn't have been of much use to OP.

you're quite welcome. while that was clear from the way that you referred to dipping it, I thought OP may have appreciated specific break points (2 for soul caster, 5 for crown, 9 for arms) if he hadn't built the character yet.

you are right since soulcaster doesn't unlock new chakras. but worst case scenario, you can go soulcaster and take shape soulmeld (beast tamer circlet) as your level 11 feat for wild empathy, or shape soulmeld (riding bracers) at 18 if you just need the handle animal. or suck it up and take a bunch of totemist for chakras. there are worse classes to play to 20 than totemist (it sure saves on feats!)

by "lose a lot of wild empathy" you mean not have crown chakra unlocked for beast tamer circlet, right? unless you meant something else.

how could I forget? your entry, bjorn doragoniru, was what forced me to learn the meldshaping rules. I judged that round. you actually used the web version, soul manifester, since cryokineticist requires manifesting.

yeah, figured it was a cute idea.

[Gotterdammerung]

by "lose a lot of wild empathy" you mean not have crown chakra unlocked for beast tamer circlet, right? unless you meant something else.

I mean something else.

Totemist gets a totem chakra. You can add more essentia to a soulmeld that is bound to the totem chakra. This amount increase with your totemist lvl. At 15th lvl you reach the max boost of +2 max essentia for totem chakra's.

Expanded Soulmeld capacity x2 and the totem chakra of a max lvl character with 15th lvls of totemist gives us the ability to spend 7 essentia in both our 2 soulmelds. This is where the big skill boost comes from. Basically, more essentia capacity= bigger skill bonus.

The double chakra feat will allow us to bind both melds to the totem chakra so both melds can get the max essentia capacity of 7 by 18th lvl.


Unicorn horn will give you a +16 competence bonus on wild empathy and move silently if you have 7 essentia invested.

Beast Tamers Circlet will give you a +16 insight bonus on wild empathy and handle animal if you have 7 essentia invested.

That is a +32 total wild empathy bonus before charisma and magic items. Plenty for a rushed diplomacy to calm down big bad monsters for training.

If you wanted to ride your new monster mount (like if you did the build to use wild empathy on magical beasts and train magical beast without penalty and decided to calm and train the tarrasque, for instance) after it is trained you could trade out beast tamer circlet for riding bracers (+18 handle animal and ride, as well as free action handle animal checks, and evasion for your mount). Now you would have a total +34 handle animal +18 ride bonus before adding in stats and items and ranks and if your mount is an animal or a magical beast you get faster handle animal checks (command it as a free HA or push it as a move just like a druids Animal companion) and evasion for the mount.



And to clarify the feat trick

(fill in the blank) trainer is a feat in A&EG. you pick a creature type. Now you can train specimens of that type who have an intelligence of at least one and at most 4.

Savage empathy (dragon mag #326)- You no longer take the penalty for using wild empathy on magical beasts & you can choose a creature type, it can be any type except animals, constructs, humans or undead. You can now use Wild empathy to influence specimens of this creature type if they have an intelligence score of 3 or less.

Also, if your going the magical beast training route and trying for a tarasque, a 1 lvl dip into beast heart adept works pretty well.



Combining these tricks with templates that push monster intelligence scores into the proper window can make several different Creature Trainer archetype builds.

Bug trainer guy

Ooze trainer guy

Magical beast trainer guy

ect ect