3e Shaman for my DM

[silverwolfer]

I was wondering, if they are any suggestions I should look into , before I introduce the 3e Shaman from Oriental Adventures to my DM , for a 3.5 E campaign.


Nothing in it seems to foreign, the only thing am worried about is my Dm could be over spooked, that it has to many toys to play with.

[eggs]

Shameless Self Plug Goes Here (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=248262). :smalltongue:

[silverwolfer]

You are actually what caught my interest, when you fiddle with it, do you find yourself being top tier like normal casters, or more towards god tier that a druid is.

[eggs]

Awesome! :smallsmile:

How crazy the Shaman gets depends a whole lot on optimization.

The weakest Shaman is a lot weaker than the weakest Druid: Shamans don't have Wild Shape or as many encounter-shutdown spells like Entangle or Sleet Storm on their base spell list, and they're missing most of the buffs that the Druid uses to keep its SNAed animals scary at high levels.

But I'd also say the strongest Shaman is probably going to be just as bad, if not worse, than the strongest Druid: it has most of the Druid's intimidating tricks like Shapechange shared with its companion, nasty self-buffs, SNAed Fey/Outsiders and weather control, but it can also break the game in areas where the Druid struggles relative to other casters: Gate/Spirit Ally spells to conjure monsters to do basically anything the Shaman wants, it has Miracle/Holy Word/Divine Power/Righteous Might to do all the nasty things to the game that the Cleric does, Polymorph for all those low-level hijinks, access to Enchantment/Teleportation/Illusion effects through domains for versatility that the Druid sorely lacks and access to divine metamagic for that whole mess of abuse.

Basically, if the Shaman avoids Spirit Ally, Polymorph and Divine Metamagic or uses them sparingly, it plays like a weaker core Druid with a couple domains' worth of tricks. Using SA/Polymorph/DMM often or aggressively, it gets out of hand just as quickly.

[silverwolfer]

so not going all crazy in optimization, do you think it is a solid tier 2 caster?

[eggs]

so not going all crazy in optimization, do you think it is a solid tier 2 caster?
Sounds reasonable. It's pretty comparable to a core Cleric, but compared to a Cleric or Wizard with splatbooks, it doesn't have quite as many ways to break the game, and it is possible to catch it off-guard (specifically, the Shaman can't contain teleporters well and has trouble dealing with DR).