[3.5] Please Improve my PC!!!

[HunterOfJello]

I know you guys hate posts with long character builds and a question at the end, so I tried to keep things short and to the point.

If you see anything you think could be improved on or modified, please let me know. Any cheese generally below the level of POA shenanigans is welcome. The DM is very lenient and wants us to go over the top.

Any sorcerer spell suggestions that you think would do well in this build would also be appreciated.
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Name: ??????
Race: Outsider (Augmented Fey, Dragon?, Kobold)
Magic Blooded, Dragonwrought, Half-Fey, Unseelie Fey, Desert Kobold

Class: Sorcerer 4/Geomancer 9/Abjurant Champ. 2War Mage 2 // Druid 5/Planar Shepherd (Thelanis) 10
(note: double prestige classing allowed)

Ability Score Totals: (Don't ask, just trust me on the calculations)
Str 5
Dex 22
Con 12
Int 18
Wis 14
Cha 37

Feats, Traits, Flaws:

(Every odd level)
1: Combat Casting
Flaw Feat: Dragonwrought
Flaw Feat: Dynamic Priest (use Charisma for bonus spells in a divine class)
3: Craft Wondrous Items
5: Greensinger Initiate
7: Draconic Resovoir
9: Draconic Wildshape Weapon Focus (Ranged Touch)
11: Greater Draconic Wildshape (DM Approved Housefeat for gaining Large type for Draconic Wildshape) Quicken Spell
13: Split Ray
15: Repeat Spell

Trait: ???
Trait: ???
Flaw: ???
Flaw: ???

Animal Companion = Fleshraker

Saves:

Fort 16 = 2con + 9base +5resist + 1luck
Relfex 18 = 7dex + 5base +5resist +1luck
Will 20 = 3wis +9base +5resist +2??? +1luck

Skill Ranks:

Bluff 10
Concentration 18
Diplomacy 16
Handle Animal 1
Spellcraft 15
Survival 5
Tumble 10
UMD 1
K (Arcana) 10
K (Geography) 5
K (Nature) 10
K (The Planes) 8
K (Other Crap) 1 each, Total = 7
Craft (Alchemy) 3
Profession (herbalist) 3

Items so far:

Can have up to 300000gp worth of items. Wondrous Items cost half.

Circlet of Rapid Casting
Veil of Allure
Wildshape Amulet (Magic of Faerun)
Mantle of the Beast w/ +5 enhancement bonus to Charisma
Druid Vestments w/ +5 resistance bonus to saves
Gauntlets of Heartfelt Blows (Dragon Compendium) {gives +cha fire damage to melee attacks}
Ring of the Beast
Belt of Magnificence +2 (i.e. +2 enhancement bonus to all stats)
Tome of Leadership and Influence +5 (+5 inherent bonus to charisma)
Wildling Clasp x10
Least Crystal of Return x2
Anklets of Translocation x3

Luck Blade w/ 3 wishes (DM provided item, doesn't count in the cost calculations)


General Ideas for the Character:

1. Dynamic Priest + Geomancer 9 = Pure Charisma Spellcasting for both druid and sorcerer sides. I'm surprised that I haven't seen this combo before. It's probably because it's too prestige class intensive.

2. Planar Shepherd of Thelanis allows access to all Eladrin. A loose DM interpretation of the Wildshape Amulet allows Wildshaping into creatures of up to 19HD. This allows access to Tulani Eladrin (CR 18) and many other Eladrin who have all sorts of awesome abilities

3. Draconic Wildhshape and the homebrewed Greater Draconic Wildshape allow access to Large Dragons of up to 19HD. There are tons of great uses for this and I've already made a chart of good dragons to choose from.

4. Planar Shepherd 10 + Planar Bubble spell = Automatic Empower and Extend to all Arcane Spells cast within 10 ft of the spellcaster

5. Geomancer makes the character even wierder than he was and also gives a handful of nice benefits. These include: Weapon Finesse, +5 land speed, +4 untyped to Diplomancy, Diehard equivalent, Trip w/ all natural attacks, and Blindsense 30ft.

6. Sorcerer side is mainly for blasting and arcane debuffs. Druid side is for versatility, scrying, crowd control, playing god, and summoning.

7. "???" = I don't know yet, or haven't decided yet

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So, that's about it. I'm looking for improvements that can be made to this PC. I'll be starting it up around saturday and would appreciate any comments, critiques, or suggestions that you guys can make.

[HunterOfJello]

Do you guys think turning this guy into a Necropolitan would improve him?

Then again, I'm not sure what would happen if he was Necropolitan, then got turned into an Outsider (or if the opposite would be better).

[Pilo]

You cannot become necropolitan, as your type is dragon or fey and not humanoid or monstrous humanoid.

[HunterOfJello]

You cannot become necropolitan, as your type is dragon or fey and not humanoid or monstrous humanoid.

Ah, you're right! I missed that part when reading the Necropolitan entry. His type at 15 is Outsider, and he was a Dragon or Fey before, so all that stuff is out the window.
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What about Improved Critical (Ranged Touch) for use with Ray spells and the Tulani Eladrin's Dream Ray? Dream Ray is a supernatural 300ft ranged touch that deals 1d6 Charisma damage per hit. That's not a lot of damage, but I think it could stack up quickly and become useful in a pinch since it disallows saves and SR.

[Psyren]

Well, you've already made yourself into Sir Charisma the SAD. I don't think it's so much about anyone hating this or that post, so much as there just not being that much more to add to a build like this, which is clearly at the upper echelons of optimization already.

[HunterOfJello]

Well, you've already made yourself into Sir Charisma the SAD. I don't think it's so much about anyone hating this or that post, so much as there just not being that much more to add to a build like this, which is clearly at the upper echelons of optimization already.

Hmm. I suppose that's true.

Do you think there are any metamagics that would be good for this character to use? The only metamagic I ever end up grabbing is Extend and then I never use it.

I'm really not sure what to grab for those last 2 feats. The current potential feat list includes: Multiattack, TWF, Power Attack, and Split Ray metamagic.

[nedz]

I'm not sure about the combat feats: if you're a double caster you will almost always have something better to do than to hit things.

When you talk about blasting, you seem to mean rays ?
If you meant AoE's then there are several feats you are missing.
For Rays: Split Ray, Repeat Spell, Chain Spell, Fell Drain ?

What about Quicken ?

[HunterOfJello]

I'm not sure about the combat feats: if you're a double caster you will almost always have something better to do than to hit things.

When you talk about blasting, you seem to mean rays ?
If you meant AoE's then there are several feats you are missing.
For Rays: Split Ray, Repeat Spell, Chain Spell, Fell Drain ?

What about Quicken ?

When I talk about Blasting, I mainly mean normal arcane evocation-type blasting spells like fireball. All of the character's arcane spells are already Empowered and Extended and his Abjuration spells are all doubled in length too.

I'm not too fond of the Fell Drain metamagic, because it seems like 1 negative level isn't going to have a huge impact on CR 15+ monsters. I know that I'd love it on an Artificer, but I don't know how well it would help this character.

I'd forgotten about Chain Spell. That could be awesome. Repeat Spell is also interesting. I usually don't consider abilities like that, though I suppose it could be very effective on a single enemy that you want to harm for a lot of damage in a short amount of time.

Split ray is already tempting towards me since it's only a +2 and I've already been tempted towards using a lot of rays.

I've avoided Quicken so far because it's only available for my Druid spells unless I go and take Rapid Metamagic.
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Wildshaping into all sorts of dragons and eladrin (especially Tulani) already gives the character a ton of at-will abilities while he's wildshaped including Blasting abilities like all the different dragon breath weapons and the SLAs of the Eladrin like (empowered) Chain Lightning and Righteous Smite at-will (CL=18). That covers a lot of normal blasting and puts the character in much hardier forms.

I was tempted towards Power Attack or Multiattack just because of the large number of attacks the character can get while Wildshaped. Large Dragons have 6 natural attacks that they can make per round. Also, the gloves he has give fire damage to his attacks equal to his charisma modifier. That's an extra 16 fire damage per attack (ability score above with +5 from cloak), which would stack up fast... and just generally be awesome. Power Attack is probably a bad idea. I can get it from the Bite line of spells anyway if I really want to go into melee for a legitimate reason.
~

Split Ray, Chain, and Repeat Spell each require another metamagic feat as a pre-requisite. If you were playing this character and had only 2 feats available, which would you take and which other metamagic feat would you take?

[nedz]

Fell Drain can be improved by things like Split Ray, Twin Spell, Repeat Spell, ... but whatever. This is a lot of feats.

There is a Sorcerer ACF you need to know about
Metamagic Specialist (PHB 2, p 61): lose familiar. Gain the ability to apply metamagic rapidly 3 + Int bonus times per day.
So Quicken 7/day. Add in Arcane Fusion and Greater Arcane Fusion for Complete Nova.

Good feats for blasting include
Maximise/Sculpt Spell/Sudden Widen

I'm still concerned by the focus of this character. You have spent a lot of feats on Wildshaping which implies combat, but yet you have two active casting classes. Whilst triple threat is good; the action economy will not help you. The normal advice for Gestalt is to have a passive side for this very reason.

[HunterOfJello]

There is a Sorcerer ACF you need to know about
Metamagic Specialist (PHB 2, p 61): lose familiar. Gain the ability to apply metamagic rapidly 3 + Int bonus times per day.
So Quicken 7/day. Add in Arcane Fusion and Greater Arcane Fusion for Complete Nova.

I'd forgotten that I'd actually be able to use that acf quite a bit. That would definitely fix the Quicken problem. Also, I'd never heard of the two arcane fusion spells. Those are awesome as hell.


Good feats for blasting include
Maximise/Sculpt Spell/Sudden Widen

I'm still concerned by the focus of this character. You have spent a lot of feats on Wildshaping which implies combat, but yet you have two active casting classes. Whilst triple threat is good; the action economy will not help you. The normal advice for Gestalt is to have a passive side for this very reason.

That's.... a very good point.

I had originally been favoring the dragons for their immunities and a few different abilities they get, but I can get most of that stuff from Druid spells I've looked up recently anyway. I think you're right. I should just stick to the Eladrin forms because their deflection (or natural armor) bonuses and SR are better anyway. So I'll drop the 2 Wildshape feats, which leaves me with 4 feats open.

I've also been reconsidering Abjurant Champion. I only have 2 levels open after Geomancer 9 and I'll need to take another level of Geomancer for 9th level spells soon. However, I should make better use of those levels. Right now I'm considering War Mage from Age of Mortals. It would cost 1 more feat than Abjurant Champion, but it gets a free metamagic feat at it's 2nd level. It's cost is the same as Abjurant Champion's and I wouldn't lose a feat that I could use for metamagic. It is, however, limited to Empower, Enlarge, Maximize, and Widen. That could be bad. I guess Maximize would be very good with the free Empower and with summoning spells. I mainly am favoring it because I'd get a morale bonus to AC of 16 and the small boost to damage on spells. That's a much nicer AC boost than abjurant champion gives. (Note: DM would easily give Eschew Materials to a sorcerer, we've discussed that before when he was playing a sorcerer.)

So if I drop the 2 wildshape feats, I'd have 4 slots open that would look something like this:

1: Weapon Focus (for War Mage)
--->Maximize Spell
2: Quicken Spell
3: Split Ray
4: Repeat Spell

How does that look? I normally don't go with stuff like Repeat Spell, but that seems like a better option if I'm already going with Split Ray. Split rays are good for both doubling on one character and for spreading out damage. Plus, if I'm fighting that many targets, then a different type of spell might be a better choice (or a different strategy).

edit: I could really use a way to boost my saves. My AC will get another bump at 16 when I take a level in Mystic Wanderer. Maybe I'll have to give in and take a level in Witch Hunter from OA at 16. I'd do it now, but I don't want to lose my 8th level spell as a Sorcerer or my Outsider type.