Dragonfire Adept questions

[Yogibear41]

Got a few questions about this class:

I know invocations are considered spell like abilities, but is its at will breath weapon considered a spell like ability as well, can't find any mention of it in the book.

Also is their anyway to reduce the arcane spell failure for using the adepts invocations besides special armor materials (if I decided to invest in some armor proficiency)

Also would the adepts natural armor bonus be affected by a +2 bonus increase from lycantrhope (in human form)

[Phelix-Mu]

The DFA's breath weapon is supernatural, which makes it a nice way to avoid caster level checks to beat spell resistance. It says so right in the name of the ability: Breath Weapon(Su).

EDIT: I think the natural armour question is a matter of when the lycanthrope template is added. If you already have the template at the level of DFA when you gain the natural armour from DFA, it doesn't stack, but I'm unclear if you already have the bonus from DFA, since the wording of lycanthrope template is just an increase in natural armour (no mention of not stacking).

[Yogibear41]

Oh I thought it could be supernatural and still spell like silly me.

[Phelix-Mu]

I think there is the Twilight ability for an armour enhancement; I believe that it reduces spell failure chance. It was originally in PHB2, a sidebar in the duskblade class description, but it may have been published again in Magic Item Compendium.

[Kuulvheysoon]

I think there is the Twilight ability for an armour enhancement; I believe that it reduces spell failure chance. It was originally in PHB2 the Book of Exalted Deeds, a sidebar in the duskblade class description, but it may have been published again in Magic Item Compendium.

Fixed that for you.

[Phelix-Mu]

Oh, thanks. I had forgotten that PHB2 was just another reprinting. Really, in a long-cherished tradition of Dungeons & Dragons through the ages, reprinting existing material (even repurposed third-party material) was raised to an art form in 3e. Not that there is anything inherently wrong with this, but I do like books full of new stuff.

Back to the OP, though, DFA is pretty strongly battlefield control, and it's usually easiest to accomplish battlefield control if you aren't right in the mix of the action. Of course you are welcome to get armour proficiency if you want, but make sure to get a good Concentration modifier if you have invocations that you'll need to use in combat.

You also should invest in Ability Focus: Breath Weapon, if you haven't already, as dealing half of fairly low damage really hurts at low levels.

[Yogibear41]

Isn't an exising character working on an idea for a were-dragon character using a phynxkin lycanthrope with either dragon shaman or dragonfire adept as the main class. I'm still pretty torn because adept gets cooler breath abilities and can use it every turn, while the dragon shaman can only use it once every 1d4 turns, but dragon shaman has a better BAB and armor proficiencies and I want to be fighting in melee using claws/bite mixing breath attacks into the mix as well.

Im also not sure if the adept qualifies for meta-breath feats, but I know the shaman does.

I've seen handbooks that talks about the adept using these feats but in the book it says:

"To take a metabreath
feat, a creature must have a breath weapon whose
time between breaths is expressed in rounds."


On a side note if anyone knows a way to change my type to dragon easily so I can pick up the rapidstrike feats that would be great.

[A_S]

DFA's who want to use meta-breath feats require either DM fiat (which I would view as a totally reasonable house-rule), or a breath weapon from some other source which has a cooldown (e.g., Heart aspect Dragonborn). By RAW, once they get something like that, they can apply the metabreath to their DFA breath weapon, even though it wouldn't qualify on its own.

[Greenish]

On a side note if anyone knows a way to change my type to dragon easily so I can pick up the rapidstrike feats that would be great.Dragonwrought Kobold. Though you can't apply Lycanthrope template on a dragon.

[Yogibear41]

Yeah I was going to use human for the base race should of said that sorry.

Although now that I think about it the improved version which is really the only one worth getting requires a +15 BAB which would be over level 20 since I will have 1 animal hit die and 19 levels of dragon shaman giving me +14 at 20 (with LA bout off)