D3 Question - Dragonborn, Dragonfire Adept, Dragon Shaman

[Noobborn]

How do you set this up to make it effective, should it be run as a Gestalt class combo? I don't know much about that except for what I read on here. And is a Dragonborn in both classes trying to hard? I know it can grant dragonbreath even if you don't take the aspect but thats all.

[Nettlekid]

Don't. It's nearly useless as a Gestalt. Way too much overlap between the classes; you're basically just a single class in a world of Gestalts. The apparent appeal would be that a Dragonfire Adept's breath weapon is made stronger with Metabreath feats, which can only be taken if you have a breath weapon with a recharge time expressed in rounds, like the Dragonborn's or the Dragon Shamans. Once you have that, you can take the Metabreath feats, and technically can then apply them to the DFA breath weapon (though most DMs might raise an eyebrow, RAW it's legal). But even if you have more than one breath weapon, if any one breath weapon is on cooldown, you can't use any of them. Which means you can't stack tons of Metabreath feats onto your Dragon Shaman breath, nuke the foe, and then use your DFA breath in the downtime. It's just not allowed. So you basically use up all your resources from both classes doing what you could do with only one class.

The way a Gestalt works best is to take two classes with very different powers but synergy in ability scores and action types. For example, Totemists and DFAs want high Con. Totemists get a lot of passive buffs with their soulmelds, while DFAs have active attacks. Good timing synergy. Or, use the Dragon Shaman's passive auras with the few standard action attacks that Totemists get, like a volley of Manticore Spikes. DFA and Factotum combos well, because at level 8 Factotums can get extra standard actions, which means extra breath attacks in a turn. That can be quite useful. Or combo two things which are quite unrelated, like Dragon Shaman and Barbarian, use Metabreah feats to nuke the enemy, and charge in with Barbarian to attack while your breath recharges. There are a number of good combinations, but Dragon Shaman//Dragonfire Adept is not one of them.

[Noobborn]

Alright thank you so much

[Psyren]

You can however use invocations during the cooldown just fine. Combined with the Infernal Adept feat (which lets you pick up Warlock invocations) you do have some options for when your breath weapon is on cooldown.

But you're probably better off gestalting Warlock + DFA rather than DS + DFA. Use Dragonborn to get a breath weapon with a cooldown for metabreath feats, and when your breath is on cooldown you can fire off Eldritch Blasts.