Plea for help with my build

[teriderol]

Hello people in the playground,

Our group was tasked to make some semi high power, growing, not too cheesy characters, availability to all books, dragon magazines available only with good reason.
One trick ponies tend to get crushed in the most horrible and very inventive ways.

My basic idea: something that morphs, shifts and changes to my liking

for this i found a few prestige classes, however warshaper and master transmogrifist were the most interesting.
My cheesy part comes from my race, we decided to rewrite the non-errata pixie so to lower the Lavel Adjustment with keeping the polymorph. (this might seem a gruesome violation of the rules to some, but we decided this for gameplay purposes)


Race: pixie (LA +1, polymorph, +2 CHA, -4 STR)
Class 1: bard 4 (gives alter self for master transmogrifist) PHB 1
Class 2: spellthief 2 complete adventurer
PrC 1: Master Transmogrifist complete arcane
PrC 2: Warshaper complete warrior
Feats: (1) eschew materials; (?) weapon finesse; (6) Practised spellcaster; (9) assume supernatural ability; (?) master spellthief;
Flaws: none presently

I have played around with it for a bit and found a few choices:
taking spellthief early on: spell steal throughout he whole game, (normal) PrC entry at lvl 5, fewer spells and less spell progression.
late or no spellthief: no trapfinding, no spell steal, more spells, 4th lvl spells late game, extra feat and very fast PrC entry.

furthermore, 5th lvl transmogrifist should be taken before 5th lvl warshaper, what would be the setup for that?

overal question: could someone post a guide for what to take at which lvls?

[eggynack]

That solution to the problems at hand seems rather intricate and complex. I'd just make a druid. That'd make for something that can shift around, and can adapt to just about anything. If you really want to push it, making the race shifter could help by granting extra form switching.

[Red Fel]

That solution to the problems at hand seems rather intricate and complex. I'd just make a druid. That'd make for something that can shift around, and can adapt to just about anything. If you really want to push it, making the race shifter could help by granting extra form switching.

This. You're going about this shapechanging thing in an awfully elaborate way, when you can simply go Druid and go nuts. There are also feats you can take that makes Druid wildshape even more obscene (like Dragon Wild Shape).

Oh, plus you get all the other things that make Druids outrageously Tier 1.

Shifter Druid is also an awesome choice, as Eggy points out. Shifters already have a wild form, and the first two ACF levels are awesome (the third, not so much). Further, it opens up the Moonspeaker PrC, which is outrageous. Check out the Shifter Handbook (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=225294) to see all the juicy details. Basically, it turns you into a truly sick shapeshifting, metamagic, summoning monstrosity.

[teriderol]

Well, you guys are 100% percent completely right, shifter druids are just insane. and well out of the league of semi high powered.
The reason I am trying to pull of this build is for a few reasons:
- we use personalized summons
- Druid forms are restricted
- mithril breastplate
- druid wild shape uses are limited
- stun+crit immunity
...

so, anybody else some pros and/or cons i missed? (about this or about the build setup)

[Corinath]

It sounds to me like there are a lot of house rules going on (Pixie is a pretty big one, imo. Greater Invis for +1 LA? I'd take that in a heartbeat. I'd also reject it as a DM), and that makes it relatively difficult to sort of crowdsource this info. Despite the restrictions on Druid abilities, there are still ways around it.

I know very little about Druid, personally, so I can't speak much to it, but there are definitely other ways to get Polymorph and augment it, iirc. (I just started exploring this with Artificer, for example, and the Polymorph handbook.)

Though it sort of seems your DM wants you to pretty much play a specific role while making you guess what that role is…

I'll take a look at the classes in a bit, drifting in and out of the thread while working (Read: "Rendering" video)

EDIT: ---

Spellthief seems a bit out of sync to the build for me. Maybe it's just a flavor thing, but you have a highly versatile build. Taking levels in Spellthief, and then a feating for it just seems a bit out of alignment with the shifting taste.

Personally, if I had to do this, I'd roll Bard 2 / Master Transmogrificer 6 / Warshaper 5 / Master Transmogrificer 7-10

And you have three levels left over to do whatever you want to with. But by now you're at level 17, so it'd be stronger to make it sync up with your shifting abilities.

And I'd probably lose Weapon Finesse as well. Maybe take Metamagic Extend / Persist. If I'm not mistaken (which I could be), Metamagic Persisting Polymorph + Reflexive Change + Infinite Variety + Flashmorph/Multimorph means you can polymorph as often as you want, the entire day, reflexively to negate damage certain damage types (I think), and as a move action.

Gotta get back to work. Mull over that. I'm new to shifting, and all those classes, so I could totally be wrong. But it looks interesting.

[eggynack]

Well, you guys are 100% percent completely right, shifter druids are just insane. and well out of the league of semi high powered.
The reason I am trying to pull of this build is for a few reasons:
- we use personalized summons
- Druid forms are restricted
- mithril breastplate
- druid wild shape uses are limited
- stun+crit immunity
...

so, anybody else some pros and/or cons i missed? (about this or about the build setup)
It feels like you're simultaneously saying that druids are too high power, and too low power with the restrictions. Honestly, you could just keep naming restrictions, and the druid would persevere as a superior choice. The fact that shifting already gets a lot of the flavor across, which gets added to the wild shape, means that you're probably fine where that's concerned. If you gave some specifics about how you're restricted, and mentioned what you think is lacking from the druid, I could probably come up with some fancy suggestions. Unfortunately, I have no such expertise when it comes to the build you've presented. Also, you can get critical hit immunity from the four heart of X spells in complete mage. You'd only get it marginally later than on a warshaper, and it's a pretty strong line. Just tossing that out there.

[teriderol]

thank you both for the constructive idea's, I can now chose between arcane and divine for shifting, thank you.

and yes, spellthief was an idea that got thrown into the mix later and started to need the feat master spellthief. and pixie was downtuned to the description i gave.