Filling in the Gaps (Gestalt Campaign Help) [Archive]

7th son of sons

2014-01-09, 11:51 AM

I will be joining in on a Gestalt campaign with some of my friends within the next few weeks, and I'm wondering what type of character I should make. I am relatively new to the 3.5 system, having played only an Aasimar Sacred Exorcist/Druid (Loved it), and an Elven Fighter/Rogue Pirate (A lot of fun). My current party (At the moment) looks like this:

Human Barbarian/Rogue (With plans to go into Frenzied Berserker, Thief of Life, and Zhentarim Fighter)
Human Bard/Knight (With plans for Warchanter, Warrior of Darkness, and Paladin of Tyranny)
Human Paladin/Sorceror (Who I don't know very well, but has been playing longer than I)
Oread Ranger/Archivist (With plans for Scout and Order of the Bow Initiate, the newest member of our group)

So I'm wandering what all I should be doing to help out the party with my character. The campaign is predominantly evil aligned, though neutrality is acceptable, and (almost) any source is available. Dragon Magazine is available on a case by case basis, Polymorph/Disjunction/Ice Assassin or any other spell that's just... problematic on its own (looking at you shivering touch) are prohibited, and the DM is a known Char-Op'er(?), so boss fights will be difficult, to say the least. Any Ideas?

sideswipe

2014-01-09, 12:33 PM

This post was originally in a gestalt thread a few pages back. and i found it pointed out a few things to think about when making a gestalt character.

Socratov

Well, in my opinion Gestalt is all about supplementing and synergy. You will often find that one side of the gestalt could be considered your 'main' tree. It will be be core of the build and reflect what you want your role to be. The main build is what you will base your ability scores on and (most of) the feat selection. The other tree is the support tree (let's call this side tree). This part of the build you will take to supplement anything the main tree is missing (think about saves, hp, bab, or classfeatures that will really help you). The second tree can be used to either broaden your expertise, or to boost and focus your expertise.

Now the big problem with gestalt is that no matter how many classes and option you have, yo uare still bound to the action economy. So if your main tree does not give you action economy abuse, your side tree should supplement it or give you a way to spend your actions with more efficiency. A good example of this is making sure you have certain buffs up (Warlock's invocations like Fell Flight to give you 24 hours of flying so you don't have to prepare it in your spellslots and won't have to waste time at the start of combat to cast flight) or factotum to give you more actions. Another way is to take cleric and DMM: Persist to walk around with buffs all day without burning spell levels of your main tree. The side tree is also the tree with the most multiclassing (again, to supplement what you lack in your main tree).

As for synergy: let's say you want to be a dual wielding rogue. You have the Sneak attack form Rogue, but you don't want to burn all your feats on TWF and so on. So you might take ranger on the side tree to get you those feats for free. This opens up a bit of divine casting, an animal companion, combat style feats and favored enemy. All things that could help you kill faster and better as a rogue. As a bonus you have to burn to improve your rogueness. By the way, a good tip is to seek for classes that utilize roughly the same ability scores. the sidetree does not neccessarily need to comply, but it helps a lot in inching out just that extra bit of power or versitality.

You will find that some classes are fantastic side tree material, while some are more main tree material. To give some guidelines on what goes well with what I'll post some rules of thumb (at least, for base classes). Remember they are not absolute, but tend to work well.

Good main tree classes:

Anything with a full spellcasting/manifesting/initiating progression. They are powerful enough in their own right and can benefit greatly from some side action to improve HD, saves, BaB and other basic things.

Anything devoted to martial prowess (think fighter, warblade, barbarian, and so on). With a few classes like binder, Marshall, Factotum or warlock you can trick yourself out so you can save on equipment or have just a bit more tools in your toolbox.

Good side tree classes:

Factotum - Get ALL the skills, with a boatload of skillpoints, and ways to get extra standard actions and a bonus to pretty much everything. Also, for martial characters: Ijatsu focus.

Warlock - It's NAD, has great self buffs, you can pick some utility and it's fantabulous at using magic trinkets (decieve item, lol). Good stuff is see the unseen, baleful utterance, Beguiling Influence, Fell Flight, Flee the Scene, and so on.

Bard - great social skills, nice utility casting, ways to boost damage through DFI and fantastic support in splats. It's been commented upon that threre is very little a bard cannot do or help with

Spellthief - if you are a caster, get spellthief, get the master spellthief feat and you are good to go.

Initaitors - diamond Mind and Shadow Hand are very popular here. They can give you just the ultility you need to boost saves, attacks, sneak attack, etc.

Incarnum users - Free equipment-ish stuff!

Notable builds and combinations:

Swift hunter (scout+ranger+swift hunter feat)//rogue: "What do you mean it's immune to sneak attack? I hate it too much for it to be immune to it"

Sorcerer//spellthief 1/wizard 19: Metamagic synergy. This is what you get if you mix Batman and the mailman. there is no way you will catch him/her unprepared and what the Sorcerer side doesn't solve, the wizard side will fix. Als, steal just about any spell you want. Doesn't really matter.

Barbarian X/fighter 20-X//Bard: a bit mad (nothing that can't be fixed with a little +stat items), but imagine a barbarian shouting, his sword bursting into flames and him powerattacking you for so much damage that not even disintegrate can copy it's results. The X depends on how many fighter feats you want and how much barbarian you want. Needless to say the Barbarian is of the Lion totem variety.

basicly, think of a class you want to play, and find a class that either covers its weaknesses and provides some more utility, or find a class that compliments it fully.

you still only have limited actions each turn, so having lost of options is nice (wizard/cleric for instance) but your still only as good as one or the other at any time.

whereas a ranger who is also a rogue is as good as both classes in combat adding his ranger bonuses to his rogue bonuses.