dehro
2014-12-01, 05:42 AM
one unfortunate dice-roll later, my warmage has kicked the bucket and I've decided that I didn't like playing him after all.. (he'd dropped several levels behind because of an unfortunate albeit satisfying encounter with a succubus, which made catching up and not being a hindrance to everybody impossible)
anyway, dice were rolled as follows 16, 15, 14, 13, 12, 8
the new character joins the party at level 18... so a fair bit of optimisation is tollerated in that retraining or finetuning becomes highly impractical at these levels. I am particularly bad at building characters without assistance...
that said, I do not like to multi and/or prestige class into more than one, two classes at the very most, and there are some restrictions as to what is allowed, specifically:
NO setting specific-sources/classes or similar.
NO psionics
NO monks
NO third party
MAGAZINES are subject to DM approval but should be perused as little as possible. A single feat or somesuch should be acceptable, but not much beyond that.
NO Tome of Battle. (the DM is unfamiliar with the whole stances and such.. and I am even less than unfamiliar)
RACE should be humanoid in nature... but there are options.
Blatant and full-on minmaxing would be nerfed or, more likely, outright rejected by the DM (and as I said, I don't like it either).... "dip one level in this, one level in that the combo makes you eligible to 2 levels of that third thing" is NOT what I'm going for and an endless list of feats and powers will only throw me into confusion.
It is also worth noticing that in my group of players, things often end up devolving into "every man for himself" situations, where, except for a few initial group buffs, we're pretty much supposed to be self sufficient in a fight.
Put simply, the bard will sing for 6 or 7 points of bonus to attack rolls and such, and has a tendency to flee at the first sign of real trouble, the other character is able to buff himself and deal a lot of heavy damage in melee... and may be tempted into healing you back to health if there really is no other option but will rub it in your face at every opportunity.. (still trying to figure out if that's the player talking or the character, lol) the other two are npcs that tend to deal ranged damage and the occasional heal or buff.
that said, I'm thinking about a few options, which I'd like to throw out there to see what comes up in your minds.
We're mostly fighting against abissal and infernal creatures, on various planes of a shady nature... and our own plane has also been mostly corrupted by devilish creatures.. as is to be expected, they come with several immunities or reductions.
despite us being the good guys whose mission is to ultimately save the world, most of the characters are either neutral or chaotic neutral
I'm liking the Dark template very much, for flavour and a few benefits...
Things that have bitten my previous characters in the butt are: low saving throws, low BAB, low AC, lack of means to reduce damage and of immunities (not all of these things at the same time of course)
For reference, the toughest character in the party has 200+ HP, tends to reduce 10-15 damage, buffs himself to 30-40+ AC, and once buffed has saves in the 20-30 range. He still gets hit fairly often (albeit for damage that he can take)... everybody else has worse stats pretty much at all times, and copes in different manners, either by mostly staying out of range or using spells and powers to avoid damage.
As a general rule, I prefer to create interesting characters over creating unkillable ones... even though this means that I'm that guy whose characters die a lot.
The options that I am currently looking into are:
a karsite warlock (my previous warlock gave me quite a few satisfactions) probably more into ranged attacks,
a changeling sneaky sort/rogue who deals a ton of melee damage (Sneaking might be problematic.. our opponents tend to be big bad monsters rather than large numbers of thugs.. and those tend to come equipped with means of detection galore especially since we tend to walk right into their home-turf more often than not.)
a bard/barbarian who buffs himself and then goes melee, or
a more standard cleric.
I know this is very much all over the place, I'm fishing for ideas and possible feat-chains to enhance those ideas all the way up to level 18
anyway, dice were rolled as follows 16, 15, 14, 13, 12, 8
the new character joins the party at level 18... so a fair bit of optimisation is tollerated in that retraining or finetuning becomes highly impractical at these levels. I am particularly bad at building characters without assistance...
that said, I do not like to multi and/or prestige class into more than one, two classes at the very most, and there are some restrictions as to what is allowed, specifically:
NO setting specific-sources/classes or similar.
NO psionics
NO monks
NO third party
MAGAZINES are subject to DM approval but should be perused as little as possible. A single feat or somesuch should be acceptable, but not much beyond that.
NO Tome of Battle. (the DM is unfamiliar with the whole stances and such.. and I am even less than unfamiliar)
RACE should be humanoid in nature... but there are options.
Blatant and full-on minmaxing would be nerfed or, more likely, outright rejected by the DM (and as I said, I don't like it either).... "dip one level in this, one level in that the combo makes you eligible to 2 levels of that third thing" is NOT what I'm going for and an endless list of feats and powers will only throw me into confusion.
It is also worth noticing that in my group of players, things often end up devolving into "every man for himself" situations, where, except for a few initial group buffs, we're pretty much supposed to be self sufficient in a fight.
Put simply, the bard will sing for 6 or 7 points of bonus to attack rolls and such, and has a tendency to flee at the first sign of real trouble, the other character is able to buff himself and deal a lot of heavy damage in melee... and may be tempted into healing you back to health if there really is no other option but will rub it in your face at every opportunity.. (still trying to figure out if that's the player talking or the character, lol) the other two are npcs that tend to deal ranged damage and the occasional heal or buff.
that said, I'm thinking about a few options, which I'd like to throw out there to see what comes up in your minds.
We're mostly fighting against abissal and infernal creatures, on various planes of a shady nature... and our own plane has also been mostly corrupted by devilish creatures.. as is to be expected, they come with several immunities or reductions.
despite us being the good guys whose mission is to ultimately save the world, most of the characters are either neutral or chaotic neutral
I'm liking the Dark template very much, for flavour and a few benefits...
Things that have bitten my previous characters in the butt are: low saving throws, low BAB, low AC, lack of means to reduce damage and of immunities (not all of these things at the same time of course)
For reference, the toughest character in the party has 200+ HP, tends to reduce 10-15 damage, buffs himself to 30-40+ AC, and once buffed has saves in the 20-30 range. He still gets hit fairly often (albeit for damage that he can take)... everybody else has worse stats pretty much at all times, and copes in different manners, either by mostly staying out of range or using spells and powers to avoid damage.
As a general rule, I prefer to create interesting characters over creating unkillable ones... even though this means that I'm that guy whose characters die a lot.
The options that I am currently looking into are:
a karsite warlock (my previous warlock gave me quite a few satisfactions) probably more into ranged attacks,
a changeling sneaky sort/rogue who deals a ton of melee damage (Sneaking might be problematic.. our opponents tend to be big bad monsters rather than large numbers of thugs.. and those tend to come equipped with means of detection galore especially since we tend to walk right into their home-turf more often than not.)
a bard/barbarian who buffs himself and then goes melee, or
a more standard cleric.
I know this is very much all over the place, I'm fishing for ideas and possible feat-chains to enhance those ideas all the way up to level 18