daremetoidareyo
2016-06-12, 03:27 PM
"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should."
This build works off of the drow E6 gish (http://www.minmaxboards.com/index.php?topic=5111.msg73307#msg73307) and takes it in another direction: what if we used the initiate of ellistrea feat to qualify for force missile mage?
Now, I expect that there are three large criticisms to this build:
1.) Initiate feat granted SLAs may not count as racial SLAs.
But seeing as how the initiate feat requires a specific race, it is arguable that indeed the SLA is powered by race SLAs and without being drow, you cannot access the ability. Seeing as how losing your drowning race would exclude you from using the SLA, it isn't too wild of an argument.
2.) Magic in the Blood is a once off bonus to the number of racial SLAs you currently have and does not extend to SLAs acquired later.
The feat says: "You can use your racial spell-like abilities more often than you otherwise could. Any ability that is otherwise usable once per day is now usable three times per day." This one is hard to argue, but isn't impossible. The feat is MAGIC IN THE BLOOD, if that blood gets more ability to be magical, then so it should advance the SLAs granted by feats that come later in levels. It also says "any ability".
3.) That is a lot of racial paragon levels! Are you sure that a half drow can take all of them?
Quit it with your bi-racial erasure. Actually, the drow blood racial ability reads "Drow Blood. For all special abilities and effects, a half-drow is considered a drow." And Half elf paragon's divided ancestry allows human paragon levels. So it should all work out.
Level
Class
Feat
1
Half Elf Paragon
Drow legacy (dotu 220), Magic in the blood (PGTF 40)
2
divine counter spell Cleric
Travel devotion (CC p.62)
3
Drow paragon
Initiate of Elistrae (CoV 30)
4
Human paragon
5
Human paragon
Combat Casting
6
Human paragon
Master of shadow (Dotu 51)
7
Force missile mage
8
Force missile mage
9
Force missile mage
Mortalbane (BOVD 49)
10
Force missile mage
11
Force missile mage
12
Empowered Spell like ability (MM)
So the premise is relatively simple:
Drow Legacy provides a 1/day dancing lights, darkness, and faerie fire with a caster level equaling your class level. Magic in the Blood bumps up your usage per day of each of these feats to 3/day. Half Elf paragon grants an extra feat at first level and the ability to take more than one paragon racial class, except not both elf paragon and human paragon. Lucky that you're taking Drow paragon instead of elf paragon, amiright?
Then you dip cleric, and with eilistraee as a patron deity, you can probably get travel devotion in place of one of your lame domain choices. Cleric 1 allows you to take your initiate feat. Ranger 4 can also allow the same thing if you wanted a totally non-castery build.
Drow Paragon advances your cleric casting level as well as grants an additional casting of each of your racial SLAs: dancing lights, darkness, faerie fire, and magic missile, bringing you to 4 magic missiles a day. Initiate of Ellistrae allows you to spend any one of those racial SLAs 1/day to cast magic missile with a caster level equal to your class level. If magic in the blood comports to racial SLAs gained by feats, that means that you have a 3/day magic missile at level 3.
Next, we lean on the other half of your ancestry, the humans, for 3 levels of human paragon. We are doing this for the bonus feat. The later two levels of the class advance casting, and as a bonus you have an adaptive skill that you can now use to qualify for whatever prestige class that you are craving. The bonus feat is used for the lunker of a feat combat casting, a force missile mage pre-req. At sixth level, master of shadow adds yet another use of racial SLAs, bringing you up to 5 magic missile castings a day, (in addition to darkness, dancing lights, and faerie fire).
Next comes five levels of force missile mage (FMM). Weirdly enough, the prestige class doesn't require arcane casting. You need to be able to cast magic missile, have the combat casting feat, and have 9 ranks in both concentration and spellcraft.
At first and fifth levels of FMM you get an extra magic missile per casting. At second level he gets 1/day immediate casting of the shield spell as well as the ability to add acid, cold, electricity, or fire descriptor to any magic missile he casts. The mortalbane feat from BOVD adds 2d6 damage to your magic missiles when used against living nonoutsiders. Weirdly enough, it appears that the 2d6 can be per missile, so long as each missile targets a different target. FMM advances your cleric casting by 4 over the 5 levels bringing you up to 8th level cleric casting by level 11.
Spell like ability feats
12th level is where there is a branch in your tree. Consider empower spell like ability (MM) to add 150% to your magic missile damage. 1d4+1 averages to 3.5 damage per missile. Mortalbane averages an extra 7 damage per missile or per casting. So at 12th level you can inflict (7 x 3.5 + 7) 10 to 11 damage per target. If empowered that means that you can do 15 damage per target. Or if you send all of the missiles to hit a single target, you can deal 31 (or 46 empowered) damage per magic missile SLA.
Also consider purify spell like ability (BOED), which allows you to increase each of your damage dice types by one when cast against an evil enemy. Against a single evil enemy you would deal 7(1d6+1)+2d8 damage per magic missile casting, for an average of (4.5x9) ~40 damage.
Of course you can also maximize your spell like ability also, which, at level 12 yields 42 damage to a single enemy or 17 damage to seven different enemies.
Energy substitution
Now if you have a helpful DM, you might be able to argue that Force missile mage's energy missile ability counts as the energy substitution feat and thus allows you to qualify for the energy admixture feat from complete arcane. This will allow you to double the damage per missile. Further, if the DM goes for this, consider also/instead born of three thunders from complete arcane.
If energy admixture is a real option, consider taking both Cali****e elementalist:air and Cali****e elementalist: Fire can give you an extra missile, bringing the damage up to 8 missiles @ 2d4+2 + 4d6 (mortalbane). Born of three thunders triggers more saves for bonus effects and is probably the better way to go.
Other prestiges and dips.
Argent Savant
The short list of prestige classes to go into at level 12 include a 1 level argent savant dip to get an additional +1 to each of your seven magic missiles. For entry, you need to be able to cast 5 force spells: cleric allows you entry by the time you have access to 5th level cleric spells if you include magic missile:
alicorn lance (silver marches) 2nd
Silver charger (Heroes of Battle) 3rd
Divine retaliation (PHB2) 3rd
Spiritual weapon (SRD) 2nd
Stars of arvandor (BOED) 4th
Stars of mystra (CoV) 4th
Stars of Selune (CoV) 4th
Summon living dragonmark (dragonmarked) 3rd
Obviously, you need access to heighten spell to get one of those force spells to be 5th level. Blowing a feat for 1 more damage per missile might not be worth it considering that you can instead take maximize, purify, or empower spell like ability feats instead to get the same effect. But if you have a metamagic rod of heighten spell...definitely dip and take those feats instead.
Hierophant
If you are going the argent savant route, hierophant is a decent choice for a follow up prestige class once you get 5 more caster levels. So the stub would look like: halfelf paragon 1/cleric 1/drow paragon 1/human paragon 3/FMM 5/contemplative 1/Divine Disciple 4/heirophant 1/argent savant 1/other 2. Take the force domain with your contemplative dip and heighten spell at 15 to turn a heightened magic missile into an ability that you can use 5 times per day in addition to your other 5 magic missiles. Hierophant allows you to turn any spell into a spell like ability that you can use multiple times per day.
Visionary seeker
Seeing as how you have all of this Spell like ability feat based optimization, visionary seeker allows you to pile those feats on top of your mimicked spells. No real pre-reqs other than skills so this is a nice direction to go. But then again, your cleric spell casting will suffer.
Divine disciple
Imbue with spell ability shenanigans. Full casting progression. Skills only and 4th level casting prerequisites
Other ideas
A 1 level dip of warlock for darkness as an at will SLA will help. Seeker of the misty isle may be a good prestige to work into, further extending your cleric casting. Consider heretic of the faith for your 12th level feat or a 1 level contemplative dip and go doom dreamer from return to the temple of elemental evil, which doesn't have an alignment restriction. Suggestions are appreciated for other prestige options from there.
This build works off of the drow E6 gish (http://www.minmaxboards.com/index.php?topic=5111.msg73307#msg73307) and takes it in another direction: what if we used the initiate of ellistrea feat to qualify for force missile mage?
Now, I expect that there are three large criticisms to this build:
1.) Initiate feat granted SLAs may not count as racial SLAs.
But seeing as how the initiate feat requires a specific race, it is arguable that indeed the SLA is powered by race SLAs and without being drow, you cannot access the ability. Seeing as how losing your drowning race would exclude you from using the SLA, it isn't too wild of an argument.
2.) Magic in the Blood is a once off bonus to the number of racial SLAs you currently have and does not extend to SLAs acquired later.
The feat says: "You can use your racial spell-like abilities more often than you otherwise could. Any ability that is otherwise usable once per day is now usable three times per day." This one is hard to argue, but isn't impossible. The feat is MAGIC IN THE BLOOD, if that blood gets more ability to be magical, then so it should advance the SLAs granted by feats that come later in levels. It also says "any ability".
3.) That is a lot of racial paragon levels! Are you sure that a half drow can take all of them?
Quit it with your bi-racial erasure. Actually, the drow blood racial ability reads "Drow Blood. For all special abilities and effects, a half-drow is considered a drow." And Half elf paragon's divided ancestry allows human paragon levels. So it should all work out.
Level
Class
Feat
1
Half Elf Paragon
Drow legacy (dotu 220), Magic in the blood (PGTF 40)
2
divine counter spell Cleric
Travel devotion (CC p.62)
3
Drow paragon
Initiate of Elistrae (CoV 30)
4
Human paragon
5
Human paragon
Combat Casting
6
Human paragon
Master of shadow (Dotu 51)
7
Force missile mage
8
Force missile mage
9
Force missile mage
Mortalbane (BOVD 49)
10
Force missile mage
11
Force missile mage
12
Empowered Spell like ability (MM)
So the premise is relatively simple:
Drow Legacy provides a 1/day dancing lights, darkness, and faerie fire with a caster level equaling your class level. Magic in the Blood bumps up your usage per day of each of these feats to 3/day. Half Elf paragon grants an extra feat at first level and the ability to take more than one paragon racial class, except not both elf paragon and human paragon. Lucky that you're taking Drow paragon instead of elf paragon, amiright?
Then you dip cleric, and with eilistraee as a patron deity, you can probably get travel devotion in place of one of your lame domain choices. Cleric 1 allows you to take your initiate feat. Ranger 4 can also allow the same thing if you wanted a totally non-castery build.
Drow Paragon advances your cleric casting level as well as grants an additional casting of each of your racial SLAs: dancing lights, darkness, faerie fire, and magic missile, bringing you to 4 magic missiles a day. Initiate of Ellistrae allows you to spend any one of those racial SLAs 1/day to cast magic missile with a caster level equal to your class level. If magic in the blood comports to racial SLAs gained by feats, that means that you have a 3/day magic missile at level 3.
Next, we lean on the other half of your ancestry, the humans, for 3 levels of human paragon. We are doing this for the bonus feat. The later two levels of the class advance casting, and as a bonus you have an adaptive skill that you can now use to qualify for whatever prestige class that you are craving. The bonus feat is used for the lunker of a feat combat casting, a force missile mage pre-req. At sixth level, master of shadow adds yet another use of racial SLAs, bringing you up to 5 magic missile castings a day, (in addition to darkness, dancing lights, and faerie fire).
Next comes five levels of force missile mage (FMM). Weirdly enough, the prestige class doesn't require arcane casting. You need to be able to cast magic missile, have the combat casting feat, and have 9 ranks in both concentration and spellcraft.
At first and fifth levels of FMM you get an extra magic missile per casting. At second level he gets 1/day immediate casting of the shield spell as well as the ability to add acid, cold, electricity, or fire descriptor to any magic missile he casts. The mortalbane feat from BOVD adds 2d6 damage to your magic missiles when used against living nonoutsiders. Weirdly enough, it appears that the 2d6 can be per missile, so long as each missile targets a different target. FMM advances your cleric casting by 4 over the 5 levels bringing you up to 8th level cleric casting by level 11.
Spell like ability feats
12th level is where there is a branch in your tree. Consider empower spell like ability (MM) to add 150% to your magic missile damage. 1d4+1 averages to 3.5 damage per missile. Mortalbane averages an extra 7 damage per missile or per casting. So at 12th level you can inflict (7 x 3.5 + 7) 10 to 11 damage per target. If empowered that means that you can do 15 damage per target. Or if you send all of the missiles to hit a single target, you can deal 31 (or 46 empowered) damage per magic missile SLA.
Also consider purify spell like ability (BOED), which allows you to increase each of your damage dice types by one when cast against an evil enemy. Against a single evil enemy you would deal 7(1d6+1)+2d8 damage per magic missile casting, for an average of (4.5x9) ~40 damage.
Of course you can also maximize your spell like ability also, which, at level 12 yields 42 damage to a single enemy or 17 damage to seven different enemies.
Energy substitution
Now if you have a helpful DM, you might be able to argue that Force missile mage's energy missile ability counts as the energy substitution feat and thus allows you to qualify for the energy admixture feat from complete arcane. This will allow you to double the damage per missile. Further, if the DM goes for this, consider also/instead born of three thunders from complete arcane.
If energy admixture is a real option, consider taking both Cali****e elementalist:air and Cali****e elementalist: Fire can give you an extra missile, bringing the damage up to 8 missiles @ 2d4+2 + 4d6 (mortalbane). Born of three thunders triggers more saves for bonus effects and is probably the better way to go.
Other prestiges and dips.
Argent Savant
The short list of prestige classes to go into at level 12 include a 1 level argent savant dip to get an additional +1 to each of your seven magic missiles. For entry, you need to be able to cast 5 force spells: cleric allows you entry by the time you have access to 5th level cleric spells if you include magic missile:
alicorn lance (silver marches) 2nd
Silver charger (Heroes of Battle) 3rd
Divine retaliation (PHB2) 3rd
Spiritual weapon (SRD) 2nd
Stars of arvandor (BOED) 4th
Stars of mystra (CoV) 4th
Stars of Selune (CoV) 4th
Summon living dragonmark (dragonmarked) 3rd
Obviously, you need access to heighten spell to get one of those force spells to be 5th level. Blowing a feat for 1 more damage per missile might not be worth it considering that you can instead take maximize, purify, or empower spell like ability feats instead to get the same effect. But if you have a metamagic rod of heighten spell...definitely dip and take those feats instead.
Hierophant
If you are going the argent savant route, hierophant is a decent choice for a follow up prestige class once you get 5 more caster levels. So the stub would look like: halfelf paragon 1/cleric 1/drow paragon 1/human paragon 3/FMM 5/contemplative 1/Divine Disciple 4/heirophant 1/argent savant 1/other 2. Take the force domain with your contemplative dip and heighten spell at 15 to turn a heightened magic missile into an ability that you can use 5 times per day in addition to your other 5 magic missiles. Hierophant allows you to turn any spell into a spell like ability that you can use multiple times per day.
Visionary seeker
Seeing as how you have all of this Spell like ability feat based optimization, visionary seeker allows you to pile those feats on top of your mimicked spells. No real pre-reqs other than skills so this is a nice direction to go. But then again, your cleric spell casting will suffer.
Divine disciple
Imbue with spell ability shenanigans. Full casting progression. Skills only and 4th level casting prerequisites
Other ideas
A 1 level dip of warlock for darkness as an at will SLA will help. Seeker of the misty isle may be a good prestige to work into, further extending your cleric casting. Consider heretic of the faith for your 12th level feat or a 1 level contemplative dip and go doom dreamer from return to the temple of elemental evil, which doesn't have an alignment restriction. Suggestions are appreciated for other prestige options from there.