Devoted Tracker

[schreier]

I am looking to build a mount-based character using a Ranger / Stalker of Kharash / Ranger knight of Furyondy.

The feat devoted tracker says:
"If you have both the special mount and animal companion class features, you can designate your special mount as your animal companion. The mount gains all the benefits of being both your special mount and your animal companion"

For both mounts and animal companions, you can select "alternate" options - such as a pegasus, or griffon, or even a dragon (if you take the dragon steed feat). If you do this, how would you calculate the appropriate leveled benefits? For example, an 8th level paladin can select the griffon. That is not an option for an animal companion, unless you select savage empathy and monstrous companion feats - and then you could get it at level 7.

So in that case, do you need to take savage empathy and monstrous companion to benefit from the devoted tracker feat? If so, would you calculate the benefits for mount from the base 8, and the animal companion from base 7? What if you don't take savage empathy/monstrous companion?

If you do not need to take savage empathy/monstrous companion, do you calculate the animal companion bonuses as if the creature was a standard (so you get the benefit of all levels, not just from 8 forward)? Or do you just figure out the highest "base" - in this case 8, and calculate both benefits forward from that point? Or maybe you take the lowest "base" (which would be 7?)

This can be further confused by a section titled "Paladin Cohort Mounts," it says, in the DMG on page 200, which says:
"At the DM's option, she may allow a paladin or other character with a special mount class feature to combine the special mount with the cohort feat. The special qualities such as the empathic link and shared spells make this quite potent and worth a minimum of a +2 level adjustment to the cohort mount ECL."

So if you took Dragon Cohort for example, you would add +2 (or more) to the ECL when calculating the cohort level. With devoted tracker, how do you figure out the animal companion benefit? Take the +2 ECL (or whatever), and reduce the benefit of animal companion by that (so +2 would be the equivalent of a level 3 minimum animal companion? Normally, the next level is 4 (so -3, not -2), so I'm not sure how that would work.

Any thoughts are appreciated.

Thanks,
schreier

[schreier]

Just an attempted bump to see if anyone has any advice

[sleepyphoenixx]

I think you're overthinking this.
Personally i'd just reduce the special mount level as appropriate and add full animal companion advancement.

You don't need to savage empathy and monstrous companion because Devoted Tracker already takes care of that.
It would be nonsensical to make the feat basically unusable without going splatbook diving, since even a normal warhorse special mount is a magical beast.

[DEMON]

The feat devoted tracker says:
"If you have both the special mount and animal companion class features, you can designate your special mount as your animal companion. The mount gains all the benefits of being both your special mount and your animal companion"

For both mounts and animal companions, you can select "alternate" options - such as a pegasus, or griffon, or even a dragon (if you take the dragon steed feat). If you do this, how would you calculate the appropriate leveled benefits? For example, an 8th level paladin can select the griffon. That is not an option for an animal companion, unless you select savage empathy and monstrous companion feats - and then you could get it at level 7.

So in that case, do you need to take savage empathy and monstrous companion to benefit from the devoted tracker feat? If so, would you calculate the benefits for mount from the base 8, and the animal companion from base 7? What if you don't take savage empathy/monstrous companion?

If you do not need to take savage empathy/monstrous companion, do you calculate the animal companion bonuses as if the creature was a standard (so you get the benefit of all levels, not just from 8 forward)? Or do you just figure out the highest "base" - in this case 8, and calculate both benefits forward from that point? Or maybe you take the lowest "base" (which would be 7?)

The feat allows you to treat your special mount as also your animal companion for animal companion benefits. The mount need not be a creature normally available as an animal companion.


The feat devoted tracker says:
This can be further confused by a section titled "Paladin Cohort Mounts," it says, in the DMG on page 200, which says:
"At the DM's option, she may allow a paladin or other character with a special mount class feature to combine the special mount with the cohort feat. The special qualities such as the empathic link and shared spells make this quite potent and worth a minimum of a +2 level adjustment to the cohort mount ECL."

So if you took Dragon Cohort for example, you would add +2 (or more) to the ECL when calculating the cohort level. With devoted tracker, how do you figure out the animal companion benefit? Take the +2 ECL (or whatever), and reduce the benefit of animal companion by that (so +2 would be the equivalent of a level 3 minimum animal companion? Normally, the next level is 4 (so -3, not -2), so I'm not sure how that would work.

The animal companion benefits are unaffected by the mount/cohort's ECL , they are reliant on your effective Druid level. Same goes for the Paladin.
The +2 ECL affects, what type of Dragon you can attract with your Dragon Cohort or Leadership feat.

[schreier]

The feat allows you to treat your special mount as also your animal companion for animal companion benefits. The mount need not be a creature normally available as an animal companion.
.....
The animal companion benefits are unaffected by the mount/cohort's ECL , they are reliant on your effective Druid level. Same goes for the Paladin.
The +2 ECL affects, what type of Dragon you can attract with your Dragon Cohort or Leadership feat.

While I appreciate what you are saying ... my concern is the level of power. Let's say you get a dragon cohort for +2 ECL (cohort gives -3 ECL). Normally cohorts are allowed within 2 ECL (2 levels below)

If you assign animal companion stats as if the companion were a basic companion, at level 15 you would have +10HD, +10 Natural Armor, +5 Strength, with multiattack, improved evasion, and like 3 bonus feats ... add that on top of a dragon, and it's pretty scary

It seems like you have to somehow reduce the "benefit" of animal companion to the power level of the creature you're getting, right?

[sleepyphoenixx]

While I appreciate what you are saying ... my concern is the level of power. Let's say you get a dragon cohort for +2 ECL (cohort gives -3 ECL). Normally cohorts are allowed within 2 ECL (2 levels below)

If you assign animal companion stats as if the companion were a basic companion, at level 15 you would have +10HD, +10 Natural Armor, +5 Strength, with multiattack, improved evasion, and like 3 bonus feats ... add that on top of a dragon, and it's pretty scary

It seems like you have to somehow reduce the "benefit" of animal companion to the power level of the creature you're getting, right?

You do know you're not actually getting 15 levels of Animal Companion progression, right?
You don't stack your paladin levels on top of your ranger levels to determine the benefits you get.
You apply what your ranger levels give you (which is nothing if you exit at Ranger 5) and then you apply what your paladin levels give you (which is a maximum of 8 HD, before reductions from a more powerful mount).

The only way to really abuse Devoted Tracker is a supermount build with a class like Halfling Outrider that progresses both Animal Companion and Special Mount at the same time. Which you're not using.

[schreier]

I was using 15 levels as an example just to make the point .... add in a level of beastmaster for +3, more base ranger or druid, any class that advances a companion ... seems strange to tack on the extra hd as if the cohort, regardless of level/base hd gets the same bonus

Honestly, as long as you can qualify for a mount, the bonuses are meh compared to the companion bonuses ...

A level 20 character with dragon cohort can pick an ECL 20 dragon basically as their steed ... anything above the basics is just gravy. If that dragon gets the benefits of all animal companion HD/armor/str - it gets crazy from what I can tell

[sleepyphoenixx]

I was using 15 levels as an example just to make the point .... add in a level of beastmaster for +3, more base ranger or druid, any class that advances a companion ... seems strange to tack on the extra hd as if the cohort, regardless of level/base hd gets the same bonus

You can't use 15 levels to make a point if you can't actually realistically achieve 15 levels of animal companion progression in your build.

Not to mention that the whole "leadership cohort as special mount" section in the DMG basically amounts to "ask your DM what he thinks is the proper LA".
I think your problem here is more with Leadership than with Devoted Tracker, because otherwise it works fine.

If you substract the adjustment from both you're not actually getting any benefit from the feat. That seems a whole lot stranger to me.

Lets say you're a Ranger 6/Paladin 5. You get 2 HD from Animal Companion and nothing from Special Mount.
A Paladin 11 would get 6 bonus HD without spending a feat. So would a Druid 11. Even a Ranger 11 gets 2 HD despite his crappy half-progression.

Beastmaster effectively adds 2 bonus HD. In exchange for all the other class features it doesn't progress, and a crappy feat.



A level 20 character with dragon cohort can pick an ECL 20 dragon basically as their steed ... anything above the basics is just gravy. If that dragon gets the benefits of all animal companion HD/armor/str - it gets crazy from what I can tell
Dragons have pretty high HD for their CR, so that's not really saying that much. You're getting what, a young gold dragon at most?
Keep in mind that bonus HD don't advance age categories. Or casting. Or really anything beyond BAB and skills.

You're dedicating your whole build to get a young gold dragon with a few extra HD and a sidekick. That doesn't really sound overpowered to me, or at least not nearly as overpowered as just using Leadership to get a human wizard.

I fiddled around with a Druid Supermount (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?289543-Supermount-Druid-(and-choosing-the-right-mount)) build a long time ago (also using Ranger Knight), and i dedicated pretty much everything to getting that dragon as high as possible.
I used Arcane Hierophant to stack familiar progression on top of Devoted Tracker and a bunch of Dragonmag feats to double and triple those progression levels.
And it still only came out +36HD for a normal warhorse mount, +28HD for a dragon, with all the abuse and favorable rules interpretations i could come up with.

So yeah, i'd say Devoted Tracker alone is not a problem.

[DEMON]

While I appreciate what you are saying ... my concern is the level of power. Let's say you get a dragon cohort for +2 ECL (cohort gives -3 ECL). Normally cohorts are allowed within 2 ECL (2 levels below)

If you assign animal companion stats as if the companion were a basic companion, at level 15 you would have +10HD, +10 Natural Armor, +5 Strength, with multiattack, improved evasion, and like 3 bonus feats ... add that on top of a dragon, and it's pretty scary

It seems like you have to somehow reduce the "benefit" of animal companion to the power level of the creature you're getting, right?

With max level leadership score and Dragon Cohort, you'd get an ECL 18 Dragon, so young or juvenile, depending on the type of dragon.

Through 12 levels of Druid and Beastmaster combined and Natural Bond you could qualify for the highest level of AC bonuses and have enough room in your build for Paladin 8, so the 2nd set of bonuses for your SM.

You'd need Skill Focus, Track, Devoted Tracker, Natural Bond and Dragon Cohort to do this.

You'd end up with +16 HD, +8 STR and so on. You could do even better, if you take more Paladin levels and Natural Bond feats.

Pretty impressive, I guess, but you'll become The Mount: The Class, dumping all your resources to this one feature. The mount would almost certainly outshine it's rider.

I'll let everyone decide on their own if it's worth it or not.

[sleepyphoenixx]

Through 12 levels of Druid and Beastmaster combined and Natural Bond you could qualify for the highest level of AC bonuses and have enough room in your build for Paladin 8, so the 2nd set of bonuses for your SM.

You'd need Skill Focus, Track, Devoted Tracker, Natural Bond and Dragon Cohort to do this.

You'd end up with +16 HD, +8 STR and so on. You could do even better, if you take more Paladin levels and Natural Bond feats.

You can't stack druid with paladin because the alignment requirements conflict, and both classes lose their features if they shift alignment.
You also can't take Natural Bond more than once.

Even if you could a Young Gold Dragon (the strongest you can get iirc) at level 20 isn't that impressive, even with 16 bonus HD.
Sure, you'd have 30HD. But you're still stuck with 1st level sorcerer casting, a 6d10 breath weapon and so on. Even an attack bonus of 36 is merely good, not gamebreaking.
Sure, it's a moderately impressive beatstick, but it's not actually on par with a well-built barbarian in that regard. And your actual character will suck.

[DEMON]

Sure, you'd have 30HD. But you're still stuck with 1st level sorcerer casting, a 6d10 breath weapon and so on. Even an attack bonus of 36 is merely good, not gamebreaking.
Sure, it's a moderately impressive beatstick, but it's not actually on par with a well-built barbarian in that regard. And your actual character will suck.

Which I have actually alluded to in the second part of my post that you didn't quote :smallamused:
So we agree with each other.