Any way to make a Pixie Warmage viable?

[Learn34]

Ok, so first off: I had no idea what I was doing when I made this character (~3 months ago).

That said, I like the thematics/aesthetics of it, and want to try to figure out a way to make it viable. While even the base capability of this PC is going to (haven't played it yet, long story) give my current DM trouble (such that he has suspended a couple of his beneficial house rules for this PC only), my understanding is that more competent DMs would see this as a character for which the bar needed to be lowered. Is there any way to mitigate the +4LA, or a way to get a character with similar innate abilities/physical form without picking up the LA?

While it's be really great to do the above without items, I like to think my perception of any item as being equivalent to DM fiat is erroneous.

[Venger]

does your gm allow buyoff or savage progression?

[A_S]

This character is going to be quite weak unless you have a sympathetic DM willing to bend the rules in your favor, which it sounds like you don't. There's really no getting around the fact that Warmage is a primary spellcaster (first rule: Thou shalt not lose caster levels), practically all of whose spells are blasting that scales with caster level (second rule: Thou shalt not lose caster levels). You can't lose four caster levels on a character like that without it being a big hit in the power department.

The options for mitigating level adjustment are basically:

Level adjustment buyoff (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/races/reducingLevelAdjustments.htm). This isn't great in your case because for LA +4, you can't buy off the first point of LA until after level 12, which means you're stuck 4 levels behind the curve until at least ECL 16. Even then, LA buyoff is a variant rule that requires DM approval.
Convincing our DM that the level adjustment rules are too punishing, and that they should implement houserules to allow you to play LA races with less cost. It doesn't sound like your DM would be on board with this.


Since it sounds like you're primarily interested in the fluff and aesthetics of the Pixie, rather than the mechanics, maybe try working with the DM to homebrew a less powerful pixie-like race that offers less in the way of bonuses (probably no permanent invisibility, for instance), but also has less LA? Maybe the DM would be less hesitant to allow a race of cute little faerie people if they're involved in homebrewing them.

[Quertus]

Having played with a pixie sorcerer in one of my parties, and as a pixie in another game, I agree that it is... suboptimal, but not completely unplayable, and can be a lot of fun.

However.

If your GM's response to you trying to play this character is to try to nerf you, you need to seriously consider the GM's sanity, and whether this is the right character / game. You have several options.

You can try to hit the GM over the head with a clue-by-four until they realize that they need to buff this suboptimal build.

You can try to play a thematically similar character. Allow me to recommend the Petal race. At only +2 LA, you'll only be half as far behind the curve, while still being a little flying fairy.

You can scrap the concept, and build something else entirely.

You can see the red flag, and bail.

-----

So, what level are you playing at, what "beneficial rules" does the GM have in place, which of those is he removing for only your already inefficient build, and what do you want out of the character?

[Learn34]

No, my DM doesn't allow buy-off, or savage progression. My current campaign/DM isn't a problem, however. As I tried to get across in my initial post, a Warmage is a challenge for my DM; he balked at the idea of me using Split Ray on Disintegrate to potentially deal 64d6 to one target @ECL20. A custom race would likely be fine for this, but I'm trying to figure out a rule-legal means to achieve similar capabilities and form. Alternatively, am I just doing the Evoker/Blaster wrong? I have a hard time ridding myself of the idea that Ability scores are the most important aspect, but I'm starting to get the sense that the body of what I don't know in regards to boosting efficacy (Save DC/ hit chance / spell pen) is just too great for me to really try to optimize make such a character.

[Learn34]

You can see the red flag, and bail.
-----
So, what level are you playing at, what "beneficial rules" does the GM have in place, which of those is he removing for only your already inefficient build, and what do you want out of the character?

>I'm in a bit of a social (and literal) desert, so I'll stick with this group, if only because I like the people and the...essence?... of the game.

>Started ECL 12, now ECL 15.

>House rules I've been bumped out of are fee metamagic casting and maximize spell applying to all spells.

>Only other general house-rule i know of is that limits on crit stacking are ignored.

>At this point, what i want out of the character is a villain, basically (it's an evil campaign). A magical-race, CE character that just wants to burn the world to the ground and laugh while doing it. Kinda (super) cliched now that I actually spell it out to someone else, but I refuse to be ashamed of that.


So, for context: This is technically my first campaign, though I participated in the final two sessions of the last campaign this DM ran. Said DM has repeatedly admitted he prefers to be a player, and had this group (4 people including him) start at ECL 13 because he wanted have a War Troll PC and failed to read the MMIII entry correctly. I later noticed his error and tried to gently point it out to him, but my deliberately-not-insistent mention of such seems to have fallen on def ears. All our initial PCs died last session, so it's a bit of a moot point; however, I'm trying to paint a picture. The initial PC death is why this one is getting swapped in, though I'm the only person in the group who tried to have both PCs ready for the first session back in January.

[Nifft]

Ok, so first off: I had no idea what I was doing when I made this character (~3 months ago).

That said, I like the thematics/aesthetics of it, and want to try to figure out a way to make it viable. While even the base capability of this PC is going to (haven't played it yet, long story) give my current DM trouble (such that he has suspended a couple of his beneficial house rules for this PC only), my understanding is that more competent DMs would see this as a character for which the bar needed to be lowered. Is there any way to mitigate the +4LA, or a way to get a character with similar innate abilities/physical form without picking up the LA?

While it's be really great to do the above without items, I like to think my perception of any item as being equivalent to DM fiat is erroneous.

If the DM is inexperienced and/or twitchy, and this character isn't one that you care about much, then it might be best to just come up with a different character.

What wold count as "similar innate abilities / physical form"? Pixies are humanoid-shaped Small creatures, so a Halfling or Gnome could fit the physical form.

Innate abilities => turning invisible at-will? There are a couple ways to do that. Ring of Invisibility is the most SRD-friendly, but also rather expensive. To get that kind of ability with class / race features, off the top of my head...

- Racially, the Primordial Giant template in Secrets of Xen'Drik (via Half-Giant perhaps, or the Half-Ogre template) can get Invisibility (Sp) at-will, limited to caster level 1.
- Class-wise, you could take the Invisible Fist ACF on a Monk 2 to replace Evasion with the ability to turn invisible every 3 rounds.


You might want to fly, too, since pixies do that.

Let's see... Glimmerskin Halfling (Dragon Magic) gets the [Dragonblood] subtype, which allows you to take the Dragon Wings feat (Races of the Dragon) so you can glide at level 1 and have an always-on fly speed at level 12 (with another feat). Since you've got the [Dragonblood] subtype, maybe you want to be a Sorcerer instead of a Warmage.


Putting it together...

Halfling Monk 2
- Halfling Racial sub levels 1 & 2 from Races of the Wild - you get (6+Int) skill points instead of (4+Int), your HD is only d6, and you replace Flurry of Blows with Skirmish +1d6. At level 2, you get Weapon Finesse instead of choosing a bonus feat.
- Invisible Fist alternate class feature from Exemplars of Evil - you lose Evasion at level 2, and instead you can turn invisible for a round every 3 rounds.

Sorcerer 3
- Dragonblood racial sub level 1 (Races of the Dragon) gets you the Draconic Heritage feat instead of a Familiar, which is actually good, since you can take Rust Dragon as your heritage to get Search as a class skill. You want Search on your skill list because...

Unseen Seer 10
Requirements: Hide 8 ranks, Search 8 ranks, Sense Motive 4 ranks , Spellcraft 4 ranks, Spot 8 ranks
- Monk gets Hide, Sense Motive, and Spot
- Sorcerer gets Spellcraft, and with Draconic Heritage (Rust Dragon) adds Search

You'll have to waste some points paying for cross-class ranks. I think the best way to get the ranks at level 5 would be to go Monk 1 / Sorc 1-3 / Monk 2, since Monk 2 has (6+Int) skill points and can afford to pay 2 cross-class for Search. The painful part will be buying a few ranks in Spot and Hide with your Sorcerer levels.

Plus you need to cast 1st-level arcane spells (Sorc gets this), including at least two divination spells, so be sure to choose two Divination spells.


Feats:
- L1 (Monk 1): Dragon Wings + Monk 1 bonus feat
- L2 (Sorc 1): Draconic Heritage (Rust) from ACF
- L3: Practiced Spellcaster (Sorcerer)
- L5 (Monk 2 bonus): Weapon Finesse
- L6: Improved Dragon Wings
- L9: ______
- L12: ______


Now you can dress up like a Pixie and you'll have a good chance at fooling basically everyone.

Plus, you'll have some nice mechanical options:
- Sorcerer casting.
- Skirmish +1d6 which improves to +5d6 by Unseen Seer 10, which works with your orbs, rays, and touch attack spells.
- Wings that work by level 6, and work effortlessly by level 12.
- Turn invisible every few rounds, so you can reposition safely or force your target to be flat-footed.

Finish with 5 levels of Abjurant Champion.


--- --- ---

Alternately, you could be a Monk/Wizard instead of a Monk/Sorcerer, but only if you can get Search on your skill list. You might be able to use one of these feats:
- Flexible Mind [chaotic] (Drag Mag326 p80) any two, but lose a skill point to do so if initially out of class
- Academy Graduate (Savage Tide Player's Guide, p10) lets you have any 3 cha or int-based skills

... but one is from Dragon Mag, and the other is from an Adventure Path module. I don't see a whole lot of other ways, but maybe someone else could find something.

Anyway, cheers and good luck.

[Dread_Head]

>Started ECL 12, now ECL 15.

>House rules I've been bumped out of are fee metamagic casting and maximize spell applying to all spells.

I'm not sure what you mean by fee metamagic casting but the issue here might have more to do with free maximise spell on all spells combined with warmage than with your race. That's a very powerful buff to the damage of blasters and if the other players are playing melee focused monsters I'd expect you to be at least on par for damage, if not outdamaging them. Combine that with a racial choice which makes it very difficult to be targeted in return (flying and invisible) and your character could be pretty op despite the LA.

There's a few other races you could go for that have that fey like magical feel for much lower LA.

Starting at LA0 we have Killoren from races of the wild. They are humanoid looking fey seeking to protect nature so their default fluff might not fit very well but you could refluff them if you want a basic fey race.

Moving up to LA1 there are Feytouched from Fiend Folio. Again these are fey and this time they have a cha boost as well. Also come with mind affecting immunity which is a nice defence.

At LA2 there is the half fey template, again from Fiend Folio. This gives flight, +4 cha, immune to enchantment and a nice selection of scaling SLAs. Stick it on halfling or gnome and you've got small size so most of the pixie abilities are there barring the invisibility. This is probably what I'd recommend as the SLAs nicely fill the gaps in the Warmage casting list and it still has most of the feel of a pixie for half the LA.

A slightly different option would be multiclassing warlock which has invocations that can grant flight, invisibility etc. You could go warlock 3 / warmage 4 / eldritch theurge 8 at ECL 15 and you would have a CL of 12 for your warmage spells (one better than with a pixie) along with 11th level invocations and eldritch blast for use when you don't want to waste a spell. Plus because this is multiclassing rather than LA you can take Practised Spellcaster so your blasting spells are hitting with full power.

[emeraldstreak]

With a Pixie I'd go for high AC. So you have to key your Warmage casting stat to an AC boost via the Dragon Magazine feat + monk/monk's belt/carmedine monk.

Offensively you can go spells, or melee, perhaps via the Sizing enchant like this fey character (https://www.myth-weavers.com/sheet.html#id=1135804).

[PacMan2247]

Many years ago, I had a Pixie Psion(shaper) who, despite the +4 LA, had no trouble keeping up with a party with a more standard composition, but a large portion of that was probably due to differences in creativity and understanding of the system. Especially moving into higher levels, the flight and natural invisibility are going to be neutralized by more and more enemies. Some of the suggested other races so far are probably things you want to consider. Even the Half-fey template (Fiend Folio pp 89-90) only gives +2 LA, and it provides the wings and a suite of spell-like abilities. Slap that onto whatever chassis you like, and you're probably in better shape than with a pixie.

[Learn34]

If the DM is inexperienced and/or twitchy, and this character isn't one that you care about much, then it might be best to just come up with a different character.

>I'm sadly somewhat committed in this campaign, as the DM's getting one of the other players to take over DM for a few... sessions? What do you call a "campaign" that only lasts a few sessions? Anyway, said player is really looking forward to having this PC partake in a "heist" scenario, and it would seem mean spirited to try to swap out characters more-or-less at the last minute, after sort-of coming out on-top of a tussle between my first PC and his.


What wold count as "similar innate abilities / physical form"? Pixies are humanoid-shaped Small creatures, so a Halfling or Gnome could fit the physical form.

>This is more of a mental visualization thing, and looking at the Player Handbook and MMI again could probably get something more aligned with what I'm thinking with a halfing or Elf somehow permanently shrunken via Reduce Person or similar.


Innate abilities => turning invisible at-will? There are a couple ways to do that. Ring of Invisibility is the most SRD-friendly, but also rather expensive. To get that kind of ability with class / race features, off the top of my head...

>The scaling SR and ability score bonuses are the biggest draw here. Originally the invisibility was a big draw, but I've come to understand the only way I could make that a close-to-inviolate strength would be Third Eye Conceal. Said item suffers from having ways around it and requiring either a feat & XP to create it or the DM giving it to me. Flying I only care about because of the crappy 20' base land speed.


Anyway, cheers and good luck.

Thank you for your input. I'll look into the sources you've referenced.

[Learn34]

I'm not sure what you mean by fee metamagic casting but the issue here might have more to do with free maximise spell on all spells combined with warmage than with your race. That's a very powerful buff to the damage of blasters and if the other players are playing melee focused monsters I'd expect you to be at least on par for damage, if not outdamaging them. Combine that with a racial choice which makes it very difficult to be targeted in return (flying and invisible) and your character could be pretty op despite the LA.

>I'll go back and edit it to read "free". As in, said house rule is that metamagic versions of spells don't have increased casting costs. The damage compared to martial/melee combat character statement is another example of how frustratingly inexperienced I am in this game, as I cannot fathom how a melee PC could rival the damage of a caster. The most I could theoretically crank out of my other PC (Lizardfolk Barb/Druid) is an average DPH of ~44


There's a few other races you could go for that have that fey like magical feel for much lower LA.

Of the races listed, Killoren is the most appealing. As for classes, I think I need to dig deeper into what can be done with the selective-spell classes (Wiz/Sorc) and figure out ways to get similar damage output.

[Learn34]

Offensively you can go spells, or melee, perhaps via the Sizing enchant like this fey character.

The most important of that character sheet is greek to me, but I'll be very interested to learn how they've got 12d6-1 on an attack.

[Heliomance]

>I'll go back and edit it to read "free". As in, said house rule is that metamagic versions of spells don't have increased casting costs.

I'm sorry what. Unless martial characters have been utterly ludicrously buffed, your DM has absolutely no concept of game balance. Metamagic mitigation is absurdly powerful, to the point where Incantatrix is considered one of the most OP prestige classes in the game because it reduces metamagic costs.

I wouldn't play a blaster in that game, I'd play a buffbot applying Persist Spell to literally everything for free and laugh all the way to the bank.

Or maybe I would play a blaster, with free Widened Empowered Maximised Twinned Repeating Enervating spells.

How does Heighten work?

Basically, that houserule is ridiculous and needs to be struck off unless your DM is ok with casters dominating literally everything forever even more than they already do - which, by the sound of it, he isn't.

[emeraldstreak]

The most important of that character sheet is greek to me, but I'll be very interested to learn how they've got 12d6-1 on an attack.

By making its strike Colossal via the Sizing weapon enchant. This comes at a price though, lower attack. However this particular build has a fairly high attack via Intuitive Strike (Wisdom) which it also leverages twice for the 40 AC (monk and saint).

[Quertus]

Well, it may be OP, but the most viable evil blaster is the Tainted Sorcerer. Can you make a DC 69 save? No? Then you're taking full damage. IIRC, they have their own "free" (cut yourself, take damage) metamagic reducers, and similarly "free" ability to ignore expensive components.

Starting at level 15 (but can't pick your gear?!), meh, I'd eat the LA, play the character in whichever form (pixie/petal, Tainted Sorcerer or straight War Mage) for a few sessions, and talk to the new GM about whether any if those builds was appropriate for your group. Switch out the underlying class mechanics as appropriate between GMs, and call it a day.

Of course, if your GM was giving free metamagic, I don't think that balance is something that they really understand all that well in the first place.

Oh, and a "campaign that only lasts a few sessions"? I'd probably call that an adventure, personally.

[skunk3]

Pixie Warlocks ftw. Don't have to waste invocations on invisibility or flight, tiny size, almost no stats really needed to play one and at-will / all-day powers and blasting. The extra CHA is also great for a lot of Warlock builds and the extra +6 to INT would also be great if you wanted to be an Eldritch Theurge, or the +4 to WIS if you wanted to be an Eldritch Disciple. Seems to me that a Pixie Eldritch Theurge would be awesome. Either option would be a very viable choice and with all of that bonus INT they would have lots of skill points to spend too.

Invisible Pixies flying around and pew-pew'ing things all day long, backed up with lots of handy invocations and spells when necessary? Oh yeah.