Dragonfire Adept/Sorcerer Theurge?

[TalonOfAnathrax]

Is there a way to get Sorcerer spell progression and Dragonfire Adept breath weapon damage progression at once?

I'm making a Gnome Half-Dragon and I'd like to make a breath weapon focused build that still has access to Alter Self, and possibly Wings of Cover. Any solutions?

[Rebel7284]

1. Talk to your DM about making a gestalt character.

2. Phaerimm hatchling is 2 LA but gets sorcerer spellcasting = HD. You have to be a super ugly worm thing from hell, but you have alter self.

3. Warlock Eldritch blast scales with arcane progressing classes, so maybe Ultimate Magus and a houserule that treats breath progression the same as Eldritch blast

4. With sufficient shenanigans, you can enter sublime chord with limited casting. Just a few levels of that give you good spellcasting. Need to be at least level 10 before you can enter thought.

5. Be a dragonborn sorcerer. You give up the Dragonfire adept invocations, but the dragonborn breath weapon qualifies for metabreath feats without any shenanigans.

[retaliation08]

You could try straight Sorcerer with Draconic Feats. The Dragonblood Sorcerer substitution levels grant Draconic Heritage in place of a familiar. This lets you take the Draconic Breath feat at 1st level and use your spells slots to fuel your breath weapon. It also opens up the other Draconic feats.

Edit: I am only aware of two Invocation Theurge PrCs, Eldtritch Theurge and Eldritch Disciple, and neither will do what you want without some reworking. If the Breath Weapon Damage is your main concern, the above Draconic Breath feat damage scales according to the spell slot used to fuel it. So, with full casting progression, it goes from 2d6 to 10d6 damage.

[DrMotives]

Eldritch Theurge seems like it's almost what you need. It was written to advance arcane & invocation use, but was published before DFA was a twinkle in a desinger's eye. So it unfortunately has warlock-only requirements, and warlock-esque features. If I was the DM I'd start trying to adapt that class for DFAs with a Dragonbreath Theurge variant.

Replace the 2 dice of elditch blast with a couple dice of DFA breath. Change spellblast to work on breath weapons, change the resilience & DR to advancing DFA scales. Greatreach blast would also mod breath weapons. Otherwise, you could mostly leave it as-is.

[Zaq]

It’s not what you asked for, but technically DFAs do get an Alter Self invocation, don’t they? Wings of Cover will be harder if you can’t get a wand of it, though.

Long story short, though, there are basically no PrCs that advance DFAness by RAW and very few PrCs that advance multiple arcane classes simultaneously at all (I can’t think of any offhand other than Ultimate Magus and the aforementioned Eldritch Theurge, neither of which is close to being applicable by RAW).

I think your best bet is to either ask your GM for a homebrew adaptation of Eldritch Theurge or to simply identify what you want out of the proposed class mix and then find an indirect way (items, dragonmarks or other weird feats, actual spells if you’re more Sorc and less DFA, etc.) of mimicking the elements, if not necessarily the names, that you care about.

[TalonOfAnathrax]

Damn. Well, DFAs do get Use Magic Device. I could probably use items of at-will Alter Self and Wings of Cover, right?
Would an item of Alter Self be able to turn me into Dragon shapes? If I cast Alter Self I could because I have the dragon type from Half-Dragon, but would that work if I were using a magic item?

[Rebel7284]

Items of at-will alter self and wings of cover don't exist. Your DM would have to figure out a fair price for such an item. UMD on regular wands would work (although activating Swift action spells is not 100% clear by the rules, most folks are okay with it). There are some sort of Spelltouched feats in SRD one of which gives Alter Self to mundanes. It's pretty limited duration though.

[Troacctid]

Humanoid Shape invocation is basically Alter Self, pretty much, but if you want it at will for reals, you could try prestiging into Shapeshifter, Mountebank, or Thrall of Juiblex. For Wings of Cover, you can use a wand. There's even a feat you can take, Arcane Schooling, to count as a Sorcerer for the purpose of spell trigger items, which means no need for any UMD check.


Items of at-will alter self and wings of cover don't exist. Your DM would have to figure out a fair price for such an item. UMD on regular wands would work (although activating Swift action spells is not 100% clear by the rules, most folks are okay with it). There are some sort of Spelltouched feats in SRD one of which gives Alter Self to mundanes. It's pretty limited duration though.
Swift action wands work fine. It was clarified in another book.