Piggy Knowles
2019-03-28, 10:15 AM
As promised, it’s time for a new showcase!
INTRODUCTION
With more than a decade and a half of toying around with 3.5, I’ve accumulated a lot of spare builds and ideas. While I don’t have an active game going right now, I still like to pop open my builds folder and try to refine things. Recently I decided to make a dedicated effort to flesh out some of these builds into full write-ups, and reached out to some friends in the CO community who might be interested in doing the same. In the spirit of Tempest Stormwind’s Weekly Optimization Showcase (imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, right?), I thought I’d showcase the end results here.
The goal is (usually) not to show off any fancy new TO trick, but to showcase effective, playable builds and spur discussion. While each of us has a different build philosophy, in general the intent is to create something that can be played in most groups from level 1 to level 20. Again, the goal is discussion, so feel free to discuss the build, talk about other options, make suggestions or tear it all to shreds. Also, feel free to use anything showcased here in any of your campaigns—and let us know how they work out if you do!
Right now the group consists of myself, the Viscount, Akal Saris, Venger and WhamBamSam, with a couple of other folks hopefully on their way. Typically one of us writes up the build concept and possibly a stub, the others share feedback on Discord or in some of the shared documents we have, and together we refine things until we’re happy with the final product. I’ll list the build’s main author whenever I showcase a particular build.
Buffsader (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?559259-Optimzation-Showcase-in-the-Playground-Buffsader) (PK, ToB/Gish/Party Support)
The Utility Belt (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?560988-Optimzation-Showcase-in-the-Playground-The-Utility-Belt) (PK, Psionics/Stealth/Utility)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless War Mind (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?569004-Optimization-Showcase-in-the-Playground-Eternal-Sunshine-of-the-Spotless-War-Mind) (PK, ToB/Psionics/Melee Damage)
The Melding Pot (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?579458-Optimization-Showcase-in-the-Playground-The-Melding-Pot) (Veng, Incarnum/Utility)
That’s So Raven (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?581950-Optimization-Showcase-in-the-Playground-That%92s-So-Raven) (PK, Gish/Ranged/Debuff)
Dancing in the Dark (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?582528-Optimization-Showcase-in-the-Playground-Dancing-in-the-Dark) (PK, ToB/Stealth/Lock-down)
Gladys Knight and the Pips (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?583657-Optimization-Showcase-in-the-Playground-Gladys-Knight-and-the-Pips) (PK, Arcane/Face/Utility)
You asked for it, so here it is: Zen in the Art of Archery! Huge thanks to WhamBamSam in particularly for helping me update this one.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/05/Twin_Arrows-Twin_Arrows_Entrance.jpg/640px-Twin_Arrows-Twin_Arrows_Entrance.jpg
Zen in the Art of Archery
Sometimes a little problem needs a BIG solution.
BACKGROUND
I have a love-hate relationship with archers.
I love the feel of archers. They’re iconic and they’re fun to play. They have a lot of strengths, too. They can make full attacks with greater ease than any other fighting style. They can straight up avoid a lot of common forms of battlefield control, and can stay out of range of many powerful attacks. They’re fantastic at making a ton of attacks. By keeping a variety of arrows on hand, they can easily bypass things like damage reduction that often frustrate multi-attackers.
But boy are they frustrating. Archery typically requires at minimum three feats just to be competent. They force you to divide up your stats, requiring Dexterity for attacking and Strength for damage. They often aren’t party friendly, since they rarely absorb attacks away from casters the way a melee brute might, and they don’t threaten attackers. And they lack most of the reliable damage boosters that melee characters have. There’s nothing remotely comparable to Power Attack for archers (and no, Hank’s Energy Bow doesn’t count… only 1:1 returns and the fact that archers typically make volley attacks means it can hurt even more than it helps). Magical gear helps a bit, but only so much.
The most common ways of increasing damage for archers to try to bring them in line with melee classes tend to rely on precision damage, typically sneak attack or skirmish, but there are tons of problems with these. Skirmish isn’t too bad if you go the Swift Hunter route, since that lets you bypass some immunities and can be extended to 60’, but in general precision damage is super easy to shut down. It also forces you to stay fairly close to your enemies, which has always felt to me like it defeats the point of fighting with a longbow. Imagine having 110’ range increments and being forced to stay less than a dozen yards away from your enemies.
Anyhow, I have a whole thread of archer builds that represent my efforts at toying with archers I’d actually enjoy playing. They range from the simple (such as a bardblade that uses inspire courage and DFI to boost damage on large volley attacks) to the complex (such as a factotum with Mindsight and the ability to phase through walls in order to fire off poisoned Greater Manyshot volleys). One of my favorites, though, is the Psycarnum Archer. It was the result of toying with the idea of making a psychic warrior archer. Without access to the most sources of bonus damage, I ended up using expansion as my main source. Alongside the oversized archery ability of an arrow demon, the build could reliably dual fire gargantuan longbows, with a base damage of 4d6 per arrow. That may not sound impressive, but it was roughly equivalent to +10 damage per shot as compared to a standard longbow, came alongside a decent bonus to Strength, and unlike most forms of bonus damage, was not easily shut down by things like concealment or fortification. And since psychic warriors needed a high Wisdom regardless, the build was able to use Zen Archery to ignore Dexterity altogether.
That said, the Psycarnum Archer had some flaws, so it’s always a build I’ve been meaning to go back and update. Since psychic warriors have a lot of notable PP issues, it relied on a fairly cheesy use of Psycarnum Infusion alongside Azure Talent and Midnight Augmentation that might not fly at many tables, and its BAB was always a bit disappointing (notably missing that all-important +16 benchmark). For this build I decided to focus exclusively on its core trick (Zen Archery alongside expansion and oversized weapons), without relying on the dirtier tricks. I think the final outcome is actually a cleaner build overall, and a more effective one. I hope you enjoy!
THE BASICS
Race: Neraph. It’s a +0 LA outsider with ranger as a favored class, making it just about perfect here, and its racial abilities fit well with the build to boot.
Build Stub: Ranger 2/Ardent 8/Slayer 10
ACFs: Arcane hunter, voice of the city (but see the variants section)
Alignment: Any.
Zen in the Art of Archery
Level
Class
Feats
Class Features
Powers
Notes (Click to Expand)
1st
Ranger 1
TrackB, Zen Archery
Favored enemy (arcanists), Track, voice of the city
Ranger is a nice lead-in for any Zen Archery build, primarily because it grants you Rapid Shot as a bonus feat that ignores pre-reqs, allowing you to dump Dex entirely. It also provides an excellent lead-in to slayer down the road, so bonus points there. I always recommend any ranger build take arcane hunter for favored enemy (arcanists), as spellcasters and creatures with SLAs are far more common overall than any single favored enemy grouping. And since you will be getting a much better version of wild empathy down the road, I also recommend you ditch it for voice of the city or spiritual companion, which allow you to communicate with those you otherwise couldn’t. I went with voice of the city here, but either ACF is a fine choice.
2nd
Ranger 2
Rapid ShotB
Combat style
You’re now reliably firing off two attacks per round with your bow off an 18 Wis. Not too much else to say here.
3rd
Ardent 1
Point Blank Shot, Weapon Focus (longbow)B
Assume psionic mantles (conflict, freedom)
Metaphysical weapon, dimension hop
While the original build functioned as a psychic warrior, for this version you’ll be running as an ardent. Ardents can be a bit of a pain to build (unless you have access to the Substitute Domain power, in which case lol), but going ardent alleviates most of the PP concerns of the original build while still hitting many of the relevant powers.
For your mantles, conflict gives you a free Weapon Focus (attack bonuses are always handy for volley archers) and provides a number of handy buffing powers. Meanwhile freedom gives you a ton of mobility powers, making sure you can always get to the most advantageous spot for your archery or stay out of harm’s way. To start with, you nab metaphysical weapon, providing a cheap enhancement bonus to your bow, and dimension hop, providing you short-range swift action teleportation. These powers should remain useful throughout your career, which is important for an ardent, which gets so few powers.
4th
Ardent 2
Assume psionic mantle (time)
Prescience, offensive
The time mantle helps shore up your poor initiative (sadly hard to avoid since unlike most archers, you’ll be abandoning Dexterity) and gives you access to a number of useful utility powers down the road. For now, though, go ahead and grab prescience, offensive off the conflict mantle for another quick damage boost.
5th
Ardent 3
Hustle
With access to 2nd-level powers you can now grab hustle, and between this and dimension hop you should be able to stay fairly mobile despite focusing on full attacks.
6th
Ardent 4
Precise Shot
Deceleration
Precise Shot is a feat tax for any and every archer, unfortunately. Shooting into combat is something you’ll inevitably have to do, and while you can do that without this feat, your allies will appreciate not having to pull arrows out of their sides. It also is a requirement for the incredibly valuable splitting enhancement, which is one of the things that can really make volley archers shine.
Deceleration is an interesting debuff for an archer, halving an enemy’s Speed to keep it far away from you. It targets Reflex, making it perfect for those big hulking brutes that you tend to want to keep a healthy distance from.
7th
Slayer 1
Favored enemy, enemy sense
Slayer is pretty much the psionic gish PrC, providing 9/10 manifesting advancement and perfect BAB, and it has some very nice class features to boot. It also works perfectly alongside your ranger base, so that’s a plus. Pick a favored psionic foe based on your campaign (though it’s hard to go wrong with the classic choice of mind flayers).
8th
Slayer 2
Brain nausea
Dimension slide
Man, I love the flavor behind the slayer’s abilities. Brain nausea likely won’t come up much unless you’re specifically in an illithid-heavy campaign, but boy it’s fun. Dimension slide gives you some tactical teleportation with more significant range than dimension hop allows, and can be downgraded to a move action for a fairly cheap augmentation cost.
9th
Slayer 3
Expanded Knowledge (expansion)
Lucid buffer
Expansion, time hop
See what I mean about having surprisingly good class features? Lucid buffer gives you a sizable bonus to saves against charms and compulsions, and alongside your good Will saves and Wisdom focus, you should rarely have to fear these ever again.
With a spare feat you can now pick up expansion. Go ahead and blow up to huge size and enjoy the fact that your arrow’s base damage is upgraded to 3d6. And as far time hop, it is one of the most flexible utility spells around. Use it to bypass doors and traps, send yourself or an ally into the future to avoid detection or harm, remove a foe from combat for a bit (it allows a save, but you should actually have fairly high DCs on your powers), and more.
10th
Ardent 5
Assume psionic mantle (natural world)
Metamorphosis
Hop back into ardent for a level in order to pick up another psionic mantle, just in time to grab metamorphosis. I hardly need to explain why this is so good; it’s even better for you than most, as you can take on outsider forms.
11th
Slayer 4
Favored enemy +4
Fly, psionic
Flight is incredibly valuable for an archer. You can access flight via metamorphosis, but taking fly as a power means you’re not locked into winged forms every time you want to fly around a bit.
12th
Slayer 5
Practiced Manifester
Temporal acceleration
Big, big power bump at this level.
Most people know this already, but ardents are a bit unique in their power selection. At each level, an ardent learns a power of up to any level it is capable of manifesting. Since the power you are capable of manifesting is based on your manifester level and not your class level, by nabbing Practiced Manifester you can now pick up powers as though you hadn’t dropped three manifesting levels along the way. That’s great, because it means that at this level you can pick up temporal acceleration, AKA mini-time stop. Use it as a swift action to apply a round’s worth of buffs (such as, oh, I don’t know, metamorphosis).
And speaking of metamorphosis, you are now able to metamorph into what will be your favored form: the arrow demon. This lovely little beasty is everything you could ever want in a combat form, thanks to its three completely fantastic (Ex) abilities. The first is Close Combat Shot, which allows you to fire off a bow while threatened without provoking attacks of opportunity, and lets you make AoOs with your bow. The second is Oversized Weapons, which is exactly what it sounds like: you can wield bows up to one size larger than your current size, meaning that alongside expansion you can wield gargantuan longbows (without the awkwardness of being roughly the size of a whale). And finally, the piece de resistance: Symmetrical Archery allows you to dual wield longbows, an entirely unique ability in 3.5. Bring it all together and you’ve got a really fantastic combat option that will still be effective at level 20.
13th
Slayer 6
Cerebral blind
Anticipatory strike
Cerebral blind is an incredibly cool ability, letting you ignore all kinds of divination spells. Meanwhile, anticipatory strike is ridiculously handy, allowing you to take your turn as an immediate action. It uses up your next turn’s worth of actions, but there are a ton of circumstances where this is incredibly valuable, especially in the later rounds of combat when you can effectively use it to go twice in a row and end an encounter early.
14th
Slayer 7
Favored enemy +6
Animate plants, psionic
You actually don’t have a ton of great options when it comes to 7th-level powers (hence why you took a 5th-level power last level). Animate plants is a cute option, though teleport or freedom of movement might be better. Still, this gives you a bit of minionmancy, letting you turn the trees around you into giant animated objects to wallop your foes. Could be handy, I guess, especially since you have already have teleportation and can always pick up FoM via items. (But feel free to swap back to one of the other options if animate plants isn’t for you).
15th
Slayer 8
Woodland Archer
Breach power resistance
Spirit of war
Spirit of war always feels like it’s maybe a level too high for what it does, but there’s no denying that the effects are useful for you. A +4 bonus to attack and damage that stacks with your other buffs is fantastic, and the fact that you can also automatically confirm a critical hit and take +10 to a save during its duration is certainly not going to go amiss. And the fact that it buffs your whole party instead of just you makes it just worthwhile enough to make it into your regular buff routine.
Breach power resistance is actually a very cool ability for a volley archer, especially if transparency is in full effect and this applies to spell resistance as well. While it does require you to get a bit closer than I’d usually recommend for an archer, you can easily knock down something’s power/spell resistance to manageable levels in a single round thanks to the huge number of attacks you can spit out in a round.
Finally, Woodland Archer is just a phenomenal archery feat for any volley archer. The first two abilities in particular are invaluable to you. The first, adjust for range, gives you a +4 bonus to all your subsequent attacks any time you miss. That’s a huge advantage, almost eliminating an entire iterative penalty and helping to limit how often your arrows whiff. Pierce the foliage helps you bypass concealment, often the bane of an archer’s existence, and while it isn’t quite as effective as Improved Precise Shot, it doesn’t come with that hefty 19 Dexterity requirement. (Check with your DM to see if pierce the foliage even applies if you ignore miss chance with something like bracers of accuracy; by my reading it shouldn’t, but if your DM rules otherwise, it’s even better.)
16th
Slayer 9
Cerebral immunity
Teleport, greater psionic
Cerebral immunity is completely fantastic, essentially giving you mind blank for as long as you are psionically focused (and actually is even harder to bypass than mind blank). And greater teleport is something every party should have access to at these levels.
17th
Slayer 10
Blast feedback, favored enemy +8
Time regression
After cerebral immunity, blast feedback is a bit of a let-down as a capstone, but I suppose it’s alright if you face a lot of mind flayers. But it’s OK, time regression more than makes up for it. 1,000 XP is a hefty cost, but boy is this one worth it. You get the ability to literally rewind time for a round, retaining your knowledge of the near future. Combine with anticipatory strike and you can even manifest it off-turn.
18th
Ardent 6
Linked Power
Time hop, mass
Remember everything I said about how useful time hop is? Now you can affect all of your allies, you can hop hours instead of rounds into the future, and with a torc of power preservation you can activate this as an immediate action.
While you mostly haven’t bothered with metapsionics, Linked Power is just great action economy, allowing you to link standard action powers to one of your swift action buffs, and ensuring that you’re spending your time filling enemies with holes rather than buffing.
19th
Ardent 7
Earthquake, psionic
Truth be told, earthquake doesn’t really fit your MO, but ardents aren’t exactly spoiled for choices when it comes to high level powers. Still, it’s certainly not bad to have.
20th
Ardent 8
Evade burst
Yeah… you’re completely out of available 8th- and 9th-level powers. Evade burst gives you evasion on demand in case someone decides to fling a fireball at you, so that’s nice. This could also be oak body or freedom of movement as well; it’s filler either way, so it might as well be an immediate action power that you might feel like manifesting now and then.
1: Metaphysical weapon, dimension hop, offensive prescience, deceleration, expansion
2: Hustle
3: Dimension slide, time hop
4: Metamorphosis, psionic fly
5: Anticipatory strike
6: Temporal acceleration, evade burst
7: Psionic animate plants
8: Spirit of war, greater psionic teleport, mass time hop
9: Time regression, psionic earthquake
Wisdom is your friend, driving your power points, ranged attack rolls and power DCs. Charisma is a complete dump stat, and there’s no great reason for Int or Dex to be higher than 10. A decent Strength score for bonus damage on your composite longbows won’t hurt, though expansion and metamorphosis allow you to get away with keeping this on the lower side.
SAMPLE STAT ARRAYS:
28-point buy: Str 12/Dex 10/Con 12/Int 10/Wis 18/Cha 8
32-point buy: Str 14/Dex 10/Con 14/Int 10/Wis 18/Cha 8
You’ve got tons of breathing room when it comes to skills. Your only required skills are 4 ranks in knowledge (dungeoneering) by level 6 and 4 ranks in psicraft by level 12, and you’ve got decent skill points off a broad list for most of your career. Perception skills work nicely alongside your Wis bonus and the neraph’s natural bonuses, so they’re a solid choice. Survival is also decent; you have Track, so you might as well use it. But really, it’s up to you.
Welp, you’re an archer, so you’re going to be dumping a fair bit of money into your bow. In general you’re going to want a +1 sizing splitting composite longbow with a decent Strength bonus, so you can size it up and down as necessary. You’ll also likely want a spare longbow for when you’re in arrow demon form. If you’re playing with typical WBL I wouldn’t recommend going all out on both longbows; keep one as your main bow, and a second +1 sizing bow to pull out as needed.
I always recommend archers get a wide variety of ammunition and weapon crystals to bypass DR as needed, since otherwise your 10-20 attacks per round are going to start looking mighty sad. And go ahead and get a few magical arrows to have on hand just in case. This is a nice advantage that archers have over melee classes, since they can choose the arrows best suited for the task at hand.
Also, as a ranger, you have access to ranger spells via spell trigger items. Rangers actually have some excellent archery spells. You’ll have some competition for your swift action, but spells like hunter’s eye, spellslayer arrow, brilliant energy arrow, arrow storm, arrow mind and the like can all be handy things to have access to now and then.
A torc of power preservation is always useful for a manifester, and is essential if you want to use mass time hop as a swift action. And any item that is good for a psion or an archer is probably good for you. I’m particularly a fan of the Helm of the Hunter from MIC, which is a steal at 9,000gp and gives you a hefty bonus to Spot checks and the Far Shot feat. The various bracers of archery aren’t too bad, though they preclude you from using the bracers of accuracy, which are always nice. And speaking of bracers, if your DM believes that the strongarm bracers will stack with the oversized weapons ability you pick up via metamorphosis, get them and don’t look back; that will increase your base arrow damage to 6d6, providing a huge damage boost for the cost. (I personally don’t think this will work based on the wording of oversized weapons, but it’s worth mentioning.)
BUILD SUMMARY
As always, we start with the basics: with +18 BAB and 9th-level powers, it’s hard to really go too wrong. You’re really darn close to being Wis-SAD, which is always nice, and with the standard Wisdom-boosting items you should have 352 PP from class levels and bonus PP, which should be more than enough to keep yourself going all day long without requiring any shenanigans. You have all the necessary feats to be a competent volley archer and the BAB and buff powers to back it up. You do all this while also having above-average skills, several very solid defensive options (most courtesy of slayer’s surprisingly good class features) and a number of cool utility powers such as time hop, time regression, psionic earthquake and greater psionic teleport. But here’s the million dollar question: can you deal level-appropriate damage as a psionic archer? Let’s dig a bit deeper.
Your standard buffs aren’t anything fancy: +5 enhancement bonus via metaphysical weapon, +6 insight bonus to damage via offensive prescience, +4 competence bonus to attack and damage via spirit of war (the latter of which gets shared with your allies), for a total of +9 to attack rolls and +15 to damage. Expansion up to huge size and with a splitting composite bow with a +5 Strength bonus, you’ll be firing off 10 attacks per round, each doing 3d6+20, before other items like bracers of archery are taken into account. This isn’t gamebreaking damage but it’s more than enough to two-shot most level appropriate foes, and unlike most archers, none of this is precision damage. You aren’t reliant on activating sneak attack, skirmish or any other circumstantial bonuses. You don’t need to get up close and personal, so you can take full advantage of your longbow’s excellent range. You can easily move and still full attack thanks to hustle and you have flight and teleportation. Most of these buffs can be applied as a swift action or have long durations that allow them to be applied before combat, and Linked Power and temporal acceleration lets you quickly apply the few buffs that can’t.
Where it gets better is when you start adding on metamorphosis. By changing into an arrow demon, you can wield gargantuan bows, and can dual wield bows. By carrying a spare sizing bow, you add on five extra attacks in a full attack action, and your base damage increases to 4d6 per shot. You can also make AoOs with your bow and fire while threatened.
So what does this look like in practice? Let’s take a typical CR 20 enemy in a balor. Assume that you’re hanging out at the extent of your range (a good idea versus a balor!), meaning no PBS damage, and you’re making a full attack. For the purposes of this we’ll also assume you have no accuracy or damage-boosting items beyond the lesser bracers of archery, and no enhancements on your bow other than sizing and splitting. With a 34 Wisdom, your standard attack routine against AC 35 is +37/+37/+37/+37/+32/+32/+27/+27/+22/+22, and Woodland Archer gives you a +4 to all subsequent attack rolls if you miss. With a lesser fiendslayer crystal and cold iron arrows, you don’t need to worry about DR. Let’s assume an average of three misses per attack routine, and no critical hits. That’s an average of 234.5 points of damage, just with your standard everyday buffs and without adding on a single extra boost (such as the collision enhancement or higher-Strength bows). That’s enough to bring the balor down to ~55 HP in a single full attack without breaking a sweat.
And if you go the full temporal acceleration into arrow demon route? Assuming you hit just ten out of your fifteen attacks (a fairly conservative assumption with Woodland Archer in the picture) and don’t roll a single crit, that’s still an average of 370 damage, putting that poor little balor at -80 HP. Good thing you’re outside of its death throes range!
VARIANTS
An easy variant is going Ranger 2/Ardent 10/Slayer 8, which nets you an additional mantle. This can help shore up the paucity of decent high-level powers you currently have, but comes at the cost of cerebral immunity (which is worth a high-level power all on its own) and +1 BAB. It’s not a bad route to go, but it’s definitely one that comes at a cost. If you do go this direction, one interesting option is the corruption and madness mantle. While on the surface this doesn’t add much, breach power resistance into microcosm is a nice little one-two punch for taking out powerful foes.
And, of course, there’s the elephant in the room: Substitute Powers from the Mind’s Eye Expanded Classes series. I didn’t include this ACF because frankly it’s hard to incorporate, since it basically amounts to “work with your DM to determine new powers for mantles” and can mean anything from an inconsequential boost to perfectly hand-picked powers. Every DM is going to be different in what they do and do not allow, so it was easier for me to assume this ACF was off the table entirely. That said, I strongly strongly recommend you take advantage of it if it’s allowed. Some interesting options without deviating from the theme of the current mantles include greater metamorphosis from the natural world mantle, overland flight or inconstant location from the freedom mantle and timeless body or synchronicity from the time mantle.
Also, this build still works fairly well as a psychic warrior, which is how the original build was envisioned. You’ll need to get a bit creative to bypass the psychic warrior’s low PP, but there are a number of known tricks that will let you do that. The previous version of the build used Psycarnum Infusion shenanigans (for those unfamiliar, Psycarnum Infusion essentially allows you to break the daily restriction on incarnum feats, which can be used to good effect with feats like Azure Talent and Midnight Augmentation). If I went this route again I think I’d use the soulbound weapon ACF, allowing you to call splitting bows on the fly and not rely on purchasing them.
***
And that’s that! Please let us know what you think in the comments, and what you’d like to see for future showcases!
INTRODUCTION
With more than a decade and a half of toying around with 3.5, I’ve accumulated a lot of spare builds and ideas. While I don’t have an active game going right now, I still like to pop open my builds folder and try to refine things. Recently I decided to make a dedicated effort to flesh out some of these builds into full write-ups, and reached out to some friends in the CO community who might be interested in doing the same. In the spirit of Tempest Stormwind’s Weekly Optimization Showcase (imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, right?), I thought I’d showcase the end results here.
The goal is (usually) not to show off any fancy new TO trick, but to showcase effective, playable builds and spur discussion. While each of us has a different build philosophy, in general the intent is to create something that can be played in most groups from level 1 to level 20. Again, the goal is discussion, so feel free to discuss the build, talk about other options, make suggestions or tear it all to shreds. Also, feel free to use anything showcased here in any of your campaigns—and let us know how they work out if you do!
Right now the group consists of myself, the Viscount, Akal Saris, Venger and WhamBamSam, with a couple of other folks hopefully on their way. Typically one of us writes up the build concept and possibly a stub, the others share feedback on Discord or in some of the shared documents we have, and together we refine things until we’re happy with the final product. I’ll list the build’s main author whenever I showcase a particular build.
Buffsader (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?559259-Optimzation-Showcase-in-the-Playground-Buffsader) (PK, ToB/Gish/Party Support)
The Utility Belt (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?560988-Optimzation-Showcase-in-the-Playground-The-Utility-Belt) (PK, Psionics/Stealth/Utility)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless War Mind (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?569004-Optimization-Showcase-in-the-Playground-Eternal-Sunshine-of-the-Spotless-War-Mind) (PK, ToB/Psionics/Melee Damage)
The Melding Pot (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?579458-Optimization-Showcase-in-the-Playground-The-Melding-Pot) (Veng, Incarnum/Utility)
That’s So Raven (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?581950-Optimization-Showcase-in-the-Playground-That%92s-So-Raven) (PK, Gish/Ranged/Debuff)
Dancing in the Dark (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?582528-Optimization-Showcase-in-the-Playground-Dancing-in-the-Dark) (PK, ToB/Stealth/Lock-down)
Gladys Knight and the Pips (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?583657-Optimization-Showcase-in-the-Playground-Gladys-Knight-and-the-Pips) (PK, Arcane/Face/Utility)
You asked for it, so here it is: Zen in the Art of Archery! Huge thanks to WhamBamSam in particularly for helping me update this one.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/05/Twin_Arrows-Twin_Arrows_Entrance.jpg/640px-Twin_Arrows-Twin_Arrows_Entrance.jpg
Zen in the Art of Archery
Sometimes a little problem needs a BIG solution.
BACKGROUND
I have a love-hate relationship with archers.
I love the feel of archers. They’re iconic and they’re fun to play. They have a lot of strengths, too. They can make full attacks with greater ease than any other fighting style. They can straight up avoid a lot of common forms of battlefield control, and can stay out of range of many powerful attacks. They’re fantastic at making a ton of attacks. By keeping a variety of arrows on hand, they can easily bypass things like damage reduction that often frustrate multi-attackers.
But boy are they frustrating. Archery typically requires at minimum three feats just to be competent. They force you to divide up your stats, requiring Dexterity for attacking and Strength for damage. They often aren’t party friendly, since they rarely absorb attacks away from casters the way a melee brute might, and they don’t threaten attackers. And they lack most of the reliable damage boosters that melee characters have. There’s nothing remotely comparable to Power Attack for archers (and no, Hank’s Energy Bow doesn’t count… only 1:1 returns and the fact that archers typically make volley attacks means it can hurt even more than it helps). Magical gear helps a bit, but only so much.
The most common ways of increasing damage for archers to try to bring them in line with melee classes tend to rely on precision damage, typically sneak attack or skirmish, but there are tons of problems with these. Skirmish isn’t too bad if you go the Swift Hunter route, since that lets you bypass some immunities and can be extended to 60’, but in general precision damage is super easy to shut down. It also forces you to stay fairly close to your enemies, which has always felt to me like it defeats the point of fighting with a longbow. Imagine having 110’ range increments and being forced to stay less than a dozen yards away from your enemies.
Anyhow, I have a whole thread of archer builds that represent my efforts at toying with archers I’d actually enjoy playing. They range from the simple (such as a bardblade that uses inspire courage and DFI to boost damage on large volley attacks) to the complex (such as a factotum with Mindsight and the ability to phase through walls in order to fire off poisoned Greater Manyshot volleys). One of my favorites, though, is the Psycarnum Archer. It was the result of toying with the idea of making a psychic warrior archer. Without access to the most sources of bonus damage, I ended up using expansion as my main source. Alongside the oversized archery ability of an arrow demon, the build could reliably dual fire gargantuan longbows, with a base damage of 4d6 per arrow. That may not sound impressive, but it was roughly equivalent to +10 damage per shot as compared to a standard longbow, came alongside a decent bonus to Strength, and unlike most forms of bonus damage, was not easily shut down by things like concealment or fortification. And since psychic warriors needed a high Wisdom regardless, the build was able to use Zen Archery to ignore Dexterity altogether.
That said, the Psycarnum Archer had some flaws, so it’s always a build I’ve been meaning to go back and update. Since psychic warriors have a lot of notable PP issues, it relied on a fairly cheesy use of Psycarnum Infusion alongside Azure Talent and Midnight Augmentation that might not fly at many tables, and its BAB was always a bit disappointing (notably missing that all-important +16 benchmark). For this build I decided to focus exclusively on its core trick (Zen Archery alongside expansion and oversized weapons), without relying on the dirtier tricks. I think the final outcome is actually a cleaner build overall, and a more effective one. I hope you enjoy!
THE BASICS
Race: Neraph. It’s a +0 LA outsider with ranger as a favored class, making it just about perfect here, and its racial abilities fit well with the build to boot.
Build Stub: Ranger 2/Ardent 8/Slayer 10
ACFs: Arcane hunter, voice of the city (but see the variants section)
Alignment: Any.
Zen in the Art of Archery
Level
Class
Feats
Class Features
Powers
Notes (Click to Expand)
1st
Ranger 1
TrackB, Zen Archery
Favored enemy (arcanists), Track, voice of the city
Ranger is a nice lead-in for any Zen Archery build, primarily because it grants you Rapid Shot as a bonus feat that ignores pre-reqs, allowing you to dump Dex entirely. It also provides an excellent lead-in to slayer down the road, so bonus points there. I always recommend any ranger build take arcane hunter for favored enemy (arcanists), as spellcasters and creatures with SLAs are far more common overall than any single favored enemy grouping. And since you will be getting a much better version of wild empathy down the road, I also recommend you ditch it for voice of the city or spiritual companion, which allow you to communicate with those you otherwise couldn’t. I went with voice of the city here, but either ACF is a fine choice.
2nd
Ranger 2
Rapid ShotB
Combat style
You’re now reliably firing off two attacks per round with your bow off an 18 Wis. Not too much else to say here.
3rd
Ardent 1
Point Blank Shot, Weapon Focus (longbow)B
Assume psionic mantles (conflict, freedom)
Metaphysical weapon, dimension hop
While the original build functioned as a psychic warrior, for this version you’ll be running as an ardent. Ardents can be a bit of a pain to build (unless you have access to the Substitute Domain power, in which case lol), but going ardent alleviates most of the PP concerns of the original build while still hitting many of the relevant powers.
For your mantles, conflict gives you a free Weapon Focus (attack bonuses are always handy for volley archers) and provides a number of handy buffing powers. Meanwhile freedom gives you a ton of mobility powers, making sure you can always get to the most advantageous spot for your archery or stay out of harm’s way. To start with, you nab metaphysical weapon, providing a cheap enhancement bonus to your bow, and dimension hop, providing you short-range swift action teleportation. These powers should remain useful throughout your career, which is important for an ardent, which gets so few powers.
4th
Ardent 2
Assume psionic mantle (time)
Prescience, offensive
The time mantle helps shore up your poor initiative (sadly hard to avoid since unlike most archers, you’ll be abandoning Dexterity) and gives you access to a number of useful utility powers down the road. For now, though, go ahead and grab prescience, offensive off the conflict mantle for another quick damage boost.
5th
Ardent 3
Hustle
With access to 2nd-level powers you can now grab hustle, and between this and dimension hop you should be able to stay fairly mobile despite focusing on full attacks.
6th
Ardent 4
Precise Shot
Deceleration
Precise Shot is a feat tax for any and every archer, unfortunately. Shooting into combat is something you’ll inevitably have to do, and while you can do that without this feat, your allies will appreciate not having to pull arrows out of their sides. It also is a requirement for the incredibly valuable splitting enhancement, which is one of the things that can really make volley archers shine.
Deceleration is an interesting debuff for an archer, halving an enemy’s Speed to keep it far away from you. It targets Reflex, making it perfect for those big hulking brutes that you tend to want to keep a healthy distance from.
7th
Slayer 1
Favored enemy, enemy sense
Slayer is pretty much the psionic gish PrC, providing 9/10 manifesting advancement and perfect BAB, and it has some very nice class features to boot. It also works perfectly alongside your ranger base, so that’s a plus. Pick a favored psionic foe based on your campaign (though it’s hard to go wrong with the classic choice of mind flayers).
8th
Slayer 2
Brain nausea
Dimension slide
Man, I love the flavor behind the slayer’s abilities. Brain nausea likely won’t come up much unless you’re specifically in an illithid-heavy campaign, but boy it’s fun. Dimension slide gives you some tactical teleportation with more significant range than dimension hop allows, and can be downgraded to a move action for a fairly cheap augmentation cost.
9th
Slayer 3
Expanded Knowledge (expansion)
Lucid buffer
Expansion, time hop
See what I mean about having surprisingly good class features? Lucid buffer gives you a sizable bonus to saves against charms and compulsions, and alongside your good Will saves and Wisdom focus, you should rarely have to fear these ever again.
With a spare feat you can now pick up expansion. Go ahead and blow up to huge size and enjoy the fact that your arrow’s base damage is upgraded to 3d6. And as far time hop, it is one of the most flexible utility spells around. Use it to bypass doors and traps, send yourself or an ally into the future to avoid detection or harm, remove a foe from combat for a bit (it allows a save, but you should actually have fairly high DCs on your powers), and more.
10th
Ardent 5
Assume psionic mantle (natural world)
Metamorphosis
Hop back into ardent for a level in order to pick up another psionic mantle, just in time to grab metamorphosis. I hardly need to explain why this is so good; it’s even better for you than most, as you can take on outsider forms.
11th
Slayer 4
Favored enemy +4
Fly, psionic
Flight is incredibly valuable for an archer. You can access flight via metamorphosis, but taking fly as a power means you’re not locked into winged forms every time you want to fly around a bit.
12th
Slayer 5
Practiced Manifester
Temporal acceleration
Big, big power bump at this level.
Most people know this already, but ardents are a bit unique in their power selection. At each level, an ardent learns a power of up to any level it is capable of manifesting. Since the power you are capable of manifesting is based on your manifester level and not your class level, by nabbing Practiced Manifester you can now pick up powers as though you hadn’t dropped three manifesting levels along the way. That’s great, because it means that at this level you can pick up temporal acceleration, AKA mini-time stop. Use it as a swift action to apply a round’s worth of buffs (such as, oh, I don’t know, metamorphosis).
And speaking of metamorphosis, you are now able to metamorph into what will be your favored form: the arrow demon. This lovely little beasty is everything you could ever want in a combat form, thanks to its three completely fantastic (Ex) abilities. The first is Close Combat Shot, which allows you to fire off a bow while threatened without provoking attacks of opportunity, and lets you make AoOs with your bow. The second is Oversized Weapons, which is exactly what it sounds like: you can wield bows up to one size larger than your current size, meaning that alongside expansion you can wield gargantuan longbows (without the awkwardness of being roughly the size of a whale). And finally, the piece de resistance: Symmetrical Archery allows you to dual wield longbows, an entirely unique ability in 3.5. Bring it all together and you’ve got a really fantastic combat option that will still be effective at level 20.
13th
Slayer 6
Cerebral blind
Anticipatory strike
Cerebral blind is an incredibly cool ability, letting you ignore all kinds of divination spells. Meanwhile, anticipatory strike is ridiculously handy, allowing you to take your turn as an immediate action. It uses up your next turn’s worth of actions, but there are a ton of circumstances where this is incredibly valuable, especially in the later rounds of combat when you can effectively use it to go twice in a row and end an encounter early.
14th
Slayer 7
Favored enemy +6
Animate plants, psionic
You actually don’t have a ton of great options when it comes to 7th-level powers (hence why you took a 5th-level power last level). Animate plants is a cute option, though teleport or freedom of movement might be better. Still, this gives you a bit of minionmancy, letting you turn the trees around you into giant animated objects to wallop your foes. Could be handy, I guess, especially since you have already have teleportation and can always pick up FoM via items. (But feel free to swap back to one of the other options if animate plants isn’t for you).
15th
Slayer 8
Woodland Archer
Breach power resistance
Spirit of war
Spirit of war always feels like it’s maybe a level too high for what it does, but there’s no denying that the effects are useful for you. A +4 bonus to attack and damage that stacks with your other buffs is fantastic, and the fact that you can also automatically confirm a critical hit and take +10 to a save during its duration is certainly not going to go amiss. And the fact that it buffs your whole party instead of just you makes it just worthwhile enough to make it into your regular buff routine.
Breach power resistance is actually a very cool ability for a volley archer, especially if transparency is in full effect and this applies to spell resistance as well. While it does require you to get a bit closer than I’d usually recommend for an archer, you can easily knock down something’s power/spell resistance to manageable levels in a single round thanks to the huge number of attacks you can spit out in a round.
Finally, Woodland Archer is just a phenomenal archery feat for any volley archer. The first two abilities in particular are invaluable to you. The first, adjust for range, gives you a +4 bonus to all your subsequent attacks any time you miss. That’s a huge advantage, almost eliminating an entire iterative penalty and helping to limit how often your arrows whiff. Pierce the foliage helps you bypass concealment, often the bane of an archer’s existence, and while it isn’t quite as effective as Improved Precise Shot, it doesn’t come with that hefty 19 Dexterity requirement. (Check with your DM to see if pierce the foliage even applies if you ignore miss chance with something like bracers of accuracy; by my reading it shouldn’t, but if your DM rules otherwise, it’s even better.)
16th
Slayer 9
Cerebral immunity
Teleport, greater psionic
Cerebral immunity is completely fantastic, essentially giving you mind blank for as long as you are psionically focused (and actually is even harder to bypass than mind blank). And greater teleport is something every party should have access to at these levels.
17th
Slayer 10
Blast feedback, favored enemy +8
Time regression
After cerebral immunity, blast feedback is a bit of a let-down as a capstone, but I suppose it’s alright if you face a lot of mind flayers. But it’s OK, time regression more than makes up for it. 1,000 XP is a hefty cost, but boy is this one worth it. You get the ability to literally rewind time for a round, retaining your knowledge of the near future. Combine with anticipatory strike and you can even manifest it off-turn.
18th
Ardent 6
Linked Power
Time hop, mass
Remember everything I said about how useful time hop is? Now you can affect all of your allies, you can hop hours instead of rounds into the future, and with a torc of power preservation you can activate this as an immediate action.
While you mostly haven’t bothered with metapsionics, Linked Power is just great action economy, allowing you to link standard action powers to one of your swift action buffs, and ensuring that you’re spending your time filling enemies with holes rather than buffing.
19th
Ardent 7
Earthquake, psionic
Truth be told, earthquake doesn’t really fit your MO, but ardents aren’t exactly spoiled for choices when it comes to high level powers. Still, it’s certainly not bad to have.
20th
Ardent 8
Evade burst
Yeah… you’re completely out of available 8th- and 9th-level powers. Evade burst gives you evasion on demand in case someone decides to fling a fireball at you, so that’s nice. This could also be oak body or freedom of movement as well; it’s filler either way, so it might as well be an immediate action power that you might feel like manifesting now and then.
1: Metaphysical weapon, dimension hop, offensive prescience, deceleration, expansion
2: Hustle
3: Dimension slide, time hop
4: Metamorphosis, psionic fly
5: Anticipatory strike
6: Temporal acceleration, evade burst
7: Psionic animate plants
8: Spirit of war, greater psionic teleport, mass time hop
9: Time regression, psionic earthquake
Wisdom is your friend, driving your power points, ranged attack rolls and power DCs. Charisma is a complete dump stat, and there’s no great reason for Int or Dex to be higher than 10. A decent Strength score for bonus damage on your composite longbows won’t hurt, though expansion and metamorphosis allow you to get away with keeping this on the lower side.
SAMPLE STAT ARRAYS:
28-point buy: Str 12/Dex 10/Con 12/Int 10/Wis 18/Cha 8
32-point buy: Str 14/Dex 10/Con 14/Int 10/Wis 18/Cha 8
You’ve got tons of breathing room when it comes to skills. Your only required skills are 4 ranks in knowledge (dungeoneering) by level 6 and 4 ranks in psicraft by level 12, and you’ve got decent skill points off a broad list for most of your career. Perception skills work nicely alongside your Wis bonus and the neraph’s natural bonuses, so they’re a solid choice. Survival is also decent; you have Track, so you might as well use it. But really, it’s up to you.
Welp, you’re an archer, so you’re going to be dumping a fair bit of money into your bow. In general you’re going to want a +1 sizing splitting composite longbow with a decent Strength bonus, so you can size it up and down as necessary. You’ll also likely want a spare longbow for when you’re in arrow demon form. If you’re playing with typical WBL I wouldn’t recommend going all out on both longbows; keep one as your main bow, and a second +1 sizing bow to pull out as needed.
I always recommend archers get a wide variety of ammunition and weapon crystals to bypass DR as needed, since otherwise your 10-20 attacks per round are going to start looking mighty sad. And go ahead and get a few magical arrows to have on hand just in case. This is a nice advantage that archers have over melee classes, since they can choose the arrows best suited for the task at hand.
Also, as a ranger, you have access to ranger spells via spell trigger items. Rangers actually have some excellent archery spells. You’ll have some competition for your swift action, but spells like hunter’s eye, spellslayer arrow, brilliant energy arrow, arrow storm, arrow mind and the like can all be handy things to have access to now and then.
A torc of power preservation is always useful for a manifester, and is essential if you want to use mass time hop as a swift action. And any item that is good for a psion or an archer is probably good for you. I’m particularly a fan of the Helm of the Hunter from MIC, which is a steal at 9,000gp and gives you a hefty bonus to Spot checks and the Far Shot feat. The various bracers of archery aren’t too bad, though they preclude you from using the bracers of accuracy, which are always nice. And speaking of bracers, if your DM believes that the strongarm bracers will stack with the oversized weapons ability you pick up via metamorphosis, get them and don’t look back; that will increase your base arrow damage to 6d6, providing a huge damage boost for the cost. (I personally don’t think this will work based on the wording of oversized weapons, but it’s worth mentioning.)
BUILD SUMMARY
As always, we start with the basics: with +18 BAB and 9th-level powers, it’s hard to really go too wrong. You’re really darn close to being Wis-SAD, which is always nice, and with the standard Wisdom-boosting items you should have 352 PP from class levels and bonus PP, which should be more than enough to keep yourself going all day long without requiring any shenanigans. You have all the necessary feats to be a competent volley archer and the BAB and buff powers to back it up. You do all this while also having above-average skills, several very solid defensive options (most courtesy of slayer’s surprisingly good class features) and a number of cool utility powers such as time hop, time regression, psionic earthquake and greater psionic teleport. But here’s the million dollar question: can you deal level-appropriate damage as a psionic archer? Let’s dig a bit deeper.
Your standard buffs aren’t anything fancy: +5 enhancement bonus via metaphysical weapon, +6 insight bonus to damage via offensive prescience, +4 competence bonus to attack and damage via spirit of war (the latter of which gets shared with your allies), for a total of +9 to attack rolls and +15 to damage. Expansion up to huge size and with a splitting composite bow with a +5 Strength bonus, you’ll be firing off 10 attacks per round, each doing 3d6+20, before other items like bracers of archery are taken into account. This isn’t gamebreaking damage but it’s more than enough to two-shot most level appropriate foes, and unlike most archers, none of this is precision damage. You aren’t reliant on activating sneak attack, skirmish or any other circumstantial bonuses. You don’t need to get up close and personal, so you can take full advantage of your longbow’s excellent range. You can easily move and still full attack thanks to hustle and you have flight and teleportation. Most of these buffs can be applied as a swift action or have long durations that allow them to be applied before combat, and Linked Power and temporal acceleration lets you quickly apply the few buffs that can’t.
Where it gets better is when you start adding on metamorphosis. By changing into an arrow demon, you can wield gargantuan bows, and can dual wield bows. By carrying a spare sizing bow, you add on five extra attacks in a full attack action, and your base damage increases to 4d6 per shot. You can also make AoOs with your bow and fire while threatened.
So what does this look like in practice? Let’s take a typical CR 20 enemy in a balor. Assume that you’re hanging out at the extent of your range (a good idea versus a balor!), meaning no PBS damage, and you’re making a full attack. For the purposes of this we’ll also assume you have no accuracy or damage-boosting items beyond the lesser bracers of archery, and no enhancements on your bow other than sizing and splitting. With a 34 Wisdom, your standard attack routine against AC 35 is +37/+37/+37/+37/+32/+32/+27/+27/+22/+22, and Woodland Archer gives you a +4 to all subsequent attack rolls if you miss. With a lesser fiendslayer crystal and cold iron arrows, you don’t need to worry about DR. Let’s assume an average of three misses per attack routine, and no critical hits. That’s an average of 234.5 points of damage, just with your standard everyday buffs and without adding on a single extra boost (such as the collision enhancement or higher-Strength bows). That’s enough to bring the balor down to ~55 HP in a single full attack without breaking a sweat.
And if you go the full temporal acceleration into arrow demon route? Assuming you hit just ten out of your fifteen attacks (a fairly conservative assumption with Woodland Archer in the picture) and don’t roll a single crit, that’s still an average of 370 damage, putting that poor little balor at -80 HP. Good thing you’re outside of its death throes range!
VARIANTS
An easy variant is going Ranger 2/Ardent 10/Slayer 8, which nets you an additional mantle. This can help shore up the paucity of decent high-level powers you currently have, but comes at the cost of cerebral immunity (which is worth a high-level power all on its own) and +1 BAB. It’s not a bad route to go, but it’s definitely one that comes at a cost. If you do go this direction, one interesting option is the corruption and madness mantle. While on the surface this doesn’t add much, breach power resistance into microcosm is a nice little one-two punch for taking out powerful foes.
And, of course, there’s the elephant in the room: Substitute Powers from the Mind’s Eye Expanded Classes series. I didn’t include this ACF because frankly it’s hard to incorporate, since it basically amounts to “work with your DM to determine new powers for mantles” and can mean anything from an inconsequential boost to perfectly hand-picked powers. Every DM is going to be different in what they do and do not allow, so it was easier for me to assume this ACF was off the table entirely. That said, I strongly strongly recommend you take advantage of it if it’s allowed. Some interesting options without deviating from the theme of the current mantles include greater metamorphosis from the natural world mantle, overland flight or inconstant location from the freedom mantle and timeless body or synchronicity from the time mantle.
Also, this build still works fairly well as a psychic warrior, which is how the original build was envisioned. You’ll need to get a bit creative to bypass the psychic warrior’s low PP, but there are a number of known tricks that will let you do that. The previous version of the build used Psycarnum Infusion shenanigans (for those unfamiliar, Psycarnum Infusion essentially allows you to break the daily restriction on incarnum feats, which can be used to good effect with feats like Azure Talent and Midnight Augmentation). If I went this route again I think I’d use the soulbound weapon ACF, allowing you to call splitting bows on the fly and not rely on purchasing them.
***
And that’s that! Please let us know what you think in the comments, and what you’d like to see for future showcases!