Extract Gift X Demonic Blood Infusion: need monsters with high stats

[Jowgen]

Extract Gift is a neat little spell from FCI that normally only serves as a complicated way to replicate +X enhancment/compentence to ability/skill items, but really shines when you get is as an SLA. There's a whole Handbook (http://minmaxforum.com/index.php?topic=2421.0)on it.

What the Handbook doesn't consider is applying the Ghostwalk spell Demonic Blood Infusion to the procedure, which unequivocally makes a creature count as a Demon for for hours per level.

So what I am looking for are creatures, be it in the Planar/Spirit binding range or just in general, that have exceptionally high scores in some abilities or a lot of skill ranks in a specific thing; which might serve as better Gift Extraction donors than the limited pool of garden variety Demons.

I shall update the OP with top contender candidates for each ability and skills below:

Str
Dex
Con
Int
Wis
Cha

Worthwhile Skills

[AvatarVecna]

Keep an eye on this thread (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?613310-Highest-printed-ability-scores-in-the-game). Although I think if you're willing to cheat hard enough, I've got two possible solutions.

Dragons can age indefinitely, and get absurdly powerful with every age category gained. Even a dragon just spending its HD feats on Great Dexterity will end up with higher attributes than anything else in the game. Getting a dragon this old to bend to your whims might be difficult, so what you wanna do is render the dragon incapable of acting somehow (unconscious?), give it magic items that prevent it from succumbing to hunger/thirst, then put it in a planar field that ages it extremely rapidly. Age as fast as desired, and as far as desired, then take your unconscious wyrm and extract a gift from them.

Find/summon/call/gate a Ruin Swarm (or multiple Ruin Swarms, if you can manage it), and make it a hivemind, either via Dark Speech of Vermin Lord (I suggest the latter so that your will is their will as well, and thus they won't resist helping you out). A single Ruin Swarm will have Int 27/Cha 49, gain 400 bonus feats, and can spend all of those on Great [Attribute] feats. Every additional swarm increases the Int/Cha gained by 20, the feats gained by 500, and gives an additional pool of feats (since each individual stat block in the hivemind gets the bonus feats).

Ideally, you'd have a multiple of six. 6 Ruin Swarms has 6000 members, and thus Int 127/Cha 149, and thus each of the six Ruin Swarms will gain 2900 feats. If that all goes into just making one attribute as great as possible per swarm, that ends with the swarms (collectively) being able to offer Str 2903, Dex 2942, Con 2930, Int 3027, Wis 2923, and Cha 3049. This puts the max they can give via Extract Gift at Str +723, Dex +733, Con +730, Int +754, Wis +728, and Cha +759.

For each of those attribute transfers, your CL needs to be a bit higher than the ability score being offered. The max bonus they can offer is half their modifier, which is about half their score, so max bonus offered is one-quarter their score (more or less). And the highest score you can receive is one-quarter your CL. So...yeah. That makes it easy to see if you can actually gain the gift from them: you need CL as high as their attribute. This brings me to the second reason I suggested Vermin Lord: you don't get to share the attributes, and you might not be epic and thus couldn't get 2900 epic feats yourself, but you do get the casting the hivemind gains access to. For the 6-swarm hivemind, that would be casting as Sorcerer 132. That's...a bit of a problem. Their attributes can advance faster than the hivemind's CL, which is itself going to advance at impressive speeds anyway. Fortunately, you're in charge of an epic hivemind, so just abuse some (Greater) Consumptive Field usage and go for a stroll through a major city, murdering people until your CL reaches a point you're comfortable with.

EDIT: Also, got flashbacks writing up this bit about hiveminds. I feel like you've asked this question before, and I've given this answer before.

EDIT 2: That's right. (603474) Last time my answer had to involve getting a Lillitu Vermin Lord to do the hiveminding for you, though, which is clearly an inferior choice.

[Kelb_Panthera]

Dragons aren't immortal. They die "when their time is up" just like any other mortal creature. Draconomicon says that final age is a function of charisma but the highest of the original ten caps out at something like 6000.

[Gusmo]

Well hot diggity, does that make the extended life span (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/epic/feats.htm#extendedLifeSpan) feat useful? It's unclear how it would work with dragons. Should it work at all with dragons? I feel like people who have waded into dragonwrought kobold debates would be better suited to answer this.

[Nifft]

Well hot diggity, does that make the extended life span (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/epic/feats.htm#extendedLifeSpan) feat useful? It's unclear how it would work with dragons. Should it work at all with dragons? I feel like people who have waded into dragonwrought kobold debates would be better suited to answer this.

I don't think it helps non-kobold dragons much because it specifically extends age via aging effects ("middle-age", "old", "venerable") which don't apply to non-kobold dragons. They don't have a "venerable" age category, so they don't have a way to calculate a new maximum age.

Interestingly the way the feat is written it is especially useful to a kobold dragon, since it extends the humanoid "aging effects" numbers but explicitly won't lower your "age category", and I don't know of any other creature which has both.

[Jowgen]

Keep an eye on this thread (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?613310-Highest-printed-ability-scores-in-the-game). Although I think if you're willing to cheat hard enough, I've got two possible solutions.

Dragons can age indefinitely, and get absurdly powerful with every age category gained. Even a dragon just spending its HD feats on Great Dexterity will end up with higher attributes than anything else in the game. Getting a dragon this old to bend to your whims might be difficult, so what you wanna do is render the dragon incapable of acting somehow (unconscious?), give it magic items that prevent it from succumbing to hunger/thirst, then put it in a planar field that ages it extremely rapidly. Age as fast as desired, and as far as desired, then take your unconscious wyrm and extract a gift from them.

Find/summon/call/gate a Ruin Swarm (or multiple Ruin Swarms, if you can manage it), and make it a hivemind, either via Dark Speech of Vermin Lord (I suggest the latter so that your will is their will as well, and thus they won't resist helping you out). A single Ruin Swarm will have Int 27/Cha 49, gain 400 bonus feats, and can spend all of those on Great [Attribute] feats. Every additional swarm increases the Int/Cha gained by 20, the feats gained by 500, and gives an additional pool of feats (since each individual stat block in the hivemind gets the bonus feats).

Ideally, you'd have a multiple of six. 6 Ruin Swarms has 6000 members, and thus Int 127/Cha 149, and thus each of the six Ruin Swarms will gain 2900 feats. If that all goes into just making one attribute as great as possible per swarm, that ends with the swarms (collectively) being able to offer Str 2903, Dex 2942, Con 2930, Int 3027, Wis 2923, and Cha 3049. This puts the max they can give via Extract Gift at Str +723, Dex +733, Con +730, Int +754, Wis +728, and Cha +759.

For each of those attribute transfers, your CL needs to be a bit higher than the ability score being offered. The max bonus they can offer is half their modifier, which is about half their score, so max bonus offered is one-quarter their score (more or less). And the highest score you can receive is one-quarter your CL. So...yeah. That makes it easy to see if you can actually gain the gift from them: you need CL as high as their attribute. This brings me to the second reason I suggested Vermin Lord: you don't get to share the attributes, and you might not be epic and thus couldn't get 2900 epic feats yourself, but you do get the casting the hivemind gains access to. For the 6-swarm hivemind, that would be casting as Sorcerer 132. That's...a bit of a problem. Their attributes can advance faster than the hivemind's CL, which is itself going to advance at impressive speeds anyway. Fortunately, you're in charge of an epic hivemind, so just abuse some (Greater) Consumptive Field usage and go for a stroll through a major city, murdering people until your CL reaches a point you're comfortable with.

EDIT: Also, got flashbacks writing up this bit about hiveminds. I feel like you've asked this question before, and I've given this answer before.

EDIT 2: That's right. (603474) Last time my answer had to involve getting a Lillitu Vermin Lord to do the hiveminding for you, though, which is clearly an inferior choice.

Your link be broke, but yes I recall, that particular excerise was purely about using the spell as intended with natural born demons though, I hadn't thought yet about using Demonic Blood Infusion, which opens up so many interesting venues. In any case, always a pleasure to have you in one of these :smallsmile:

Powerful Dragons do seem like the most straightforward high-end option. With a reliable Dex damage dealing method -not nessecarily the ultra broken shivering touch, but stuff like Golden Ice on Evil dragons for example- they are reasonably simple to subdue, as long as you don't get caught out by their spells.

Rather than just focusing on the super high end pool of Gifters, I would like to also focus on the regular mid-high level spectrum.

Things in the CR 10-20 range that have disproportionate stats/ranks for their level. Anything come to mind?


EDIT: A cursory search of the MMs and Monster of books has returned preciously little with ability scores over 30, except of course Str, which every big enough lug gets.:smallannoyed:

[AvatarVecna]

Your link be broke, but yes I recall, that particular excerise was purely about using the spell as intended with natural born demons though, I hadn't thought yet about using Demonic Blood Infusion, which opens up so many interesting venues. In any case, always a pleasure to have you in one of these :smallsmile:

Powerful Dragons do seem like the most straightforward high-end option. With a reliable Dex damage dealing method -not nessecarily the ultra broken shivering touch, but stuff like Golden Ice on Evil dragons for example- they are reasonably simple to subdue, as long as you don't get caught out by their spells.

Rather than just focusing on the super high end pool of Gifters, I would like to also focus on the regular mid-high level spectrum.

Things in the CR 10-20 range that have disproportionate stats/ranks for their level. Anything come to mind?

Here's a proper link, that's my bad. Onto the new question, which is more directed at reasonable uses of the spells...

...right okay, let's get a technical point of contention: "Demonic Blood Infusion" technically doesn't require the target to be a living creature (or one possessing blood, for that matter), but this is
Similar point of technical contention: Demonic the kinda thing a DM might limit you to.
Blood Infusion makes the recipient a Fiendish Creature, Chaotic Evil, and count as an Outsider for the duration. However, being a Fiendish CE Outsider does not make you a legal target for Extract Gift. Extract Gift has to target a demon, and you're not a demon...you're just a chaotic evil outsider. This is very technical RAW, but I'm sure that if a DM was considering allowing Extract Gift shenanigans in the first place, they'd probably let this technicality slide. Putting aside those facts...hmm...

Instinct says you wanna find something that primarily advances by HD, and advances 1 CR per 3 or 4 HD, and gets to pick its own feats/HD bumps. HD Advancement, Elite Array, and possible size increases will send CR up slowly, and you should get some pretty nice options at CR 20. Lemme take a quick glance through my books...

Night Twist (MM3 pg 110): Elite Array, Advanced to 39 HD, CR 20. Such a creature could have Str 64, Con 50, Int 30, Wis 32, or Cha 38.

Cyclonic Ravager (MM4 pg 10) Elite Array, Advanced to 40 HD, CR 20. Such a creature could have Dex 44.

...I'm betting there's some seriously better options for Int and Wis and maybe Cha out there, but these are the ones I found relatively quickly.

EDIT: And I do wanna specify: this is assuming that advanced elite creature puts the elite's 15 in that stat, and dedicates every attribute bump from HD and every epic feat towards improving that attribute. There is doubtlessly somewhere in the universe an example creature of each of these that has the indicated stat. So you'd need to track down 5 of the most powerful non-epic Night Twists in existence, and hope they've naturally selected for those attributes. It might actually be easier to use time-abuse magic to breed strong Night Twists. Although if you use Gate to summon one up, you could combo that with a good enough knowledge check to know the true name (or whatever) of the Night Twist in particular that's decided it wants a 38 Cha.