Piggy Knowles
2020-09-10, 04:26 PM
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, WhamBamSam, Darrin and daremetoidareyou. Typically one of us writes up the build concept and possibly a stub, the others share feedback on Discord, and together we refine things until we’re happy with the final product.
For this showcase, we’re doing something a little bit different and showcasing four builds that didn’t quite make the cut: welcome to the Cutting Room Floor!
Special Edition: The Cutting Room Floor
BACKGROUND
You may not believe it based on how infrequently we post these optimization showcases, but our little group stays very active. While not everything we talk about is specifically focused on the optimization showcases, we’re pretty much always tinkering, tossing builds back and forth and coming up with ideas.
Unfortunately, I’ve noticed a bit of a problem. We’ve got at least a half-dozen builds completed and partially written up… but before they get finalized, we get another idea and go off chasing that one! Sometimes this is good - some of my favorite builds are concepts we started, wrote up, got distracted from, and then eventually returned to with some fresh new ideas. But in practice, we’ve got tons of cluttered Google docs full of everything from build stubs to mostly completed write-ups that may never see the light of day.
So, we decided to do a lightning round of showcases called the Cutting Room Floor. This will feature not one but four builds that we put together. These don’t represent everything we’ve been working on in the past few months, but they’re all builds that we thought felt interesting and worth exploring further, even if we didn’t quite develop them as far as some of the previous showcases.
Because we’re doing so many at once, I’ll probably be a bit lighter on the flavor side of the write-ups here, and I’m going to be selfish and not include sources. Please feel free to ask if you want us to source anything, though! As always we’ve basically stuck to Iron Chef rules just to have a general baseline: official sources only, no DragMag unless it was reprinted in Dragon Compendium, no assumed flaws/traits, attempted minimal reliance on items. I hope you enjoy and comment on what we’ve got. I think there’s a lot of fun stuff here.
List of builds this showcase:
Cutting Room Floor: The Happiest SADiest (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?618674-Optimization-Showcase-in-the-Playground-Cutting-Room-Floor-The-Happiest-SADist) (Cha-SAD gish)
Cutting Room Floor: Burn, Baby, Burn (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?618675-Optimization-Showcase-in-the-Playground-Cutting-Room-Floor-Burn-Baby-Burn) (Warmage optimization)
Cutting Room Floor: Bad Touch (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?618676-Optimization-Showcase-in-the-Playground-Cutting-Room-Floor-Bad-Touch) (Dread necromancer gish/debuffer)
Cutting Room Floor: Stomp the Yard (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?618679-Optimization-Showcase-in-the-Playground-Cutting-Room-Floor-Stomp-the-Yard) (Trample optimization)
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https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/431937476010180610/753419268472963118/Z.png
Burn, Baby, Burn
I survived because the fire inside me burned brighter than the fire around me...
OVERVIEW
This one is actually a build that has been kicking around in our build folder for AGES. A while back there was a fair bit of discussion on how to properly tier the warmage, which led to some general discussion on the warmage itself. I don’t personally like to dip my does into tiering debates much, but I love the fixed list casters, and wanted to see for myself what a warmage could do.
After talking it out, we decided we would try to build a classic warmage: something that focused on all the warmage’s best aspects (namely, getting basically every blasting spell under the sun), rather than trying to turn the warmage into something else entirely like the rainbow warsnake. We also wanted to avoid incantatrix, because it’s ridiculous and way way overused, and agreed to drop Arcane Thesis as well. The Arcane Thesis restriction may sound odd, but if you’re focused around heavily augmenting a single spell, why play a warmage instead of a sorcerer?
We also decided that our focus would mostly be on damage, not on debuffs or lockdown spells. I think it was Venger who described the warmage as an archer with a really high special effects budget, and so we decided we’d put the warmage to the same test we tend to put any damage-focused build to: can it do enough to make damage dealing its primary role? We actually have a benchmark we like to use for this: if your main roll is killing things with HP damage, you should be able to consistently drop a level-appropriate foe in a maximum of two rounds. Yes, yes, I know an ubercharger can do damage only expressed in scientific notation, but at an actual table we all agreed that this was the minimum that should be expected.
(It’s a bit more complicated than this, of course - we typically take things on a gradient, with our vulnerable melee builds to one-shot in a single attack routine to avoid taking unnecessary attacks, while builds that can fire at range, hit multiple opponents and/or bypass typical immunities and roadblocks can get away with slightly less damage.)
Anyhow, here is what we ended up with. Hope you enjoy.
THE BASICS
Race: Silverbrow Human. That dragonblood is going to come in handy.
Build Stub: Warmage 6/Fiend-blooded 8/Escalation Mage 6
Alternate Class Features: Eclectic learning
Alignment: Any nongood
Burn, Baby, Burn
Level
Class
Feats
Class Features
Notes (Click to Expand)
1st
Warmage 1
Eschew Materials, Blood Calls to Blood
Armored mage (light), warmage edge
Warmages start off fairly strong: they get a wide variety of offensive spells and a decent number of spells per day for an ECL 1 character, and with warmage edge these will deal respectable damage. Your go-to options will be burning hands, magic missile and the lesser orb spells (hail of stone is a strict upgrade from burning hands, but the 5 GP per casting cost can really add up when you’re just starting out!). The warmage’s giant spell list is the real selling point here: you’ve got AoE options for groups of foes, orbs for bigger brutes with low touch AC and the ever-reliable magic missile for everything else. Alongside warmage edge, you’ll be dealing an average of 6.5 damage per target with your most reliable spell, magic missile, which gets you right in that sweet spot I mentioned of 2HKOing level-appropriate foes (the average HP of a CR 1 foe is 12.24). And with passable Dex and light armor, you’re a lot harder to kill than your typical mage. Overall, if there’s anywhere that warmages especially shine, it’s these early levels.
2nd
Warmage 2
Your 1d4/level spells start to eke up in overall damage, especially hail of stone, which is a bit less painful to cast now that you aren’t running solely off your limited starting gold.
3rd
Warmage 3
Knowledge Devotion
Adanced learning: floating disk
With your first advanced learning, go ahead and pick up floating disk for some general utility. Knowledge Devotion, meanwhile, is a solid damage booster for these levels (with a cross-class rank invested in all the monster identifying skills, it’s a guaranteed +1 to attack and damage) that also has the nice side-bonus of giving you knowledge (the planes) as a class skill.
As for where we are damage-wise, the average CR 3 monster HP is 27.26. Assuming only a +1 boost from Knowledge Devotion, your lesser orbs are doing an average of 13 damage per shot, which puts you just a hair under the 2HKO benchmark, but with even slightly above-average rolls on either your knowledge checks or the damage you’ll be right where you need to be. This is especially true when you consider the flexibility of being able to attack with just about any damage-type and in a variety of areas and methods.
4th
Warmage 4
Access to 2nd-level spells keeps you right where you need to be damage-wise. Your highest-damage options are either scorching ray or acid arrow (both of which benefit nicely both from your warmage edge and Knowledge Devotion), but there are a lot of fun things here. You also get your first taste of solid battlefield control (pyrotechnics) and one of your best utility spells (shatter).
5th
Warmage 5
This is a level where warmages fall a bit behind the damage curve. The lesser orbs just about catch up with scorching ray damage-wise, and acid arrow still puts some good damage over time thanks to your boosters, but with monster HP jumping to an average of 56.33, you’ll struggle to consistently hit that 2HKO range. You’re still good at crowd control and you’ve got some decent utility at this level, but if you’re the party’s main damage dealer, expect things to be a bit of a slog against bulkier monsters until next level.
6th
Fiend-blooded 1
Fiery Spell
Fiendish companion, fiendish heritage +1 AC
You dropped a bit below the damage curve last level, but luckily you get right back up there now. Fiery Spell provides one of the best damage to level adjustment ratios of any metamagic feat, and with your plethora of [fire] spells and the ability to add it on the fly, this can be really effective. The best damage option you have is a fiery fireburst; though it can be awkward to position properly, hitting every foe within 10’ of you for 5d8+5+Int+Knowledge Devotion damage can be fantastic. Here’s where your particular brand of spontaneous casting plays in your favor: you may not be able to spam fireburst every combat, but it’s automatically an option you have in your back pocket for dealing heavy damage any time your foes get close to you.
Meanwhile, 3rd-level spells provide you with some more excellent options. Fireball suffers a bit damage-wise compared to fireburst, but it’s still a classic for a reason: that range and area is hard to beat. Against foes with decent Reflex saves or with fire resistance, you also get the excellent ice storm. You also have several fantastic utility and BFC options (gust of wind, stinking cloud and sleet storm are all particularly great).
As for your prestige class, Fiend-blooded is a flavorful prestige class that heavily expands your spell list. In particular it manages to nab some key spells that even things like MotAO would otherwise miss, and it has a handful of other class features that certainly come in handy.
7th
Fiend-blooded 2
Fiendish sorcery: creaking cacophony
With your first fiendish sorcery, go ahead and pick up creaking cacophony, a bard- and druid-exclusive illusion spell. This may seem like an odd pick, since warmages don’t get a huge number of [sonic] spells, but it’s got a big area, allows no save, makes casting more difficult and acts as a free Empower on steroids for all [sonic] spells you do cast. You’ll have more ways to take advantage of it shortly, I promise.
8th
Escalation Mage 1
The shade within
Into one of my absolute favorite caster PrCs. Escalation Mage isn’t fancy, but like Fiend-blooded it has a ton of flavor (which coincides nicely with Fiend-blooded!), it’s easy to qualify for and every single level gets you something nice. Right now it’s some bonus hit points and a boosted Fort save, certainly nothing to scoff at.
Meanwhile 4th-level spells come on board, and some very strong options with them. The improved orb spells are very nice, and between orb of sound and shout, you finally have some ways of taking advantage of creaking cacophony. Black tentacles is phenomenal battlefield control. And a fiery fireball can be quite nasty, doing 8d6+8 base damage in a huge area before adding on boosters like warmage edge.
9th
Escalation Mage 2
Energy Substitution (fire)
Escalation (shadow focus)
Your first escalation ability comes online: shadow focus, which serves as a free Heighten effect on two spells per day. You have fewer ways to take advantage of a free Heighten than most, but it’s still handy.
Energy Substitution (fire) may seem like an odd pick on the surface. After all, if there’s one thing that a warmage does not need more of, it’s fire spells. But instead of using it on your damaging spells, you’ll be using it on creaking cacophony. Now everyone not completely immune to fire instead gains a vulnerability to it with no save, not only breaking through fire resistance but also functionally empowering your strongest spells.
10th
Escalation Mage 3
Escalation (shadow power)
Shadow focus was alright, but shadow power is particularly good for you. You’ve now got a free empower effect 3/day, which combines quite nicely with your fire-spamming tactics. You also get 5th-level spells, including your highest-damage option yet: greater fireburst. The increased radius makes it a bit easier to position, and when combined with shadow power and a fire-subbed creaking cacophony, it does a very respectable 137.25 points of damage on average. Considering that the average HP of a CR 10 foe is 136.53, and you’re doing that to everyone within 15’ of you with a single turn of setup, that’s not too shabby at all.
11th
Escalation Mage 4
Escalation (shadow growth)
Shadow growth requires some hefty caster level checks to use with your best spells, but effectively doubling the area of spells like cone of cold or greater fireburst can be gamechanging.
12th
Escalation Mage 5
Twin Spell
Escalation (shadow haste)
Shadow haste is fantastic capstone, giving you the ability to effectively quicken a spell (something that is particularly hard for spontaneous casters to do). The high CL check means it’ll be best alongside mid-level spells, although next level’s soul of shadow means you get one extra guaranteed use without needing to muck about with the check. Check with your DM to see if the quicken effect even applies to spells that you’ve applied metamagic to; by RAW I believe it should, but since it references Quicken Spell, it’s something to discuss. Either way it’s a great option, letting you drop a creaking cacophony and cast in the same round.
Twin Spell may seem like an odd choice without metamagic reducers, but it has some key advantages over other spell boosters. The biggest is that it allows you to get extra mileage out of your escalations: twinned spells are explicitly just one spell, so any empowering effects from shadow power or enlarging effects from shadow growth will apply to both. At a level adjustment of +4 it’s certainly a hefty ask, but consider that against enemies with a low touch AC, a twinned shadow power scorching ray under creaking cacophony easily exceeds the damage of any of your 6th-level spells barring a pre-prepped fire seeds.
And speaking of other 6th-level spells, the aforementioned fire seeds has a ton of potential, especially when combined with tacking on fire vulnerabilities via cacophony. Disintegrate is combination utility and blasting, and is your highest-damage option against fire-immune foes. And acid fog is probably my second-favorite fog spell, and can trap foes in the area of creaking cacophony while blocking sight and dealing damage over time. (Don’t forget you can e-sub this one to deal fire damage too!)
13th
Escalation Mage 6
Soul of shadow
And for your capstone, you get an extra use of every single one of your excellent escalations, without even needing to bother making a check.
14th
Fiend-blooded 3
Blood of fiends +1 saves, fiendish heritage +1 Cha
With escalation mage completed, it’s time to go back into fiend-blooded, which picks up a nice little bonus to your saves and your Charisma.
As for your spells, hitting 7ths certainly opens up some options. For raw damage, a shadow power fiery twinned scorching ray while under fire-subbed cacophony gives you six rays in all, each one empowered and then boosted again due to fire vulnerability and boosted via Fiery Spell, Knowledge Devotion and warmage edge. If all six hit, you can easily exceed 300 points of damage this way. Even factoring in misses, with average HP sitting at 180.33 for CR 14 foes, you should easily be able to power through most foes. And outside of raw damage, you also have some incredibly handy spells like earthquake and waves of exhaustion.
15th
Fiend-blooded 4
Residual Magic
Fiendish sorcery: greater shadow conjuration, smiting spell 1/day
Another level of fiend-blooded brings you another use of fiendish sorcery. There are a lot of good options at this level, but it’s hard to go wrong with the sheer flexibility of greater shadow conjuration. You also get smiting spell, which plays very nicely with Twin Spell. And for your feat, Residual magic is just fantastic for any metamagic-focused build, especially for those that don’t muck about with common metamagic reduction tools. The big seller here is the lingering magic option. Now you can fire off a set of fiery twinned scorching rays in one round as a 7th-level spell, then follow up with another set as only a 2nd-level spell. Better still, this reduction in spell level means your escalation abilities can be applied with ease. It’s huge both for saving resources and for increasing power, and ensures that you never have to stop setting the world on fire.
16th
Warmage 6
Eclectic learning: arcane spellsurge
A quick pop back into warmage at this level means you time an eclectic learning at the same time that you hit 8th-level spells. This means picking up a 7th-level sorcerer/wizard spell from any school. Use this to nab arcane spellsurge (aka the main reason you went for silverbrow instead of standard human). As I mentioned before, one area where warmages struggle is in finding swift action spells. With arcane spellsurge, that all changes. This reduces the casting time of all of your spells, allowing you to use the warmage’s generous spells per day to go nova when necessary. It ensures that when you run up against foes on the high end of that HP bell curve, you have no difficulty in taking them down.
And while 8th-level spells for warmages always felt a bit disappointing to me, you do have a couple of solid options. Prismatic wall in particular is a very nice piece of battlefield control; unlike most walls, this one actually blocks most spells as well, and is a serious pain in the butt to bypass. Greater shout doesn’t have the high damage of some of your metamagic’d options, but sonic damage is nice (and can be boosted by cacophony!) and it carries a very nice debuff rider with it. (That said, I’ll never understand why they added somatic components to this spell, since one of the biggest selling points of shout was that it was verbal only.)
17th
Fiend-blood 5
Fiendish heritage +1 Int
Nothing terribly interesting happens here, but that’s OK, we’ll get to more good stuff soon.
18th
Fiend-blooded 6
Arcane Mastery
Blood of fiends cold/fire resist 5, fiendish sorcery: shades
By dipping back to warmage for an eclectic learning, we also time this fiendish sorcery so that you can add a 9th-level spell to your spell list. And that’s great, because 9th-level spells just aren’t all that hot for warmages right out of the box, unfortunately. Meteor swarm is a nuke but damage-wise will actually be inferior to many of your metamagic’d options, and prismatic sphere lets you turtle when you need to… and those are probably your two best options. Overall, it just isn't that impressive.
But fiendish sorcery changes all that with one simple addition: shades. Now you have access to every conjuration spell (aka the largest school of magic in all of 3.5) of up to 8th level, and the spells are 80% real. That’s a heck of a lot more flexible, and makes a very big difference.
As for your feat, Arcane Mastery comes on a bit late, but it means you can finally reliably make those caster level checks required to use shadow haste on your highest level spells.
19th
Fiend-blooded 7
Fiendish heritage +1 Dex
More spells and a slightly boosted dex? Sure, why not?
20th
Fiend-blooded 8
Fiendish sorcery: monstrous thrall, smiting spell 2/day
And for your capstone, you get another use of fiendish sorcery. There are a few decent options, all with varying degrees of brokenness. I decided to avoid some of the really cheesy options like ice assassin, and instead picked up monstrous thrall. Monstrous thrall may feel a bit out of place, but it’s a fun pick that almost nothing gets, so we figured it was worth including. It’s not all that useful in combat, but it’s basically an improved Leadership in spell form, and provides a particular kind of utility that the build overall hasn’t touched. There are some other very good options, though. I’m always a fan of the classic astral projection, which can make you almost unkillable (just watch out for githyanki). Transmute rock to lava is definitely on theme and can do a ton of damage over time or completely destroy structures, though between earthquake and your other damage options it’s not actually THAT much of an improvement.
Charisma, Dexterity and Intelligence are your three main stats. Intelligence is huge at lower levels, even more so than Charisma, but becomes less important as you go on. Charisma quickly becomes your primary stat from then on.
SAMPLE STAT ARRAYS:
28-Point Buy: Str 8/Dex 14/Con 10/Int 16/Wis 10/Cha 15
32-Point Buy: Str 8/Dex 14/Con 12/Int 16/Wis 10/Cha 16
Concentration, knowledge (arcana), knowledge (the planes) and spellcraft are your required skills. Other than that, focus on getting every monster-identifying knowledge skill trained for purposes of Knowledge Devotion, and dump any extra skill points you have into whatever knowledge skill feels most relevant for your campaign. You’ll easily have enough skill points to hit all benchmarks plus some to spare with a starting Int of 16.
I’ve been writing ever so many write-ups and equipment reqs are my least favorite section, so can we skip this one? Boost Charisma and Int, get some things that will expand your spell list, maybe some metamagic wands. Go to town.
BUILD SUMMARY
We tried our best to keep the flavor and unique casting style of the warmage at the forefront, and I think we mostly succeeded: no dropped casting, no being forced into a single spell, plenty of ways to rain hellfire down upon your foes. Despite not using the two most common forms of metamagic abuse (incantatrix and Arcane Thesis), it still has no problem putting out consistent damage numbers thanks to your escalations, damage boosters like fire-subbed creaking cacophony, metamagic like Twin and Fiery Spell and arcane spellsurge. While its flexibility certainly can’t match a wizard or sorcerer, access to spells like greater shadow evocation and shades certainly put it above your typical warmage.
VARIANTS
The easiest changes come in your fiendish sorcery and advanced/eclectic learning slots. We didn’t want to focus too much on any single spell, so we kept things fairly general when we made our choices, but there’s definitely room to play around there.
EDIT: I also want to add that for anyone looking at ways to tweak this build, or for advice on items, or really for anything warmage-related at all, Troacctid has several excellent guides on ideal items (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GgINDD7nEVLs6B_ygsj4SLJza_YrZLGU89KdjIumP7M/edit), advanced learning choices (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mBZFBdZRuCtldiqti91ej1FkIbngCr_aYKyF5zyZee8/edit), possible feats (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kRm19NLPkyvXuWnkM0goBSztg9PfGbiHlylijIY3WuA/edit?usp=drivesdk) and basically anything else you could want when building a warmage.
***
And there you have it! Feel free to comment, discuss or check out one of the others!
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, WhamBamSam, Darrin and daremetoidareyou. Typically one of us writes up the build concept and possibly a stub, the others share feedback on Discord, and together we refine things until we’re happy with the final product.
For this showcase, we’re doing something a little bit different and showcasing four builds that didn’t quite make the cut: welcome to the Cutting Room Floor!
Special Edition: The Cutting Room Floor
BACKGROUND
You may not believe it based on how infrequently we post these optimization showcases, but our little group stays very active. While not everything we talk about is specifically focused on the optimization showcases, we’re pretty much always tinkering, tossing builds back and forth and coming up with ideas.
Unfortunately, I’ve noticed a bit of a problem. We’ve got at least a half-dozen builds completed and partially written up… but before they get finalized, we get another idea and go off chasing that one! Sometimes this is good - some of my favorite builds are concepts we started, wrote up, got distracted from, and then eventually returned to with some fresh new ideas. But in practice, we’ve got tons of cluttered Google docs full of everything from build stubs to mostly completed write-ups that may never see the light of day.
So, we decided to do a lightning round of showcases called the Cutting Room Floor. This will feature not one but four builds that we put together. These don’t represent everything we’ve been working on in the past few months, but they’re all builds that we thought felt interesting and worth exploring further, even if we didn’t quite develop them as far as some of the previous showcases.
Because we’re doing so many at once, I’ll probably be a bit lighter on the flavor side of the write-ups here, and I’m going to be selfish and not include sources. Please feel free to ask if you want us to source anything, though! As always we’ve basically stuck to Iron Chef rules just to have a general baseline: official sources only, no DragMag unless it was reprinted in Dragon Compendium, no assumed flaws/traits, attempted minimal reliance on items. I hope you enjoy and comment on what we’ve got. I think there’s a lot of fun stuff here.
List of builds this showcase:
Cutting Room Floor: The Happiest SADiest (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?618674-Optimization-Showcase-in-the-Playground-Cutting-Room-Floor-The-Happiest-SADist) (Cha-SAD gish)
Cutting Room Floor: Burn, Baby, Burn (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?618675-Optimization-Showcase-in-the-Playground-Cutting-Room-Floor-Burn-Baby-Burn) (Warmage optimization)
Cutting Room Floor: Bad Touch (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?618676-Optimization-Showcase-in-the-Playground-Cutting-Room-Floor-Bad-Touch) (Dread necromancer gish/debuffer)
Cutting Room Floor: Stomp the Yard (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?618679-Optimization-Showcase-in-the-Playground-Cutting-Room-Floor-Stomp-the-Yard) (Trample optimization)
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https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/431937476010180610/753419268472963118/Z.png
Burn, Baby, Burn
I survived because the fire inside me burned brighter than the fire around me...
OVERVIEW
This one is actually a build that has been kicking around in our build folder for AGES. A while back there was a fair bit of discussion on how to properly tier the warmage, which led to some general discussion on the warmage itself. I don’t personally like to dip my does into tiering debates much, but I love the fixed list casters, and wanted to see for myself what a warmage could do.
After talking it out, we decided we would try to build a classic warmage: something that focused on all the warmage’s best aspects (namely, getting basically every blasting spell under the sun), rather than trying to turn the warmage into something else entirely like the rainbow warsnake. We also wanted to avoid incantatrix, because it’s ridiculous and way way overused, and agreed to drop Arcane Thesis as well. The Arcane Thesis restriction may sound odd, but if you’re focused around heavily augmenting a single spell, why play a warmage instead of a sorcerer?
We also decided that our focus would mostly be on damage, not on debuffs or lockdown spells. I think it was Venger who described the warmage as an archer with a really high special effects budget, and so we decided we’d put the warmage to the same test we tend to put any damage-focused build to: can it do enough to make damage dealing its primary role? We actually have a benchmark we like to use for this: if your main roll is killing things with HP damage, you should be able to consistently drop a level-appropriate foe in a maximum of two rounds. Yes, yes, I know an ubercharger can do damage only expressed in scientific notation, but at an actual table we all agreed that this was the minimum that should be expected.
(It’s a bit more complicated than this, of course - we typically take things on a gradient, with our vulnerable melee builds to one-shot in a single attack routine to avoid taking unnecessary attacks, while builds that can fire at range, hit multiple opponents and/or bypass typical immunities and roadblocks can get away with slightly less damage.)
Anyhow, here is what we ended up with. Hope you enjoy.
THE BASICS
Race: Silverbrow Human. That dragonblood is going to come in handy.
Build Stub: Warmage 6/Fiend-blooded 8/Escalation Mage 6
Alternate Class Features: Eclectic learning
Alignment: Any nongood
Burn, Baby, Burn
Level
Class
Feats
Class Features
Notes (Click to Expand)
1st
Warmage 1
Eschew Materials, Blood Calls to Blood
Armored mage (light), warmage edge
Warmages start off fairly strong: they get a wide variety of offensive spells and a decent number of spells per day for an ECL 1 character, and with warmage edge these will deal respectable damage. Your go-to options will be burning hands, magic missile and the lesser orb spells (hail of stone is a strict upgrade from burning hands, but the 5 GP per casting cost can really add up when you’re just starting out!). The warmage’s giant spell list is the real selling point here: you’ve got AoE options for groups of foes, orbs for bigger brutes with low touch AC and the ever-reliable magic missile for everything else. Alongside warmage edge, you’ll be dealing an average of 6.5 damage per target with your most reliable spell, magic missile, which gets you right in that sweet spot I mentioned of 2HKOing level-appropriate foes (the average HP of a CR 1 foe is 12.24). And with passable Dex and light armor, you’re a lot harder to kill than your typical mage. Overall, if there’s anywhere that warmages especially shine, it’s these early levels.
2nd
Warmage 2
Your 1d4/level spells start to eke up in overall damage, especially hail of stone, which is a bit less painful to cast now that you aren’t running solely off your limited starting gold.
3rd
Warmage 3
Knowledge Devotion
Adanced learning: floating disk
With your first advanced learning, go ahead and pick up floating disk for some general utility. Knowledge Devotion, meanwhile, is a solid damage booster for these levels (with a cross-class rank invested in all the monster identifying skills, it’s a guaranteed +1 to attack and damage) that also has the nice side-bonus of giving you knowledge (the planes) as a class skill.
As for where we are damage-wise, the average CR 3 monster HP is 27.26. Assuming only a +1 boost from Knowledge Devotion, your lesser orbs are doing an average of 13 damage per shot, which puts you just a hair under the 2HKO benchmark, but with even slightly above-average rolls on either your knowledge checks or the damage you’ll be right where you need to be. This is especially true when you consider the flexibility of being able to attack with just about any damage-type and in a variety of areas and methods.
4th
Warmage 4
Access to 2nd-level spells keeps you right where you need to be damage-wise. Your highest-damage options are either scorching ray or acid arrow (both of which benefit nicely both from your warmage edge and Knowledge Devotion), but there are a lot of fun things here. You also get your first taste of solid battlefield control (pyrotechnics) and one of your best utility spells (shatter).
5th
Warmage 5
This is a level where warmages fall a bit behind the damage curve. The lesser orbs just about catch up with scorching ray damage-wise, and acid arrow still puts some good damage over time thanks to your boosters, but with monster HP jumping to an average of 56.33, you’ll struggle to consistently hit that 2HKO range. You’re still good at crowd control and you’ve got some decent utility at this level, but if you’re the party’s main damage dealer, expect things to be a bit of a slog against bulkier monsters until next level.
6th
Fiend-blooded 1
Fiery Spell
Fiendish companion, fiendish heritage +1 AC
You dropped a bit below the damage curve last level, but luckily you get right back up there now. Fiery Spell provides one of the best damage to level adjustment ratios of any metamagic feat, and with your plethora of [fire] spells and the ability to add it on the fly, this can be really effective. The best damage option you have is a fiery fireburst; though it can be awkward to position properly, hitting every foe within 10’ of you for 5d8+5+Int+Knowledge Devotion damage can be fantastic. Here’s where your particular brand of spontaneous casting plays in your favor: you may not be able to spam fireburst every combat, but it’s automatically an option you have in your back pocket for dealing heavy damage any time your foes get close to you.
Meanwhile, 3rd-level spells provide you with some more excellent options. Fireball suffers a bit damage-wise compared to fireburst, but it’s still a classic for a reason: that range and area is hard to beat. Against foes with decent Reflex saves or with fire resistance, you also get the excellent ice storm. You also have several fantastic utility and BFC options (gust of wind, stinking cloud and sleet storm are all particularly great).
As for your prestige class, Fiend-blooded is a flavorful prestige class that heavily expands your spell list. In particular it manages to nab some key spells that even things like MotAO would otherwise miss, and it has a handful of other class features that certainly come in handy.
7th
Fiend-blooded 2
Fiendish sorcery: creaking cacophony
With your first fiendish sorcery, go ahead and pick up creaking cacophony, a bard- and druid-exclusive illusion spell. This may seem like an odd pick, since warmages don’t get a huge number of [sonic] spells, but it’s got a big area, allows no save, makes casting more difficult and acts as a free Empower on steroids for all [sonic] spells you do cast. You’ll have more ways to take advantage of it shortly, I promise.
8th
Escalation Mage 1
The shade within
Into one of my absolute favorite caster PrCs. Escalation Mage isn’t fancy, but like Fiend-blooded it has a ton of flavor (which coincides nicely with Fiend-blooded!), it’s easy to qualify for and every single level gets you something nice. Right now it’s some bonus hit points and a boosted Fort save, certainly nothing to scoff at.
Meanwhile 4th-level spells come on board, and some very strong options with them. The improved orb spells are very nice, and between orb of sound and shout, you finally have some ways of taking advantage of creaking cacophony. Black tentacles is phenomenal battlefield control. And a fiery fireball can be quite nasty, doing 8d6+8 base damage in a huge area before adding on boosters like warmage edge.
9th
Escalation Mage 2
Energy Substitution (fire)
Escalation (shadow focus)
Your first escalation ability comes online: shadow focus, which serves as a free Heighten effect on two spells per day. You have fewer ways to take advantage of a free Heighten than most, but it’s still handy.
Energy Substitution (fire) may seem like an odd pick on the surface. After all, if there’s one thing that a warmage does not need more of, it’s fire spells. But instead of using it on your damaging spells, you’ll be using it on creaking cacophony. Now everyone not completely immune to fire instead gains a vulnerability to it with no save, not only breaking through fire resistance but also functionally empowering your strongest spells.
10th
Escalation Mage 3
Escalation (shadow power)
Shadow focus was alright, but shadow power is particularly good for you. You’ve now got a free empower effect 3/day, which combines quite nicely with your fire-spamming tactics. You also get 5th-level spells, including your highest-damage option yet: greater fireburst. The increased radius makes it a bit easier to position, and when combined with shadow power and a fire-subbed creaking cacophony, it does a very respectable 137.25 points of damage on average. Considering that the average HP of a CR 10 foe is 136.53, and you’re doing that to everyone within 15’ of you with a single turn of setup, that’s not too shabby at all.
11th
Escalation Mage 4
Escalation (shadow growth)
Shadow growth requires some hefty caster level checks to use with your best spells, but effectively doubling the area of spells like cone of cold or greater fireburst can be gamechanging.
12th
Escalation Mage 5
Twin Spell
Escalation (shadow haste)
Shadow haste is fantastic capstone, giving you the ability to effectively quicken a spell (something that is particularly hard for spontaneous casters to do). The high CL check means it’ll be best alongside mid-level spells, although next level’s soul of shadow means you get one extra guaranteed use without needing to muck about with the check. Check with your DM to see if the quicken effect even applies to spells that you’ve applied metamagic to; by RAW I believe it should, but since it references Quicken Spell, it’s something to discuss. Either way it’s a great option, letting you drop a creaking cacophony and cast in the same round.
Twin Spell may seem like an odd choice without metamagic reducers, but it has some key advantages over other spell boosters. The biggest is that it allows you to get extra mileage out of your escalations: twinned spells are explicitly just one spell, so any empowering effects from shadow power or enlarging effects from shadow growth will apply to both. At a level adjustment of +4 it’s certainly a hefty ask, but consider that against enemies with a low touch AC, a twinned shadow power scorching ray under creaking cacophony easily exceeds the damage of any of your 6th-level spells barring a pre-prepped fire seeds.
And speaking of other 6th-level spells, the aforementioned fire seeds has a ton of potential, especially when combined with tacking on fire vulnerabilities via cacophony. Disintegrate is combination utility and blasting, and is your highest-damage option against fire-immune foes. And acid fog is probably my second-favorite fog spell, and can trap foes in the area of creaking cacophony while blocking sight and dealing damage over time. (Don’t forget you can e-sub this one to deal fire damage too!)
13th
Escalation Mage 6
Soul of shadow
And for your capstone, you get an extra use of every single one of your excellent escalations, without even needing to bother making a check.
14th
Fiend-blooded 3
Blood of fiends +1 saves, fiendish heritage +1 Cha
With escalation mage completed, it’s time to go back into fiend-blooded, which picks up a nice little bonus to your saves and your Charisma.
As for your spells, hitting 7ths certainly opens up some options. For raw damage, a shadow power fiery twinned scorching ray while under fire-subbed cacophony gives you six rays in all, each one empowered and then boosted again due to fire vulnerability and boosted via Fiery Spell, Knowledge Devotion and warmage edge. If all six hit, you can easily exceed 300 points of damage this way. Even factoring in misses, with average HP sitting at 180.33 for CR 14 foes, you should easily be able to power through most foes. And outside of raw damage, you also have some incredibly handy spells like earthquake and waves of exhaustion.
15th
Fiend-blooded 4
Residual Magic
Fiendish sorcery: greater shadow conjuration, smiting spell 1/day
Another level of fiend-blooded brings you another use of fiendish sorcery. There are a lot of good options at this level, but it’s hard to go wrong with the sheer flexibility of greater shadow conjuration. You also get smiting spell, which plays very nicely with Twin Spell. And for your feat, Residual magic is just fantastic for any metamagic-focused build, especially for those that don’t muck about with common metamagic reduction tools. The big seller here is the lingering magic option. Now you can fire off a set of fiery twinned scorching rays in one round as a 7th-level spell, then follow up with another set as only a 2nd-level spell. Better still, this reduction in spell level means your escalation abilities can be applied with ease. It’s huge both for saving resources and for increasing power, and ensures that you never have to stop setting the world on fire.
16th
Warmage 6
Eclectic learning: arcane spellsurge
A quick pop back into warmage at this level means you time an eclectic learning at the same time that you hit 8th-level spells. This means picking up a 7th-level sorcerer/wizard spell from any school. Use this to nab arcane spellsurge (aka the main reason you went for silverbrow instead of standard human). As I mentioned before, one area where warmages struggle is in finding swift action spells. With arcane spellsurge, that all changes. This reduces the casting time of all of your spells, allowing you to use the warmage’s generous spells per day to go nova when necessary. It ensures that when you run up against foes on the high end of that HP bell curve, you have no difficulty in taking them down.
And while 8th-level spells for warmages always felt a bit disappointing to me, you do have a couple of solid options. Prismatic wall in particular is a very nice piece of battlefield control; unlike most walls, this one actually blocks most spells as well, and is a serious pain in the butt to bypass. Greater shout doesn’t have the high damage of some of your metamagic’d options, but sonic damage is nice (and can be boosted by cacophony!) and it carries a very nice debuff rider with it. (That said, I’ll never understand why they added somatic components to this spell, since one of the biggest selling points of shout was that it was verbal only.)
17th
Fiend-blood 5
Fiendish heritage +1 Int
Nothing terribly interesting happens here, but that’s OK, we’ll get to more good stuff soon.
18th
Fiend-blooded 6
Arcane Mastery
Blood of fiends cold/fire resist 5, fiendish sorcery: shades
By dipping back to warmage for an eclectic learning, we also time this fiendish sorcery so that you can add a 9th-level spell to your spell list. And that’s great, because 9th-level spells just aren’t all that hot for warmages right out of the box, unfortunately. Meteor swarm is a nuke but damage-wise will actually be inferior to many of your metamagic’d options, and prismatic sphere lets you turtle when you need to… and those are probably your two best options. Overall, it just isn't that impressive.
But fiendish sorcery changes all that with one simple addition: shades. Now you have access to every conjuration spell (aka the largest school of magic in all of 3.5) of up to 8th level, and the spells are 80% real. That’s a heck of a lot more flexible, and makes a very big difference.
As for your feat, Arcane Mastery comes on a bit late, but it means you can finally reliably make those caster level checks required to use shadow haste on your highest level spells.
19th
Fiend-blooded 7
Fiendish heritage +1 Dex
More spells and a slightly boosted dex? Sure, why not?
20th
Fiend-blooded 8
Fiendish sorcery: monstrous thrall, smiting spell 2/day
And for your capstone, you get another use of fiendish sorcery. There are a few decent options, all with varying degrees of brokenness. I decided to avoid some of the really cheesy options like ice assassin, and instead picked up monstrous thrall. Monstrous thrall may feel a bit out of place, but it’s a fun pick that almost nothing gets, so we figured it was worth including. It’s not all that useful in combat, but it’s basically an improved Leadership in spell form, and provides a particular kind of utility that the build overall hasn’t touched. There are some other very good options, though. I’m always a fan of the classic astral projection, which can make you almost unkillable (just watch out for githyanki). Transmute rock to lava is definitely on theme and can do a ton of damage over time or completely destroy structures, though between earthquake and your other damage options it’s not actually THAT much of an improvement.
Charisma, Dexterity and Intelligence are your three main stats. Intelligence is huge at lower levels, even more so than Charisma, but becomes less important as you go on. Charisma quickly becomes your primary stat from then on.
SAMPLE STAT ARRAYS:
28-Point Buy: Str 8/Dex 14/Con 10/Int 16/Wis 10/Cha 15
32-Point Buy: Str 8/Dex 14/Con 12/Int 16/Wis 10/Cha 16
Concentration, knowledge (arcana), knowledge (the planes) and spellcraft are your required skills. Other than that, focus on getting every monster-identifying knowledge skill trained for purposes of Knowledge Devotion, and dump any extra skill points you have into whatever knowledge skill feels most relevant for your campaign. You’ll easily have enough skill points to hit all benchmarks plus some to spare with a starting Int of 16.
I’ve been writing ever so many write-ups and equipment reqs are my least favorite section, so can we skip this one? Boost Charisma and Int, get some things that will expand your spell list, maybe some metamagic wands. Go to town.
BUILD SUMMARY
We tried our best to keep the flavor and unique casting style of the warmage at the forefront, and I think we mostly succeeded: no dropped casting, no being forced into a single spell, plenty of ways to rain hellfire down upon your foes. Despite not using the two most common forms of metamagic abuse (incantatrix and Arcane Thesis), it still has no problem putting out consistent damage numbers thanks to your escalations, damage boosters like fire-subbed creaking cacophony, metamagic like Twin and Fiery Spell and arcane spellsurge. While its flexibility certainly can’t match a wizard or sorcerer, access to spells like greater shadow evocation and shades certainly put it above your typical warmage.
VARIANTS
The easiest changes come in your fiendish sorcery and advanced/eclectic learning slots. We didn’t want to focus too much on any single spell, so we kept things fairly general when we made our choices, but there’s definitely room to play around there.
EDIT: I also want to add that for anyone looking at ways to tweak this build, or for advice on items, or really for anything warmage-related at all, Troacctid has several excellent guides on ideal items (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GgINDD7nEVLs6B_ygsj4SLJza_YrZLGU89KdjIumP7M/edit), advanced learning choices (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mBZFBdZRuCtldiqti91ej1FkIbngCr_aYKyF5zyZee8/edit), possible feats (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kRm19NLPkyvXuWnkM0goBSztg9PfGbiHlylijIY3WuA/edit?usp=drivesdk) and basically anything else you could want when building a warmage.
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And there you have it! Feel free to comment, discuss or check out one of the others!