Familiar / Celestial Familiar

[schreier]

Quick question on calculating stats for familiars:

For hit points, it is one-half the master's hit points (ignoring temporary)
Would that include the penalty from a legacy item?
For example, if a character has 66 hit points currently (76 - 10 from the legacy penalty), would the familiar have 33 or 38 hit points?

I found a post mentioning that a celestial familiar's skills were the base creature's skills as opposed to the master's skills. Do most people play that that way? Further research showed that BoED was 3.0, and the 3.0 familiar did not use master's skills so it could be that the skills should be updated per 3.5 rules.

[mattie_p]

Familiars get 1/2 of the master's total hit points (rounded down), excluding temporary hp. Being as the hit point loss of a legacy weapon is permanent, it would be 1/2 of 66 or 33 hp.

In 3.0, familiars used either the skills of a normal animal of their type or the master's, whichever is better.

[Crake]

In 3.0, familiars used either the skills of a normal animal of their type or the master's, whichever is better.

This rule still exists in 3.5 as well

[schreier]

But celestial familiar seems to lack the language where it uses the master's skills

[mattie_p]

Yes, that wording is missing from BoED. So by RAW, they use their normal skills. But you can probably get away with normal familiar rules for skills, just this once.

[Darg]

Celestial familiar uses half the master's hp or the familiar's normal total, which ever is higher. So if you have a way to buff the familiar’s normal hp to be higher than half the wizard's hp then you can use that.