Friendship Through Superior Firepower! Magical Girl Base Class, Set Up! [3.5]

[Selinia]

No major additions tonight, but I've made some additional tweaks as detailed below.

Hey, nice changes :)
Made all the bad illuminations worthwhile. Now i have to go and change my ratings.

Another thing that might qualify as an exploit (sorry that i didn't catch that before):
When using Limit Form, you can use Glimmering Echo and then make your full attack, adding your Charisma bonus to all damage with said full attack.

That makes this Illumination very powerful at higher levels for its cost. It depends on your hitting with the Strike itself, but that can be easily achieved with rerolls from the Lucky-CQ if needed.

With a Charisma bonus of 10 (reasonable for a high-level MG), that would be about 30 extra damage (assuming that your main attack, your haste attack and your secondary attack hit) - on your own attack, plus whatever your allies do.
Hardly gamebreaking IMO, just probably more powerful than intended for a first-level illumination.

If you don't want that to happen, it can be fixed with a single modification:
"This bonus damage does not apply to this strike or any other attacks you make this turn"

Honestly? I don't mind that. It wasn't an intended interaction, but it doesn't strike me as an overpowered one. Limit Form in general is somewhat situation, since it effectively replaces an aura in your mote budget and makes it harder to regularly use the more powerful illuminations (and access their nasty status effects). Not to mention that by the time a magical girl has a bonus high enough to be getting that level of damage out of it, the rest of the adventuring party is going to be rolling in their own endgame features. Bards will be handing out fistfuls of inspire courage, Initiators/Manifesters/Casters will be getting their 8th and 9th level spell-equivalents, and everyone in general is going to be busy being awesome.

If the combo came online sooner, I'd be more worried, but Limit Form doesn't even show up until the midgame. By that point pure damage has lost a lot of its luster, and high-damage tricks become much more acceptable.

Edit: Rainbow road may need a note that it doesn't block movement if placed in mid-air. It's clearly not supposed to, but a quick addition like "these spaces do not count as obstacles and do not block movement" would make it clearer.

Fair enough. Clarification made.

Just took a look at the Archetypes.

The Barrier Maiden ability of the Kofū Shōjo is strictly worse than Shrug it Off. My suggestion would be that the AC-Bonus applies to allies around her like an aura. Optionally only if she has her aura active, with a bonus depending on the level of the Aura.

Interesting suggestion, which I went and split in half. When she has an aura up, the AC bonus applies to any ally in the aura as well as herself. When she uses a non-aura illumination, the AC bonus bumps up for a turn. It's potentially a very potent boost, though it still relies on the Kofū Shōjo managing her motes carefully.

The Spirit Shooter could use an option for Composite Longbows and a free Gunsmithing-feat when selecting Firearms for her device. Not necessary since it's already a powerful Archetype though.

The spirit shooter can now properly repair her ranged device, though she still can't make other firearms like it. I've also made it explicit that the archetype's weapons refer to the Pathfinder firearm system. I'm sure there are 3.5 rules for firearms (actually, several sets of them that I can think of), but the pathfinder set has the huge advantage of being openly available on their SRD.

The Mist Breaker could really use the Monks Unarmed Damage Progression (without it, unarmed attacks are strictly worse than armed ones).

This doesn't seem like it would hurt anything, considering how mild that progression is. I've also tossed in the monk's no-off-hand-attacks clause, mainly to be able to mix in kicks and martial arts with the pure fisticuffs.

Personally, I don't think that allowing evolved device to grant melee or ranged weapons for magical girls who use the opposite would be too much intermixing. There are plenty of magical girl shows where the weapon swaps between a ranged and melee form. Further, the key difference is that spirit shooters have spirit shoot while lacking limit-form, while normal magical girls have the reverse. A normal magical girl would also still need to buy ammo. The main benefits to selecting a device form counter to your build would be getting the costume bonuses to it and not needing to put away the device and draw a normal weapon of the other type (you can just change the forms).

It might also be worth noting how evolved device interacts with twinned device. Do both devices have to remain in the same form, or may one be in the evolved form and the other in the normal form?

Some good arguments were made all around, and Evolved Device now allows a magical girl to choose something outside her ordinary weapon type. I've also clarified the interaction of that feat with Twinned Device - namely, that you can shift each of your devices freely, so long as you keep them one-handed devices.

Unrelated, spirit shooters seem to lack any support in the area of strike illuminations. While spirit shoot is nice, some illuminations to add choice effects to attacks like strikes would be useful.

Strike illuminations are, by and large, melee attacks. It's one of their primary traits, so I'm not sure that any spirit shooter is ever going to be getting too much use out of strikes. There are a good number of ranged illuminations for them to focus on, after all, not to mention the heavy mote investment of Spirit Shot.

That said, there are far fewer purely ranged illuminations than there could be. When I get a chance to write up more, expect to see some focus in that area.

I also figured I'd ask, spirit shoot notes that character abilities reducing reload time make the mote cost go down, but would this also apply to temporary reductions of reload time, such as maneuvers that make your reloading faster for a given duration? An example would be the Black Tempest maneuver.

I'm going to say yes on this. The restriction is primarily just to keep item abuse out - I didn't want someone getting a major discount from a handful of dirt-cheap paper cartridges (though they're still useful to have for mundane shooting).

I like the idea of one ranged and one melee device.

I also really hope you add back in the original version of Vigil of Candles somewhere. It was just an awesome image.

Vigil of Candles is effectively the same as it was, just not quite as overpowering. The original, or a close variant of it, is likely to crop up at a higher illumination level where the hefty effect can be more appropriately priced.