Quote Originally Posted by TooManySecrets View Post
Okay, so I'm interested in making a Graughtsman in a campaign. One of the major draws of the Graughtsman is the ability to make biological suits of power armor. The problem is that they seem to suck. Badly.

It comes down to this:

The way I'm reading this is basically the way new, errata'd shapeshifting works i.e. none of your character abilities transfer over and you act as that creature for the duration.



The chassis is going to have - at most - 5 HD, and that's at size Colossal, which is extremely hard to effectively play (hope your campaign takes place only in clear, open fields). Realistically, it's going to be 3 HD.

A 3 HD Construct has 3d10 HP, +2 BAB, and +1 to base saves.

In order to make this, you need to be at least a 2nd level Graughtsman, which in turn requires you to be a 7th level Gramarist. When you make your bio-armor, you have 9 HD, 9d6 HP, +4 BAB, +5 to Fort, +2 to Ref, and +8 to Will. In other words, you are almost strictly superior to your bio-armor and are probably superior in HP as well.

You can slightly improve the situation by picking up Material Fleshshape at 4th level Graughtsman and turning your bio-armor into a Dragon, which picks up +1 BAB, turns the HD into d12s, and makes base saves +3. Of course, two levels of Graughtsman gives you 2d6 HP, +1 BAB, and +1 to all saves i.e. it doesn't really improve the power of your bio-armor in relation to you.

Now, your bio-armor does have hardness, which is nice, but being durable doesn't really matter if nobody has any reason to attack you and you have no real way of doing damage. About the only way I could see of salvaging the situation is by giving your bio-armor a damaging graft (like a Draconis Fundamentum or Nimbus of Light) and just spam that, except that it would still probably be better to just give it to yourself through xenomachinery.

Am I missing something here?
Well, there is the size-dependent health boost from being a construct, but yeah, on the whole chassis aren't too resilient, unfortunately.