The LA-assignment thread IX: I have no mouth and I must S,V,M

[Morphic tide]

The Wicker Man is a touch interesting as a -0 because it's mostly a matter of having only one thing to do that's not perfectly applicable, but unlike the standard borderline of t4 and t5 Martial, that thing makes it perfectly useful for non-lethal combat encounters because it can Encage enemies and just keep them. Three Large, and goes down from there at the standard doubling, so you can pretty easily scoop up whole bands of ruffians to turn in to the town guard.

And for Huge enemies and up? Well, you do have hands explicitly able to hold things, are Huge yourself, and have 26 Strength. So you ought to very readily function as a conventional Martial with little investment, but you don't really have the space to get anywhere with being anything more than a beatstick. It's probably in a better position, overall, than a standard Barbarian 20, and the infamous frontloading of the Pounce works just as well with the requisite levels in play, even though I think this is a niche where Monk might actually not be a meme for the rapid access to grappling feats and movement acceleration.

So I guess I'm saying LA +0, because it's a big monster with passable damage and battlefield control that doesn't have to be lethal? Not Ubercharger damage, but probably better than the Spiked Chain Trippers and likely more reliable battlefield control than them. Definitely solid for a t4 party, because it actually does something beyond beating face, and seems to have enough defensive chops to shrug off being Con-less.

If I'm understanding this properly, you can by baseline, before you're even touching the PC ability scores, deal 4d8+18 Bludgeoning damage and 4d6 Fire each turn, from being able to use the two Slams every turn to do the grapples and then the Flaming Body damage. And Improved Natural Attack (Slam) adds 1d8 to each Slam for one feat, while the enhancement-carrying amulet for Natural Weapons only needs to cover two for a sensible amount. Maybe also Armor Spike damage, which is 2d6 by baseline, but I've no idea how applicable that actually is because I don't know if you can still get your BAB-based grapple checks to use the Armor Spike damage.

And this can be split between two targets being actively pummeled and another three to twelve enemies "stored" to suffer 10d6 Fire a turn. And if you can mix in the BAB grapples, that's another two to start with and a third at probably level 14, with all the subjects being locked down relatively reliably, with a non-zero shot at Colossal enemies being locked down at the end of campaign with enough optimization.

Edit: The big thing here is that the downsides of Construct RHD aren't critical for a Huge Grappler, and being a Construct with Immunity to Magic (Ex) means you have almost no reason to care about saving throws. Having any Hardness is a big thing for making even more a mockery of the need for saves, because the few non-magic Energy damage sources will be halved without issue, and you have a separate immunity to the most common of them. It's just layers and layers of stuff that looks simple, but usable, to me, in the context of the narrowly-good t4 build spaces.

The question to ask here is if you'd trade the back 12 of Fighter, Monk, or Barbarian 13-15 for this thing. And I think that's a quite genuine question for just the pile of blunt no you get out of it. May also be some edge-cases with Setting Sun Swordsages, but that's a losing proposition for the more general comparison to the class because Initiators can't casually throw away 12 levels.

(also, the archive has the Shadow Asp link to the Shadar-kai post)