Quote Originally Posted by remetagross View Post
Ah, too bad this ability is both 1/day and completely useless. It has to be entirely disregarded to assess the monster's power, basically. Rogue seems a good choice: going Maiming Strike allows you to double up on Cha damage up to the point where it's a OHKO on a lot of monsters. But the utter lack of anything useful brought forth by the racial HDs makes me think that 9 or 10 RHDs is quite a lot, already. I'd go 7: this way you can nab 2 Rogue special abilities before level 20.
In this kind of situation, where there is one far-reaching ability that may have heavy consequences on basically the whole campaign, my main goal has always been consistency with the original thread. You take a similar monster and you compare the current monster with it. Case in point, incorporeal undead. The spectre got a LA+1 in the main thread, for a total of ECL 8. Now, offensively, Charisma Drain and 40ft flying is much worse than 2 negative levels on your incorporeal touch attack and 80ft, but comparing that with the defensive abilities of +8 Dex, -6 Int, +6 Cha, +2 Turn Resistance, no sunlight powerlessness, death's grace and freaking Despair, I can't put the deathshrieker below the spectre. Not that much higher, but definitely stronger. 9 RHD is a minimum in my opinion, but putting the deathshrieker higher would be a stretch, since it is really passive without at least one or two class levels. So there you have it.

Of course, the standards for Level Adjustment have slightly changed during the years, and maybe the Spectre would have gotten LA+0 nowadays, but that's the best scale I've got for some of these monsters. I've never actually played an incorporeal creature, you know (the closest I've done was a Shadowcaster/Master of Shadow), but even with that I know that it is really a boon, especially with dedicated stats like those of the deathshrieker.