[3.5] Feats for a Blackguard

[Chrizzt]

Hello

I am building a Blackguard for a Campaign I am about to master soon, and I am a little bit wobbly on the feats. It is not intended to be overly optimized, however I would like to hear advice on which feats to take.

The NPC will be a Human Fallen Paladin 1 / Blackguard 10 / Undead Hitdice 5 (Lvl 16)

(The Character has Undead Hitdice for some reasons. Basically they come with some extra abilities that would go too far to disclose them here)

The Feats I have chosen so far are the following. Perhaps some one knows some nice other feats?

1. Able Learner (Sounds strange, but it is necessary due to some House Rule adjustments I have made)
Power Attack (Necessary for Blackguard)

3. Improved Sunder (Necessary for Blackguard)

6. Cleave (Necessary for Blackguard)

9. Mounted Combat

12. Divine Vigor (to help offset the missing Con Bonus a little bit)

15. Combat Brute (Blackguards already have the prerequs, so why not take it)

Which feats would blend well (especially) into my/every blackguard build? I already had a look at other Divine Feats in Complete Warrior. They are nice, but apart from Divine Vigor they are not what I had in mind.

Thank you for your advice in advance!

[Thrice Dead Cat]

Honestly, if you're not against a redesign, I would just go Cleric 1/Walker in the Waste 10/whatever 5 (Ordained Champion would probably work best here to keep with the Blackguard beatstick'ing).

You'll get Cha to HP, so that's no longer a problem, you'll have feats to spare to actually get things like Power Attack and DMM (Quicken) to keep Divine Power up in combat without wasting actions casting. Grab Improved Bullrush and Shock Trooper to smack people around something fierce, using magic for defense.


Some of this advice will hold even if you stick to Blackguard, but I personally would appreciate any and all houserules explaining the need for Able Learner and the randomly thrown on undead HD.

[Chrizzt]

@Thrice Dead Cat: Thank you for your kind reply!

The 5 HD are not randomly thrown in, but resulted in a modification of the Death Knight Template. I am not yet sure about this, however, so I preferred to keep it out of the equation.

Generally I have the impression that the good old Blackguard PrC gets very little attention on the boards. As my Campaign features quite unoptimized player characters, I thought I would use the occassion and finally use all Level 10 Blk-Levels to create a nice, flavorfull Blackguard without much dipping or the like.

Able Learner was necessary to allow for Class Skills for the Undead Racial Hit Die, because otherwise there would no skills for these Hit Dice be available (as they come into action after Paladin 1 / Blackguard 10. However, perhaps I am just overlooking some reading here).

So while serious redesign might seem appropriate, within the context above I really would like to use the old-school-Blk-PrC. ; )

[Thrice Dead Cat]

That's fine. As for skills, I believe one of the monster manuals listed a general "All animals have these skills, all magical beast those, etc." but I don't have the text on hand to support that view. Generally, the trend is "If the statblock for X race has skill bonuses listed, then those are its racial skills." This may or may not help you, but I figured I'd mention it.

Sadly, since Blackguards gain their own casting you can't simply grab Battle Blessing to auto-swift action casting your spells. If you just want to beat face, Shock Trooper will help. Improved Trip or Disarm may not be a bad idea either, as I suspect your party is largely weapon wielding.

Still, though, more info on the modified Death Knight would help. If you're worried about your players coming in and seeing it, you could use a spoiler in that post and warn them of the dangers of reading it. That or just do that for the thread itself so none of them stumble upon it. I see a large issue with the undead HD, as they are notoriously bad among racial HD, though.