Iron Chef E6 Appetizer Edition, Round XXXVIII

[loky1109]

Table here!

Name	Alignment / Race	Class Levels	Chef	Total	Place
Blaise deForrest	?? Jermlaine	Planar Spiritual Connection Wildshape Ranger 6
Carsus Tall	LG Lesser Aasimar	Paladin 6
Charles M. Ander	CG Lesser Aasimar	Paladin of Freedom 4/Hit and Run Tactics Fighter 1/Master Thrower 1
Firefist	CG Human	Ardent 2/Shaman 4
Simon the Fire Lance	LN Human	Psychic Warrior 6
Spirit of Fire	LE Lesser Fire Gensai	Shugenja 6
Steamy Romancer	NG Shalarin	Druid 1/Sorcerer 1/Cleric 3/Beastmaster 1
Uanafaira Worldfire	CE Illumian	Cleric 5/Wizard 1
Aara	TN Human	Evoker 3/Master Specialist 3

[loky1109]

Cool entries folks! I like open themes. All so different, unexpected!
I have two favorite for HM, but shall wait till judges will say their words.

Some builds are straightforward, some have interesting finds.
Should to say some participants gave too short fluff for their crunch. Aara's chef gave too long. ))) I didn't read and understand it completely yet. )

By the way, it looks like less than half competitors used mattie_p's build template. It's cool and entries done with it are easily to read. Use it.

[Zaq]

Is anyone interested in judging?

[loky1109]

Judges? Anybody? We need you!

[H_H_F_F]

I've been far too busy. I have an exam in my occupational training on Sunday, if I pass it I can probably find the time to start looking at these entries some time next week. If I don't... probably won't be able to help with this round.

[loky1109]

I've been far too busy. I have an exam in my occupational training on Sunday, if I pass it I can probably find the time to start looking at these entries some time next week. If I don't... probably won't be able to help with this round.

Good luck on the exam!

[AsuraKyoko]

I can try my hand at judging, though I'm pretty busy, so I don't have a specific timeline of when I'd be done. I'm also not very confident in my capability of judging, so I don't think I would do a very good job of it. Is it alright to get some friends to help me with the judging process?

[Zarvistic]

I check these entries out from time to time but never judged in any of the contests before. If that's no issue, I can give it a try.

[loky1109]

I check these entries out from time to time but never judged in any of the contests before. If that's no issue, I can give it a try.

Everybody did it first time once. )

I see we have three potential judges! Cool.

[H_H_F_F]

If judgement was limited only to those who have previously judged, we'd have a hard time with the first competition, I'd assume

[Zarvistic]

Alright, I will start working on them!

Edit: I'm sorry, but I'll have to withdraw from judging. I ended up being busier than expected.

[loky1109]

H_H_F_F, how did your exam go?
AsuraKyoko, I think we need Zaq's word, but if you'd ask me... Advice about rules is ok. Advice about subjective moments where we want your judge opinion (e.g. almost full UoSI or Originality) is not.
Zarvistic, it's ok, live goes first. Take care of yourself.

[H_H_F_F]

H_H_F_F, how did your exam go?

Think I passed. I'll attempt to start judging tomorrow, if life lets me.

[loky1109]

Think I passed. I'll attempt to start judging tomorrow, if life lets me.

It's great! Congratulations!

[AsuraKyoko]

H_H_F_F, how did your exam go?
AsuraKyoko, I think we need Zaq's word, but if you'd ask me... Advice about rules is ok. Advice about subjective moments where we want your judge opinion (e.g. almost full UoSI or Originality) is not.
Zarvistic, it's ok, live goes first. Take care of yourself.

As it turns out, I'm definitely not going to have time to judge for at least another month; work is crazy busy right now, and it's going to keep draining me until he hit our deadline. I am still curious about the answer, though.

[H_H_F_F]

Okay, I've read through your entries. Liked a lot of what I've seen!

Hoping to be able to start work on judgement this weekend. I'll be in touch.

[H_H_F_F]

The Late Judge^TM is on the case. It's going to take a little while, sorry guys.

[MinimanMidget]

Surprise! A wild judge appeared! I've been keeping the contest in my head this whole time, and now I finally have time to do some judging, so here we go!

Global judging note: There's a lot of information missing from some of these entries.

Tell the judges what's cool about your build! You spent hours or days on this (y'know, probably) and know it inside and out, but the judges are getting a whole bunch of these dishes all at once and don't know the build history of each one. You're significantly more likely to score well if you spell out exactly what makes you awesome than if you try to just let it stand on its own.

I can't fill in the gaps and give you points for things you didn't write down in your entry.

Global judging note: I haven't judged a theme round before, and I've had to refit my criteria for Originality and especially UotSI quite a bit. I've done my best, but they're much more based on gut feeling and even less concrete than usual.

Spoiler: Blaise deForrest

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Spoiler: Originality

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Jermalaine comes up a lot more often in contests than it does in normal play, but it's still a pretty unusual choice. (+0.25)

Wildshape Ranger, alchemical weapons, manuevers...there are some interesting ingredients here. Nothing really out there, but interesting. (+0.25)

What's really missing, though, is cohesion. There's nothing tying these things together. I'm pretty sure Dance of Flames is supposed to be the core concept here, but there's a lot in the build that just doesn't connect to it. And there's not even any fluff, which could potentially have fixed this issue. (-1)

Overall: 2.5

Spoiler: Power

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Dance of Flames is stylish, but it's not exactly impressive in terms of damage. Alchemical weapons are in the same boat, although they diversify your damage types, and give you some non-damaging options, at least. You're right that your damage is difficult to prevent, but there's just not enough of it for it to be a meaningful contribution. (-0.75)

In terms of staying alive, your best defence is probably going to be your sheer speed. Your AC (including touch AC) is impressive, but your hp pool is pathetic. Your Fort save is bad, your Ref save is great, and your Will save is average. You shouldn't get targeted much, since you're more annoying than dangerous, but you'll probably go down the moment someone points a Fort save at you. Elusive Target gives you some situational defensive options, too. (-0.25)

Outside of combat, things start looking a lot better. You're a fantastic party radar, you're superfluously good at tracking, you've got Wild Shape, you've got your familiar, you're okay at stealth even with no skill investment, Knowledge (the planes) is handy, you've got Ranger spells, you've got Speak with Animals/Plants, Speak with Rats, whatever you can find to do with alchemical weapons... On the whole, you should have no problem making yourself useful whenever you aren't fighting or in a social situation. (+0.75)

Overall: 2.75

Spoiler: Elegance

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I have no idea what SRD chart you're talking about that made your Cha 4 instead of 2, but according to the PHB: "If these changes put your score above 18 or below 3, that’s okay, except in the case of Intelligence, which does not go below 3 for characters." (-0.5)

Rangers don't have Tumble as a class skill. I'm assuming you meant to write the words "Skilled City Dweller" somewhere in your entry. (-0.5)

You're right about both Martial Study and Craft (alchemy) being legal to take before you can actually use them. Being legal doesn't prevent it from being a little inelegant, though. (-0.25)

I'm not totally convinced you can initiate the stance you're already in. "You initiate a stance as a swift action. A stance remains in effect indefinitely and is not expended. You enjoy the benefit your stance confers until you change to another stance you know as a swift action." I can see arguments for both sides, but you didn't make any of them. (-0.25)

Overall: 3.5

Spoiler: Use of the Secret Ingredient

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Most of your feats are contributing towards fire in one form or another, and you even got some fire out of your skill points. Your class levels, on the other hand... Actually, why are you a ranger at all? Let's see...it gets you full BAB to qualify for Scorching Sirocco, a bunch of skill points, (eventually) counting as a spellcaster for alchemy, and Wild Shape. So essentially, all your non-combat utility comes from being a ranger, but it doesn't really contribute much to fire at all. That said, I'm probably being a bit unfair, since there's not that many ways to hit BAB +6 while getting spellcasting. (+0.25)

Thematically speaking...I don't know. This would be a lot easier for me if you'd gone all in on one thing. As it is, you have a bunch of different ways to do small amounts of fire damage. Dance of Flames is cool, at least. (+0.25)

Overall: 3.5

Total: 12.25

Spoiler: Carsus Tall

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Spoiler: Originality

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Lesser aasimar on a paladin? How original! That said, I've not seen anyone go heavily into aasimar feats before. You're not just grabbing the stat boosts and leaving, and that's pretty nifty. (-0.25)

Wait, Diablo 2 Paladin? Diablerie? Okay, this is new. (+1)

My dislike of Diablo 3's...alterations to Diablo lore aside, I'd argue lesser aasimar isn't a good representation of a nephalem. The nephalem are humans, that's the whole point. You also can't just decide to become a nephalem, or become one via research. The return of the nephalem was only possible because Tyrael destroyed the Worldstone, removing the limits Inarius placed on humanity. Anyway, I'm not here to judge you on your knowledge of Diablo lore. In the context of this contest, to the best of my knowledge, this is a completely unique build. Thanks for showing me something new! (+1)

Overall: 4.75

Spoiler: Power

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2d6 fire damage to one enemy within 15 ft, once per round? Heck, you don't even get to pick which enemy! This is just not good, and it's insulting to the Holy Fire Paladin in the game, especially since they buffed it. In theory, you have other options, but you don't have the stats to make any real use of Might or Sacrifice. Hmmm, Thorns is actually pretty great against melee brutes. 3/day Searing Light is something, I guess. Holy Radiance is nice against undead. (-0.75)

Defensively, your hp pool is good, your AC should be good, assuming you wear heavy armour and accept the slower flight speed. Your Fort save is average, but your Ref and Will are pathetic. Speaking of flight speed, that should help you stay alive, too, although your need to stay within 15 ft of enemies makes that less useful than it normally would be. (-0.25)

When it comes to utility, you're absurdly good at Diplomacy, which is famously useful. You shouldn't have any problems making untrained Bluff and Intimidate checks, either. Unlimited out of combat healing is certainly handy, and flight is often useful. (+0.75)

Overall: 2.75

Spoiler: Elegance

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Lesser planetouched is a campaign variant. (-0.25)

You've used a bunch of Forgotten Realms-specific options on a decidedly non-FR character, which is always a minor Elegance penalty. I do also want to point out that, by default, humans are the only playable race in Diablo. If you'd used anything except aasimar (or tiefling), I would absolutely penalise you separately for it, since races like dwarves or elves straight up don't exist in the world of Diablo, but aasimar (and tiefling) at least could exist, and are about the only non-human races that could. By the same token, where in the world of Diablo are you going to find a good-aligned fey (for Nymph's Kiss)? (-0.5)

The D2 Paladin doesn't have Tumble as a class skill. I'm assuming you meant to write the words "Skilled City Dweller" somewhere in your entry. (-0.5)

Magic item dependency bad. You took Ancestral Relic, and it's well within WBL, so it's relatively minor. On the other hand, you are dependent on it to make your core ability work, and on top of that you're relying on the DM agreeing with you on the chakra bind (although you're pretty obviously correct). (-0.5)

Technically, Celestial Bloodline was updated to 3.5e in Dragon. It's pretty clearly a different feat, but it has the same name, so RAW, you can't take the old version, and you don't qualify for the new version. (-0.25)

Overall: 3

Spoiler: Use of the Secret Ingredient

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Holy Fire, all day, every day. It took some work to get there, but you got there. On the other hand, Holy Fire is really all the fire you've got. I mean, you didn't even take the Resist Fire aura. (-0.5)

Thematically speaking...well. This is a build with an incredibly strong concept, but it's not the right concept for this round, I think. If the theme was light, holy, divine, angelic, celestial, or really anything along those lines, you would have knocked it out of the park here. In fairness, though, those themes are at least related to fire. (-0.5)

Overall: 2

Total: 12.5

Spoiler: Charles M. Ander

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Spoiler: Originality

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Another lesser aasimar paladin? And what angelic heritage gave you jade eyes and scales? No, wait, you're just trying to justify dragonborn. (-0.5)

Ok, it's Charmander. That's pretty cute. Persistent Produce Flame is a neat idea, and you've done some pretty weird things to try and makes this concept work. (+1)

Overall: 3.5

Spoiler: Power

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Assuming everything works the way you want it to (more on this in Elegance), you can pump out a pretty good amount of fire damage every round. You don't have any real backup options against fire-resistant or -immune enemies - you could throw a bunch of darts or something, but it wouldn't do much to speak of. You have your Paladin abilities, but your poor Cha makes them even less useful than usual. (+0.25)

When it comes to not dying, your hp pool and your AC are both okay. Your Fort and Will are both average, and your Ref is poor. You've got some resistances, which is nice. Overall, it's not great, even considering that you're not planning to be in melee. (-0.25)

Outside of combat, you're okay at Sense Motive and Sleight of Hand, both of which are less useful without supporting skills, and you have access to the wizard and paladin spell lists. (-0.5)

Overall: 2.5

Spoiler: Elegance

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Lesser planetouched is a campaign variant. (-0.25)

Two flaws? Ouch. That's a preset penalty, it's in the contest rules. (-2)

Planetouched have regions, you know. I'm not sure why you're talking about the outsider type, especially since, as a lesser planetouched, you aren't even an outsider. You could have gotten around this with a mere 2 ranks of Knowledge (local), rather than taking Human Heritage, which...okay, I can see an argument that it can affect your region, but why didn't you make that argument, instead of the frankly incoherent one you did? (-0.5)

Ok, turns out the point of that was to have a three-feat chain to swap all at once. That's a cool idea, and I'd probably give you a bonus for it if all the feats you were swapping qualified as straightforwardly as Two-Weapon Fighting does.

There's a weird order of operations problem with that swap, because Prehensile Tail requires either Two-Weapon Fighting, which you don't qualify for and arguably don't have when you take Prehensile Tail, or Multi-Weapon Fighting, which you can't have when you take Prehensile Tail, since it requires Prehensile Tail. (-0.5)

You can't take Dragonscale Husk. Not dodgy, not questionable, just straight up wrong. You weren't dragonblooded at level 1, and there's no provision in dragonborn for retroactively applying ACFs. It's also pretty dodgy to then take Hit-and-Run Tactics. "If you would later gain some form of armor proficiency (such as by multiclassing or taking a feat), you can choose at that time to gain that proficiency, but you then lose this class feature." I would argue that you had to choose to gain heavy armour proficiency, thereby losing Dragonscale Husk, in order to then trade it away. (-0.75)

So to qualify for Master Thrower, you need Weapon Focus (Any Thrown Weapon). Given that you're taking Weapon Focus (ranged spells) specifically in order to have Weapon Focus with Produce Flame, which is a thrown weapon, I'm inclined to say it works. (-0)

"Since Sword of the Arcane Order never explicitly states whether the wizard spells you cast with your Paladin spell slots are arcane or not, we’re going to choose to have them be Divine so we can apply Divine Metamagic." That definitely doesn't mean you get to choose, just means it's ambiguous and up to the DM. Not a penalty since it is ambiguous, and if anything, it makes more sense for it to be divine anyway, I just wanted to explicitly reject that argument.

While I'm mentioning things, SotAO lists an Int 13 pre-req in the table, but doesn't mention it in the text. I'm curious if you knew and figured text trumps table, or just didn't notice, but no penalty, anyway.

On that note, SotAO qualifying you for Arcane Disciple is questionable, especially when slready said you're calling those spells divine. And continuing to cast the spells from Arcade Disciple after you traded the feat away is very questionable. (-0.25)

Palm Throw lets you throw two projectiles with each attack...with darts, shuriken, and daggers. "The DM might allow other weapons", so, ok, you're going to have to argue for Produce Flame to get allowed. I could penalise you for that alone, but there's a deeper issue here - where are you getting the second projectile? "No sooner do you hurl the flames than a new set appears in your hand." They get replaced after you throw them, but Palm Throw requires you to have two when you throw them. (-0.5)

Spontaneous Healer qualifying you for Versatile Spellcaster, and using Versatile Spellcaster as a prepared spellcaster, is a little iffy. At least Divine Metamagic gets around the question of how metamagic works when you're spontaneously casting as a prepared spellcaster. (-0.25)

Not that it matters, but it's also pretty questionable whether Prehensile Tail lets you make Produce Flame's flames appear on your tail. For Charmandering purposes, you can just fix this with Continual Flame, anyway.

Overall: 1

Spoiler: Use of the Secret Ingredient

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Persistent Produce Flame, and a fire breath weapon. It doesn't sound like a lot, but it took almost every level and feat you had to get there, and the leftovers are going towards boosting your Produce Flame. In the end, there are almost no extraneous elements in your build. (+0.75)

As far as the theme goes, you're Charmander. The few elements in your build that didn't go towards Produce Flame went towards being Charmander. (+0.75)

Overall: 4.5

Total: 11.5

Spoiler: Firefist

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Spoiler: Originality

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Human, bleh. (-0.5)

Ardent and Shaman? Now we're getting somewhere. There's some weird feats in there, too. (+0.75)

Setting people on fire is, weirdly, kind of an unusual concept. At least, when you do it this way. (+0.25)

Overall: 3.5

Spoiler: Power

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Assuming everything works the way you want it to (more on that in Elegance), you can do a decent amount of fire damage. You have a bunch of per day limits to deal with on both Mortalbane and your domain feats, even with your turn attempts (remember that Animal Devotion eats 3 per use and Fire Devotion eats 2). You have a side gig as an AoO Stand Still build, and sundering is sometimes useful in and of itself, as well as some powers and spells to play with. (+0.25)

Defensively, your hp pool is pathetic, and your AC is only okay. Your Fort save is pathetic, your Ref is bad, but your Will is good, at least. I have serious concerns about your ability to survive in melee. (-1)

In terms of non-combat utility, you have Shaman spells, and that's it. (-0.75)

Overall: 1.5

Spoiler: Elegance

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You only spent 31 points out of 32 - no penalty, but something to watch out for.

Trading the Flame domain for Fire Devotion is...eh, I guess it's okay, but it doesn't sit well. "Each domain represents an individual spirit with which you have a special relationship". Given that Shamans get their powers from their relationships with spirits, trading away a Shaman domain seems like a big deal. (-0.25)

"You can't sunder armor worn by another character." So sundering people's clothes to set them on fire is a no-go. (-0.25)

Fire Devotion says that it sets people on fire for 1d4 damage a round, not 1d4 damage a round in addition to the normal 1d6. (-0.5)

It's pretty questionable whether Mortalbane applies to Fire Devotion (or Animal Devotion, or Strength Devotion), since the effect is to give you a 1 minute buff, not to damage enemies. (-0.25)

Taking Improved Natural Attack for Strength Devotion arguably requires you to level up during the 1 minute duration of Strength Devotion. (-0.25)

Overall: 3.5

Spoiler: Use of the Secret Ingredient

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A lot of your feats are just generic unarmed fighting feats. That said, your unarmed attacks set things on fire, so that counts. Your powers are nicely fire themed, although your spells aren't - you might have done better to keep the Flame domain and take the feat normally. Profession (arsonist) and Knowledge (architecture) is a nice touch. (+0.5)

In terms of theme, it's a little understated. Fire Devotion is really doing all the heavy lifting here, and the only thing backing it up is the powers, which aren't emphasised much. (-0.5)

Overall: 3

Total: 11.5

Spoiler: Simon the Fire Lance

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Spoiler: Originality

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Human, still bleh. (-0.5)

Heavy blaster, oooh. And you even justified it in your backstory! (+1)

If we ignore the heavy blaster, this is a fairly standard Psionic Shot build. (-0.25)

Overall: 3.25

Spoiler: Power

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Blaster goes pew. Accuracy is great, damage is great. I was all ready to complain about running out of PP, but you're doing fine there. The 1 round manifesting time is a bigger drawback, since it's going to cost you the first round of most combats. Assuming you get 3d6 power packs (more on this in Elegance), you're not going to run out of shots, although you'll occasionally have to waste a round reloading. You actually have enough PP that you could have easily fit some weapon enhancements in there, so I'm a little sad you didn't even mention the possibility. It's probably not even worth mentioning fire resistance, but fire immunity is a problem for you, at least. (+0.75)

As far as staying alive goes, you've got a great hp pool, let alone Vigor, and your AC (and touch AC) is good, even before you use Force Screen. Your Fort and Will are okay, although your Ref is low. Overall, you're pretty tanky for someone who isn't even planning on being in melee. (+0.5)

Outside of combat...you might find a use for Jump checks or Wall Walker occasionally. Autohypnosis and Knowledge (psionics) are something, I guess. (-0.75)

Overall: 3.5

Spoiler: Elegance

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I'm inclined to agree that the heavy blaster requires Exotic Weapon Proficiency, but EWP in turn requires BAB +1. (-0.5)

Surprisingly, there's nothing in Call Weapon that prevents you from getting a heavy blaster. That said, you highlighted one issue yourself. "If you call a projectile weapon, it comes with 3d6 nonmagical bolts, arrows, or sling bullets, as appropriate." Alien blaster power packs are definitely not arrows, bolts, or sling bullets. Not to mention, is a blaster technically a projectile weapon in the first place? (-0.5)

Psionic Prodigy is explicitly the psionic equivalent of Spellcasting Prodigy, which survived a 3.5 update unchanged. It definitely works.

Overall: 4

Spoiler: Use of the Secret Ingredient

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Most of your feats, and Soulbound Weapon, go towards your blaster, but that does fire damage, so it counts. Outside of that, you have generic defensive feats and powers. (+0.25)

The theme for this build is "I have a blaster". Yes, the blaster does fire damage, but it's a laser, not a flamethrower. (-0.5)

Overall: 2.75

Total: 13.5

Spoiler: Spirit of Fire

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Spoiler: Originality

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Hmmm, fire genasi. On the one hand, you don't see it often, but on the other hand, it's just so completely on theme. (+0)

Shugenja is walking the same line - it's a very unusual choice, but it goes perfectly with the theme. (+0)

With extremely minimal fluff, and no build writeup or tactics section whatsoever, this isn't so much a build as it is just a list of spells and feats. (-1)

Overall: 2

Spoiler: Power

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Wait, iaijutsu? Seriously, you need a build writeup. You can't just throw something like that in there and expect me to know what you're planning to do with it. Anyway, you have a bunch of fire spells, and feats to enhance them. Looking at your options, Fire Wings isn't great with your stats, so your best choices will usually be Produce Flame, Flaming Sphere, or Searing Light. At least Fiery Burst means you'll never run out of fire, and Searing Spell lets you deal with fire resistance and immunity. The Shugenja spell list really works against you here - you're hitting the damage cap on all of your spells even without your caster level boosts. Overall, for a full caster, you're looking kind of underwhelming. (-0.25)

Defensively, your hp pool is pretty small, and your AC is low even with Shield of Faith. Your Fort and Ref are both low, and your Will is still pretty mediocre. I definitely don't recommend going into melee, whether it's with Fire Wings or iaijutsu. (-0.5)

In terms of utility, Silent Image is nice. Knowledge (arcana) and Spellcraft will sometimes be useful, and I guess in theory you might get some mileage out of Sense Elements. (-0.5)

Overall: 1.75

Spoiler: Elegance

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Lesser planetouched is a campaign variant. (-0.25)

I eventually unravelled your stats, but I almost just declared your point buy illegal. Please make it clearer in future that you're listing the totals including racial modifiers and the level 4 increase. (-0.25)

Quoting from the contest rules: "It's still fine to list total skill bonuses, if that's your style, but don't only list bonuses; make sure that there is a clear listing somewhere of your ranks alone." Zaq put it in bold and everything. (-1)

Shugenja has a bunch of notes about where it fits in a campaign setting, and in Faerun, it would be Kara-Tur, not Calimshan. You could work around it with your backstory, of course, but you didn't. (-0.25)

You don't need to explicitly list weapon (or armor) proficiencies that you get from your class - it took me a moment to work out that you hadn't taken 3 feats at first level. Similarly, it's a lot easier to read if you just list what you got at each level, not the cumulative total of everything up to that point. No penalty, just some formatting notes.

Overall: 3.25

Spoiler: Use of the Secret Ingredient

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Fire genasi, fire shugenja, fire spells, fire feats...it's pretty much all fire, all the time. (+1)

Thematically, visually...as much as I dislike the lack of a build writeup, I can't justify less than a pefect score here. (+1)

It'd be pretty funny if I gave you a penalty for spelling "fire" wrong a bunch of times, but not quite funny enough for me to actually do it.

Overall: 5

Total: 12

Spoiler: Steamy Romancer

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Spoiler: Originality

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Shalarin? Yeah, you don't see that too often. (+0.5)

So...this is a little weird for me. This build is eerily similar to one I submitted to round 29, Signature Spells. Of course, imitation is the highest form of flattery, and besides, you probably came to the same idea on your own. On top of that, you're doing everything underwater, which is fun. (+0.5)

Overall: 4

Spoiler: Power

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Maximised Empowered Balor Nimbus does a lot of damage (36 + 0.5*6d6 = average 46.5). Potentially dealing that damage three times per round if you all grapple the same enemy will kill most things in E6 very, very quickly. If you run into fire immune enemies, well, you're still riding around on an Enlarged Elasmosaurus, and grappling is still useful. If you run into something that can't be grappled...you're going to feel a little foolish. I guess Freedom of Movement notionally isn't available in E6, at least. The elephant in the room is that the build mostly only functions in an underwater campaign. We can assume that it'd only see play in an underwater campaign, of course, but it still limits its usefulness. (+0.75)

Defensively, your hp pool and your AC are both decent (although your AC goes down when you're enlarged), your Fort and Will are both good, and your Ref is average (and you can add Conviction to all of those). And, of course, your giant dinosaur is bound to tank some hits for you with its massive hit points. Grappling puts you in harm's way, but overall staying alive should not be an issue for you. (+0.75)

Outside of combat, between you, your dinosaur, and your octopus, there's a good chance one of you will succeed on a Spot check. Beyond that, you can potentially prepare different spells to suit your needs, your octopus is useful in all the ways a familiar is generally useful, and that's about it. (-0.5)

Overall: 4

Spoiler: Elegance

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Shalarin? I can't argue with its legality, but there's no way I can let an LA 0 with +4 Str, +4 Dex just slide by. There's an argument to be made that the drawback is the lack of a walking speed, but you've assumed that you're in an aquatic campaign. (-0.25)

Multiclass experience penalties, minor penalty. (-0.25)

Overall: 4.5

Spoiler: Use of the Secret Ingredient

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Persistent Balor Nimbus is all the fire you have, but all of your feats go towards it, one way or another. Oops, forgot your familiar's breath weapon. Turning fire creatures is nice too, although it'd be better if it was rebuking them. (+0.5)

Thematically, you're always on fire, you have a dinosaur who is always on fire, and you have a draconic octopus who is always on fire. Even though you're underwater, it's somehow still fire. (+0.5)

Overall: 4

Total: 16.5

Spoiler: Uanfaira Worldfire

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Spoiler: Originality

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Illumian, nice. (+0.25)

Persisted Corona of Fire on your familiar is a pretty great concept. (+0.5)

Overall: 3.75

Spoiler: Power

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Assuming everything works the way you want it to (more on that in Elegance), you (and your familiar, too) have a permanent aura that does a heap of fire damage with some nasty rider effects. Invisible Spell makes it a nasty surprise to your enemies, and Searing Spell means it's still effective against fire resistance or immunity (making Overcome Resistance redundant, by the way). (+0.75)

Your hp pool is decent, and your AC should be good (although it's difficult to know which equipment/buffs you'll have on at any given time). Your Fort is mediocre and your Ref is low, but your Will is good and you have extended Mass Conviction. Speaking of, you've got a nice array of defensive buffs in your prepared spells, which both you and your theoretical party members will appreciate. (+0.25)

In terms of utility, Knowledge (arcana) and Spellcraft are sometimes useful. Familiars are useful, although you may find that a permanent damage aura prevents you from using your bat in some situations where you normally could. Your spells are set up to let you fill the role of party medic, as well as providing some handy divinations. And, of course, you can potentially prepare different spells to suit your needs. (+0.25)

Overall: 4.25

Spoiler: Elegance

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Maximise Spell explicitly states that that's not how it combines with Empower Spell. Similarly, Empower Spell would not apply to the bonus damage from Blistering Spell, since while it is numeric, it's not variable. It's not a question of order. (-1)

"The heightened spell is as difficult to prepare and cast as a spell of its effective level." It's generally accepted that you can't reduce the cost of Heighten Spell. Or, technically, you can, but if you heighten a 3rd level spell to 9th level, then reduce the cost until it's a 3rd level spell again, its effective level is 3rd, making it a rather pointless exercise. (-0.25)

Overall: 3.75

Spoiler: Use of the Secret Ingredient

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Persistent Corona of Fire is all the fire you have, but all of your feats go towards it, one way or another. (+0.5)

A permanent 20 ft aura of fire is pretty great thematically, although Invisible Spell could be argued to count against you here, and the fact that it's only fire because of Energy Substitution is a negative. (+0.5)

Overall: 4

Total: 15.75

Spoiler: Aara

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Spoiler: Originality

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Human, bleh. (-0.5)

The concept here is essentially just "fire themed spellcaster". That said, you've got some unusual feats, and overall I like your take on it. (+0.25)

I don't know whether to give you a bonus or a penalty for that name, good grief. Your backstory is great, although it does have the same minor flaw as (weirdly) many of the better backstories in build contests seem to - the better part of it is the backstory for a different character than the one you wrote your entry about. (+0.5)

Overall: 3.25

Spoiler: Power

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You're pretty good with fire spells, huh? Not just reaching, but actually exceeding the damage cap of Fireball is pretty impressive in an E6 environment, not to mention getting 2 rays out of Scorching Ray. Fiery Burst means you're never going to run out of fire, and Counterfire will give you some extra damage sometimes. You've diversified your damage types, although it's less useful for you as a prepared caster than it would be if you could change on the fly. And, of course, there's whatever other spells you know/prepare. (+0.5)

Defensively, you don't have a lot of hp, and your AC is terrible (presumably you're using Mage Armor, but you didn't say). Your Fort and Ref are both low, and your Will is average. Classic squishy wizard. (-0.75)

Outside of combat, you're the party encyclopedia. And, of course, there's the untapped potential utility of 6 levels of wizard casting. I guess, based on your backstory, you know Lesser Creation? Except that's not possible, it's 4th-level. I know I'm harping on about this, but I like this entry, and it saddens me to see you leaving points on the table. (-0.25)

Overall: 2.5

Spoiler: Elegance

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You forgot to write down your Wisdom score? I also don't know if the stats you've given include racial modifiers and the level 4 increase or not (based on skill points, I'm guessing not). (-1)

Lesser planetouched is a campaign variant. (-0.25)

Where in Calimshan are you getting snow for all this Snowcasting from? Not to mention the rare frostfell herbs for Primitive Caster that you also don't have the ranks in Profession (herbalist) to find? Did Aara move to the Great Glacier or something? That seems like the sort of thing you should have mentioned in her backstory. (-0.25)

Genie Lore arguably only works for sorcerers. (-0.25)

You seem to be missing a spell list. Even ignoring the possibility of scribing scrolls, I only know 2 of the 15 spells you learned from levelling up. Considering how much work you put into your backstory, this is a disappointing omission. Even a snapshot of what you'd usually have prepared would go a long way. (-0.5)

Mastery of Ice and Fire is very much an Eberron-specific feat, on an otherwise entirely Forgotten Realms-based character. (-0.25)

Overall: 2.5

Spoiler: Use of the Secret Ingredient

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Fire genasi, fire feats that give you fire spells...there's a lot here that's on point. Diversifying your damage types, while obviously a good idea, does count against you here. I would really have preferred to see a full spell list. Technically, all the spells I know you have are fire themed, but you could easily have given me another 13 fiery spells for me to give you fire points for. (+0.5)

On the bright side, Spell Thematics means every spell you cast will be on theme (it's in the name). I almost feel bad awarding points for it, since it's such a gimme, but hey. You well and truly justified it in your backstory, too. (+1)

Overall: 4.5

Total: 12.75

[H_H_F_F]

Woah! Surprise judgement!

I'm always in favor of having more than one judge, but no hard feelings on my part if you decide to move on instead, Zaq. Just let me know.

[ciopo]

Thank you for judging, MinimanMidget!

@H_H_F_F : my personal preference would be to wait for your judging, always nice to get multiple impressions

[loky1109]

@H_H_F_F : my personal preference would be to wait for your judging, always nice to get multiple impressions

Totally agree!

MinimanMidget, thank you for judging!

Name	Alignment / Race	Class Levels	Chef	MinimanMidget	Total	Place
Blaise deForrest	?? Jermlaine	Planar Spiritual Connection Wildshape Ranger 6		12.25	12.25	6th
Carsus Tall	LG Lesser Aasimar	Paladin 6		12.50	12.50	5th
Charles M. Ander	CG Lesser Aasimar	Paladin of Freedom 4/Hit and Run Tactics Fighter 1/Master Thrower 1		11.50	11.50	8th
Firefist	CG Human	Ardent 2/Shaman 4		11.50	11.50	8th
Simon the Fire Lance	LN Human	Psychic Warrior 6		13.50	13.50	3rd
Spirit of Fire	LE Lesser Fire Gensai	Shugenja 6		12.00	12.00	7th
Steamy Romancer	NG Shalarin	Druid 1/Sorcerer 1/Cleric 3/Beastmaster 1		16.50	16.50	1st
Uanafaira Worldfire	CE Illumian	Cleric 5/Wizard 1		15.75	15.75	2nd
Aara	TN Human	Evoker 3/Master Specialist 3		12.75	12.75	4th

[MinimanMidget]

Is it alright to get some friends to help me with the judging process?

FWIW, I can't see any problem with collaborative judging, as long as it's consistent. If anything, having multiple people cross checking will probably yield better quality judgement.

Woah! Surprise judgement!

I'm always in favor of having more than one judge, but no hard feelings on my part if you decide to move on instead, Zaq. Just let me know.

I'd prefer to wait, personally - I judged because I finally had time, not because I wanted to move things along. If you've already started, it'd be a shame to waste the work.

[H_H_F_F]

Update: I'm making good progress. Slowly and surely getting there. Looking forward to reading your judgements when I'm done, Minimanmidget!

[H_H_F_F]

Update 2 (EB): Fully done with 6 of the entries. Half done with 2 that are giving me a real headache. haven't started on one.

[loky1109]

Thank you for update!

[Zaq]

I love that we're actually getting judges! I know this sounds terrible but I'd kiiiiind of almost given up? So I'm really glad to have some movement!

Feel free to speculate or make suggestions for the next ingredient, btw!

[MinimanMidget]

I love that we're actually getting judges! I know this sounds terrible but I'd kiiiiind of almost given up?

Sorry about that. I was planning to judge from the moment I didn't submit an entry, but I knew it would be a while before I had time, and I didn't want to (once again) be posting "I'm getting to it" messages for weeks on end.

Looking forward to reading your judgements when I'm done, Minimanmidget!

Same here! It's always great reading about all the things I missed.

Speaking of, are there really no disputes? This eerie silence is freaking me out a bit.

[H_H_F_F]

I love that we're actually getting judges! I know this sounds terrible but I'd kiiiiind of almost given up? So I'm really glad to have some movement!

Feel free to speculate or make suggestions for the next ingredient, btw!

I'd like to see something a bit more concrete next round, though those are obviously getting harder to come by. Signature weapon, perhaps?

Speaking of, are there really no disputes? This eerie silence is freaking me out a bit.

Haven't seen your judgement yet, but it's probably just THAT GOOD.

[H_H_F_F]

Judgement is here. Please, no posting before I post the second part.

I had a lot of fun reading your builds. I know I can sometime sound harsh, but I'm genuienly always proud of this community for all the effort we put in to our projects. Cheers!

Spoiler: Blaise deForrest

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Originality:

Desert wind was very expected here. Not using the actual maneuvers and stances, but the tactical feat… Hadn't thought of that. Nice touch, which also allowed you to approach it with a less expected class structure. You also picked a unique race, with good reasoning behind that pick – it's not just an originality trap.

A complete lack of fluff is something I penalize. I don't penalize fluff for being bad or short, but I do see fluff (whether that be a story or a snapshot) as part of a complete entry. Cool name though.

Grenadier and mad alchemist are very cool here, and your build has the action economy to use them. Is it strong? No, but it's certainly creative and well thought out. The rest… eh.

Overall though, a surprisingly creative take on the expected desert wind build.

Score: 3.5 points.


Power:

Let's start with the elephant in the room: Blaise is hot trash for his entire pre-epic career. Can't say that's not fitting for a fire round, but still. You throw a tiny sized spear, doing one point of damage if you hit. 2, potentially, once you get desert wind dodge. And that takes a lot of maneuvering to achieve, which might get you some AoOs. That's legitimately all you can do in combat for 3 entire levels. That's garbage, and having 1 ranger spell per day really isn't enough to fix it. You recommend a hand crossbow, but you're not proficient with that – and a light or heavy crossbow will fully kill your maneuverability.

Things get better for you with wildshape, but still. You're utter trash in combat, and offer shockingly little utility for your chassis. Hide and move silently + darkstalker would let you at least pass as a scout. Right now, at 3rd level, you're less useful than the sorcerer's owl familiar. The fact that medium size wild shape has helped you so much is less of a praise to wild shape and more of a condemnation of Blaise.

You start doing something only during your epic career. And that thing is pretty bad. You're pretty good at consistently (not as consistently as you think, though – see elegance) doing low damage to multiply semi-clumped foes. That's better than being pretty good at doing low damage to multiple very clumped foes once per day, but it's still a thoroughly unimpressive tactic for most combats. And during epic E6, even mooks shouldn't worry too much about 1d6 damage, guaranteed or no. The whole "no way to avoid it" would be more impressive if the damage had some rider effect, but as is it's just not that much. The "as a move (+swift) action" part would be far more impressive if you were a warblade or something. As is, your standard actions are trash (even if colder trash once mad alchemist comes along), so having them at your disposal isn't that important.

As for the rest of your epic feats… they feel more than a bit like a grab bag of "I don't know what to do with so many feats". Keen eared scout and Quick Reconnoiter are nice I guess, and though mad alchemist isn't great, it sees investment. Skill focus is fine. Swift tumbler we'll talk about in Elegance. Mobility – come on. You try to justify it, but the odds of you tumbling past a 5th enemy and rolling a 1 are very low. It's there to qualify for Elusive Target.

Elusive Target is one of my favorite feats in the entirety of 3.5. It's fun, it's unique, it has a classic swashbuckling feel. It's also utterly useless on blaze. 2 of its tactical options rely on designating an opponent with dodge, which you cannot do, because you don't have a dodge feat that designates opponent. The third option relies on someone making an AoO against you – the thing your entire build is focused on avoiding. If you do fail a tumble check, and you are attacked and missed, you get to try a trip attempt. A trip attempt. You're tiny and have a Strength score of 5. What are you going to trip? An ant? Two completely dead feats.

Overall, I'm not going to say that having access to wild shape and having good sensory options is bad, and your defenses are mostly pretty good. But this build simply does not do enough to justify even a modest score here.

Score: 1.25 points.


Elegance:

1 class means you can't have really messy level progression or multiclass penalties, so that's good – but I don't belong to the school of thought saying simplicity=elegance. I do like that you've found something to do with a standard action, even if it takes a while to develop, given the swift+move action requirement for your main trick. I like the planar ranger pick for a planar touchstone feat without losing BaB. I think your minimal Cha score should be 2, not 4, but that's unimportant.

However, ranger doesn't have tumble as a class skill. It's solvable with skilled city dweller, so it doesn't fully make your build dysfunctional, but that's certainly a penalty from me. You might want to come back at me with "obviously I used SCD, I just forgot to note it", but that's a can of worms I'm not willing to open. I'm judging Blaise as submitted.

Speaking of tumble, saying "I took a feat that does who knows what because the designer probably intended it to do something" is… bad. You're taking language that does not surely work, gesture vaguely in the air and say "let your DM homebrew something nice here for you". Really Not a fan. You're not even willing to offer an interpretation of what the feat does.

You don't qualify for keen eared scout. It requires skill focus (listen), which you do not have. Penalty, as always. Qualify for you stuff, friends.

As for what you do with Scorching Sirocco… Read ToB p.43 on stances. While in a stance, you can use a swift action to end your current stance and swap to another, or simply to end your current stance without entering another. Nothing here lets you enter the same stance you're already in, and it's a swift action to drop it. You can't do it turn by turn, there's always going to be a dead turn between uses. That'd be solvable with another stance, and you have the feats to spare – but unlike some disciplines, desert wind only has one first level stance, and you don't have the IL to go for Holocaust Cloak (****ing hate that name.) You should've been a warblade. For more than this reason, but for this reason especially.

Overall, a fairly elegant build at the core plagued by rules issues.

Score: 1.75 points.


UoSI:

You approach the theme from a couple of different directions. You can do fire damage throughout the day. You're built around maximizing the efficiency of delivering that damage. Doing fire damage is one of your more efficient options in certain situations, even if only by virtue of sucking otherwise. Most importantly, it's not coincidental to your build – the "move action guaranteed damage to everybody" had to be fire.

However, you kind of lose focus once you get scorching sirocco. More significantly, you don't really USE the SI. You find your way to do fire damage, but it's hard for me to get an answer on why. What did that let you do? Assured damage, sure, but that's hardly ever important. If you ever face extraordinarily high-AC, high-saves, low-hp foe – yeah, having guaranteed damage helps. If you had some standard action that relied on your foes being damaged that round, that would've been a 5 here. As is, it's hard to see what you actually gain from going this route.

You do shine on "other fire stuff" though with mad alchemist, and you do have a fire-related maneuver. That counts for something.

Score: 3.6 points.


Total Score: 10.1 points. You found something neat here, but failed to make an impact, and was unfortunately still in the ballpark of expected approaches. You also were not vigilant enough when it came to rules and errors, and it cost you greatly here. Better luck next time!

Spoiler: Carsus Tall

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Originality:

Okay. So, I knew about Diablo material, but only because you've told me about it, and I've never examined this book. I can hardly say that I saw this coming. Lesser Aasimar shows up often, but here you're looking for far more than cheap ability score improvements, and you apparently have a fluff justification too. I'm going to resist my urges and not do a deep dive on Diablo lore to determine how faithful that is. Let's try to submit this judgement before Christmas.

You've created a strongly evocative concept, and your fluff is nice. The unfamiliar class has also led you to an unfamiliar optimization path, with your focus on Cha checks. The focus on the angel theme through your feats is nice, mechanically works, and isn't expected.

Overall, unique approach with a lot of unfamiliar material. Well done.

Score: 4.75 points.


Power:

Flight is excellent, but it takes long to develop. You have 13 Str and no relevant feats, so even though you can basically function in combat, you're not going to be anything special. Even one more point in Str would've benefited you greatly here, as someone who can afford being on the frontline. Diplomacy, however, starts off strong and keeps being strong throughout your career. It's a real asset.

Up until E1, you're at risk for losing each of your class abilities for an entire day with a bad roll. Not that those class abilities are anything to right home about. The combination of sacrifice and prayer is nice once you hit that +12 to Cha checks, and even before that. Prayer in general is a fine resource to have once you hit that benchmark, and you're getting credit for that. Might, on the other hand, is utterly worthless. Standard action activation, 1 round duration? You won't be using that, it's just a prereq.

Thorns, on the other hand, is situationally pretty awesome. Very situational, but still. Not bad for a standard action, under the right circumstances. Depends on what your DM decides "special damage" is and isn't. Christ, this book.

Holy fire is what you're here for, but it's just not very good. You're able to do it while hovering above your enemies, which is great, but it's 2d6 damage. If you're looking for damage delivery, you'd be better off full attacking with a greatsword and using sacrifice – and that's despite your 13 Str. Again, like with blaze – guaranteed damage would be more impressive if you had something to do with it, or if it allowed you to do something that'd normally trash your ability to hit people.

Searing light is alright to have, but it's very much a nova option and doesn't have that much utility overall. Holy radiance… you took that for thematic reasons (which, respect) but it doesn't really do you much good here. Light to daylight is weird to me – if you thought that'd get you more uses of searing light, I have to disagree. The benefit text clearly states "once per day" separately from "usage of your light or daylight".

Overall, this build can still play pretty functionally as a warrior, and is an excellent diplomancer – but it falls short of becoming an impressive combatant

Score: 2.25 points.


Elegance:

This book is making me take back everything I ever said about WoTC editing being trash. This is trash editing. I won't be penalizing you for using this source, of course, but I am penalizing you for thorns being a mess and for armor proficiencies being a mess. Essentially, I'm penalizing you for taking absolutely unclear rules and gesturing at the DM to make a judgement call. That's not illegal, but it is inelegant.

You're getting a penalty for hefty cross-setting materials. You're also getting a penalty for a lacking build explanation section. You've given me the math behind holy fire, and your fly speed – but that's pretty much it. What does Carsus look like before holy fire comes online? What's happening with E4-E7? I'm not asking because I need you to clarify it in a response, but because it should've been laid out to begin with.

Other than that… I don't see any qualification or rules issues, other than heavy armor which was already discussed. On the other hand, I don't see any clever mechanical synergy either. Simple, yes – but to me, simplicity does not necessarily equal elegance. Overall, this build has few issues, but little to offer in this category.

Score: 2.5 points.


UoSI:

So, guaranteed consistent fire damage is a decent starting point. You gain some use of it by having access to range, which is complmented by your flight. Is it significantly better than archery? I think it could've been far more remarkable with flyby attack, given your speed and the fact that you don't need a full round action, but it's a decent use as is. Searing light gives you another, more impactful, fire option – but it is very much a nova, once a day.

You've spent a lot of effort on all sorts of thematic and utility choices, but you hadn't succeeded in capitalizing on holy fire in any way. I wonder whether there's a feat or class level you could have that'd make that more impactful. You're getting a nod for your fire-adgecent light stuff here.

Overall, you achieved the baseline but failed to develop it into something interesting.


Score: 2.6 points.


Total Score: 12.1 points. My vote for HM

Spoiler: Charles M. Ander

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Originality:

Your stub isn't doing you a lot of favors here. Lesser Aasimar DoB Paladin of freedom is making me yawn as I type it down. Heart dragonborn is also pretty boring in this competition. So, the base is pretty expected.

I cannot in good conscience say the same about what you built upon that base though. This is weird as hell, which is excellent for you in this category. Going for Charmander is also nice.

And then, just when I'm ready to like you here… Persistomancy. Most well known and most boring unoriginal cheese in the world. Heavily penalized here.

So, to sum up, you use an extremely conventional base to open up a very unconventional casting progression to support with extremely conventional cheese to achieve an unconventional goal.

Overall: What?

Score: 3 points.


Power:

Spoiler for elegance: unfortunately, most of what this very cool build is trying to do utterly and completely fails to work. This always presents a conundrum in this category. I don't want to double penalize you, naturally. I also never want to recognize illegal tactics as counting for power (the "I have infinite wishes from my commoner level" strategy). That's easier to deal with when a thing the build tries to do doesn't work, and always harder to deal with when the build itself doesn't work at all.

If we recognize everything that's problematic here, but don't let the strictly illegal stuff work… Well, this build stops making sense, but let's try our best to be generous here. We can imagine this as a paladin multithrowing build. Lack of heavy armor hurts real bad here, when conjoined with your lower constitution and lack of martial prowess.

You did offer an alternative that you'd pick here once everything fails with weapon focus dagger. I don't get how you claim to swap practiced spellcaster later, but whatever. Maybe you meant arcane disciple. Point is, we could see this is a nearly ok build throwing lots of daggers at people or fighting up close.

Small note: taking extra turning after persist and DMM was a mistake. They don't work without it, but it can help (extremely situationally, but still) without them.

Score: 1.5 points.


Elegance:

As you know, 2 flaws make for a really rough start here.

Saying the dragonscale husk ACF is not terrible in E6 assumes that this ACF is at all intelligible. Which, it obviously isn't otherwise you wouldn't've (What the hell did I just type, is that an actual valid way to write this?) managed to get it so wrong. First thing first, you can't sacrifice your heavy armor prof from fighter without gaining armor prof, which would disqualify you from husk. Second, and more importantly, you can't take that ACF because you don't have the dragonblood subtype until E10. So, as written, this build just walks around in light armor for no reason. Not awesome.

Qualifying for master thrower with WF on ranged spells does work, and is awesome. Great catch. However, you don't accomplish much with that detail. Palm throw's language explicitly locks you to a "mother may I" situation with the DM, and you don't really have a good case on that front at all. I'm not sure why you went for that one at all – two with one blow is excellent on a touch attack, trip throw is always good – you have plenty of options to go for that don't require DM adjudication.

The feat-swap, however… very hard pill to swallow. You're ordering everything in a way that could work, but this tower of card collapses if I refuse to recognize that it goes loss-replacement-loss-replacement and not losses-replacements. It also collapses if I say ability scores take precedent. It's a big issue here, and your interpretation seems just about the least solid to me – even if I do respect the hassle.

Versatile spellcaster references spells you know, which makes it iffy to use here. You qualify, no question, but can you use it?

You implied all the fire domain spells are automatically inscribed on your spellbook. They aren't – you still need to inscribe them normally, they just get added to your class list of spells, and you can inscribe them as would be normal for you. Speaking of which…

Live by the RAW, die by the RAW. You're being very cute here, but you're not a wizard, and any information on inscribing new spells to your spellbook is wizard specific. You prepare your spells exactly as a wizard does, and you cast your spells as instructed, but nothing gives you the ability to inscribe spells as a wizard does. You also don't have a class spell list you can add those to, save for the paladin list, which isn't clearly arcane even with SaTO in that context – and inscribing spells on a spellbook isn't how you get access to 2nd level paladin spells. Either way, I'd rule SaTO spells being divine, not arcane. I can see a case for them still being divine, even if I disagree. You know what I can't see a case for? Them being both divine (DMMP) and arcane (AD) at the same time. No matter which case I think is stronger, you can't make both cases at the same time. Completely dysfunctional.

Losing magical training and keeping your spellbook. Losing arcane disciple and keeping the spells. I've had one of these arguments before, and was not on the side you're taking. If you lose a feat, you lose its benefits. You can fluff it however you want. "But I already got the spellbook/spells! I'm not using the feat, I'm using the spells I've already inscribed on the spellbook I already got!"
Nope. Same could be said for taking open minded. "I'm not using the 5 skill points, I'm using the ranks I bought with them!" Weapon proficiency "I'm not using my ability to choose an exotic weapon to be proficient with, just the proficiency I already got!" could be used on nearly any feat in the game. Does not work. Even if I did buy it, I could always tell you that the spells are still inscribed, on the spellbook you still have and can use, but they're no longer on your class list so you can't cast them.

Overall, at the end of the day, too much of this build doesn't work – enough so that it absolutely stops making sense at all if we ignore all the illegal stuff. That means I have to put the hammer down and call this build [color=red]ILLEGAL[/red]. Sorry.

Score: 0 points.


UoSI:

All of this… for valiant attempt credit on produce flames?

Yeah, I don't have much to say. If any of this would've come close to working, it'd be nice. You could score a semi-decent score here

Score: 1.5 points.


Total Score: 6 points. Extremely fun attempt, of which I'm a fan. Burning down in a fiery blaze of glory is better than dying in moderate anonymity, and is certainly fitting for this round!

Spoiler: Firefist

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Originality:

Well, as you know there's a little penalty for me when there's no fluff – even if you did use it for kindling. Sorry about that.

I was wondering if someone would try to make fire devotion good. I've also had my eye on that mind's eye article lately for various reasons, so I did see fire mantle as an option – even if that's not really what you ended up using. However, I did imagine a TWFer for the one and a psionic blaster for the other – and you use both, and do neither. Shaman is fun and a more interesting choice here than cleric, and you have justification for it.

Human is never surprising, but other than that I can't say that I see any very obvious choices here at all. Pyro is a very cool feat that provides the core you build around. The way you build around it is full of little surprises. There is no one big unifying concept that blows me away here – just the relentless march of little creative choices to make the already creative Pyro pick more effective. Circle kick, mortalbane, AoO investment. Clever.

Overall, very good stuff.

Score: 4.5 points.


Power:

Split focus between powers and spellcasting makes both not really shine. ~15pp is nice to have, though, and you have good powers and spells on hand – especially once E1 comes in.

Multiturn, limited/day SLAs such as fire devotion are an excellent use of mortalbane. It doesn't work on everyone, of course, and lack of investment in knowledge skills (other than architecture, lol) means you might gimp yourself against enemies that don't really broadcast their type – but overall, this functions as an excellent damage multiplier. It was used very inefficiently last I saw it, so I'm glad to get a glimpse of how it functions when it is used well.

Your main trick mostly work, though its damage is lower than you presented, and you're kind of wasting a lot of resources here on not-quite-dead feats. See elegance. Still, it's pretty decent damage + action economy burden you're doing there. Nice!

Standstill+control-flames is cute. Like a lot of your AoO based tactics, though, I'm somewhat concerned with enemies preferring to just end you, with your low Con and low hit dice. Heavy armor proficiency is very impactful here – my mind initially assumed you were not wearing armor, just because I'm preconditioned to imagine any unarmed character as unarmored, too. Still, you're not as likely to get a lot of enemies provoking as we want you to be, I think.

You're in a somewhat awkward position in relation to your psionic focus: You've jumped through a 3 feat hoop (not terrible feats for you, but still) to get to use lava – but that counteracts your mantle granted powers, both of which you feature quite intensely.

Finally, I feel like your to-hit is too low for what you're doing. Weapon finesse would've helped you.

Overall, this build can pile on an ok amount of damage, annoy enemies, has a couple of ways to deal with multiple enemies and has good access to lower level casting to support it. It is also going to occasionally struggle melee survival, and is going to have a very hard time dealing with high-AC foes.

Score: 3.3 points.


Elegance:

Here's the thing: for you (for most if we're being honest) the elemental mantles are a straight-up nerf to the original Elements mantle. I'm mentioning it here, in elegance, because the fire mantle doesn't have elemental steward, which would make it an illegal choice. However, your breakdown does say "elemental mantle". Which, you know, isn't a mantle. But given context, we're going to assume that you meant the elements mantle, thought about moving to the fire mantle, and that you accidentally forgot to change back the table when you figured out fire removed elemental steward so you're back at the elements mantle. So, penalty for having the wrong info, but other than that you're fine.

I don't really buy the interpretation that fire devotion does 1d4+1d6. I don't think that's RAI, if that's the argument you're trying to make with "additional" – which references the original fire damage from the hit, not the damage from being on fire, in my opinion. If you're trying to make a RAW case – you'd need it to explicitly say the target catches on fire. "Ignite" isn't a keyword, and doesn't make a case for you here. It's just 1d4. The fact that this isn't the "catching on fire" rule taking action is further evidenced by only needing a move action for dousing yourself. Being caught on fire (which you CAN inflict by sundering clothing) has to roll on the ground only to make a second save with a +4. Much better debuff. It also stacks with burning after being ignited.

Unfortunately, you can't sunder armor, so this only works on enemies who have clothing.

As for the domain feats: "Corresponding" is vague enough to make flame=fire work, maybe, but it's still far from being ironclad RAW. As for using your nature turns to fuel devotion feats: nah. I get what you're trying to do here (if you have ability to turn undead, for each turn use you expend… You have turn undead, you expend turn animals) but first of all, you really can't try to sell me on something like that in the same build in which you try and say it's reasonable to assume fire=flame. Second of all, this text is predicated on the general text establishing how domain feats work.

If you have the ability to turn or rebuke undead, you can gain additional daily uses of a domain feat's benefit by expending daily uses of that ability.

Pretty clear, in my opinion.

Mortalbane. Oof, that's a hard one. Reminds me of the "mind blade & empower supernatural ability" discussion I had with another chef in the Shining Blade round of IC. I'll say that it doesn’t work on Strength devotion for sure, as that is certainly not a damaging SLA – not moreseo than polymorph or haste. So that's another aspect of strength domain that causes problems here. As for fire devotion… Yeah, it's not very elegant by any means, as it relies on very imprecise language, but I'll say it works. Animal devotion – no, same as Strength devotion. Also, "fire damage" isn't a neutral word like "damage", which can indeed be applied to ability damage. Fire damage is a much more precise term, and it is always HP damage. So, no such thing as con-fire damage. I'm guessing part of the reason this is so late in the build is that you assumed this wouldn't work, though maybe you couldn't put your finger on precisely why.

This, combined with a lower turn pool than you assume, makes Strength devotion much less useful. It's still good when combined with sundering, but it has a higher cost and lower value. I guess it still helps by increasing your unarmed damage (which is stupid, but RAW I guess. Never thought about that. Nice catch. 100% unintended.) Also, just noting that even if I did accept mortalbane working on stuff granting you natural weapons, it could be said very coherently that Strength devotion combined with the bite actually ****s you over by forcing you to replace the excellent con damage with the (higher value damage) hp damage.

A sister discussion to mortalbane is control flame's relationship to privileged energy and paraelemental power. Is control flame a damaging power, or is it more akin to animate objects & elemental steward? No black&white answer here, IMO, but I think your interpretation will usually pass, and I'd let it fly in my games.

Circle kick and AoO. Doesn't work, IMO. If you're going for something like that, you ideally really want more precise language. Something using the word round, at least. Your reading of it is linguistically less valid than saying "I've full-attacked (once), so I get to use this feat (whenever I want)". But that's not a strong case either, because "This feat requires the full attack action" is one of the most imprecise phrasings I've ever seen. So, there's no clear RAW here to help you, and you don't present a real way to back up your reading. You just sort of vaguely wave your hand at the feat and say "imagine how clever you'd find me to be if this feat said it only works on rounds when I full attack! Why don't we just treat it like that's what it says?" And yeah, I would. With language that bad, however, we simply have to either ignore the feat or default to RAI (because there is no RAW), and that's crystal clear, and doesn't help you. This sort of kills a lot of the effort you've put in.

Overall, this build's main weak point here is trying to mix and match RAI, RAW and RDM (Reasonable Dungeon Master) instead of sticking to one of these options and it alone, something I find to be incredibly inelegant. Live by the RAW, die by the RAW. Sorry, pal.

Score: 1 point.


UoSI:

Good category for you. Even when I don't give you anything but valiant attempt credit for the stuff that doesn't work, the stuff that does work alone is good and diverse. You have a reason to want to do fire damage specifically – lighting people on fire for pyro, which is either sustained damage or an action-economy annoyance (or both).

You also have "a bit extra" for every single time you do fire damage, which encourages you to use your various fire options often. Having some of those is great – you've built some synergy between control flame and your aoo (though you'd have a hard time getting it to work, control flame being concentration) and having a multi-enemy option which you can augment when you need to is excellent. I'd like to see more fire-themed options with your spell choices, and I wish you would've devoted the peak of the build to something more sturdy, rules wise – but overall, good stuff with a bonus for valiant attempt for more.

Score: 4.25 points.


Total Score: 13.05 points. Nice one. I know telling you to write fluff is useless, but I will tell you to be less forgiving with your language. I think you could've found feats that would support what you can do if you weren't to rely on those that required an extremely liberal reading of the text.

[H_H_F_F]

Spoiler: Simon Firelance

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Originality:

Not that much to say here, honestly. This is a supremely cool build, going at it from an unexpected route, and using a lot of archery feats I wouldn't have thought would show up in this round. It's not anything I've never seen before – "psionic archer" is not a foreign concept – but in this context, and with this particular twist, it's very cool.

I do question your choice of going human just to take prodigy. Going for most psionic races would've given you around the same amount of pp (Twice as much for kalashtar) and would've given you interesting tools and a less boring racial choice. Human is something I'm not a big fan of in this category, and in your case it really wasn't that hard to avoid.

Extend range is cute.

Score: 4.35 points.


Power:

Having 8d6 damage on a touch attack at your access at level 1 is huge. You're going to be trash at hitting at first, and it's a 1 round prep time, but that blows anything other characters of your level should be able to do out of the water. ~28 damage on a ranged touch attack, repeatable for enough rounds to last a full combat, is bonkers.

This impressive start doesn't really scale, obviously. With minutes per level, you could afford to spend 1 pp to manifest it at its unaugmented form when you suspect combat might ensue, but other than that – leveling doesn't really do that much for you. Maybe I'd be more impressed with it if you found some +1 enhancement that really helped you here, so you could use the augment. Without that… Soulbond isn't doing that much for you. We'll discuss it in Elegance.

Rapid shot is the main gamechanger here, and it comes very late. I do think that with a base damage of 8d6, you sort of got your priorities wrong going for psionic shot before rapid/precise shot. Psionic shot makes for a 25% increase in damage sometimes. That's nice to have, but it doesn't compare to doubling your rate of fire or avoiding a very common penalty.

Ammo will sometimes be an issue, but you'll always get 3 shots at the very least. Any more than 12 and you'd have to reload, but if you hadn't managed to fisnish combat after doing up to 96d6, you're not going to finish it alive.

Your powers are nice, but your action economy makes some of them harder to use. You're already spending the first round of combat by summoning your weapon 90% of the time. Vigor, force screen, wall walker – all good powers, but you'll often have a very hard time bringing them to bear.

I'm heavily questioning your choice of devoting two feats to getting plate armor during E3 and E4. Avoiding item reliance is one thing, but at this point, affording and finding plate is just obvious. Devoting two feats to that cause fees less like you want to make sure you have the armor you need, and more like you just don't know what to do with so many feats.

Overall, this build starts off incredibly strong, but doesn't manage to keep up. The difference in fire power between level 1 and level 6 is nigh-negligible, and many of your powers fail to make an impact in combats when you're not free to buff at your leisure. E1 represents a big boost in power, even if it should've come sooner, and you remain a real and potent threat throughout your career. Could've easily been a 5 with better pacing of feats and a couple different decision points. Still very powerful.

Score: 4.4 points.


Elegance:

So, I have this judging tool I use. I call it "Live by the RAW, die by the RAW." If your build is trying to pull off RAW shenanigans on me, don't expect me to say "well, no reasonable DM would rule like that" if another piece of dumb RAW screws you over. So I was totally ready to tear you apart upon reading the rule which you actually quoted:

If you call a projectile weapon, it comes with 3d6 nonmagical bolts, arrows, or sling bullets, as appropriate.

Do you see power packs and their charges mentioned anywhere here? Because I sure don't. It comes with bolts, arrows, or sling bullets.

But the thing is… Upon reflection, you're not actually pulling weird RAW nonsense on me. This is perfectly in line with what the power was meant to do, much more so than a freaking trebuchet. Did the designers of temple of the frog consider the fact that this weapon could be manufactured again? No, but that's not on you, is it? Everything you do is within RAW and RAI, and uses no weird readings of anything involved. You even provided sensible fluff to explain how one could come to know of the heavy blaster.

So you're still getting penalized here for appealing to RAI when RAW clearly doesn't go your way – but given the rest of your build never goes anywhere nonsensical, that’s not enough for me to say "it doesn't work" and kill your build here. We're going to assume that you're getting a power pack (or two, depending on the roll) with 3d6 charges every time you use your power.

Let's keep going with the rest of the build. You don't qualify for EWP at level 1. You'd have to swap it with PBS, as Zen Archery also has a +1 BaB prereq. This is actually a pretty catastrophic DQ, for one that's relatively fixable: not being proficient with your chosen weapon until like, level 5, is terrible.

Another way to solve this issue connects to my complaint earlier in power. You could solve it by just not going for soulbond weapon. Call weaponry does the heavy lifting here. Imagine this build without soulbond: it's -1 to hit from lacking WF, and another -1 from level 4 onwards for losing the free enhancement bonus (less important to you because you don't worry about DR/ magic.) Take PBS as your bonus feat at 1, alongside vigor. Bring EWP at 2, alongside call weaponry, and Zen archery at 3. rapid shot at 5, precise shot at 6. This build is very feat starved (early in its career, not late) and you're wasting a feat on weapon focus, because it's a call weaponry build so you automatically assumed soulbond was the way to go. It's really not.

You didn't source extend range. Took me a couple of minutes to figure out where it was from and what it does. Other than these issues, this build is pretty simple, which is good. I like hustle+psionic meditation on a build that gets value not only from expending focus, but also from maintaining it.

Overall, a decently elegant build with a couple of serious issues.

Score: 2.4 points.


UoSI:

So, this category starts off excellent for you. You've found a way to reliably do fire damage, and you have a real reason to want it – it's insane damage early on, not accessible with any other damage type. So far, great.

However, you simply do not build much upon this concept. You look like you do; you manifest the power by being the psychic warrior specializing in that power, you take 6 levels, feats, you make it all feel necessary. But… at the end of the day, this is only marginally better at doing your trick than a high-Dex synad fighter with hidden talent, and it takes a lot longer to pan out. That synad fighter can summon the gun and be proficient with it at first level, using an 18 in the relevant ability score. They can get rapid shot by level 3. They have better to-hit. They can summon it for up to 5 combats a day, 4 if they do one of them as a swift action. All in all, they have a real case for being overall better than you are at this (when considering the fact that early levels exist too, I mean), while investing 2 feats, a racial choice, and not a single level.

This is not to say that this should've been "this build I came up with". This is simply to say that at the end of the day, all you have to offer is call weaponry and EWP with this weird weapon you've found. That's it. It's a very neat trick, and an excellent use of fire damage, but everything else is peripheral.

That is not to say that you didn't invest in it further. Extend range and psionic shot are both nice picks here, and both enhance your firepower by relying on the fact that you're already a psionic character. Excellent. You could've gone for greater psionic shot if you were to go for Kalashtar Psychic warrior 4/ full BaB 2, but you were very locked in on maxing out PP at any cost. Archery feats are a given in this context, and even most of your defensive feats are ones accessible only to a psionic character, which again – you had to be for your trick to work, so it's better than generic feats.

But still – Most of this character's focus on fire comes from a single 1st level power. Take away 1 power and 1 feat, and this build makes just as much sense as a generic psionic archery build. It'd be perfectly functional, but have nothing to do with fire. That's not what you want.

Overall, one insanely good find that'd get you a 5 here in a heartbeat if you would've found a way to build on it in a way that relied on it being fire. You could also grab a better score here simply by having more fire around the periphery of the build.

Score: 3.75 points.


Total Score: 14.9 points. If I ever play in an optimization-friendly level 1 oneshot, I'll ask the DM if call weaponry brings other types of ammunition. If they say yes, I'm bringing in a synad fighter with 2 flaws for rapid shot. You've found something truly cool here.

Spoiler: Spirit of Fire

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Originality:

Theme is very strong here, and earns you some credit. I didn't think anyone would go Shugenja. Lesser fire genasi is cute, but I've covered that in theme, and mechanically it offers worse than nothing to the build, so I can't congratulate you too much for a clever find here.

Spell choice is trivial, feats are mostly uninteresting. You're getting a boost for armor proficiency here. Wow.

Score: 3.1 points.


Power:

You know, my body recoiled against you taking light armor proficiency, but… Yeah, it's a fine choice here, even if I feel weird just from saying that. You had no obvious way to reach Shugenja 3rds while getting better armor proficiencies. If there is a prc you can sensibly enter at 5 which'd advance your casting and give you full armor proficiency, I haven't found it on a cursory glance.

Anyway, as for the actual build: I don't follow. Maybe it has to do with the lack of a build breakdown, which we'll talk about in elegance, and maybe it doesn't, and the build is just flawed, but – I don't get these feats at all here. Sure, they're thematic, but – to paraphrase our Chairman – what do they DO? You have a bunch of metamagic feats, most of them having to do with fire, none of them very clearly more useful to you than just casting a higher level spell. You can accelerate a couple of them, which would help if you wanted to move a flaming sphere while casting another spell, I guess. But why these, specifically? Do you do anything interesting I'm missing with a non-lethal transdimensional burning hands?

I'm sad to say that I don't think so. Theme is cool and all, but it's more fun when it actually supports something valid the build does. It doesn't have to be good, necessarily, but you should have at least one more reason to take a feat than "it has fire in it". Same for taking a Cha caster for a Cha penalty race. WHY?

Other than epic feats… Cute blaster. Would've been more impressive to pile all of this metamagic on an arcane thesis or two, I think, or to attempt any means at all of increasing your blasting power outside of Bloodline of Fire and fiery burst. Having metamagic flexibility as your top goal to achieve on such a limited caster was a bad move, in my opinion. Searing light is the only offensive spell you have which really enjoys your increased CL, and you can't use any of your metamagic on it.

Iaijutsu: okay. I mean, what? Sure, why not. I'm not giving you any credit for it because like… what?

Overall, this is a slow-burn blaster that barely improves during its entire epic career. Full casters are pretty much the only thing in the world you can mess up this bad and still get a semi-decent score on – you have access to flight, some decent damage when you need to, and flaming sphere + blasting is an okay move in E6.

Score: 2.25 points.


Elegance:

See, this is why I'm always pushing for people to carefully read through a past competition or two before submitting. I don't need you to reprint the text of every feat you take. I can look them up if you source them. That's a waste of your effort and time, which should've gone towards explaining what the hell you were doing.

Now, you have all your crunch and you've written a bit of fluff, so I'm going to try to be generous here and not give this build an auto-0 for being an incomplete entry. However, it came really close. Please try to do better on this front next time.

I don't see any qualification issues, but I'm seeing anti-synergy out the roof. So much dead space in this build. There's also the issue with using 31 pb (weird) and not noting your racial ability modifiers within your ability lines (slap on the wrist).

Overall, though it is very thematic, this build is very mechanically ugly in my view. It is made mostly of dead space and anti-synergy. Could've been just bad and not this bad if it had a tactical section of any kind.

Score: 1.4 points.


UoSI:

Fire Genasi Shugenja from the fire order using the fire element? That's commitment to a theme if I've ever seen such. Is it a good choice of order, given your element? No, but you're not interested in versatility. You're interested in fire. That's very nice to see here. But how well do you use said fire?

Well… eh. You support it mainly by virtue of having high CL with fire spells, and taking firey burst for tenacity. I don't think that's really necessary, with the amount of spells per day you have – but on the other hand, it's probably superior to produce flames here, so why not.

Quantity has a quality of its own, and you certainly have a lot of fire – even if all you have in the quality department is one feat, pretty much.

Score: 3.25 points.


Total Score: 10 points. This feels like a first-time submission, perhaps? If so: good first try! I really recommend looking over other builds in previous rounds of the competition. Get a feeling on how things are usually submitted. Theme is great, but this is an optimization competition: if the theme doesn't add up to anything in the end, it feels disappointing. Better luck next time!

Spoiler: Steamy Romancer

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Originality:

So, you know how each judge is affected by their existing experience? Other options on the field surprised me, but shared Balor Nimbus was very much something I had in mind, as it was heavily featured not too long ago on this very competition, in the first round I participated in. It was on my shortlist for "stuff we'll probably see this round", and I didn't feel like I was being creative coming up with it, given the circumstances. The only thing I didn't expect was going at it with a druid 1/ beastmaster 1 – and the only reason I didn't expect that was the fact that this was the exact approach taken by the original Balor Nimbus build, so I assumed you'd at least find a new direction to take it.

That's not to say that "sharing a spell with a familiar and an animal companion" is a bad thought, just that it's unoriginal to do so with this particular spell in this particular round of this particular competition.

Balor nimbus came alongside persistomancy, which is always going to be an enormous eyeroll from me in this category. Yeah, it's good, but it's also deeply unoriginal. The rest of your feats follow in line, either as part of the core concept (which was expected) or as obvious persistomancy feats for E6 (which is always expected).

Shalarin are a very cheesy race, and not in an interesting way; it's just cheap ability scores in exchange for being underwater. On the other hand, I can't say I've seen them discussed too much before, so we'll call it a wash. Same for cheesy animal companion.

Complete lack of fluff is something I always penalize here. Short is fine, bad is fine, but I see it as a part of a complete entry.

Overall, you started with an approach I expected, built it with expected ingredients, and then only built upon it by using the most unoriginal sort of cheese. I saw nothing new here. That was almost enough to bring you all the way down, but you picked a race I didn't penalize, so that’s good. Unfortunately, lack of fluff was just enough to completely kill this build.

Score: 1 point. Sorry, bud.


Power:

Really thought I had you here with spellcraft before I finished reading. Well done. We'll talk in elegance.

This build avoids too much of a rough start by having excellent ability modifiers and using high tier classes as your base. It's still a slow progress, but it's no "I survive with 4 hp, no animal companion and a +0 in my casting stat" druid, like some demented souls here have done recently. Other than your main trick, which only gets fully operational in E3, most of your stuff is usually somewhat under-leveled. It's not a terrible start, but without the main trick, it's a weak build.

Once that gets operational, however… It's pretty okay. It's not great by any means, but it's getting near good.

I'm sure your eyes are widening in disbelief as I say this, as your build is obviously extremely powerful. All day 54 damage *3. Excellent grappling modifiers. What's not to love? Is a 154 damage per round not enough for me?

Well, first thing first, you somewhat overestimate your damage.

An empowered, maximized spell gains the separate benefits of each feat: the maximum result plus one-half the normally rolled result.

So, around 46 damage on average, not 54. Not that much of a difference, I agree, just pointing it out. You're also vulnerable to dispelling, of course, especially with your trash CL – but while that is a reduction here, it's niche enough to not be a severe one. You should still be cruising on your way to 4.75 or something, right?

What does make much of a difference is the lack of improved grapple on you. You provoke an attack of opportunity when you attempt to grapple. Since you're explicitly going around casting Sorc spells, your AC can't be that high – and getting hit with the AoO means the grapple fails. Your octopus body has improved grab, but it only gets above +5 to grapple at E9, and even that's only when you manage to pre-buff with enlarge person, and it has to hit an attack first. It's +0 to grapple without that buff, which, come on. I'd say on the majority of rounds you two try this against level appropriate opponents, you both fail, and then you're getting dunked on, hard. When it works it's excellent damage, sure – but it really is far from being reliable enough. Yet another entry flunking due to forgetting something in the grappling rules. Tragic.

But wait! Maybe not *3, fine, but you still have the big guy. That's what we're all about here, right? The cheesy CR 7 animal companion. Huge size, gargantuan when buffed, another +6 by E10 – and it has snatch on a good attack bonus basis, so it isn't impeded by the AoO problem. Problem solved!

Well, it would be, if you could count on your companion being there more than 3% of the time. Who the hell picks an air-breather for their animal companion in an underwater campaign? Where are you trying to claim this campaign is happening, at the freaking beach?

I genuinely cannot fathom (heh) why you went this route. This seems insane to me. It can hold its breath for 4 and a half minutes before it starts making saves. That's not enough to dive to where you live, forget about actually adventuring alongside you. Multisnatch is also extremely stupid on an animal that only has a bite attack, but maybe you're relying on a cheesy reading of Girallon Arms. Besides, I'm too distracted to talk about that dead feat because the entire animal it's on is just… useless.

So, when everything is said and done, when your build is fully developed at E3, You have a pretty risky strategy that can result in around 93 damage per round, or half that in less successful turns, but is significantly more likely to end up in 0 against most level-appropriate oponnents – even if you had the round to prebuff. If you didn't, your chances are even worse. And ending up with 0 damage done means you have none of the normal defenses a mage can expect – chief of which being range, of course. You or your octopus are going to eat a full attack to the face.

Now, this isn't unfixable, but fixing it requires switching the animal companion – which isn't what you submitted, so, you know. However, even the fixes aren't great – I cannot find a huge aquatic animal companion, so not only are your numbers going to be significantly lower – snatch is out, which means we're back at the AoO conundrum. It's still a far higher chance of success than just you and your pus, especially considering the AoO will only be used against the biggest threat – but still, nowhere near as good as you thought it was, and a significantly later bloomer.

So, not terrible at all. High risk high reward, and with 3 rounds to buff or so it becomes somewhat more reliable if you're willing to spend the spell slots and become more of a nova. But it's not nearly as good as you think it is, and about half of the build's resources are utterly wasted as presented. Other than your core tactic you're pretty trash after level 1.

Overall, a very late-bloomer build which fails to make a significant enough impact once it blooms.

Score: 2.25 points.


Elegance:

Well, you're stuck underwater. You can't walk up until level 5, even that's for 3 hours a day, and you still can't breath – so it's a moot point anyway. Meaning, you've limited this character to only make sense in a strictly underwater campaign, which is far from the norm. I wasn't sure whether to penalize it here or in power, but decided that it makes more sense here. It wouldn't be fair to say "you're useless at all out of water situations, full 2 point deduction" for a build that isn't meant for a land campaign, so saying "you've made a build which only functions in 5% of possible campaigns, which is pretty darn inelegant" felt more fair. Besides, your power score has suffered enough, I think.

You don't have the cleanest level structure, which means you're not getting the "easy points for simplicity", and have to actually do clever things here. Multiclass penalties are something I ding here. Consider yourself dinged. You also don't speak common. Shalarin explicitly only speak aquan, and you have no additional languages from Int or skill ranks. Dinged again. You list all your sources (though you are getting a slap on the wrist for failing to mention that the dinosaur on the 7th level list came from Stormwrack; sent me book-diving), and everything else is fine – no DQs, no math errors I caught. I'm a big fan of how elaborate your build explanation is, without it becoming tedious.

Dodging out of taking steam magic with Balor Nimbus lacking the [fire] descriptor… Baller move. Clever, too. I was really trying to bust you there, but I can't. The sources are both in agreement, and I can't find a concrete definition of "nonmagical fire" anywhere – and the commonsense one would rule out Balor Nimbus. Very well done.

Another thing I liked is share soulmeld pulling double duty. It's not surprising, but it is elegant.

Hard disagree on non-undead turning being usable for DMM. "You can take the energy from turning or rebuking undead". This isn't some fluff text, this is the feat explaining how it works. The rest of the text references this paragraph, and assumes that you read "turn attempt" within context. It's like reading "them" somewhere and saying "That could be anyone!" when the first sentence is talking about your animal companion. Not RAW, not RAI, doesn't match the fluff of using negative or positive energy. Illegal. It's very good that you proposed a way out, and that you took extra turning and didn't rely on that reading for your core trick. No penalty due to that diligent book keeping.

Natural bond argument… A problematic reading, even if it is one I'm sympathetic to. "It wasn't the thing that brought my EDL above my HD, the new class did! And besides, my EDL for my Dino is 2!" Well, yeah, but we both have to admit it's hardly an ironclad case, even if I won't call it illegal and deny you the possibility. A penalty.

Overall – many issues, but enough cleverness to keep your head above the water.

Score: 2.65 points.


UoSI:

Strong category for you. The biggest tool in your arsenal is fire, it often makes sense to use, and your entire build is built around supporting and enhancing it. It's not a tool that would be accessible for you other than going for a fire option – there is no non-fire alternative to achieve what you've tried to achieve. You also get a nod for your secondary options, produce flame and drakken breath weapon. Produce flame is eh, and the breath weapon is utter trash – but they're there, and unlike what you probably imagined, you actually have a valid reason to use them, because your main tactic will often be simply out of the picture.

You don't have to many other "fire" things – could probably squeeze a slightly better score here with a different suggested spell list. You also didn't feature any reason to use fire in particular – if Nimbus did cold damage, your tactics would be completely unchanged – but that's a high bar to reach. Actual underwater fire, and not steam, is also very cool.

I'll also give you a tiny boost for fire vulnerability being more common under the sea.

Overall, good stuff.

Score: 4.1 points.


Total Score: 10 points. I liked this build a lot, even though I generally dislike persistomancy. Very cute idea, assuming that you were unaware of the aforementioned Balor Nimbus build. Terrible execution, though. Better luck next time!

Spoiler: Uanafaira Worldfire

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Originality:

This seems like a good place to explain my fluff policy. Your "lore blurb" could've been a story if you were willing to invest literally 2 more minutes into it.

My very first memory is of the fireplace in my father's house. Burning brightly, chasing away the shadow and cold, feeling the room with life. Ever moving, ever shifting. Beautiful. Through all hardship, through all doubt, that image was there. Burning away all other thoughts, letting me focus on that which we planned to achieve. We of the Ember Syndicate will have our wish.

Soon, all shall be fire.

Now, maybe that would've taken you an extra 5 minutes, and would've been worse than what I have here. Maybe you could do far better than that with 10 minutes. I don't know. Either way, it would make there be a character here, not just a leveling table. That’s all I'm asking for. I know it's not what you came here to do, but I don't feel like it's a lot – it's just a couple of minutes to do the bare minimum.

Anyway, Naenhoon persistomancy isn't any more original to me than DMM persistomancy. I'm not impressed with an Illumian pick in that context. Cleric/Wizard aren't classes one is ever surprised by. Energy transmutation I saw coming from a mile away, though I was concerned that folks will fail to justify it – but we'll talk about that in UoSI.

Your specific specialty spell choice is nice and interesting, though the rest your recommended spells are of course bog standard, and you don't even try to feature any interesting correlation between them and the rest of your build. Mainly "insert good spell here" stuff, unfortunately. You are getting a tiny boost here from making creature shiver uncontrollably as you burn them. That's pretty funny. Your use of invisible spell is similarly fun here and earns you another boost.

Overall: a nice central spell, but very expected and cheesy approach overall with too little done to make it truly unique. Get some fluff next time to save an easy 0.25 points.

Score: 1.45 points.


Power:

Straight cleric up to 5 is a very good start, even with your lowish Str. Having persist available at 3, and free empower once a day is good. I am genuinely weirded out by your approach to wizard and your high Dex here. Why not 17 Wis? You have heavy armor proficiency, you don't need to win initiative, you only really need high dex to shoot your crossbow. Do you really think that compares to your casting stat?

As is, you've decided to wear no armor and no shield (only from level 6 onward, I would hope?) so that you can cast wizard spells, and the spells you've decided to cast are… mage armor and shield? You can just wear armor and a shield, man. Significantly better AC, can't be dispelled, protects you for the full day instead of 1 hour/ 1 minute. You're in wizard for a familiar, for easy qualification to metamagic school focus, and you squeezed some extra use out of it with overcome resistance on your corona, which means you don't care about the vaccine have some utility up until E6 when you apply searing spell. You're not there for the spells, otherwise you'd pick something better than a CL 1 mage armor + shield. Just say you cast mage armor on your bat before donning your plate, and try to refresh it despite ASF later.

Anyway, aside from this baffling choice, you're doing pretty well for yourself. Half your main trick is completely illegal, of course, so that's sort of a hindrance – but it's hard for me to say that this is really such an unbelievably huge hit on your power. You're still a pretty capable T1 caster with access to third level spells, you still have access to a pretty good persisted spell that manages to provide a fine debuff alongside some damage.

Now, that spell is completely negated by a fortitude save. DMM heighten is a great assist here, for sure, but you're standing 10 from enemies with 13 AC – that's not always going to go great for you. Sudden widen is actually helpful here, but most creatures will still reach you with a charge even if they fail the save. Still, you're simply not tanky enough and have too little to do in melee for you to be able to really squeeze this aura for all it's worth. In plenty of cases, you'll decide that the enemy is too chunky, or has too much hp or movement speed, and will keep your distance.

You're also extremely unfriendly to your party, and widen is making things worse here. I personally think you should've built this character as good-aligned and taken purify spell. That'd mean that a good aligned party could still work with you, which would limit your choice of companions, but pretty reasonably so. As is, especially with invisible spell, you're a huge headache and often a liability.

Overall, obviously strong entry but with some glaring drawbacks that may not have been obvious to you.

Score: 4.25 points.


Elegance:

Clean leveling table, you qualify for everything, no multiclass penalties. Meditation domain is a nice catch, and functions as a free feat that you'd take anyway as a persistomancer. Metamagic spell focus is no news here, but it works well and you've tried to make the wiz dip work for you, which Ima all for. I'm again a big fan of how elaborate your build explanation is, without it becoming tedious. I do get the feeling that you might want some elaboration on half your main trick being illegal.

So, familiars can share spells you've cast on yourself. Corona of cold, however, is not a spell you cast on yourself. Its target is neither you, nor one creature, nor anything else. It has no target. It's a spell you cast that creates an emanation centered on you, but you are not the target of the spell. You haven't cast that spell on yourself more than you've cast burning hands on yourself. The fact that the spell emanates from the caster is completely non-consequential to this point. Spell isn't shared, your wizard level is sort of one giant waste that you've let swindle you out of your armor and Wis.

Ideal cleric to get whatever domains you like. Legal, but inelegant IMO. I think you pretty much agree with me on this. It's not a big penalty or anything, but it is a penalty nonetheless. DMM heighten magic… I've done it myself, and I've allowed it in power, but it's a penalty from me here for sure. It's a weird interaction, and it's not at all clear that it works.

Overall, this build has some serious issues but has just enough going for it to get a semi-decent score here.

Score: 2.35 points.


UoSI:

Well, let's start with the fact that despite renaming corona of cold, you don't actually have anything with fire/flame/heat whatever in its name. Minor point, but it's there. You also do absolutely nothing involving fire, with the exception of your main trick. And that's just a cold spell you've substituted.

You do consistently do fire damage throughout your day, and you did invest in being interested in it being fire specifically, I'll give you that – but even then, I'd say that in your particular case Flash Frost is significantly better than blistering spell, especially when combined with sudden widen. It provides much better protection as it greatly hinders charges, while the slowed movement over 20 ft will be enough to hinder a move action for many enemies. Better enough to make up for Piercing Cold covering less than searing spell.

In other words, I have a distinct feeling that if you were to submit this build as your entry to the signature spell round, for instance, you wouldn't even take energy substitution. Meaning, choosing fire over cold is a bad use of resources in this build. And that's not great for you in this category.

Score: 1.75 points.


Total Score: 9.8 points. I'm sorry to say this was probably my least favorite build this round. Fire felt completely coincidental to what you were doing, and that really turns me off in a submission. The scoring system made it turn out in the same ballpark as builds I liked a lot more, but if it was up to me it wouldn't be this way. However, it was very well presented, and was obviously thought out. Well done. I'm not saying any of this to disparage your work or get you down – just to encourage you to care more about the unique things about the SI in the future, which you've definitely shown you're capable of!

Spoiler: Aara

Show

Originality:

Your fluff is excellent as always, though I'd say that it fits a 3.5 game far better than an E6 game. Still, absolutely loved your take on a wizard academy here, even if the titular character wasn't as fleshed out as the setting itself.

Human Evoker isn't what I'd call a strong start here, however. Really wish you and spirit of fire would trade races here. You'd be fine without the bonus feat, and the ability modifiers would work in your favor. Master specialist isn't really interesting here to me – it's pretty much just evoker with slightly different feats before you get the esoterica making it special.

Snowcasting and energy substitution cheese has been discussed and optimized with to hell and back. Spell thematics isn't – you have some mechanical justification for it, I guess, and it makes for very nice flavor.

Overall though, aside from excellent fluff and a couple of obscure feats, this build is deeply expected.

Score: 1.5 points.


Power:

Straight up wizard with feats to do straight up wizardry better. Made it easy to get on your case in originality, but I really can't argue with it too much here without embarrassing myself.

Note: Increasing int to an odd number doesn't make sense in an E6 setting. There's no inherent bonus coming your way.

Calishíte elementalist also lets you break damage caps for spells it grants you

Well, you didn't explicitly call out what you mean, but I'd say the example given in text shows that it only increases the cap by 1: After all, an 11th level caster casting an elementalist spell has a CL of 12 for that spell. Just a note.

Anyway, you're a fully-fledged evoker with busted CL & increased range on anything you do as long as you have some snow, and on plenty you do when you don't. Nothing to see here, as far as I'm concerned.

Score: 5 points.


Elegance:

One of us is crazy here, because I swear that anywhere I look, Minor School Esoterica is a 4th level feature. You should be getting Greater school focus as a bonus feat in that level. You don't mention esoterica too much – but on the other hand, you're missing one feat (which you took anyway!) which only strengthens my point in originality that you didn't have to be human.

I find your playtips very lacking. You have something making you unique: your CL. The fact that I'm not getting a "favorite spells" list outside of your feats is outrageous. It's always a headache to do with prepared casters, but it should be done. I'm also not one to say "you need to list every spell". You can say, "normal spells, especially [list], which my build gets exceptional use from because of [X]." You should've shown me spells that really enjoyed being cast with inappropriate CL in E6, and you didn't.

Your ability scores are weird. I assume you have 12 Wis? Just a slap on the wrist here. I penalize cross setting material, so another slap on the wrist here for mastery and ice and fire for a realms character.

Counterfire doesn't do fire damage, and is limited to 4 times a day for you. I don't know what you're talking about.

Genie lore… I get what you're trying to say here, but I disagree. You're not casting sorcerer spells, or duskblade spells, or cleric spells, no matter whether or not they're on any of these lists. You're casting wizard spells. You could make this argument to take battle blessing on a cleric. I'm not buying it.

Overall, this was death by a thousand cuts.

Score: 1.55 points.


UoSI:

So, nothing groundbreaking here – but groundbreakingness was covered in originality. This is UoSI, and I have to say that you're doing very well here.

Lord of the uttercold is a disappointment here – I get why it's useful, but you should be doing fire, not cold.

Even so: everything you do looks like fire, most of it is fire, you can turn anything into fire, and most importantly: you have a mechanically valid reason to do so, because you’re an evocator, with access to plenty of scaling spells, and you manage to use fire to increase your CL. You do so very effectively, and even though some of it doesn't fully work, enough of it does for me to not really have any complaints in this category. This is how it's done.

Score: 4.65 points.


Total Score: 12.7 points. Generic approach, with a masterful execution on the macro scale – but plagued with issues when it comes down to the details.

And... that's that!

Well done again, everyone. I'm awaiting your disputes - though note the competitions rules on those, which are quite harsh!