Why all casting and manifesting PrCs should fully progress casting/manifesting

[Jervis]

I have wanted to play a spellsword.
They look like a potentially fun gish. being able to go around in full plate and cast spells, I want it just for that.

I mean with enough armor templates and special materials you can get fullplate with 0% ASF

[RandomPeasant]

Everyone is here arguing about the most broken classes in the game and meanwhile i’m just wondering is Prestige Paladin and Spellsword would see play if they were full casting classes.

Prestige Paladin would be a fine choice for a Cleric who wanted to be more martial but didn't want to DMM divine power. You can get in at 6th without giving anything up, and the stuff it offers is fine. It would be a pretty strong choice if your DM gives you all Paladin spells and lets you use them with Battle Blessing. One additional change I'd probably make is to remove the turning requirement as I think letting Favored Souls get into the class without any extra work is good.

Spellsword would be one of the many, many Gish PrCs you could make a case for after finishing Abjurant Champion. Reducing spell failure is nice, though more in terms of freeing up build resources than doing anything particularly novel (if you stack all the armor properties that reduce ASF, you can get 0% on pretty good armor already). Channel Spell gets you some action economy, though it's not nearly as good as Arcane Channeling.

Spellcasters aren't broken. Spells (a relative handful of spells, that is) are broken. If the only spells in the game were magic missile and light, no one would think casters were OP, or even P.

I broadly agree, but I do think there are some instances where you can point to spellcasters, particularly casting PrCs, as being broken (I just don't think they can be fixed by reducing people's casting progression). The thing where a Vermin Lord can take only things they automatically get from their class and cast as a 300th+ level Sorcerer is totally broken, and it's not because any individual spell is too good. Similarly, I think it's quite fair to say that something in the various "metamagic reducer + Personal buff + Persistent Spell" combos is broken, though identifying the exact issue is up for a lot of debate.

[Jervis]

Prestige Paladin would be a fine choice for a Cleric who wanted to be more martial but didn't want to DMM divine power. You can get in at 6th without giving anything up, and the stuff it offers is fine. It would be a pretty strong choice if your DM gives you all Paladin spells and lets you use them with Battle Blessing. One additional change I'd probably make is to remove the turning requirement as I think letting Favored Souls get into the class without any extra work is good.

Spellsword would be one of the many, many Gish PrCs you could make a case for after finishing Abjurant Champion. Reducing spell failure is nice, though more in terms of freeing up build resources than doing anything particularly novel (if you stack all the armor properties that reduce ASF, you can get 0% on pretty good armor already). Channel Spell gets you some action economy, though it's not nearly as good as Arcane Channeling.

That was a about what I first thought. I’m of the opinion that most (but admittedly not all in some weird cases) Gish PrCs pay for themselves with opportunity cost and feat taxes. If you’re putting in the work to get into them you don’t have as much room left for, say, metamagic cost reducers and the like. I was considering house ruling that most of the Gish PrCs give either full advancement or only loose 1 level up front in a upcoming home game. Granted it probably won’t make much of a difference one way or the other because my players never use my homebrew…

[sleepyphoenixx]

I broadly agree, but I do think there are some instances where you can point to spellcasters, particularly casting PrCs, as being broken (I just don't think they can be fixed by reducing people's casting progression). The thing where a Vermin Lord can take only things they automatically get from their class and cast as a 300th+ level Sorcerer is totally broken, and it's not because any individual spell is too good. Similarly, I think it's quite fair to say that something in the various "metamagic reducer + Personal buff + Persistent Spell" combos is broken, though identifying the exact issue is up for a lot of debate.

Everything is broken if you stack up enough of it. It's a natural consequence of the number of books 3.5 has.
I think that's really the main issue with balance (leaving aside stuff like Vermin Lord that definitely wasn't thought through properly) - most options are fine on their own, but very few of them were designed with anything but core in mind.

The game really doesn't handle it well when you use full book access to all-out optimize something, and that isn't limited to just magic (see: ubercharger).
Even Incantatrix, the essential OP class, isn't actually that OP unless you combine it with Persistent Spell (which is one of those "wasn't thought through properly" options imo) and a whole lot of spellcraft optimization.

Which is fine. The game can't assume that everyone has access to every book, and the DM looking over a build and vetoing things that aren't appropriate to the campaign is intended (and necessary either way).
That's something i think people need to remember more often.

I wouldn't be surprised if balance never came up as a major concern during development since one of the basic assumptions of the game is that you have someone right there to stop any abuse.
It's even mentioned explicitly in the "how to DM" section of the DMG.

[remetagross]

In situation B it can be worthwhile to sacrifice caster levels as caster levels are not always a primary concern. I am trying to use magic to enhance a character to be more effective. Get my warrior(type) character in a position where he can smack the flying dragon with his great sword for instance or have an easier time sneaking past some guards as a rogue character. Past a certain point in 3.X games multiclassing into something that can cast spells is almost always a necessity it feels like, just to avoid situations where your character can be shut out of an encounter by one trait of a monster.

I completely agree with this. When you play a gish, or a support caster like a Bard, you simply pick spells that do not allow for saves. Not all monsters have spell resistance, and Practised Spellcaster exists, so I find there is not much problem in picking spells that allow for spell resistance. So you pick buffs, battlefield control spells that make new stuff appear, light debuffs, etc. and you are perfectly happy with it, because all of this complements your other, main schtick. This is how Ruby Knight Vindicator is a perfectly fine PrC despite losing two caster levels, because you just use the spells to enhance your damage dealing potential as a martial initiator.

[Lans]

At that point I would start to question whether "the same tier as Incantatrix" was really a meaningful category. There aren't a lot of published full-casting PrCs I would put there. Dweomerkeeper. Shadowcraft Mage. Planar Shepherd. That sort of thing. A lot of the things in the "+2 tier" category in the PrC tier system are there because they have really weak entries, not because they are particularly objectively powerful. Warshaper is a great upgrade if you are a Shifter with a couple of levels in martial classes, but the idea that it's on the same level as Incantatrix is pretty laughable.

I understand how that prc tier system works. That is why I pointed to void disciple. If it was just 3 tiers significantly better, a little better-a little worse, and significantly worse it would expand the number of prcs that would be the same tier while still being a somewhat meaningful category.


What do you think about making PrCs so the would fill out the remaining pre epic levels? So bonded summoner would get 3 more expansions on it's elemental?