Optimization Showcase in the Playground: Fear and Loathing in Celestia

[Piggy Knowles]

INTRODUCTION
With more than a decade and a half of toying around with 3.5, I’ve accumulated a lot of spare builds and ideas. While I don’t have an active game going right now, I still like to pop open my builds folder and try to refine things. Recently I decided to make a dedicated effort to flesh out some of these builds into full write-ups, and reached out to some friends in the CO community who might be interested in doing the same. In the spirit of Tempest Stormwind’s Weekly Optimization Showcase (imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, right?), I thought I’d showcase the end results here.

The goal is (usually) not to show off any fancy new TO trick, but to showcase effective, playable builds and spur discussion. While each of us has a different build philosophy, in general the intent is to create something that can be played in most groups from level 1 to level 20. Again, the goal is discussion, so feel free to discuss the build, talk about other options, make suggestions or tear it all to shreds. Also, feel free to use anything showcased here in any of your campaigns—and let us know how they work out if you do!

Right now the group consists of myself, the Viscount, Akal Saris, Venger, WhamBamSam, Darrin and daremetoidareyou. (And though this particular build predates him, Zaq also just joined the chat!*) Typically one of us writes up the build concept and possibly a stub, the others share feedback on Discord or in some of the shared documents we have, and together we refine things until we’re happy with the final product.

For this showcase, we’re going to become real holy terrors in Fear and Loathing in Celestia!

*Outdated content alert! Zaq's been in the chat for months now, it just took me THAT long to actually post this. Sigh.

Fear and Loathing in Celestia
There’s nothing scarier than rainbows.

BACKGROUND
Hey, it’s been a while! This is actually something that we’ve had more or less completed since last July, but… well, you know, it turns out we’re all collectively realizing that the passage of time is a fake concept and sometimes it’s hard to get motivated. That’s just how it be sometimes. (For further proof of executive dysfunction, I wrote up this blurb two months ago and somehow got distracted enough to never actually post it.)

On to the build. This one is kind of an odd duck, taking on a wide variety of disparate elements to create something that (hopefully) ends up as a coherent whole. It started as a way to toy with arcane archer’s ability to create absolutely enormous cones. Imbue arrow explicitly allows you to take an area spell and use the bow’s range rather than the spell’s range. That’s always a neat ability, but it’s especially fun when you take into account cones, which extend out to the end of their range. With this, you can make cones large enough to encompass entire armies, and certainly big enough to fully blanket any reasonable D&D combat map with giant area of effect spells.

We could (and did!) use this with some standard damage spells, but that can get boring after a while. Instead, we decided to focus on one of my personal favorite cone spells: fear. Even without much optimization fear is a great save or lose spell with a decent rider on a successful save, and the decent area means it can be an encounter-ender right out of the box. With some optimization, it becomes downright brutal.

That gave us a basic skeleton for the build: fear led us to dread witch, and bards are not only one of the easiest entries for arcane archer, they also are able to enter dread witch by ECL 5. That’s when things got a bit… weird. We started talking about one of dread witch’s less discussed abilities, fearful empowerment, which allows you to add a fear rider to any spell with a visual manifestation. But what about spells that don’t have a visual manifestation? Well, that’s where Spell Thematics comes in: not only do you get a caster level boost on one spell per level, but you also get to add a visual element to every single spell. For some reason I still don’t fully understand, we decided that a fun visual theme for our fear bard would be rainbows, and suddenly we found ourselves building an exalted fear bard firing off 300’ cones of scary rainbows.

Listen, the pandemic has affected us all in strange ways. Just let us have this one.

THE BASICS

• Race: Half-elf. Qualifies for arcane archer without multiclass XP penalties, and opens up the best bard ACF ever written.
• Build Stub: Bard 4/Dread Witch 5/Fighter 1/Arcane Archer 2/Sublime Chord 2/Rainbow Servant 4/Paragnostic Apostle 2
• Alternate class features: Soothing voice, inspire awe, bardic music feat.
• Alignment: Good and nonlawful.

Fear and Loathing in Celestia

Level	Class	Feats	Class Features	Spells Known	Notes (Click to Expand)
1st	Bard 1	Point Blank Shot	Bardic music, bardic knowledge, soothing voice, fascinate, inspire awe	Detect magic, prestidigitation, daze, ghost sounds	Spoiler: Build Notes Show Bard is one of those classes that has such fun alternate class features that I can’t help just replacing all the things. In this case, though, you’ll stick to two main swaps: inspire courage for inspire awe and countersong for soothing voice. Inspire awe is always my preferred replacement any time you aren’t specifically building around inspire courage, as giving your foes the shaken condition will often be considerably more effective than adding +1 or +2 to your attacks. It’s also a particularly good fit here thanks to your focus on fear effects. Soothing voice, meanwhile, does the opposite of make people scared: it calms emotions. However, like inspire awe, it’s incredibly difficult to resist due to its save DC being based on a skill check rather than a fixed number. This means that it will scale much faster than saving throws scale, making it an effective way to calm foes throughout the game.
2nd	Bard 2			Dancing lights, grease, sleep	Spoiler: Build Notes Show Another level in bard means another use of inspire awe or soothing voice and access to 1st-level spells. It’s hard to go wrong with the ever-reliable grease and sleep.
3rd	Bard 3	Precise Shot, Soothe the Beastb	Bonus bardic music feat	Mage hand, cause fear	Spoiler: Build Notes Show Inspire competence is one of the more disappointing bardic music options, but Eberron allows you to swap out new types of bardic music for a small selection of music feats. Soothe the Beast isn’t gamebreaking, but it lets you use some of your bardic abilities on animals, which is definitely a lot nicer than anything inspire competence gives you. Meanwhile cause fear is a solid little save-or-suck for the level.
4th	Bard 4			Glitterdust, scare, sleep -> charm person	Spoiler: Build Notes Show You get two 2nd-level spells here, as well as one swap. For the swap, get rid of sleep, which is completely incredible in the early game but stops being useful very quickly, and pick up the always-handy charm person instead. Meanwhile for your 2nds, scare is an upgrade to cause fear and is a required pick for your PrC, while glitterdust is, well, glitterdust.
5th	Dread Witch 1	Unnatural Willb	Master of terror, Unnatural Will		Spoiler: Build Notes Show Into dread witch, an excellent little prestige class that has the fun advantage of also being something you can enter by ECL 5 with any class that has a good Will save and the right spell list. Master of terror is a solid DC boost for scare at this level.
6th	Dread Witch 2	Purify Spell	Absorb fear	Improvisation, cloud of bewilderment	Spoiler: Build Notes Show Purify Spell may seem like an odd choice, but you’ll eventually be firing off some fairly large area damage spells, and it allows you to do so without having to worry as much about friendly fire (assuming your party is also good). Cloud of bewilderment is basically a smaller and lower-level stinking fog, and one of my favorite early cloud spells. And improvisation is one of the rare low level spells that is much more useful in the mid- to late-game than in the early game. Absorb fear is a cute little ability that can crank your CL or give you an extra casting of a low level spell. You’ll actually eventually be able to self-target some of your fear spells to get these boosts by modifying their area to include yourself; with Unnatural Will, you should reliably make your saves to avoid being locked down by said spells.
7th	Dread Witch 3		Fearful empowerment 1/day		Spoiler: Build Notes Show Fearful empowerment is sadly only 1/day, but lets you add a fear rider to any spell with a visual manifestation. This not only tacks on an extra debuff akin to Fell Frighten, it also serves as an immediate DC boost from your master of terror ability.
8th	Dread Witch 4		Delay fear, greater master of terror	Dimension leap, fear, adoration of the frightful	Spoiler: Build Notes Show Ah, here we go, the main reason everyone loves dread witch: with greater master of terror, you can now completely bypass fear immunities. This is huge, since fear effects can be extremely debilitating, but tend to be balanced by the large number of foes immune to them. As for your spells, you finally upgrade to fear itself, which will stay good for more or less your entire career. It has no level cap and a great area, and panicked is an extremely nasty debuff that can completely take foes out of the game. You also nab dimension leap for a bit of utility and adoration of the frightful, one of my favorite spells for a fear bard. This latter spell gives you a boost to your diplomacy checks just for knowing it, and charms anyone within 60’ of you with the shaken condition. Suddenly you can turn your lowly inspire awe ability into a mass charm spell - not too shabby!
9th	Fighter 1	Sculpt Spell, Weapon Focus (longbow)b	Bonus feat		Spoiler: Build Notes Show You’ll need one more point of BAB to qualify for arcane archer on time. I originally planned on going with crusader or soldier of light here, but the bonus feat from fighter also helps you meet arcane archer’s pre-reqs, giving you some extra wiggle-room for your remaining feat choices. As always, if you’re playing with flaws, feel free to sub in a more interesting full BAB choice at this level. Speaking of feats, you get the absolutely fantastic Sculpt Spell at this level, easily my favorite +1 metamagic feat. Sculpt gives you tremendous flexibility in spell areas, and will become especially good when you pick up imbue arrow.
10th	Arcane Archer 1		Enhance arrow +1		Spoiler: Build Notes Show Arcane archer is always surprisingly hard to qualify for, but we’re here. The first level is pretty disappointing, but it’s just a stepping stone on your way to imbue arrow.
11th	Arcane Archer 2		Imbue arrow		Spoiler: Build Notes Show Ah, here’s the good stuff. Imbue arrow is one of the best “spell channeling” abilities around, allowing you to channel any area spell into an arrow as a standard action. There are three things it will be extremely important to remember. First, channeling a spell and firing it is always a standard action, meaning this can functionally reduce casting time for metamagicked spells or spells with long casting times. Second, the arrow does not have to hit a creature for the spell to go off; it goes off “wherever the arrow lands,” meaning you can target the ground instead of a creature (so your low BAB should not be an issue). Third, when you imbue an arrow, you can use your bow’s range instead of the spell’s range. Not only does this mean that you can fire off spells ordinarily centered on you so that they go off elsewhere, it also means that you can make HUGE cones. Cones, after all, extend out to the limit of their range rather than having a fixed area. Yes, that means that with a composite longbow, you can now have a fear cone that goes out literally hundreds of feet.
12th	Sublime Chord 1	Spell Thematics	Bardic lore, bardic music	Parboil, greater mirror image, ruin delver’s fortune, flaywind burst	Spoiler: Build Notes Show And with the relevant bits of arcane archer finished, let’s start rebuilding your spellcasting. Sublime chord should be an obvious pick for any bard. For your spells, you’ve got a couple of clutch defensive options. Offensively, parboil and flaywind burst are interesting area spells that can take good advantage of your arrow imbuing, dealing damage and also providing battlefield control or debuffing. Spell Thematics is an oft-overlooked feat that does a couple of things. While most of its abilities are cosmetic, it allows you to designate one spell per spell level that will benefit from an increased caster level, which is always handy. Better still, by adding on a visual element to spells that might otherwise lack one, this feat allows you to take full advantage of your fearful empowerment ability, letting you add a fear rider to almost any spell. As for your theme, we recommend rainbows. Terrifying, terrifying rainbows.
13th	Sublime Chord 2		Song of arcane power	Assay spell resistance, greater dispel magic	Spoiler: Build Notes Show It takes a lot for a bardic music ability to outclass soothing voice, but I’ll be damned if song of arcane power doesn’t do just that. +4 to caster level is a tremendous boost and will almost always come in handy. As for your spells, assay is an easy pick to make sure that SR doesn’t get in the way of your fun, while GDM is a great pick for anyone and especially good for a sublime chord, who benefits from the reduced spell level. Don’t forget, it can also be an area spell as well!
14th	Dread Witch 5		Fearful empowerment 2/day, horrific aura, reflective fear	Antimagic field	Spoiler: Build Notes Show Finishing off dread witch gives you another use of fearful empowerment, which is always nice. The aura is cute too, though I doubt it’ll be all that useful at this level. Antimagic field can be absolutely devastating when tacked onto an arrow.
15th	Rainbow Servant 1	Practiced Spellcaster (sublime chord)	Detect evil, extra domain (Good)	Necrotic skull bomb, guards and wards	Spoiler: Build Notes Show What’s that? Rainbow servant on a non-fixed list caster? The main draw here is access to the Good domain. This gives you both the domain granted ability and the ability to select spells from said domain. It’ll pay off nicely very soon. As for spells, we’ve got a couple of good ones. Necrotic skull bomb, despite the name, is somehow NOT an evil spell, but it basically functions as a mass enervation. It’s a prime choice for imbuing and sculpting. Guards and wards meanwhile fully takes advantage of the reduced casting time of imbue arrow. This is probably one of the most devastating bits of lockdown magic around if you can bypass the casting time, filling a structure with fog, webs and other bits of chicanery.
16th	Paragnostic Apostle 1		Holy texts, lore, knowledge is power (divine understanding - good)	Holy word	Spoiler: Build Notes Show And with 7th-level spells, the reason for the Good domain becomes clear as you pick up holy word. A valid target for imbue arrow, you can fire this off to bypass its usual range restriction, completely shutting down or even killing non-good foes. Your caster level should be particularly good, too: between the Good domain, divine understanding, Spell Thematics and song of arcane power, you have an effective +7 to its CL, which can be further boosted with items. This will allow you to punch way above your weight class when it comes to laying the holy smackdown.
17th	Paragnostic Apostle 2		Knowledge is power (penetrating insight)	Greater blink, kyristan’s malevolent tentacles, prismatic spray	Spoiler: Build Notes Show Another quick level in paragnostic apostle helps you further break down SR and boosts your CL for things like dispel checks. You also get two more fantastic targets for imbuing in prismatic spray and kyristan’s malevolent tentacles, the latter of which combines the lockdown prowess of black tentacles with a level draining effect.
18th	Rainbow Servant 2	Arcane Thesis (holy word)		Mind blank	Spoiler: Build Notes Show For your last three levels you can use anything that progresses casting. Here we recommend keeping it simple and jumping back into rainbow servant, which gives some decent goodies at 4. Arcane Thesis comes online here, letting you sculpt your holy words for free and giving you a meaty +2 to the CL. It was very tempting to go with Practical Metamagic here instead, letting you sculpt a number of spells across the board at no increase, but that CL bump is just too good to pass up.
19th	Rainbow Servant 3			Hindsight, waves of exhaustion, halaster’s blacksphere	Spoiler: Build Notes Show Halaster’s blacksphere is another fun imbue/Sculpt target, putting spells like forcecage to shame. As for hindsight, well, I honestly couldn’t resist including it. You get it as a 6th-level spell thanks to the bard list, and it’s an area spell, meaning it’s a legal target for imbue arrow. This means you can bypass the 30 minute casting time entirely, instead casting it as a standard action, and you can target areas other than where you’re standing. Fire an arrow into somewhere you don’t otherwise have access to for some great intel. It’s a neat trick, though if it’s not your cup of tea, you can’t go wrong with greater scrying instead.
20th	Rainbow Servant 4		Extra domain (Air), grow wings	Shapechange	Spoiler: Build Notes Show You close out just as you hit 9ths. There are a lot of great choices here, but my favorite is almost always shapechange. It’s pretty much always going to be incredibly useful, easy to scale up or down as the campaign’s power level requires, and outrageously flexible without requiring heavy XP costs each use. Take it, use it, love it. You also get the air domain here; while it comes too late to really take advantage of its spell access (a shame, because it gets a couple of fun spells like control winds), the domain granted ability is definitely nice. You also grow a nice set of feathered wings here as well, which may be a bit irrelevant considering you also got shapechange at this level, but hey, what’s a magic rainbow fear blaster without wings?

Spoiler: Spells Known

Show

Spells:
0- Detect magic, prestidigitation, daze, ghost sounds, dancing lights, mage hand
1- Grease, sleep, cause fear, charm person, improvisation*
2- Glitterdust, scare, cloud of bewilderment, dimension leap*
3- Fear, adoration of the frightful*
4- Parboil, greater mirror image*, ruin delver’s fortune, assay spell resistance
5- Flaywind burst*, greater dispel magic, necrotic skull bomb, greater blink
6- Antimagic field*, guards and wards, kyristan’s malevolent tentacles, hindsight
7- Holy word*, prismatic spray, waves of exhaustion
8- Mind blank, halaster’s blacksphere*
9- Shapechange*
*Thematic spell

Spoiler: Stat Suggestions

Show

Charisma, Charisma, Charisma, with Dex as your secondary stat. Despite your archery focus you actually don’t care that much about hitting, since your arrows will mostly be vehicles for area spells and you can always just fire at the ground, but Dex isn’t bad to have, especially at low levels. You’ve got a lot of decent skills as well, so if you’ve got the points to spare, some Intelligence definitely does not hurt either.

SAMPLE STAT ARRAYS (after racial adjustments):
28-point buy: Str 10/Dex 14/Con 12/Int 12/Wis 10/Cha 16
32-point buy: Str 8/Dex 14/Con 12/Int 12/Wis 10/Cha 18

Spoiler: Skills Notes

Show

Starting with bard gives you a leg up in the skills department, which is good, because sublime chord’s requirements are a pain. Luckily, you don’t have a ton of difficult benchmarks to hit beyond that. However, you’ll want to make sure to keep both perform and diplomacy in particular as high as possible to make sure your soothing voice and inspire awe always land.

Spoiler: Equipment Recommendations

Show

You’re far more of a caster than an archer, so a lot of the usual archery requirements aren’t all that relevant. Still, a decent bow is nice. Your particular build makeup means you get some more mileage out of enhancements that aren’t typically considered all that good, like distance.

BUILD SUMMARY
There’s certainly a lot going on here, and glancing at the build stub may make it look like it’s a bit of a hodge-podge: archery, casting, diplomancy, fear stacking, blasting, holy word optimization… But once put together, the disparate elements actually all synergize nicely. Early game diplomancy leads quite naturally into mid-game fear and blasting, which in turn develops into a decent high CL holy word spammer for lategame brokenness. Better still, a lot of the build’s abilities and feats impact multiple roles.

What you end up with is a build that starts off strong thanks to the early game silliness of the half-elf bard and finishes with 9th-level spells, imbue arrow for extreme range blasting and gigantic cones of irresistible fear (plus a wide variety of spells to work with it) and high-CL holy words as a no save, just lose that can be fired from hundreds of feet away.

As for the actual build, you’re a smooth talking half-elf with angel wings that uses her bow to fire off 300’ terror rainbows. If that doesn’t grab someone’s attention, nothing will.

VARIANTS
The rainbow aspect doesn’t need to be so heavily emphasized, and there are other ways to get holy word (or its lawful/chaotic/evil equivalent) onto an arcane spell list beyond rainbow servant, so if you don’t feel like playing a goodie two-shoes or want to go with a different theme, you’ve got options. You can also certainly lean much harder into the metamagic side of things, which is never a bad idea for any caster, especially blasters.

SOURCES

• Dread witch: Heroes of Horror
• Bardic music feats: Eberron Campaign Setting
• Inspire awe ACF: Dragon Magic
• Soothing voice ACF: Races of Destiny
• Rainbow Servant: Complete Divine
• Spell thematics: Magic of Faerun
• Paragnostic apostle: Complete Champion
• Sublime chord, Sculpt Spell, Practiced Spellcaster, Arcane Thesis: Complete Arcane
• Purify Spell: Book of Exalted Deeds

***

And that’s that! Please let us know what you think in the comments, and what you’d like to see for future showcases!

[Piggy Knowles]

Click here for a list of all prior showcases!

[rrwoods]

... wow. Coming back with quite the dramatic re-entrance, I see!

[PoeticallyPsyco]

Cool build; love the versatility. And I always love a good fear build.

I'm a little surprised not to see Haunting Melody, since with the fear stacking rules it makes a fantastic no-action-cost rider on Inspire Awe (and a hilarious one on Soothing Melody), but the build is a little starved on both feats and Bardic Music uses.

Also, I love that there's a spell called necrotic skull bomb. What a fantastic name for a band. The fact that it lacks the [Evil] tag is just icing on the humor cake.

[remetagross]

Very nice, Piggy! I particularly appreciate how you guys have used the oft-overlooked part of Spell Thematics that speaks about visual manifestations, and actually got some good mileage out of it. Even though it seems to be pure fluff at first glance. Congrats!

Also, for 9th-level spells for an Arcane Archer, don't forget Apocalypse from the Sky, if you somehow get your hands on a cheap artifact of Good such as angel tears!

[Troacctid]

Rainbows are a great theme, but if you're interested in exploring others, I do have a table for it. https://chartopia.d12dev.com/chart/29203/

[Piggy Knowles]

I got "food," which is somehow even more ridiculous as a terror theme than rainbows. I'm impressed.

[Twurps]

Very cool build (as usual).
How is rainbow servant adding to your Sublime chord casting though? it ads its '+1 level of existing arcane spellcasting class' to a class in which you can cast 3rd level spells, and Sublime chord doesn't have those.

[Piggy Knowles]

How is rainbow servant adding to your Sublime chord casting though? it ads its '+1 level of existing arcane spellcasting class' to a class in which you can cast 3rd level spells, and Sublime chord doesn't have those.

Whoops, good catch. An easy fix would be to take a 3rd-level spell instead of a 4th-level spell via sublime chord, but this is not RAW either, and if your DM is a stickler about the fact that you cast 4ths+, they are probably also not going to allow you to take a lower level spell with a higher level spell known slot. If you want a RAW fix, the easiest one would be to take one of the bloodline feats from Dragon Compendium. They add a spell known at every spell level to all your spontaneous arcane spell lists, which would explicitly give you the ability to cast 3rds by any definition. The feats are a bit tight but it's doable - Purify Spell is probably the easiest thing to drop, since you can avoid damaging allies with careful positioning. I liked the cool factor of being able to drop big damage spells in the middle of the battlefield but it's certainly not required.

[Kazyan]

At a table with flaws available, one feat that could be fun to toy with at higher levels is Explosive Spell. 300' cones, after all.