Community

magmer1 wrote:

Do you use gate for every encounter? Even if it summons My fighter has a shot.

If I can get it for free? Yes! And if a Balor summons a Balor no sub Epic non Evil character without SR can win. Though that's due to flaws in Balor design admittedly.

I consider your staff way higher on the cheese factor than Item Familiar.

True, but the staff was made via rules that are required to keep the game functioning, while item familiars are broken and not required to maintain system cohesion. Making the staff actually use charges would admittedly make my life more difficult and require only banning one spell or one feat. Preventing me from making a staff of Miracle at level 12 and using it at CL 64ish requires totally rewriting the Artificer class, item creation rules and the UMD skill.

BTW the real cheese of item familiars are for Diplomancer builds because you can double one of your skills with it. That's why my UMD is so high. In fact that, and the intelligent items ability to trigger magic items when I'm incapacitated are the only mechanical reasons why I took it. The rest was because it's awesome.

Sorry, I misunderstood what you were doing. Could you explain it?

The staff is made via standard item creation with the usual Artificer discounts. It only requires base CL9 instead of the normal CL 17 because Artificers can pull from any class for spell lists, including prestige classes. The reason it can be cast infinitely at no cost comes from Wand Surge (artificer only feat) and Greater Heroics (Bard spell that gives me the AP to use Wand Surge infinitely).

If you pull out enough cheese you can make a Fighter that can survive anything but a sneak attack and kill anything with HP. But the problem is with the same amount of cheese you can make a caster that can do ANYTHING. He can kill anything, survive sneak attacks and still has all those awesome utility spells that your fighter has to buy over and over again...

Without cheese, well it's still pretty terrible. A Fighter wins a battle with a sword he's down HP. A Wizard wins a battle with Charm or Dominate and he's down a spell for the day and up a meat shield/buff bot for a number of days equal to caster level.

True, though most npc casters don't have disjunction listed. Granted the wizards don't have anything listed, but I haven't seen sorcerer have disjunction.

Sorcs can't afford to. Not enough high level spells known. One of the problems with Sorcerers, though you can compensate with things like Shapechange.

Maxperson wrote:

There's nothing elitist about it, and I'm sure it mattered to you. It just didn't matter to the 99% of the rest of us. When we elect a President, we don't count Hawaii's vote and then make a leader, ignoring the rest of the country. When you design a roleplaying game, you don't ask the die hard real life desiring few what they want and then make the game for them, you do what's best for the majority. When discussing a system that includes splatbooks, you don't bother with the opinions of those very few who only have core books. You go with the vast majority who use splat books.

Except that statement is flawed because while the majority of gamers will have splat books, you don't know which splat books. Thus, you can't balance the game based on any particular splat book or any group of splat books. However, all of those gamers should have core, so you can balance around that. Besides, if core isn't balanced, then the system is ****ed from the get go.

DaidojiTaidoru wrote:

The staff is made via standard item creation with the usual Artificer discounts. It only requires base CL9 instead of the normal CL 17 because Artificers can pull from any class for spell lists, including prestige classes. The reason it can be cast infinitely at no cost comes from Wand Surge (artificer only feat) and Greater Heroics (Bard spell that gives me the AP to use Wand Surge infinitely).

I've never looked at the artificer, so I have a few questions.

1) Does it specify PrCs, or does it just say classes, because a PrC is not a class, it's a PRESTIGE class.

2) Does it specifically say that spells taken from other classes get reduced in level so that you can cast every spell in the book by level 9? If it doesn't, then it doesn't matter if you can draw on a level 9 spell from another list if you don't have the caster level to actually cast it.

If you pull out enough cheese you can make a Fighter that can survive anything but a sneak attack and kill anything with HP. But the problem is with the same amount of cheese you can make a caster that can do ANYTHING.

Which absolutely does not matter at all to this discussion. This discussion is only about fighters being useful, not a comparison of them against casters.