Clarifying Wild Shape and the Shifter PrC

Just for curiositys sake, I was flicking through the PHB 3.5 and MotW, and I saw the Shifter Prc again. This continues to look like fun, if a fair amount of work.

Looking at the description of Wild Shape in the PHB, and then onwards to the Polymorph spell, I noticed that Polymorph does not grant the Extraordinary Special Qualities of the creature in question - meaning no regeneration, fast healing, spell immunities and so forth.

Doesn't this cripple the Shifter rather badly? I mean, most of the point of Greater Wild Shape (with the exception of the clearly stated ability to go Incorporeal when you gain the Undead type) is not only to gain the offensive power of giants/dragons/elementals etc, but to gain their special qualities in defense, too?

Or have a missed a Sage Advice or FAQ or errata that deals with this?

If you are going to allow the shifter PrC... you are also going to have to allow the special qualities of the shapes.


YMMV


Mike

Simply use the wild shape version printed in MotW and you're fine.

Since the very beginning of D&D, shapechanging spells and abilities have been out of balance. Simply put: you get tooo much bang for the buck out of these spells and abilities. Polymorph, wildshape, shapechange, etc ... have all been too strong, resulting in characters that were too powerful for their level.

There is a reason why the concept of ECL was introduced into the game. It was introduced because using hit dice, without any modification, as an indication of the power of a creature (or form of a creature) is completely inadequate in regulating power levels. These abilities focus on the hit dice, not the abilities, of the forms to be adopted and ignore the balance present in the abilities.

As a result of these spells and abilities, you end up with PCs gaining all the important abilities of creatures with ECLs that are sometimes many levels above the level of the PC. In other words, the character has a form more powerful than he should be, plus he gets to add his class abilities onto that form.

The Shifter is one of the grossest examples of this problem. Although an interesting idea, the balance aspects of this class upset the balance of the game and result in a PC druid that can outfight the pure melee classes by a long shot. On top of his incredible melee abilities, the PC druid also has decent spellcasting abilities as well and an animal companion that often is more powerful that the PC melee fighters as well.

If you're in love with the Shifter idea, I suggest trying to rebalance the class before using it to make sure that PCs can not gain access to forms and abilities that create a package with ECLs far above their current level.

There's a druid 7/shifter 10 in my epic-level game. I use the 3.5 version of wildshape and she is definitely not underpowered without the SQs. In fact, I've even been ruling that her wild shape ability tops out at 15 HD (like polymorph), though I'm gonna change that to her HD (after a thread on the rules forum on the subject).

I do let her take on the traits of the creature she shifts into- so when she's a construct, she's immune to crits, for instance.

A player of mine and I, since we both have problems with the Shifter PrC, created one from the ground up designed to fill the same niche.

We limited the forms available (e.g., no constructs, no undead, no outsiders), the sizes available (Huge is at 7th level), and the abilities available (e.g., natural, skills, combat and movement feats, SQ, SA, spell-like, supernatural). We spaced all of it out over the course of 10 levels and limited some things (e.g., spell-like abilities) by character level.

It's only on Version 1.0, and is due for a revision, but if anyone is interested in seeing it, feel free to drop me email: jeff (underscore) wilder (numeral two-thousand) (at) yahoo (dot) com.