What kind of problems am I likely to see?

[ImperatorK]

Mage Slayer.

 

[billd91]

Expect a neat trick that can be saved against, and cool character flavor. Scout/Shadowdancer should lend to Rogue feel. Once he get's a Shadow familiar, those are dandy with STR draining touch attacks but they're pretty fragile. I can't imagine horrible abuse from this sort of character build.

The fragility of the summoned shadow is highly dependent on the kinds of adventures they go on. Against things with magical powers or magic weapons, they can be fairly fragile. But against relatively mundane brutes, they can be fairly invulnerable and inflict a lot of debuffing. In a conversion of the Against the Giants series of adventures, one player had a shadowdancer whose shadow really went to town. He was regularly inflicting 2-4 points of strength damage on every giant in a fight, sometimes as many as 8 or so. And very few giants had a hope of affecting the shadow. It got to the point where we were saying the shadow was getting fat and putting on the illusion of depth due to all the strength it was snacking on.

I certainly wouldn't call it unbalancing, but that shadow had an effect much greater than a typical summoned monster under those circumstances.

 

[billd91]

Well, here's a bit of a postmortem on the question:

The player brought a character with rolled stats, even though we use point buy. If he'd been a point or two high or low we wouldn't have cared. He was 9 points high on a 32 point build.

When he mentioned "Just take it out of Charisma" I knew I wasn't dealing with a power gamer or even a decent optimizer. His class gets Charisma bonuses to Arcane spell Saves, so dropping his Charisma to an 8 (or lower) would be a pretty bonehead move.

He took the Mageslayer feat, one that I'm not familiar with, but apparently that nerfs his spell casting big time. -8 to his Caster level or something like that.

We haven't seen the character in combat, so I don't know how that's going to work, but from first blush it doesn't look like he's trying to break anything.

Uh, you may need to help him fix his character so that it's not underpowered at this point. My guess is he doesn't get that the hexblade is Charisma-dependent rather than dependent on some other stat.

 

[RUMBLETiGER]

The fragility of the summoned shadow is highly dependent on the kinds of adventures they go on. Against things with magical powers or magic weapons, they can be fairly fragile. But against relatively mundane brutes, they can be fairly invulnerable and inflict a lot of debuffing. In a conversion of the Against the Giants series of adventures, one player had a shadowdancer whose shadow really went to town. He was regularly inflicting 2-4 points of strength damage on every giant in a fight, sometimes as many as 8 or so. And very few giants had a hope of affecting the shadow. It got to the point where we were saying the shadow was getting fat and putting on the illusion of depth due to all the strength it was snacking on.

I certainly wouldn't call it unbalancing, but that shadow had an effect much greater than a typical summoned monster under those circumstances.

I've seen a Shadow companion played in combat by incorporeally sinking into the ground, leaving only the head sticking up. The DM allowed it to be considered tiny sized for the purpose of being hit, it worked pretty well.

It's still a single trick, and takes a number of rounds to be really take one enemy down. As a 12th level character, you could come up with much more incapacitating things than this. Useful, but not game breaking.