36th level epic characters...best combos?
- Thread starter thol
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Viktyr Gehrig
First Post
Monk 1/Psychic Warrior 6/Soulknife 14/Duelist 14/Shadowdancer 1.
Focus on stealth and use your Hide in Plain Sight to set up Sneak Attacks. If you max out bluff, you can also use Feign Weakness with your Free Draw of your mindblade.
All of your normal attacks with your Mind Blade (short sword) are +4d6. You add +7d6 for any Sneak Attack you manage to pull off. You should also have Weapon Focus and Specialization in your Short Sword, and possibly the critical-boosting feats.
Use Imbed Psionic Attack and Knife to the Soul before setting up any Sneak Attack, preferably using a highly damaging psionic attack like Mind Blast. Then you do +11d6 damage on top of a +7 short sword and temporary Constitution damage-- half of which becomes permanent.
There's a feat that lets you do extra ability damage on psionic attacks-- which is a better use of PSPs than most of your powers, since you won't have anything really effective.
If you don't mind losing two dice of damage on your Sneak Attack and one die of damage on your Precise Attack, you could take four levels out of Soulknife and Duelist and put them into Shadowdancer to gain access to Shadow companions and a nice escape power.
Focus on stealth and use your Hide in Plain Sight to set up Sneak Attacks. If you max out bluff, you can also use Feign Weakness with your Free Draw of your mindblade.
All of your normal attacks with your Mind Blade (short sword) are +4d6. You add +7d6 for any Sneak Attack you manage to pull off. You should also have Weapon Focus and Specialization in your Short Sword, and possibly the critical-boosting feats.
Use Imbed Psionic Attack and Knife to the Soul before setting up any Sneak Attack, preferably using a highly damaging psionic attack like Mind Blast. Then you do +11d6 damage on top of a +7 short sword and temporary Constitution damage-- half of which becomes permanent.
There's a feat that lets you do extra ability damage on psionic attacks-- which is a better use of PSPs than most of your powers, since you won't have anything really effective.
If you don't mind losing two dice of damage on your Sneak Attack and one die of damage on your Precise Attack, you could take four levels out of Soulknife and Duelist and put them into Shadowdancer to gain access to Shadow companions and a nice escape power.
Last edited:
buzzard
First Post
Honetly I think the archer types have to choose more carefully. If you are going to use deepwood sniper, you use multiples of five starting at 2nd level. Their most important feature is the increasing critical multiplier. With a proper stacking of epic feats, and a heavy crossbow you could do some really sick work (you could have a crit range of 15-20, and a high multiplier). I am curious as to what all is permitted. If anything goes, then there are a couple of feats in AEG Mercenaries which can be used to ill effect.
I'd go with human Monte ranger5/ Fighter 4/ Shadowdancer 1/ Deep Wood Sniper 26.
Using a crossbow, you could shoot arrows which do a x8 critical. A crossbow would be x7. Assuming you have the feat Dead Eye from AEG Mercenaries permitted, you could fire off two automatic crits per round (feat means that only a confirmation is required at the expense of a shot). Throw in Expert Aim from the same book and add your dex bonus as damage (but only if you make one attack per round).
Feats are something like:
point blank shot
far shot
weapon focus bow (whichever)
precise shot
Weapon specialization
rapid shot
dodge
mobility
combat reflexes
improved initiative
improved critical bow
Expert Aim (AEG)
Dead Eye(AEG)
Epic feats:
Epic Weapon Focus (bow)
Epic Weapon Specialization (bow)
Penetrate damage reduction
Swarm of arrows
Combat archery
Superior Initiative
Epic skill focus (hide)
Distant Shot
Blinding speed
Great Dexterity x2
Total damage would be stat and weapon dependent.
However with the above, BAB is 19, with +12 to hit and +7 damage within 30' (we have to remember that there will be quite a high dex bonus, and any epic casters in the party can treat your bow and arrows to greater magic weapon) The added magic will buff to the tune of +10 more. Being an archer we'll load up on dex. Even assuming a low point buy (starting 16 in dex), we can have a dex of 31. This is an additional +10 to hit. We come in with attacks of:
+51 +46 +41 +36 for 1d8 +18 damage (easy to increase with a strength bow) and crits of 18-20 x7. If Dead Eye is allow what you really have is two shots of 7d8+126 or a total of 14d8 +252 (average damage of 308 per round. Also the fellow will be able to hide in plain sight with a hide bonus of +59 without any magical enhancement.
The palladins won't know what hit them.
buzzard
I'd go with human Monte ranger5/ Fighter 4/ Shadowdancer 1/ Deep Wood Sniper 26.
Using a crossbow, you could shoot arrows which do a x8 critical. A crossbow would be x7. Assuming you have the feat Dead Eye from AEG Mercenaries permitted, you could fire off two automatic crits per round (feat means that only a confirmation is required at the expense of a shot). Throw in Expert Aim from the same book and add your dex bonus as damage (but only if you make one attack per round).
Feats are something like:
point blank shot
far shot
weapon focus bow (whichever)
precise shot
Weapon specialization
rapid shot
dodge
mobility
combat reflexes
improved initiative
improved critical bow
Expert Aim (AEG)
Dead Eye(AEG)
Epic feats:
Epic Weapon Focus (bow)
Epic Weapon Specialization (bow)
Penetrate damage reduction
Swarm of arrows
Combat archery
Superior Initiative
Epic skill focus (hide)
Distant Shot
Blinding speed
Great Dexterity x2
Total damage would be stat and weapon dependent.
However with the above, BAB is 19, with +12 to hit and +7 damage within 30' (we have to remember that there will be quite a high dex bonus, and any epic casters in the party can treat your bow and arrows to greater magic weapon) The added magic will buff to the tune of +10 more. Being an archer we'll load up on dex. Even assuming a low point buy (starting 16 in dex), we can have a dex of 31. This is an additional +10 to hit. We come in with attacks of:
+51 +46 +41 +36 for 1d8 +18 damage (easy to increase with a strength bow) and crits of 18-20 x7. If Dead Eye is allow what you really have is two shots of 7d8+126 or a total of 14d8 +252 (average damage of 308 per round. Also the fellow will be able to hide in plain sight with a hide bonus of +59 without any magical enhancement.
The palladins won't know what hit them.
buzzard
ruleslawyer
Registered User
creamsteak said:
Uh, beg pardon?
First off, this is a campaign involving 36th-level evil characters. In such a campaign, one needs to expect some pretty nasty characters.
Second, this character doesn't have "all that crap," as you put it. This character has three perfectly related classes. All the feats involved come from core rules, the FRCS, or the ELH, and they're feats that any wizard in his right mind would take. As for the character concept: Isn't that rather obvious? This character is a powerful, no doubt respected (check out that Charisma!) Thayan archmage, probably the de facto zulkir of the Transmutation school, who either has plans to unify Thay under his own control (Szass Tam, move over!) or is so far advanced along the road to power that he doesn't even care about wordly matters in the Realms any more. It is a natural for an evil magically-talented human from Thay to take levels in the Red Wizard PrC; it's just as natural for a high-level Red Wizard to decide to become an archmage, as the very idea of the archmage PrC is that it is the route of wizards who have reached the top of their profession and are looking for something more.
Third, the plane-traveling archmage and the evil archwizard bad guy both are staples of fantasy fiction. They may be hackneyed concepts, but they're certainly coherent, far more so than most of the smackdown characters on the SoS thread. Many smackdown characters tend to be uneasy amalgams of five different classes and PrCs (look a couple of posts up from this); this one has obeyed a pretty straightforward route. The Leadership feats also have a strong RP justification; if you're at the pinnacle of your class, and the main focus of your class and the special magical abilities it confers is to lead a RW circle, aren't you going to acquire some RW cohorts to be part of that circle?
In short, I find your criticism misplaced and rather knee-jerk. Is the character min-maxed? Of course. Is he an unreasonable munchkin? No, unless you find that the circle magic and spell power rules are unbalanced, in which case this character makes use of unbalanced rules, which makes him (I'll grant) a munchkin. YMMV.
Viktyr Gehrig
First Post
ruleslawyer said:
I do hope you're not referring to mine. Soulknife, Duelist, and Shadowdancer make sense together for a dark, evil character with a sense of style and a little flamboyance-- traits which make a lot of sense for the Soulknife in general.
I'll admit the trailing Monk level is a little incongruous, but I'm just used to seeing Monk and Psychic Warrior together-- those are the two core classes that I think most belong together, except perhaps Fighter and Rogue.
ruleslawyer
Registered User
My apologies; no offense meant, truly.
I was simply pointing out that a straightforward wizard-red wizard-archmage combo is neither contrived nor particularly outlandish from an RP perspective. You seem to understand that your character requires a bit of RP justification; I certainly wouldn't even say that mine would need all that much in the way of background justification, beyond what I just provided. To be honest, my proposed character is quite a bit more boring and cliched than yours!
I was simply pointing out that a straightforward wizard-red wizard-archmage combo is neither contrived nor particularly outlandish from an RP perspective. You seem to understand that your character requires a bit of RP justification; I certainly wouldn't even say that mine would need all that much in the way of background justification, beyond what I just provided. To be honest, my proposed character is quite a bit more boring and cliched than yours!
Numion
First Post
ruleslawyer said:
I think your epic archmage is veri well thought out. The rules are what they are, so this character is very powerful. But there's no point for a red wizard to take any other route.
As an added bonus your Red Wizard, if he ever existed on Toril, could instantly make Elminster his bee-yotch!
Viktyr Gehrig
First Post
ruleslawyer said:
Not really. The reason cliches are so common is that they work without the justification-- so that more effort, and more suspension of disbelief can be applied to the intricacies of the character and their fantastic abilities.
My character is complicated, and takes some justification. He can be a lot of fun to play, but it takes a lot of that effort and suspension of disbelief just to put the character together in the first place. Any eccentricities beyond his very existence need to be structured very carefully to avoid the character collapsing into a heap of implausibility.
Bill Muench
First Post
ruleslawyer said:
Slight tangent here - is there any particular reason why you didn't take Improved Spellcasting at all? It seems like it would be a pretty useful feat. Was it just that you didn't have enough feats to do so, or do you consider it unnecessary? I'm curious because I'm statting up a very high level NPC wizard as an experiment and I planned on taking IS a few times. Any advice?
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