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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Belzamus" data-source="post: 5205846" data-attributes="member: 61612">1. Time Stop falls apart because of    a.) Spell Stowaway    b.) Epic Ward spells    c.) Slipstream     d.) ContingenciesThe higher up you go, the more prevalent these become. By 100, everyone who's made it that far has some form of counter to Time Stop.2. WotC was obviously not designed to work in tandem with the IH, and some things from 1st party books interact in ways the original designers could not possibly have foreseen. For example, the Cosmic Descryer was certainly not designed with the Bestiary's incredibly nasty high level monsters in mind. At the very least, it needs some sort of cap. Bringing in line with Adjuration somewhat would be a start.3. The IH is filled to bursting with diverse, powerful abilities and feats. It effectively negates the need for any other books besides core and the ELH. Adding more  is simply introducing more unknown variables into a system they weren't designed for. 4. This is personal preference, but my group always had something of an armistice on optimizing with the IH. Considering how easy it is to break wide in half by combining synergistic abilities, we always agreed not to optimize to the ULTIMATE degree, because, frankly, it's utterly unnecessary; the system is already designed to make your characters power houses. Why make your DM do extra work by recalculating your effective Encounter Level to make sure you're facing appropriately challenging monsters, when you can just keep it sane and use them out of the box most of the time?5. And this relates to 4, as you get higher and higher, your list of stats, abilities, portfolios, etc becomes increasingly long. My First Ones are designed with utter simplicity in mind, not even taking class levels, and they end in the range of 6 to 10 typed pages delineating what they're capable of. When you start dipping into three dozen prestige classes to optimize TO THE MAX, you're going to end up with a character sheet the size of a novel, and also, you'll have so many options that you'll never, possibly, be able to keep them all straight.That's all just based on my experiences, though. I have, however, designed, statted out, and tested an entire pantheon from the Time Lord down to epic mortals. Also...the IH golems aren't ridiculous? Are you serious? Force Golem, anyone? Orichalcum? Diamond? Mercury? Ioun, for Cthulu's sake?! I've used all of the Golems in the Bestiary, and barring some generous knowledge checks from the party (I felt bad and gave them hints on how to win) they all would have been TPKs easily. I mean, come on, look at the Orichalcum Guardian against a level 60 party. "Hey, look, a party 20 miles away. PLASMA BREATH for 7,000 damage! LOL, no more party." I fail to see how any advanced Golem from WotC can even come close. An ambush by Force Golems on a party who's never faced is almost impossible to escape. If the wizard forgot to pack True Seeing, have fun getting stun-locked and pummeled every round.And...wow, I'm ranting. What the Hell? I don't even play this game anymore!Sorry if I got a bit heated there, not mad at you or anything. Last note, again, the higher you go, the more things change. When you summon those billions of minions, odds are that they're going to fried as collateral damage in a single round by a Cosmic Storm or some such. Or, since spells are so awesome, Resonating Banishment. Bye bye. Plus, minions get laughable at higher levels, it's absurd. Just try summoning a dozen Seraphim to fight a First One. See how well that works.Edit: also, again, at higher levels, either you annihilate the enemy utterly in one round, or they do the same to you. Gating in an army avails you nothing. It all comes down to who can land an overkill damaging strike first (and hopefully you can keep your foe dead!). One thing that would be freaking epic is a First One of double Magic with cleric levels who has hundreds of Contingent True Resurrections stored that still function even in Dead Magic Zones.</blockquote>

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