Favored soul , balanced?

[Darklone]

Is the FS Weapon Spec restricted to melee? Otherwise you might be able to build a nice archer thanks to Divine Favor and WS...

 

[IanB]

Slightly on the weak side, IMO, and suffers from massive flavor problems in many games (the wings are stupid.)

 

[Doug McCrae]

Almost perfectly balanced imo. Significantly less powerful than a cleric but then clerics are significantly overpowered.

And yeah, I agree the wings are stupid.

 

[Jack99]

IMC I have removed the wings and added the ability to choose two domains (appropriate according to the god ofc), the spells of which the FS can add to his spelllists if he wishes.

 

[Mistwell]

Almost perfectly balanced imo. Significantly less powerful than a cleric but then clerics are significantly overpowered.

And yeah, I agree the wings are stupid.

To me, calling something significantly overpowered means having that thing in your game will result in a noticeable problem.

However, given that virtually all games have this thing in them (clerics), on both sides, and the game has held up quite well even with them there, I cannot see how it can be called significantly overpowered.

More powerful than some classes on average? Sure. But significantly overpowered? I don't see it.

 

[Darklone]

No DMM for clerics and I could stand them.

 

[Mistwell]

No DMM for clerics and I could stand them.

I'm with you on that one. DMM was DUMB. Particularly with the spell-level cap missing.

 

[rowport]

Well, the lack of Knowledge (religion) as a class skill really should have been erraticized at some point, if for no other reason than how badly that winds up hamstringing the FS's prestige class options.

The wings are dumb, the divine weapon feats really don't make sense for gods who aren't melee types, and the energy resistances are kind of pointless.

I'd say the bottom line here is that the class is geared towards divine casters that plan to do a lot of self-buffing.

http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/cwc/20070227x

This article has some alternate class abilities that help clean up some of the oddball bits, like not having knowledge (religion), which makes it *very* tough for favored souls to qualify for divine prestige classes. Since it is from the WOTC site, I think (?) it counts as "official", or at least as much as Dungeon/Dragon magazine material, anyway.

FWIW, we have a favored soul of the Silver Flame (favored weapon longbow) in our Eberron game, and he works out just fine. The class is weaker than a cleric, but fine for a typical party IMO.