D&D 3E/3.5 known-abusable 3.5 combos/techniques/etc.

[Question]

I dont see what is broken about true strike + power attack. You are spending a round casting it, and you are taking a level in wiz or sorc, losing BAB and stuff in the process.

 

[nameless]

Planar Binding (and before that lesser planar binding) + Circlet of Persuasion + Nymph's Kiss feat. The two extras are just small bonuses to help you win the opposed charisma checks against your called outsiders and aren't necessary at all. The spells alone do the job. And it's one thing sorcerers naturally excel at.

At 11th level you can easily get efreeti to grant you virtually unlimited wishes, ghaele eladrins to fight your battles, heal your party, and do everything a 14th level cleric would do (plus more), rekjar (from the MMIII) to fabricate you an entire city from scratch, kelvezu demons (MMII) to pulverize whatever foes you want dead, nightmares to ride into combat for flight, full concealment and etherealness; the list is long and juicy.

Even if you are playing core rules only, the efreeti will give you +3 to all ability scores, every permanent spell you could ask for, and if you are game for abusing spell-like abilities, any magic items you want. If you feel like leapfrogging, the wishes can grant you greater planar bindings for Planetars, Pit Fiends, and Death Slaadi. Ghaeles/Trumpet Archons/Leonals/Astral Devas are all incredibly potent combat machines without trying to wish for things. Once you have planar binding, you don't even really need a party anymore.

 

[Brother MacLaren]

At 11th level you can easily get efreeti to grant you virtually unlimited wishes,

It's an efreet. All those complaints about "evil" DMs twisting wishes? Efreet are way, way more sadistic than any human being than has ever walked the earth (including DMs). And they're smart.

If you play by the rules and try to get wishes from an efreet in a non-abusive way... you will get shafted. That's what powerful evil outsiders do.

If you twist the rules and try to milk unlimited wishes out of efreet and word things super-carefully to avoid consequences... you will get very very badly shafted. That's what DMs do.

 

[Question]

BG2 had this in the form of wis checks, basically if you had a low wis, you got horrible options, and the vice versa was true.

Im sure it wouldnt be unreasonable if you include int/wis/diplomacy/etc checks for getting a wish from a efreet or such.

 

[PallidPatience]

Nevermind...

 

[ruleslawyer]

Here's another thing you need to get rid of : Vow of Poverty feat. Just say no.

Er, why, exactly?

Repeated analysis of VoP on these boards has shown that it's about on par with standard wealth; VoP has the advantage of providing slightly higher bonuses, balanced against the disadvantage of the PC being unable to apportion those bonuses to desired uses. It's *very* useful for monks, useless for primary martial classes and wizards, possibly very good for sorcerers (depending on how you handle material components), and probably broken for druids... but only because wild shape is extremely problematic. Thus, is the faulty mechanic VoP, or wild shape?

I'd say that almost all of the things listed by mvincent are features, not bugs; stuff that clever PCs can and should be able to do. But, since we're going about this, my favorites are:

1) Anything that turns a spell-like ability or spell into a supernatural ability. This includes some applications of Assume Supernatural Ability (SS), the Supernatural Spell feat (SS), and the Dweomerkeeper's mantle of spells class ability. The twin problems with this sort of thing are (a) avoiding XP costs and (b) bypassing spell resistance. Very bad for lots of potential spell applications.

2) Any ability that allows the Frenzied Berserker to auto-save, reroll, or otherwise handwave his Will save to come out of frenzy. The FB is "balanced" by the fact that it's too dangerous for a normal PC to take, since his allies stand a chance of getting beaten on by him; anything that eliminates that danger probably overpowers the class.

3) Using the rules for thrown or falling objects to calculate damage. Just say no. This is where shapechanged blocks of adamantine and weird hulking hurler builds come from.

4) Bag of rats. Yes, it is still possible to pull it off in a certain limited context (Combat Reflexes + AoOs from rats + Great Cleave).

5) Polymorph, although as far as I'm concerned, WotC's new policy should be considered official errata. Use the trollform and dragonform and whatever other polymorph subschool spells instead of the core spell, as appropriate.

6) Gate. Yes, it is still too powerful; 1000 XP cost be damned. The spell still allows a 17th-level wizard to summon a solar (CR 23), or even a theoretically more powerful creature. Very bad.

7) Abilities that allow an action plus a full attack. This includes the special dimension-walking ability of the Telflammar Shadowlord (UE), but I'll bet there are a few other similar abilities elsewhere in the expansion books. This is very, very bad. At best, all of these abilities should work like Manyshot (conferring x attacks as a standard action, with precision-based damage applying to the first attack only).

8) Natural Spell. Maybe it's not really that powerful, but I have the image of a druid in innocent-sparrow form flitting about near the bad guys using a host of deadly spells to mess with them.

9) Blasphemy/holy word/etc plus caster level increases. It's very easy to get CL increases in D&D (prayer beads, hierophant PrC, domain abilities, etc.); you can get your 20th-level cleric to hit CL 28 without too much difficulty, meaning that 18-Hit Dice creatures (like, say, that pit fiend) die with no save when whacked with a holy word. Worse still, you have true madness with high-HD half-fiend creatures and PCs.

10) Thrallherd is a messy class indeed; too much opportunity to take advantage of followers and exploit certain infinite loops.

In general, I think the easiest way to deal with all this stuff is to hit the WotC Character Optimization boards and just check off all the crazy stuff they're doing, then declare it illegal.

 

[Particle_Man]

Yeah, throwing raw sneezing dust into the air with your hands is asking for trouble.

That is what Summoned Celestial Monkeys are for.

 

[Plane Sailing]

The thing about the dust fo sneezing and choking people forget is that its an area centered on you!! So if you are not immune to the effects, you are just as screwed. Now, if you happen to be immune, then feel free to abuse

Tough if you are on your own, but in a party?

Rogue tumbles up to BBEG and does the dust. Rogue and BBEG incapacitated by sneezing and choking, rest of party eliminates BBEG. Silly.

 

[Plane Sailing]

Here's another thing you need to get rid of : Vow of Poverty feat. Just say no.

Yes?

No, not really. A player in my old campaign needed to bring in a new PC and he asked if he could bring in a 12th Monk with vow of poverty. After that evenings adventure he asked if he could swap for something else because he found the character so feeble and lacking in options compared to everyone else.

Maybe vow of poverty would be overpowered for druids though.

 

[Taraxia]

From the core rules:
1) Hundreds of explosive runes and an area dispel magic

Easy way to deal with this: "You automatically succeed on any dispel check against spells you cast yourself". No rules exist for intentionally failing a caster-level check, and I'd rule you can't. You cast _explosive runes_, you cast _dispel magic_, the runes automatically go away. Even if you have two mages using this strategy, the dispelling mage has to be quite a bit weaker than the rune-writing mage to have a decent chance at failing the check.

How to deal with it if two mages *do* try this cheese: The first time an _explosive runes_ gets dispelled, it does 6d6 force damage to everything in range, *including all the other _explosive runes_ pages*. Nothing about the spell description specifies that dispel effects are resolved "simultaneously" rather than sequentially, and for obvious balance reasons it's better to lean toward the latter (not only in this situation, but in many, many others). Unless you have a way of cheaply getting reading material that can survive 6d6 force damage, only one of the _runes_ is going to go off.

2) Dust of sneezing and choking (as mentioned)

Yeah, by RAW this is really too good for a warforged or undead character. I would rule that this is a *magic* dust of sneezing and choking -- remember, it's cursed and looks like _dust of appearance_ most of the time -- and therefore should *always* cause its sneezing and choking effect, regardless of whether the character doesn't breathe or whether he's immune to stunning. (It says "treat as stunned" for the choking condition, but it doesn't say the character *is* stunned. Big difference.) Whether this is strictly following RAW is debatable, but it at least keeps the dust within something like a reasonable power level (for a cursed item that was arguably never meant to be used as an ordinary magic item in the first place).

And, yes, the fact that this dust imitates _dust of appearance_ and only becomes dust of sneezing and choking until you try to use it as _dust of appearance_ means you do have to cast it into the air around yourself.

3) Desecrate + Animate dead can allow for a 20 HD servant (titan skeleton?) at 5th level

I'd vote this is balanced by the fact that the necessary gem is quite expensive for a low-level character, and that you shouldn't be able to go to a store and buy a titan corpse at all. High-HD corpses really should be only available by killing them yourself, in a proper campaign world where the PCs are special and high-level characters aren't everywhere.

And if you can kill a 20-HD monster, the skeleton you get from it will be far less powerful than the creature you killed.

4) Alter self and Troglodyte form (+6 Natural armor)

The potential cheese of combining _alter self_ and _polymorph_ with access to the Monster Manual is well known. That's why WotC is in the process of deprecating those two spells.

5) Spiked chain + enlarge (also with: improved trip, combat reflexes, etc.)

Enh, there are still plenty of ways around the good ol' spiked chain, notably using magic.

6) Fire seeds

Hey, it's a 6th-level spell, and within the power range for a 6th-level spell. It's still not as good as _delayed blast fireball_.

7) Mnemonic Enhancer and a day to prepare

Depending on how you interpret it, you could say that you can only prepare one 3rd-level spell per casting of _mnemonic enhancer_ and that you have to do it *when mnemonic enhancer is cast* -- it's a 10-minute casting time with Duration: Instantaneous, which generally means that unlike with touch spells you can't "hold" the spell for when you need it. This may mean that you have to prepare those three extra spell levels immediately after you cast the spell, which takes *one hour*. Unless you can cast _mnemonic enhancer_ 10 times in a row and then prepare *all* those spells in the same hour, which you'd have to to pull off this cheese, and which I don't think the RAW let you do, I'd rule you only get to do this 6 or 7 times in one day, tops, if you want to get a good night's sleep that day and be able to prepare spells normally the next day.

Still pretty good, but, well, getting that many extra low-level spells at the cost of a *whole extra day* of preparation? I think it's fair. It's balanced simply by forcing the party onto a multi-day adventure where time is of the essence and the mage is not allowed to sit on his butt every other day.

8) Permanent symbol (Persuasion, Sleep, Death etc.) tattooed on your hand

This spell specifically says it "cannot be used offensively". What this means is very vague, but it gives the DM full leeway to say that if the spell is used in any context resembling a battle, and if it is forced upon another creature with any degree of intentionality -- if the hostile emotions running behind it by its nearby creator are too high -- in other words, if the situation clearly does not resemble that of a *trap* where the triggerer triggers the spell *of his own volition*, the spell just fizzles. It's handwavy, but that's what these clauses in the RAW are for.

Even if you believe it does work in battle, note this: it is very expensive -- and using the non-costly non-permanent version of it isn't that much more effective than similar spells at the same caster level, and has more complications surrounding the way it works. (Why cast _symbol of death_ rather than _power word kill_ or _weird_?) And, notice that you yourself can't trigger the symbol, and anyone attuned to the symbol and safe from it (probably your party members) similarly can't. The spell's most effective form in this context -- triggered when looked at -- basically functions like a gaze attack, and would be countered in the same ways as a gaze attack.

Also, note that by RAW you can't _permanency_ the spell on your own skin -- it can only be _permanency_'d on an object, not a creature. You could do it to a pair of gloves, perhaps. But then the symbol would be fully vulnerable to an ordinary, targeted _dispel magic_.

9) Gargantuan, permanently animated object with overland flight cast on it

It has to be _fly_, not _overland flight_. _Overland flight_ has Range: Personal.

Problems:

Costly in XP. Requires CL 16 to animate. Unless you're using falling-object cheese -- which a DM should be able to deal with, see my thing on the _shrink item_ cheese with the boulder -- this isn't any better than the actual summoning and calling spells you ought to have access to by that level.

Also note that there's nothing that says a magically flying creature can simply suicidally choose to fall at a speed faster than its fly speed, and that the _fly_ spell gives you good maneuverability, which means no minimum speed and no plummeting if you choose not to fly fast enough. Also note that the object takes *damage* every time it falls and hits the ground, proportional to the damage it does to whatever it hits. And that there's no RAW way to heal animated objects. So this trick isn't going to last you all that long, even if it does work.

10) Permanent greater magic fang (+5) on a monk

The XP cost is consonant with that of crafting a +5 magic weapon for the fighter. You need a 20th-level caster to pull it off. I fail to see how this is all that amazingly powerful -- notice that the 20th-level caster can also cast _wish_ or _miracle_.

This is, in fact, one of those effects that's intended to work precisely the way it does work -- nothing about _greater magic fang_, _permanency_ or monks fails to anticipate the possibility of doing this and make it cheaper than it should be.

11) Anti-magic field and spell shaping

Care to elaborate on exactly how you'd abuse this? Not that AMF isn't notoriously a pain, but spell shaping doesn't allow you infinite leeway to turn your spell into all kinds of bizarre irregular shapes -- all it does is let you move things from one standard shape (sphere, cone, line) to another.

Also, Shape Spell is not core -- it's, IIRC, Complete Arcane and outside the scope of this thread.

12) Rogue polymorphed into a hydra

Yes, this is why the massive, sweeping _polymorph_ errata happened. Still waiting to see what ultimately comes of it, but this is one of the things they wanted to get rid of.

13) Tan bag of tricks

For its price? Naw. It can be good, but I'd rather have an actual _summon monster_ spell any day.

14) Shrunken lead boulders (dropped from 10')

Yeah, Wizards needs to clarify the falling-object rules to mitigate a lot of the cheesy assumptions people have about it. I'd use the rule WotC uses for traps. Plenty of traps have ludicrously big objects falling on people's heads from above -- and *all of these traps have an attack bonus*, meaning that they can be dodged or deflected or stopped by thick shielding.

The Spiked Blocks from Ceiling trap, one of the most powerful falling-object traps that exists, still caps at a +20 attack bonus. If a spiked block lodged in the ceiling designed to fall right where you're standing by the careful construction of the room gets +20, a big lead boulder that randomly poofs into existence somewhere above your head shouldn't get an attack bonus of any more than +7 or +8.

Note that for the aforementioned Gargantuan flying animated object, the attack bonus would be based on its standard BAB, +12, with a pretty hefty penalty for the fact that it's falling at you from a great distance rather than coming up at you and slamming you. I'd say the penalty should scale with the distance it falls, since once it's falling by definition it's losing control over its movement.

15) Scry/port

Enforce the failure chance for "seen once" teleports, which is the best that _scrying_ is going to give you, if that. (Note that if the _scrying_ doesn't give you an idea of where the person is located *and* what the place looks like, it won't work. You need to know "location and layout". You can't just see a room and say "I want to teleport to that room" -- you have to find some clue in the _scrying_ that says that the room is in, say, Chicago.) In order to get to "studied carefully" levels you have to either spend a whole week _scrying_ on the same location repeatedly or use _greater scrying_. You can also bypass this process with _greater teleport_ -- but both _greater scrying_ and _greater teleport_ are 7th-level spells, and once you can cast those you're *supposed* to be pretty darn powerful. (Do note, though, that even _greater scrying_ is not guaranteed to give you an "accurate description" of the place you're going. A 10-foot radius around some dude isn't guaranteed to tell you all that much about where he is, not if he doesn't spend that time wandering around and talking a lot.)

Roll Will saves every time someone tries scryporting rather than fudging like some DMs do. *Enforce* the rules about _scrying_ giving bonuses to Will saves for characters you don't know that well. This forces them into the position of having to deal with high Will saves from the powerful, high-level BBEG whom they know well and high Will saves from the random mook they know nothing about. Just enforce all the RAW instead of handwaving and this spell combo becomes a lot less powerful than it seems. Remember the existence of spells like _nondetection_, _forbiddance_, _dimensional lock_, _mind blank_, _Mordenkainen's private sanctum_, etc., and remember that if your players know about scryporting their opponents know the defenses against it. *And* that scryporting can be used against them just as easily as they can use it against others, forcing them to use up spell slots to protect themselves.

16) Strand of prayer beads purchased without bead of smiting

RAW doesn't say you can do this. Just because an item can be priced doesn't mean you can buy it that way -- it means you can find it that way or you can craft it that way, if you choose, but that's a bit more of an involved process. DMs' job is to stand in the way of someone staring at the list of magic items and making special magic items customized to their every need by varying what the RAW say you can actually get.

This is especially true for the prayer beads, which are religious objects probably made to ritual specifications, not a toolkit designed for pragmatic adventurers.

Even so, the pricing is still balanced. I wouldn't necessarily let a player buy the 79,000 gp smiting-less strand, but that strand is still really expensive for a player at low-to-mid-levels.