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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elder-Basilisk" data-source="post: 1715547" data-attributes="member: 3146">Not quite. You're normally invulnerable to grapple. A dragon or other good grappler who could cast Anti-magic field (or stand in one) would make pretty short work of you. While those are highly specialized foes (and my fighter is just about equally screwed against any skilled grappler with an anti-magic field), in a 20th level comparison, they're worth mentioning. So make that generally invulnerable and I'll agree. The exceptions to that are pretty much unavoidable. Nine times out of ten, there's no attack to be wasted. Most of the time you're looking at grapple, it's coming from a creature with Improved Grab.28 is the average damage my fighter scores on a hit. Close Quarters Fighting lets me add that to my grapple check to resist Improved Grab or Improved Grapple attempts. The rest of the grapple check is BAB (20) + strength (10) + morale (2). While there is some disagreement among rules monkeys as to whether miscellaneous attack bonusses like weapon focus (grapple), morale, luck, insight, etc bonusses apply to grapple checks, I think the rules work best if you assume they do. Grapple checks are "like an attack roll." Attack rolls are described exactly the same way (str+BAB+size). The FAQ, for those of you who care about that applies the prone penalty to characters in a grapple. And Power Attack in a grapple is horribly broken if attack penalties don't apply to grapple rolls (which is logical if bonusses don't). After all, since grapple damage is determined by unarmed strike, a character could theoretically power attack for max, add that to his grapple damage rolls but not worry about power attack reducing his grapple checks. If you rule that miscellaneous bonusses and penalties apply to grapple checks, there's no problem with power attack.Well, other than avoid getting into a grapple, this character doesn't want to do anything in a grapple. He's got a pretty good grapple check at +32 (+27 in the anti-magic field) which will sometimes work for him (if it's a mere marilith in the anti-magic field, or if anything less than the dragon is trying to hold him at the -20, he's got a fair shot at winning). However, mostly he'd rely upon his aportive armor to get him out of grapples--or his allies to punish the creature for lowering its defenses to grapple him.BTW--the concentration checks for manifesting a power while grappling or pinned are RIDICULOUSLY easy. For high level powers, it's easier than manifesting them on the defensive. There should at least be some kind of modifier on that. (Oh well, I guess I'll live with it in this comparison and join Thanee in the "more than a few things in the PsiHB were not even remotely well thought out" crowd afterward).I'm not in trouble if I can avoid being in the grapple in the first place. Which I usually can.It's buried in the monster manual under the description of rake in the glossary. The entry on the annis hag also supports this conclusion as her rake ability lets her attack with both claws at no penalty in a grapple. Ordinarily, she couldn't attack with more than one claw in a grapple. Unfortunately, the role of natural weapons in the grapple was one of the things that the otherwise laudable 3.5 cleanup and reorganization of the grapple rules did not make clear. However, that's been the rule all along.Generic creatures with natural weapons are somewhat inconvenienced by grapples. Creatures with single natural weapons (like a dire wolf) gain a mixed comparitive benefit (b/c they can still use their high damage natural weapon in a grapple but weapon users are limited to light weapons). Creatures with multiple natural weapons are disadvantaged. Creatures with Improved Grab are generally at a big advantage in a grapple. Creatures with rake are VERY dangerous in a grapple. Creatures with Constrict are, CR for CR some of the most dangerous creatures in the monster manual.Not really. The pit fiend, for instance attacks with one claw, deals damage, makes the improved grab, wins the grapple check, deals constrict damage, then uses his BAB to make multiple grapple checks (he's made one attack so he's got three more), grapples to pin and deals constrict damage when he wins, then grapples twice to do damage, dealing claw and constrict damage each time. He deals nearly double the damage he would deal with a full attack, has an easier time making the grapple checks than making the attack rolls because he goes against his foe's grapple check rather than their armor class, and ends up with his foe pinned and unable to do anything (unless he's a psion or has magic items that let him do stuff) without winning a grapple check against the pit fiend's full grapple bonus.Trust me, grappling creatures are plenty scary even without being able to use multiple natural weapons inside a grapple (unless, of course, they have rake).Sure. Your character has a 65% chance of beating the Balor's SR. You will generally succeed. On the other hand, lets say you try to transfer 90 points of damage. That means you've got about thirty five hit points left. You beat the balor's SR, it makes its save and you get 45 hit points back. You end up with 80 hit points. If we assume that the Balor did 90 points of damage to you the previous round (that's why you could try a 90 point empathic transfer and also, coincidentally just about the amount of damage your initial calculations suggested you would take each round against the hypothetical +35 bad guy), he does 90 hit points to you this round and you're dead. Of course, the balor has now taken 225 points of damage from Empathic Transfers and Empathic Feedback and you probably did 70 points of damage if you won iniative and got off a full attack so it's taken 295 points of damage and is bleeding out if it's a standard MM Balor. Unfortunately, you're quite dead yourself. And, if it scored particularly good damage on any of the times it hit you (enough to cap out the Empathic Feedback) or if we apply it's DR to the damage you did to it, it manages to survive with 30 hit points or so.Empathic Feedback is a REALLY good power and I'm tempted to agree with the "not well thought out" crowd regarding it. Hostile Empathic Transfer is also a REALLY good power (in fact, considering the amount of damage it does, I think it's dramatically underpriced, ignoring the secondary effect of healing you). They work really well in combination too. However, using them as primary offense is playing with fire--especially when you've got 134 hit points. That's pretty much what I mean. However, my observation you're a lot more confident about your skill swinging the sword than the numbers calculated give you a right to be. You may well hit and you may do enough damage to win but that's not guaranteed.See my previous note on Hostile Empathic Transfer and Empathic Feedback. They're in a lot of trouble. However, so are you. You're employing a very high risk strategy. It finishes the combat very quickly but it looks like it's going to take you into the red zone of hit points nearly every round. It just takes one of them getting a lucky crit and you're dead. Well, with the heavy fortification shield you're immune to crits but a few max damage hits could be just as bad for you.Either way, considering the empathic feedback damage, I expect it'll be over in two rounds but it seems that at least one time in ten, you're likely to fail to beat SR on the hostile empathic transfer and end up dead the following round.Well, the Balor Death Throes is a serious concern for my candidate. (While it's less of a concern for your candidate, it's hardly inconsequential--even if you have both the pps and the swift action to gain improved evasion, the empathic feedback trick looks like it's going to take you down to 40-50 hp remaining on a fairly regular basis. If you blow the save, you may well be toast even with Improved Evasion). As is the vorpal sword. On the other hand, if it weren't for the heavy fortification your character has, the vorpal sword is even more of a concern for you. In order to instantly kill a character, he needs to confirm the hit. His odds of doing that against my fighter are pretty low. Especially if the fighter is using combat expertise. And doubly so with moderate fortification on his shield. His odds of doing it to your candidate would be better than 50/50 if it weren't for heavy fort.So, no, the fighter won't be equally mangled. He is fairly easily able to get his AC high enough that the balor isn't likely to hit him more than once a round and STILL hit the balor hard enough and often enough to kill it in three rounds. So, if he takes 60 points of damage from the Balor's weapons and then fails his save against the death throes, he's still standing with a 35 hp buffer between him and death.I meant Glabrezu. And actually, cleave is useful against them. Not as useful as it is against goblins but pretty useful nonetheless. Against their AC, my candidate can power attack for 1 and his fourth attack still only misses on a roll of 1. Their hit points are right in the range that my candidate kills one per round if he gets slightly above average damage (or if he picks up an align weapon spell from an ally). So cleave is going to add about 0.2 glazebru's per round to his pile of dead bad guys. Mostly that's significant because it's the difference between killing one glabrezu in the first two rounds and killing two. With an aligned weapon, it's the difference between just barely finishing off the second glazebru at the end of round 2 and being halfway to killing the third.Yell "Cleric!" On the other hand, considering my candidate's extra attacks, attack bonus, AC (we can't count on everyone always needing a natural 20 to hit unless we can adjust our AC to their attack bonus), and hit points, that's not going to happen as often.Not really. On the other hand, he seems to do about as much damage without his reserves as your PsiWar does blowing all of his. Only the 20 pp psionic lion's charge while Expanded and Form of Doom puts you ahead. Dude, they're evil outsiders. They won't be either visible or audible because they're going to teleport in. Spot and listen are advantages for your character. But they aren't going to win the competition. One swing comes from extra gear. The other comes from BAB. Also there's five points of attack bonus from BAB to consider.For all that you claim your damage could be better if you had picked different gear you ignore the fact that my damage could be better with different gear too. (Dropping the enhancement bonusses in return for special abilities and relying upon my allies for buffs makes my guy's damage go up a lot. Going to a +1 (+5 GMW) holy, Parrying, wounding, evil outsider bane halberd bumps my character's average damage up to 192 points of damage +5 points of con/round (total 252 in round 1 and 232 in round 2) including crits against the generic evil 20 HD AC 35 etc guy and 316 in round 1, 296 in round 2 if he's an evil outsider). Stop trying to claim bonusses for equipment you didn't include in your build. That's a two-way street. (For that matter, have you added up the total value of equipment in your build? While I don't doubt your word that it all fits under the 760kgp cap, I think a lot of this "with different equipment I could do this that, the other, and cook breakfast while I'm at it" nonsense would stop if you had to look at the opportunity cost of what you're giving up. If my fighter somehow had manifester levels, I would happily snap up the Suppressing enhancement for him--even at the cost of Holy on his halberd and some of his miscellaneous horn of fog-style items. Unfortunately, it would do him no good so he uses what he's got now.As I said, my character hardly has the best equipment he could have. The boots of speed are useful, no doubt about it. But you're not going to pick up two attacks by buying boots of speed, you'll only pick up one. And based on my 15 second appraisal wherin I guessed at the value of your equipment I didn't know off the top of my head, you seem to have about 730kgp right now. So, you could pick up boots but not boots and everything else that might come in handy.Well, faster movement? Yes. Scaring away lesser mortals? Yes. DR? No more than you've already got from Inertial Barrier. "Some time"? Reread the powers. You can keep up expansion for 44 minutes if you overchannel and extend it. You can't keep up Form of Doom for more than 7-8 minutes even by overchanneling and extending it. That's enough time for a couple battles in the kick in the door style game. It's not enough time to write home about. I have no doubt that it would be fun. It's the kind of manuever that will case DMs to houseful Empathic Feedback faster than 3.0 harm. It's that good. However, it's also very risky when you've only got 130 some hit points and your enemies have 225-600 hit points. You're pretending that risk doesn't exist. It does.Actually, I'm still hitting nearly as well as you are <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> The extra attacks make up for the fact that I'm missing a little bit more often.3.5 Darkness. . . whatever. Doesn't worry me in the slightest. Improved Invisibility? Well, now I've held him off for one round. If he dispels me, that's another round. I'm happy to go at that all day (metaphorically speaking. Realistically, the character probably can't keep it up more than a couple rounds). But that buys the wizards time to get their meteor swarm/Energy Drain/Gate mojo up and running and the clerics time to do their things.Yeah, they've got a lot of things they can do. However, with 10 points of AC, his primaries needs a 14 to hit me and his secondaries need a 19 (16 with multi-attack). If he's doing much better than that, it's power attack that isn't hitting me.Well, first things first. The dragon is CR 20. So it's exactly your CR. However, dragons tend to be rather extreme melee threats for their CR. Evil Outsiders have a wider range of abilities but are less physically threatening.Second, which character are you comparing here? Is it the character you posted, the one that also has a +5 ring of protection and a +5 amulet of natural armor (which makes it three neck-slot items by the way), or the one who swapped out his weapon powers for extra damage and picked up boots of speed, or this new one who ditched his skin of the defender to pick up "a couple extra items"? There's no doubt that a psywar could be optimally equipped to deal with this situation but there's no doubt my candidate could get different eqipment too. If I drop evil outsider bane off the weapon and pick up a dragonbane weapon, I look to be better off too but that doesn't prove anything. If I swap my feats around, ditch Iron will for True Believer and start wearing the helm of the purple plume, I'm doing pretty well too. If I swap out the ring of spell storing and the luck blade for a gem of seeing that I fit into the eye of my helmet, I'm doing pretty well. But I didn't.Third, 8 attacks/round are nifty and all that, but, given your character's attack bonus, the only ones likely to hit are your primary attack (and a second primary from haste if you do have the boots).Is this the suppressing weapon that you traded out for a flaming frost psychokinetic weapon? Really, how many different characters are you comparing here? Of course, if you have five different PsyWars constructed to meet different challenges, you'll be better than a single character constructed to deal with whatever fate throws his way. But that rather vitiates the point of comparing various candidates.So which equipment are you giving up to buy these pearls of power? The stuff on your character listing? The amulet and ring you added for your initial comparison? The skin of the Defender you added after that? The boots of speed you want to include now?Since this comparison is at least ostensibly supposed to track how characters would interact in a party, I don't have any problem with your relying upon some healing to get them all up as you initially proposed. And I'm fine with the official score of my candidate being based upon the +5 armor, +5 shield, and +4 halberd I statted him up with. However, the record should also reflect that your candidate is consuming several Heal spells from party members to keep his buffs up throughout the day and my character is not.I offer the mind blank example not as something to factor into the direct comparison but rather to factor into the analysis of the conclusions.So far, my conclusions read like this:1. Empathic Feedback is hideously overpowered and potentially gamebreaking.2. Your PsyWar can perform adequately in the role of a party tank at 20th level but will require a lot more healing and plays a far more risky game (Empathic Feedback, hostile empathic transfer) than the fighter. 3. Your PsyWar can spend a round and blow his entire wad of power points to be somewhat more effective than a fighter of his level for one combat.4. Your PsyWar is more flexible than the fighter.5. Despite that flexibility, your PsyWar does not rely upon his companions/items less than the fighter; he relies upon them for different things. (Mostly healing for the amount of damage he takes in most fights and the amount of damage he takes to keep his powers up).6. A party where a PsyWar replaces the fighter will be heavily challenged by multiple EL=APL fights per day. While the fighter tears through physical opposition short of dragons without sustaining much injury, the PsyWar gets mauled, spends pps to heal himself while wounding them, and hits the top of the red zone for hit points every time. After the fight, he'll probably suck up more healing from the cleric than the fighter.7. A party where the PsyWar replaces the fighter will be less challenged by single EL>APL fights. The PsyWar blows his whole pp reserve and is better prepared for several eventualities.8. In general, the PsyWar is more likely to get killed than the fighter. However, he's more likely to take something that outclasses him with him.9. If I'm the player of a character in a solo game, I'll pick the PsyWar.10. If, OTOH, I'm the player of the party cleric or wizard and I'm picking the fourth member of the party to stand between me and the dragon or balor, I'll pick the fighter every day of the week. The fighter doesn't have the "please go kill my friends" Empathic Feedback sign on his chest. The fighter has more room to go up in power if I buff him. The fighter requires less healing and is less likely to die. Having a party member who is dancing a jig on the thin end of his hit point wedge like the PsyWar in question is is asking to have nine fights go really well and the tenth go horribly, horribly wrong. The fighter is the more stable and dependable character. And that counts for a lot.I was surprised how much of a difference the four points of AC made in the "surprised while sleeping scenario." I would guess that Alter Self: Troglodyte form has 6 points of natural armor which stack with the 5 points of enhancement bonus to natural armor from the amulet (one of the benefits of 3.5). So, the character's base AC vs. his dodge target goes up to 52. Being able to fight as well as your candidate (5 points AC=AC 57) while having an AC that the unbuffed wyrm needs a 15 to hit with his primary attack and a 20 to hit with his secondaries seems like something to me. Even if the dragon pulls +9 to hit from buffs (most of which would be short-term) his secondaries still only hit half the time. 70 hit points or so thank me.I missed the "minimum of 1 standard action" bit. So, make that Righteous Might. It doesn't help with spottingThat's at least four times as long as the considerable length of time the PsyWar's Form of Doom can last. It's not going to make a big difference in surprise situations but can make a big difference in a dungeon crawl or assault situation. Those are the times when there will be time to switch things around. Other than Righteous Might, etc. it's not for use during combat.You don't need to be able to see invisible things 24 hours a day to matter. You need to be able to see them when they show up. Believe it or not, about 30-40% of the time, you can guess when they might show up. (We're going into the enemy complex, they may have invisible guards or assassins, I put up See Invisibility; there's an assassin who's supposed to be stalking us and waiting for us to leave the safety of the villa, so I put up see invisibility; we're going into negotiations with an untrustworthy foe, I put up see Invisibility just in case; ahh heck, the fighters are handily winning this fight in the temple of elemental evil, let's put up See Invisibility just in case someone's sneaking around to death attack us, the assassin got away last time--oh, hey there he is). That's why a lot of people actually have see invisibility type powers when they can't be kept up 24 hours a day.Alone, I would agree that the fighter isn't in the same ballpark of flexibility. In a party, he's in the same ballpark, he's just getting soundly beaten. Fortunately, every character in a party doesn't need to be maximally flexible.On the other hand, I notice you've discounted or ignored every kind of non-magical flexibility. Power attack against low AC? Doesn't count. Combat Expertise to reduce damage from the dragon? Doesn't count. Spring attack to avoid AoOs from the dragon, balor, pit fiend, whatever and control the pace of the combat? Doesn't count. Improved trip to put the hurt on humanoid opponents and control the pace of combat? Doesn't count. Elusive Target so as to be less vulnerable to a dragon power attacking or a blackguard/sorceror making a spirited charge/true strike/power attack/smite? Doesn't even show up on the radar. With a scoring system like that, it's no wonder you think fighters suck.Really? You seem to have missed all of the calculations in this thread. Against the abstract threat, my candidate takes no appreciable damage unless caught flatfooted and even then takes only about 31 points per combat. Against specific threats, the Balor's Death Throes and the Pit Fiend's Meteor Swarm are the most likely to do him damage but he comes out with noticably less damage than the PsyWar and is far more likely to survive. Against the dragon, it all depends upon what the dragon gets out of his buffs but my candidate seems more likely to survive keeping it occupied for two rounds of full attacks than your candidate.</blockquote>

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