Splatbooks to Beware of?

[galaga88]

I recently ordered far more D&D 3.5 books than I needed to get my campaign up and going, and now have the Complete Warrior/Arcane/Divine/Adventurer books.

Anyways, are there any prestige classes/feats/abilities in any of those I should beware of getting abused? Would I regret allowing new core classes like the Warlock or Hexblade in my campaign as base classes? (Warlock throwing around 2D6 touch attack damage at will seems awfully useful, if boring.)

 

[Caliban]

I recently ordered far more D&D 3.5 books than I needed to get my campaign up and going, and now have the Complete Warrior/Arcane/Divine/Adventurer books.

Anyways, are there any prestige classes/feats/abilities in any of those I should beware of getting abused? Would I regret allowing new core classes like the Warlock or Hexblade in my campaign as base classes? (Warlock throwing around 2D6 touch attack damage at will seems awfully useful, if boring.)

Arcane Tricksters combining Arcane Strike (from Complet Warrior) with Razing Strike (From Complete Adventurer) to do massive amounts of damage to constructs. I've seen one do about 54 dice of damage to a golem in one round by sacrificing a 5th and 6th level spell to those feats.

Fighters combining Leap Attack, Shock Trooper, and Combat Brute feats to get Power attacks with +4 damage per -1 attack penalty, power attacking for full, and transfering the penalty to their attacks to their AC. (It takes two rounds to set this up, but things tend to explode when it happens.) Whether or not this one is actually abusive is open to debate, it takes a lot of feats to pull off and you don't always have enemies in the right position to pull it off.

There are a few other combinations, but I'm too tired to think of them right now.

 

[Rystil Arden]

I recently ordered far more D&D 3.5 books than I needed to get my campaign up and going, and now have the Complete Warrior/Arcane/Divine/Adventurer books.

Anyways, are there any prestige classes/feats/abilities in any of those I should beware of getting abused? Would I regret allowing new core classes like the Warlock or Hexblade in my campaign as base classes? (Warlock throwing around 2D6 touch attack damage at will seems awfully useful, if boring.)

The warlock is balanced. Hulking Hurler from CW can sometimes cause problems, especially if the character pumps up their strength and throws giant lead balls.

 

[Darkness]

The Cleric Plus is kind of strong.

 

[Saeviomagy]

The warlock is balanced. Hulking Hurler from CW can sometimes cause problems, especially if the character pumps up their strength and throws giant lead balls.

The hulking hurler is not broken.

However, the rules on improvised weapons from the same book are terribly, terribly broken. DO NOT USE THEM. Instead, simply treat any improvised weapon as an unusually sized club, and use the normal weapon scaling rules.

If you do that, then hulking hurler is no problem whatsoever.

Otherwise your players would be well advised to use the improvised weapon rules and simply hit their opponents with the heaviest piece of spiky iron that they can carry.

Complete divine: DO NOT LET PLAYERS CRAFT RELICS. They can get vast, vast savings on items simply because they happen to be a cleric.

As far as I know complete adventurer and complete arcane don't have anything devestatingly powerful.

 

[Rystil Arden]

I forgot about Complete Divine. It has Divine Metamagic in it. Divine Metamagic fails the "Incantatrix Litmus Test." The Incantatrix Litmus Test states that anything more powerful than an incantatrix in its own area of expertise is overpowered by virtue of being more powerful than one of the most overpowered PrCs ever. Divine Metamagic, a single feat, is better than the Incantatrix's Instant Metamagic level 8 ability...

 

[Thanee]

The Fatespinner from Complete Arcane is pretty broken, at least once per day.

Divine Metamagic is alright as long as you forbid Quicken Spell and Persistent Spell to be used with it, those really are the two big problematic ones (considering the compareable low cost to use them).

The new base classes do all seem fine to me.

Bye
Thanee

 

[Fieari]

The Thought Bottle from Complete Arcane can allow a character to reduce anything with any XP cost to 500xp, once. That is, by spending 500xp now, he can wish to his heart's content and craft items and scrolls and commune with gods and so on and so on... and then get all but 500xp back. He can then DO IT AGAIN and afterwards go back to THE SAME LEVEL (not even costing him another 500xp IIRC). Combining this with rituals of renewal from Savage Species (I think) can allow a character to practically gain just about as much free ECL as he wants, continuously stacking more level on top of what he already has and then gaining back all the XP he lost so that he can do it again and again and again.

I'm still waiting for the errata that goes: "Errata: Thought Bottle no longer exists" I see no real way to balance it. It destroys balance in every concievable situation I can think of. I mean, what NON-broken way can you use such a thing?


By the way, the Hulking Hurler is a fun exersize in math. It's not just the improvised weapon rules that are broken as much as carrying capacity rules, and the fact that HH allows you to use a weapon the size of your medium load. If carrying capacity rules were realistic, then the concept of the HH would be strong, but not unbelievably so. But carrying capacity scales exponentially with strength and size and number of legs and number of limbs and all kinds of things, such that if you min/max your medium load, you can deal trillions of damage (litterally) per iterative attack. On the other hand, all that min/maxing of carrying capacity leaves little for things like... oh... the ability to hit things you target, or the ability to withstand ANY kind of attack... or even the ability to go first in a round. Yeah, whatever the HH hits is pretty much dead, gods included (though any god worth mentioning wouldn't get hit in the first place), small planets included (and planets aren't known for dodging capabilities)... but characters of levels much lower than it can kill an HH rather easily.

 

[Mouseferatu]

Those of you banning or changing Divine Metamagic probably aren't aware of the errata.

It only works with metamagic feats you already have. Thus, if you have Maximize Spell, you can use Divine Metamagic with Maximize Spell. If you don't, you can't.

 

[Rystil Arden]

Those of you banning or changing Divine Metamagic probably aren't aware of the errata.

It only works with metamagic feats you already have. Thus, if you have Maximize Spell, you can use Divine Metamagic with Maximize Spell. If you don't, you can't.

Oh I know. But I've had a proposed PC cleric as the DM who used Divine Metamagic to pull of two Instantly-Quickened spells per day on demand, at 3rd-level. This is the equivalent of a level 10 incantatrix's Instant Metamagic 2/day ability. Also, the feat text doesn't state that it can only be used for cleric spells, so before I said "no" the player of an incantatrix (with high charisma) in one of my other games decided that the incantatrix would hold off on taking another level in incantatrix to take a level in cleric so that she could have the feat. That's when I said no.