Truenamer

[Nifft]

I remember a few years ago seeing the Truenamer class as I browed Tome of Magic: Pact, Shadow, and TrueName Magic in the book store. I liked the flavor of the class so much, I bought the book. It's a really interesting concept.

Unfortunately, it was my experience that it kind of fell apart mechanically. The class felt broken.

The way I remember it was that as you got higher and higher level, it became increasingly more difficult to give buffs to yourself and your allies, let alone your enemies. To do so would require obtaining a good number of bonuses to keep doing the simplest thing. In some ways, it felt weaker as you leveled up.

I eventually gave up in frustration.

We worked out the math a few times in optimization threads.

It turns out that your expected success rate is acceptable -- that is, it remains high enough to affect same-level foes a few times per day across all levels -- if and only if you go all out and do every obvious thing possible to optimize your Truespeak check. Feats, gold, item slots, etc.

I think we decided that it's technically a balanced class, but it's also a hideously inflexible one: if your group doesn't use the standard gold-per-level progression, you're either unplayable or you're broken.

Even then, in the best of cases, it's still a weak class whose shtick is done better by the Warlock.

Cheers, -- N