what's the best golem?

[Vaxalon]

a flesh golem made from a dragon carcass.

Oooh nasty! I'm going to have to steal that idea...

 

[AuraSeer]

Personally I'd never create a clay golem, simply because of that berserk chance. If you take the golem into combat, you will eventually roll low on your d%, and lose the golem forever.

If you look at the probability, the cumulative odds really suck. The chance of your golem going berserk in round 1 of a given combat is only 1%. But if the combat goes on for even 5 rounds, you have a 14% chance of failing on at least one of those rolls.

Assume every combat is just 5 rounds long, and you fight just twice per day. That gives you a 45% chance of losing control within two days, and an 89% chance within a week.

1% per round may not sound like much, but unless your dice are loaded, you cannot avoid it for long.

 

[Vaxalon]

Clay golems are great for guardians, who only fight once in a great while, and as trojan horses. A clay golem could be sculpted and painted to look like any sort of large, massive thing, and attack people who get too close.

 

[Tzarevitch]

In 2e my favorites were Gargoyle Golems and Stained Glass golems. Gargoyle golems has that cool petrifying attack then on next turn they'd smash the petrified character. They were also pretty tough.

Stained glass golems were about the only golem with an area of effect attack that could cause significant damage but they were pretty flimsy.

In 3e, I vote for clay golems for three reasons.
1. They require magical blunt weapons to damage.
2. Their magical power is something useful like haste-on-self.
3. They do significant damage that is hard to heal wihtout a cleric of significant power.

Tzarevitch

 

[the Jester]

Well, if you include custom golems, I gotta go with my very own homebrewed orichalcum golem:

http://enworld.cyberstreet.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=23044

Heh! Talk about reversing your standard expectations...

 

[00durrin]

yeah but your orgicum golem has an inherent weakness...once it disjoins their weapons they start whooping its butt.

 

[the Jester]

Err... except that it's dealing 5d10+17 hp of damage twice a round, PLUS disjoining whatever else they've got going on...

 

[Krafen]

The Orichalcum Golem is certainly an interesting idea. It is dangerous until the party figures out they can just stay out of range and kill it with normal arrows. You might give it limited use of the epic feat that allows you to reflect missiles back at the person who fired them at you.

 

[AuraSeer]

Oh, you just want the biggest, meanest golem? Pick up a copy of Dragon #297, and look at the stats for the Sphinx.

Yes, that Sphinx-- the big stone one in Egypt. It's a CR 100 epic golem.

250 hit dice.
Immune to all magic.
DR 300.
Average 260 damage per melee hit.
Forcecage, Insanity, and Incendiary Cloud at will, at 60th caster level, Intensified.
There's more, but I think you get the point. It's not something you want to run into in a dark alley.

This Sphinx will only obey a pharoah, you can build your own. About all you need is a 100th-level creator, 10 million XP, 500 million gold pieces, and 12 years of nonstop work.