A "Challenge"

[Cielingcat]

I found this thread on WotC, which has gathered hundreds of posts. The challenge is to defeat one of Dicefreak's penis-extensions with a 70th level DR 18 character. Now that's just ridiculous; no way anyone with a brain could fail to win with that.

So what we're going to do is win at level 20. Since they retain the right to ban anything that wins, we're not actually going to post anything there. To be nice, we'll limit ourselves to the books in the first post, which are:
# The SRD
# Complete Series
# Libris Mortis
# PHB2
# Heroes of Horror
# Sandstorm
# Frostburn

The challenge, Dispater, is found here.

Obvious things that already win are the Wish, the Word, and probably Frank's other entry from that contest.

[tzor]

1178904871[/unixtime]]Since they retain the right to ban anything that wins, ...

[the_taken]

You can find the stats of Dis starting on page 25 (335 of the book) and ending on page 21 (341).

I'm going to pass. Retardedly high levels are just way too much work for me, and dealing with an arbitrary nerf-herder is no fun either.

[Judging__Eagle]

Well, the only easy bits of advice are this:

1. You gotta be evil, or be able to make DC 64 will saves.

2. Don't use iron of any kind, adamantine, silver, that could work.

[Cielingcat]

Ok, first victory: he has 82 Hit Dice, and only SR 73 (actually 80 because of spellcasting). You need to make a DC 64 Will save, but it's mind affecting so it doesn't even matter. He has Epic Spellcasting, but all of his spells suck. So all you have to do is be a Rogue with a scroll of Mind Blank and a Staff of Blasphemy-get a 112 on your UMD check and you auto-win. Then you do it again when his Contingent Ressurection goes off; he has like 2 or 3, so you have to burn a couple charges. Boo-hoo.

[Username17]

Noone fights with weapons at hat level, you fight with bullshit.

He has sixteen hundred hit points, a +62 Will Save, an AC of 82, and a Spell Resistance of 73. He's immune to polymorphing, mind affecting effects, abilty damage, your mom, energy drain, fire, cold, electricity (despite having 40 points of Cold and Electricity resistance, whatever), petrification, sleep, death effects, disintegration, paralysis, imprisonment, disease, and poison.

:breath:

Whatever. He's not immune to holy fvcking word, so if you ass punch him with a Caster Level 72 holy word he dies instantly with no save and you can all go home. That's the easy way.

The other way is to be a Paladin with some Earth-bullshit of your own. The Aura of Hell doesn't do dick to you if you're immune to fear, and this ass hat only has 1600 hit points.

He really gets on your dick for trying to attack him, and you'd think that would be a problem what with the fact that you're contending with a fvcking disjunction every four rounds and you get hit with dimensional anchor and so on and so forth. All of that means precisely fvck all because actually what you do is simply get on a steed with Xorn Movement and some horseshoes of speed and you damn well charge in from outside the tower. You go right through the wall and have Tremorsense so it's not even a deal.

You benefit from lion's pounce or you get pounce in any of a number of other ways and you smite and you charge and you stack up your damage multiples and you blow in and do all 1600 damage in one round. It's not even an especially big deal or a lancer (Power Attack + Charge Bonus + Full Attack = 5 attacks @ over 400 damage each) Hitting him at all is sort of a problem until you realize that he only has an AC of 48 with a persistant wraithstrike in the house and the fact that you get your own Divine Ranks means that you automatically always roll 20s on attack rolls.

Dispater is offensively impressive, but honestly he can't do shit about shit if you just kill him on the first turn.

What a waste of time.

-Username17

[Fwib]

1178914797[/unixtime]]He has sixteen hundred hit points, a +62 Will Save, an AC of 82, and a Spell Resistance of 73. He's immune to polymorphing, mind affecting effects, abilty damage, your mom, energy drain, fire, cold, electricity (despite having 40 points of Cold and Electricity resistance, whatever), petrification, sleep, death effects, disintegration, paralysis, imprisonment, disease, and poison.

hilarious

[Josh_Kablack]

Oh, that's easy.

Cleric 17 of any deity with good alignment and DvR 19+ and Gate will do it.

[User3]

1178904871[/unixtime]]and probably Frank's other entry from that contest.

Was that the shapeshifter? And, didn't those rules actually get more broken since Frank made the build?

[virgil]

What ways are there, other than the Candle of Invocation and Use Magic Device, to increase your caster level?

And I think it might be a bit of a challenge. He has Unholy Word I believe (and Wish multiple times a day), and what if he tries to surround himself with Antimagic Field or something? He also gets a Fort save to negate any attack 9 times a day, whether that base effect allows a save or not.

[Fwib]

1178930535[/unixtime]]What ways are there, other than the Candle of Invocation and Use Magic Device, to increase your caster level?

Wizards boards ways to boost casterlevel thread

[Cielingcat]

1178929577[/unixtime]]

1178904871[/unixtime]]and probably Frank's other entry from that contest.

Was that the shapeshifter? And, didn't those rules actually get more broken since Frank made the build?

Kayla the Blue Mage, the Druid that stacked PaO and Shapechange to get Real Ultimate Power. And yes, they've gotten worse.

And I think it might be a bit of a challenge. He has Unholy Word I believe (and Wish multiple times a day), and what if he tries to surround himself with Antimagic Field or something? He also gets a Fort save to negate any attack 9 times a day, whether that base effect allows a save or not.

The antimagic field is not a problem; the victory comes from killing him before he can act. The Fort save vs attacks negates OMGCHARGEWTF tactics, but not Holy Word or WTFTENTACLERAEP from a Druid.

[Username17]

What ways are there, other than the Candle of Invocation and Use Magic Device, to increase your caster level?

Fwib's source leaves out all the structural ways to multiply and remultiply your caster level with clases like Ur Priest and Beholder Mage. And the Candle. I don't know why.

And I think it might be a bit of a challenge. He has Unholy Word I believe (and Wish multiple times a day), and what if he tries to surround himself with Antimagic Field or something? He also gets a Fort save to negate any attack 9 times a day, whether that base effect allows a save or not.

The Iron Curtain is essentially meaningless, as it simply causes attacks to get bounced. Non-attack effects are not affected, so the holy word still fvcks him (note: this entire entry is really badly worded). Against the Paladin entry, this results in him gtting essentially 600 extra hit points (1200 if he is allowed a second turn), which means precisely dick against a full-on cavalry charger with Divine Infusions.

The antimagic field is actually meaningless, as the characters involved in the challenge are allowed to have Divine Ranks, which among other things allows their magic to function in an antimagic field.

Dispater has death effects that are essentially impossible for anyone to survive. If he gets a turn, then he wins, no save. Really, he casts a CL 76 blasphemy and you all die with no save. So really it's just a matter of winning initiative and killing him so hardcore that he has to spend a round getting returned to life in a shaft of golden light and you have to be such a badass that you can do it again on your next round.

Which is totally doable. You just have to get your hands on a big intiative bonus and a big enough holy word or a total of +43 in completely bullshit to-hit bonuses and enough charge-whup that you can actually kill him with raw physical damage.

-Username17

[Josh_Kablack]

....or a total of +43 in completely bullshit to-hit bonuses

I thought everybody at this level used Limited Wish to auto hit all the time. Seriously, there's no duration on that effect, and "a single creature automatically hitting on the Nth attack it makes" is clearly within the "in line with the above effects" clause.

[shau]

I remember when the Char Op board was messing with that. There are two big problems that make this challenge hard.

1. The judge bans anything that he feels is cheesy. When talking about the test for what is cheesy he said something like a character who could upset the cosmic balance. Since we are taking out a god on his home plane, we are by very nature upsetting the cosmic balance. Seriously, the ability to win this contest is grounds for being ejected from the contest.

He also banned that feat that makes it so darkvision is not a "you lose your hide check automatically" ability. What's up with that?

2. It is not just Dispater, you also have to go through the City of Dis and his Iron Tower of 666 levels. So you can not really do the whole blitz strike because you have to get there first and all the good means of transportation have been cut off by DM fiat. You have to wander around through the city to find his tower then wander around the tower to find him. Judging by the the methods of the people who wrote this guy, I imagine that is going to involve wading through tens if not hundreds of encounters against foes that have abilities that are completely arbitrary.

[Josh_Kablack]

1178941718[/unixtime]] against foes that have abilities that are completely arbitrary.

Seriously, are there any other kind of Epic games?

Let alone Divine?

[Cielingcat]

1178941718[/unixtime]]1. The judge bans anything that he feels is cheesy. When talking about the test for what is cheesy he said something like a character who could upset the cosmic balance. Since we are taking out a god on his home plane, we are by very nature upsetting the cosmic balance. Seriously, the ability to win this contest is grounds for being ejected from the contest.

This remind anyone else of a certain other contest?

[NineInchNall]

I don't know. There was a "contest" waaay back about what to do if you were granted a D&D character level of your choice once a year in reality. Of course, I immediately busted out an XP-free wish - which got banned. It seemed a pretty efficient way to do accomplish some good in the world, though.

[fbmf]

1178943127[/unixtime]]

1178941718[/unixtime]]1. The judge bans anything that he feels is cheesy. When talking about the test for what is cheesy he said something like a character who could upset the cosmic balance. Since we are taking out a god on his home plane, we are by very nature upsetting the cosmic balance. Seriously, the ability to win this contest is grounds for being ejected from the contest.

This remind anyone else of a certain other contest?

[Doc Holliday]
Why, CielingCat, wut evuh do you mean?
[/DH]

Game On,
fbmf

[RandomCasualty]

1178941718[/unixtime]]
2. It is not just Dispater, you also have to go through the City of Dis and his Iron Tower of 666 levels. So you can not really do the whole blitz strike because you have to get there first and all the good means of transportation have been cut off by DM fiat. You have to wander around through the city to find his tower then wander around the tower to find him. Judging by the the methods of the people who wrote this guy, I imagine that is going to involve wading through tens if not hundreds of encounters against foes that have abilities that are completely arbitrary.

Pretty much it doesn't even matter if the tower is uninhabited. So long as Dispater can hear you coming or has some kinds of safeguards to alert him, then he can just wait for you to come into his room with a readied blasphemy. I mean just sitting in a small stone chamber with anticipate teleportation up and reading an action if you hear anyone chopping through walls would probably be enough.

All the guy needs is one action. Of course considering he can see through any iron alloy... well, the PCs are in trouble.

Also, I'd really say that the iron curtain would work on holy word. That is, if you interpret "attack" as being the same as "attack" as defined for canceling invisibility and not as the attack action, which I think is the intent. Of course, it is a free action to use the curtain, which means that technically he can't even use it except during his turn.

[tzor]

1179238190[/unixtime]]All the guy needs is one action. Of course considering he can see through any iron alloy... well, the PCs are in trouble.

Not to mention that he has line of sight to his spells through any iron alloy and his tower is an iron alloy, the party will start to be blasted before they even get to see him.

No, he gets to be massively cheesy and you can't.

[Catharz]

1179238754[/unixtime]]

1179238190[/unixtime]]All the guy needs is one action. Of course considering he can see through any iron alloy... well, the PCs are in trouble.

Not to mention that he has line of sight to his spells through any iron alloy and his tower is an iron alloy, the party will start to be blasted before they even get to see him.

No, he gets to be massively cheesy and you can't.

Does he have detect thoughts, 1000' radius? Dis is a planar metropolis, and I find it hard to believe that Dispater immediately starts blasting anyone he can see.

All you have to do is come up with some good reason to have an audience with him, and hopefully you can get to close range before blitzing him. He'll probably have an absurd number of contingencies and defenses though, so you might have to operate in a Quickened antimagic field (or open up with that ray which duplicates its effects, or MDj).

[RandomCasualty]

The diplomancer would probably be the only guy who could win, depending on how you interpret Dis' universal "I'm immune to any attack" Iron curtain ability.

Diplomacy isn't immediately considered an offensive action by any means, meaning you can take him out with it regardless.

[MrWaeseL]

Wouldn't being an Initiate of Mystra work?

[tzor]

1179243477[/unixtime]]All you have to do is come up with some good reason to have an audience with him, and hopefully you can get to close range before blitzing him.

This is a devil who practically puts on a molten metal show in order to be summoned. Logically any audience he would have would probably be equally controlled. Assuming that you can pull off the diplomacy in the first place because you can be assured he's going to sense motive at +122 the moment you walk through the entrance door.