The Gaming Den

Fuck strategy, fuck buffs, fuck save or dies. I want to make a character whose goal in life is to nuke the battlefield with bigass spells.

My biggest concern is damage. My second-biggest concern is upping save DCs, if any. My third-biggest concern are rider effect. My fourth-biggest concern is area.

What PrCs, spells, and expansion options do you got for me, Den?

P.S. No prayer beads of karma or Red Wizard of Thay. Those things just make it too easy.

Druids empowering fireseeds are always a blast. Strictly a high level option but it does let you go supernova.

Blargh

Seer of the Tempest in Tome of Fiends is a Evokery prestige class, might also be worth a look.

Truly great blasting builds I know involve twinking out single-target spells, like Orb of X with lots of metamagic feats and metamagic cost reducers (such as Incantatrix and Arcane Thesis feat) to make people just die without save, unless their touch AC is really good. I believe if you apply the same principle to the weaker area-effect spells, the resulting character will be actually decent, instead of broken. Elven Spell Lore feat from PHB II is also sometimes useful to a blaster, to make your favorite spell inflict the energy damage of your choice... but unfortunately, if you go for area effects, you don't really have any spell which is available relatively early and which you'll cast for the rest of your career

How cheesy are you looking to go? I'm assuming you're not looking for Locate City nukes, or anything, right?

At high levels, metamagic tricks are nice. I've seen a sorcerer/Incantrix that could throw around upwards to a thousand damage a round with Orbs of Force, once the Repeating spells started kicking in.

Artificer?

Wings of Flurry Sorcerer (or Wizard with a 1 level dip in some "Pick a spell")

Start out by stocking up on metamagic feats Repeat, Twin, Maximize, Empower, Quicken, Easy Meta on most of those.

Use PrCs that give you lots of bonus feats. Then go one of those knockoff Incantatrix PrCs that give -1 meta reduction earlier, but don't give persisted buffs.

Then Take Arcane Thesis as soon as you get Wings of Flurry.

1d6 per CL uncapped Force damage, ref for half. Meta the shit out of it.

Alternatively, Spellthief 1/Sorcerer 6/Spellwarp Sniper 4/ If you are going to be level 11. Spellwarp your Wings of Flurry into a no save stun that does 1d6 per CL damage, then Split Ray, Twin, Repeat, Empower, Quicken, Maximize the shit out of it.

Buff CL as much as possible.

Ooh, neat. I can't think of the PrCs that give out metamagic reductions though.

[Tome] Bullet Mage

It's Touhou themed, so it's obviously all about the explosions.

Antumbra wrote:[Tome] Bullet Mage

It's Touhou themed, so it's obviously all about the explosions.

That one's kind of under construction right now.

Yeah. We learned last night that explosions are fantastic as long as they aren't pointed at you. :P

Warmage.

trollface.jpg

Psychic Robot wrote:Warmage.

trollface.jpg

Trollmage is what I read.

Their powers revolve around:

Mental stat damage/Feeblemind.
>Implying
>Implying I'm Implying
Recursive arguments.
Actual Strawmen.
Logical Fallacies in general.
Turning people against each other, but not with Charm effects.
Massive diplomacy penalties.
They should probably turn into an actual Troll at some point.

Wait, surely this has been done?

It kinda depends on what level you're looking at.

Druids are about as blasty as you could ever want once you hit level 7. If Eberron material is open, you nab Least Dragonmark and Mark Of The Dauntless to supplement your Born Of The Three Thunders. Then you go around with a BotTT boreal winds (and the rest of the nukes from It's Cold Outside) and laugh at every fucking enemy you ever encounter.

Ever.

At levels 10+, you can pull off some rather nasty blasting with a Shadowcraft Mage using Residual Magic and cherry picking some awesome blasts. Wings of flurry, as Kaelik mentioned, is quite the awesome thing, but once you can mimic 7th level spells, I'd supplement that with whirlwind of teeth from BoVD. With the double-extending you get from the racial sub level and the 4th level of ScM, that's 4 rounds per caster level of area effect damage that moves at a speed of 40 feet (not "moves 40 feet per round" - double move!). 9th level spells bring the oh-so-cinematic crushing fist of spite, which is again something to supplement the rest of your dps output.

Take one level in Metaphysical Spellshaper (Book of Erotic Fantasy), then take one level in Binder.

Bind Naberius. Use MPSS' Metamagic Manipulation to take ability score damage to fuel metamagic costs. Naberius automatically heals your ability score damage at a rate of 1 pt per ability score per round.

This trick works for any spell. And you only lose 1 caster level. Think of it as taking a 9/10 spellcasting PrC which gives you metamagic for absolutely no effort on your part (unlike Incantatrix).

Taking more levels in MPSS gives you a bonus metamagic feat and Metamagic Mastery, which reduces the cost of all metamagic by 1.

Stock up on Empower, Maximize, Twin, Repeat, Energy Admixture, and of course Quicken.

There's a really great Druid blasting spell. It has no save, no attack roll, and spell resistance doesn't apply. It does guaranteed damage. Unfortunately, it's an 8th level spell. "Dead Fall" from the Spell Compendium.

Possible Core options:

Item Shrinker

Shrink down vats of acid or alchemeist's fire, hurl them at enemies, unshrink them, laugh at the hilarious consequences. Heck, you might not even have to worry about having volatile chemicals and just use the weight of your objects. I think Frank posted a wizard hulking hurler before.

Telekinesis.

Hurl shit at people. Not quite blasting but impaling people with giant swords has a similar feel. I am not bored enough to do the optimum math on this but even with just colossal daggers you are looking at 45d6, which generally does the job.

Equipment Shit

Not very doable without the wish economy or some other money making scheme, but necklaces of fire have a tendency to explode when hit by fire in a huge gygaxin fuxk you. You could try exploding them yourself. It costs 150 gp per d6, but the cheapest in the book does 11d6 for 1,650 (825 if self forged) and the most expensive does 58 d6 for 8700 (4450 is self forged). If you really have a lot of money you could have a summon stuff a portable hole into a bag of holding, which just chucks everything into the astral realm.

Mask_De_H wrote:Ooh, neat. I can't think of the PrCs that give out metamagic reductions though.

There's Halruaan Elder; Incantatrix and Red Wizard's secret love child.

If you're willing to just use cheesy magic items and your DM is really lenient, try the Bag of Shooting. You've probably seen this before; it's pretty simple. You carry around a single bag of holding with a few thousand other bags of holding stacked inside it. The innermost bags contain skeleton-crewed ballista; the skeletons have AI to fire and reload the ballista whenever they see light. Just open the bag to saturate the area in front of you with over nine thousand ballista bolts.

Wyzzard wrote:

Mask_De_H wrote:Ooh, neat. I can't think of the PrCs that give out metamagic reductions though.

There's Halruaan Elder; Incantatrix and Red Wizard's secret love child.

+Metaphysical Spellshaper 3 on top of that for another -1.

http://brilliantgameologists.com/boards ... pic=5394.0

You may want to tone it down...

I'll summarize.
Massive Caster Level (with the Master Spellthief Feat, Ultimate Magus and many different Arcane Classes).
Reserves of Strength to uncap damage spells.

Saxony wrote:

Wyzzard wrote:

Mask_De_H wrote:Ooh, neat. I can't think of the PrCs that give out metamagic reductions though.

There's Halruaan Elder; Incantatrix and Red Wizard's secret love child.

+Metaphysical Spellshaper 3 on top of that for another -1.

Dweomerkeeper.

Scorching Ray: as early as level 1 (setting a feat on fire) gives you 1x4d6 (RTA). CL 7 gives you 2x4d6, and CL 11 gives you 3x4d6 (42).

Split Ray is a +1 or 2 MM feat that you are reducing by 1 via Elven Spell Lore or Arcane Thesis - you're taking both, I forget which one does it. So pre-7 it's 2x4d6, then 3x4d6, then at 11 it becomes 4x4d6 (56).

You can then Empower it. Fuck, depending on how many feats you can find, you could E-Sub it for 0-1 = -1 to help with the spell level. So it becomes anywhere up to 4x6d6 (84).

Remember that E-Sub? Later you're taking E-Admixture. Or just Twin. Whatever. This means you're going as high as 8x6d6 or 4x12d6 (168).

Then one of those feats I mentioned earlier lets you pick the damage type. The DM will smack you if you try for Con damage, so just say Force or Dehydration or some bullshit.

I thought Arcane Thesis was errata-ed to not allow you to lower the level with 0-level metamagic feats like E-Sub. Or was that just errata-ed to fix the final spell level and not the individual level of any single metamagic feat applied?

It was, but paying attention to errata is pretty much a losing game.

Yeah, I don't actually pay attention to the errata.