The Gaming Den

1.) Abuse the spoon out of polymorph any object. My favorite one is retroactively changing your character to a force dragon, which can eventually push your base intelligence into the 80's.

2.) Animate object. Since there isn't a size limit past colossal, you can animate a castle, send it flying with the fly spell, and send it crashing back down to earth. Good times.

3.) Dominate drones. The higher your caster level, the more dominated drones you can acquire since the spell will last longer. A core-rules Red Wizard (pulling out every trick in the book) can eventually dominate all of the fiend lords in the book and rule the demon armies.

4.) Power leech. This spell is just insane. Cast it on your familiar for a good laugh all around.

More to come...

Um... actually PAO has no Caster Level dependent effects. At all. Look it up, PAO has no hit die limit. Not "fifteen", not "your hit dice", not "your caster level", nothing. And its duration isn't based on caster level.

The only effect of having a higher caster level on PAO is on its dispelability - that's it. But you can abuse the crap out of Shapechange rather trivially.

-Username17

I should know better than to get into the inheritance rules and shit, but I thought that the whole 'as polymorph' thing meant that the rules carried over except for when explicitly contradicted by the specific spell.

They are. The original polymorph says that you can change into any creature within certain types that has 15 or less hit dice.

PAO says that you can change into any creature or object. Any creature or Object is a set that includes creatures of 16 or more hit dice, so it's got that covered.

The Hit Dice restrictions of Polymorph would stop the examples of PAO seven ways from sunday - but they don't apply so it's not an issue. You can change anything you target with PAO into anything that is a legal target for PAO - so the only restriction is the extremely large size cap (and, it can be argued, no transforming into Plant Creatures, because they are immune to Polymorph).

-Username17

I got basically run out of hte WotC board last year for suggesting that, maybe, PaO doesn't take in the limits from Polymorph. Just saying.

WotC boards have a lot of weird ideas. There is a lot of "interpretation" that has no basis at all in rules that people cling to over there. It's reinforced by the whole vicious cycle where:

1> The moderators are "anti-munchkin", which means that they explicitly favor people who use the word munchkin to describe their opponents.
and
2> People who don't actually know what they are talking about resort immediately to name calling (which doesn't mean that people who do know what they are talking about don't resort to name calling).
and
3> When an insult is used to describe someone who is talking from a RAW standpoint, that insult is "munchkin".
and
4> When the moderators see someone decried as a munchkin, and another person decried as a moron - they side with the idiot over the asshole every time.

--

So what does that mean? It means that whenever things get complex, people who start parsing difficult language instead of just making shit up get into heated arguments, and the moderators come down on the people who were actually using their lingual and logical skills - because those are the people who are being flamed for being "munchkins".

Remember, I actually got banned for talking about the 3e Polymorph Constitution interaction problems with bracers of health. The people who "felt" that things worked some other funky way than the way they actually are written to function were basically such assholes that eventually I was banned for being too controversial.

Do that fifty times and the entire board just becomes a crazy town full of paranhas that visciously flame anybody who dares to actually read more than one step through a multi-rule interactivity system. So it's no surprise that you'd get hounded for talking about how the Rules as Written let you PAO into a Solar. The moderators encourage people to hound people like you.

-Username17

Totally kill all fiends and evil gods by saying "amen".

The only truly fun thing about high-caster level for wizards I've done is using Wail o' Banshee. Kill off a small town, or large one.

Lago_AM3P at [unixtime wrote:1105297351[/unixtime]]4.) Power leech. This spell is just insane. Cast it on your familiar for a good laugh all around.

How can you exploit this spell? I've heard about an infamous Maho-Tsukai Power Leeching build, and I'm very interested to know how it works
Thanks for your help!

http://boards1.wizards.com/showthread.p ... br][br]Not a bad build for a C.O. person.

Actually, I think the build stinks. All that questionable content, and it partially uses an infinite loop half-way through. And it requires you to misread the rules on UMD and Staff checks (the emulate ability score function of UMD only allows you to bypass a minimum attribute) to function.

Sigh. It seems like an elaborate system of ropes and pulleys to distract your DM from the fact that you have an infinite loop in your pants.

-Username17

Frank - Boondoggle explained how UMD caster level checks work in his most recent post. After reading up more on UMD, I'd have to agree with him per the RAW. I don't know if UMD was intended to work that way - but by the rules, you can do it.

No you can't. He's totally right about Caster Levels, but then he just hand waves and says that "ability scores work the same way" - they don't.

UMD skill description wrote:Emulate an Ability Score: To cast a spell from a scroll, you need a high score in the appropriate ability (Intelligence for wizard spells, Wisdom for divine spells, or Charisma for sorcerer or bard spells). Your effective ability score (appropriate to the class you're emulating when you try to cat a spell from the scroll) is your Use Magic Device check result minus 15. If you already have a high enough score in the appropriate ability, you don't need to make this check.

UMD for emulating ability scores only works for scrolls. You can no more emulate a high Intelligence while blasting people with a staff of disintegrate than you can emulate a high dexterity when making the touch attack.

UMD is good for many things. Many things which are arguably broken, even. The emulate class feature, for instance, can be used at any time (and you can give yourself a Monk level in the triple digits for purposes of a Monk's Belt and have an AC to match). But specifically Emulate Ability Score only works for scrolls and therefore can't be used to jack up the power of anything you do.

-Username17

looks like the build's author revised his verbiage. i have yet to go over it with a fine-tooth comb rules-wise. For UMD skill that is.

Great.

He has "updated" it to show that he only gets +50 to the DCs of scrolls. He doesn't get any plus to the DCs of scrolls, because scroll DCs are not dependent upon your ability scores. Scrolls have a minimum ability score to be used at all. Exceeding that minimum does nothing.

Staves, on the other hand, have no minimum scores to be used, but if your scores are larger than the normal minimums to cast the spell - they use yours instead. Fortunately or unfortunately, you can't emulate an ability score for a staff (where it would matter), you can only emulate an ability score for a scroll (where it doesn't make a lick of difference one way or the other).

Even after revising it, his statement about DCs is wrong.

And the fact is that he's still trying to get the "highest possible UMD check as an Artificer" - which is a puzzling goal, since he's using a class which contains an infinite loop for UMD.

-Username17

Isn't DC the real problem w/ the Artificer anyway? That's the main reason the Artificer IMC isn't all that happy w/ the class, it's hard to get use save or dies b/c the save DC he can get are kinda mundane.