Min/Max Boards

harmonics

e -> c

sartorium

e

Dwarf Artificer 8 w/ Leadership and Extra Followers. All his minions to do the crafting, his own craft pool to make the magic he needs to get around. All he needs is some way to convert all those cookies into crafting pool and he'll be all set.

arias - That's different. Shadowcraft Mages have an ability that turns all (or almost all?) of their illusions into Shadow illusions. If you do it right it's possible to get over 100% shadow reality (which leads to the weird case where it hurts more if they disbelieve).

Unless it's houseruled in, there also is no Divine War Weaver variant. In fact it's the one thing that class's "Adaptation" section specifically tells you never to do.

Kudos, though, on using Contemplative that way. It's not a class I've done much with, personally.
What's your opinion of Ur-Priest/Divine Oracle? Is there anything there or is it a neat idea that doesn't play out mechanically?

directionism

(change your g back to an o, reorder. Google assures me this is a real word.)

Honestly, I don't even realize I'm doing it any more.   

You could always go with Savage Bard (Unearthed Arcana p. 50) instead of regular bard to make it work.

This, with my apologies.

I once had a character who was a Focused Illusionist / Master Specialist / Shadowcraft Mage in a mid-high level game. She kept projecting BBEG's for them to fight and take down. Even gave away some loot (appropriate to BBEG of about half or a quarter her actual level) some of the times.

The party fought her no less than six times before they figured out what her schtick was, including at one point blowing up a derelict building and leaving a quarter-mile-deep crater on the edge of a major city. By the time they brought her down, she had stolen all their gear at least once, framed their bard for murder, impersonated their team leader for six weeks after kidnapping him and locking him up, shackled and blindfolded in the basement of the inn they regularly stayed at (hidden behind an illusory wall), and made three whole game sessions occur entirely inside a mirage arcana.

I find the most satisfying way to make a villain hated, isn't to make them scary or destructive, but to make them annoying as hell. 

This is an interesting idea. I would certainly like to see something to make armor class relevant at high levels, but... it really seems like it just plain doesn't. And either shouldn't, or ... I'm getting ahead of myself.

On the one hand, yes, AC becomes completely irrelevant at higher levels once AC either caps out (i.e. you can't get bigger bonuses) or becomes so offensively expensive that you just plain can't be arsed, and either way Displacement is just better. There are two causes of this: AC being both limited (bonuses don't get any bigger) and hampered (bigger bonuses get expensive fast), and the fact that BAB (for you, but more importantly for the bad guys) scaled with HD while AC doesn't and certain truly nasty bad guys rely on having piles of HD to be substantial threats (Famine Spirit, anyone?).
What this means is that above certain levels, the simple fact that attack bonuses scale with level while AC doesn't makes AC irrelevant above a certain point. (I don't honestly know what that point IS - in my experience it hovers somewhere between level 12 and level 16, but is almost certainly true by level 20 and truer the more epic you go.)

The problem I encounter every time I sit down to try to fix it is... what happens if I succeed? That is, what does it do to the game if you actually balance this? The simple fix, after all, is to give everyone an AC bonus that scales with level, perhaps equal to their BAB. ... But wait, wouldn't the end result of THAT be that the bad guys more or less have to roll a 10 to hit you, no matter what your level is?

While it might not be THAT strict a thing, or that watery a thing, I think that does become a real problem when trying to correct this. You go from AC itself as a concept being irrelevant at high levels (because they're going to hit you; you're just better off not being there when they do), to AC as a concept being relevant but the actual numbers thereof mattering more or less not at all (because they're going to hit you on a ten or better, unless you're doing it wrong, in which case, see above).

Doesn't that sort of steal the thunder out of having a jacked-up AC at all? Knowing that in a couple of levels you're to have to keep reinvesting it in in order to stay on par, while the guy who bought a cloak of displacement (or just casts a persistent displacement every day) will have the same 20% or 50% miss chance from now until forever, and the things that can challenge him (anything with true seeing) will wallop you (because they're probably casters)?