I'm going to assume everyone is familiar with the Dragonfire Adept (or Warlock) trick with Nosomatic Chirurgeon, to use at-will spell-like abilities to fuel the pestilential touch.
Let's raise the bar. Enter the
Soultwister, a variant Shugenja from The Secrets of the Shugenja (in the Rokugan line).
The important parts to remember:
- You switch the Fortitude and Will saves for the Shugenja class (you need a Base +3 Fortitude to enter Nosomatic Chirurgeon).
- You don't get Sense Elements. Instead, you get Detect Passage at-will as a 12th level sorcerer. The spell appears in the same book, and the relevant portion is this: Shu 6 (Earth), Sor/Wiz 7.
Oddly you don't cast it as a 12th level shugenja, which would make more sense (both because a 12th level Sorcerer doesn't normally have access to 7th level spells and because it
is also a shugenja spell, so going outside of the class seems weird. However, this might be a designer's work-around since you can bar the Earth element when you choose your element focus). In any case, you now have an
at-will level 7 spell-like with a caster level of 12.You also have, as a Shugenja, the perfect skill setup for Nosomatic Chirurgeon. Whereas Warlocks and Dragonfire Adepts had to worry about getting their class skills right, you have all the skills you need as class skills.
Now, ideally you just use the feat Skill Specialization from Ultimate Feats or the Netbook of Feat, but they're third party and very rightly so (many of the feats are poorly written or unbalanced). There's actually a WotC-official pairing of two feats that lets you do this trick two levels earlier, but I only remember half of it (Laborious Training from
Ravenloft: Legacy of the Blood, page 91; the other half is a feat somewhere that replaces Wisdom with Intelligence for the Heal skill). We'll assume a tamer approach:
we're just going to use skill retraining. When you hit level 5, your skill rank maximum will the necessary 8. Retrain your heal to maximum, and enter the Chirurgeon class.You now can spontaneously cast inflict spells of up to 7th level at-will (at level 5).After that, use the usual Mastery of Night and Day with your new Inflict Serious Wounds, Mass to deal 36 damage to a group; or Inflict Critical Wounds to deal 48 damage to an individual. I realize it's not overpowering, but it's decent for the level, and the more important element is that you have level 7 spell access at level 5 for certain prestige classes or other tricks.
Expanded Tricks
Getting Crazier:Start out as Soultwister Shugenja 1 with the Keen Intellect feat. Level up (Soultwister Shugenja 2) and make a Faustian Pact for a bonus feat: Laborious Training. Level up again, retraining skill ranks into Heal to boost it to 8 (as it uses Intelligence now). Enter Nosomatic Chirurgeon at level 3. Proceed to slaughter everything that is "level-appropriate."
Whoa, Kiki, Slow Down, Girl!Start out as Soultwister Shugenja 1 with the Skill Specialization feat. Level up to 3 (Soultwister Shugenja 2, about to take your next level) and retrain your Heal to 8 ranks. Enter Nosomatic Chirurgeon. 'Yes' just a little bit too hard and kill everyone.
