Seriously though, today I considered adding nerfs onto the Truenamer class after taking into account the MetaCompendium's 3.5 fixes.
"Whaaaat?" you say.
I know. I know. But remember that I was dealing with the fixed truenamer class. Ignoring the each of the 'rider' buffs, these main two buffs make truenamers fit into the Tier 4 world the designers expected:
1) Law of Sequence only applies to
harmful utterances or unwilling targets
2) Unless mentioned otherwise, all utterances
durations are 5 rounds per effective truenamer level (which is the total truenamer check)
You can view the two 'rider' buffs (meager dead level abilities & x2 utterances known which all stack with themselves) in my build compendium, but they aren't important because they don't fix the power of the class that much. Neither do the small buffs to the awful recitation feats.
Oh, and I fixed some of the utterances. It's true that the truenamer section was rushed.
"Well how much did you buff them?" you're dying to ask
Not much. I listed the exceptions to Buff #2 (some that keep the original duration, some instantaneous, some concentration, some damage/heal over time utterances, and one that uses its emulated spells durations). A few needed to be a lower level, some had a slightly larger range, some were too single-instance, some forgot to help truenamers (wierd, huh?).
"So where does the power come from?" you wonder.
It comes from the actual class's mechanics, specifically that the Law of Resistance is isolated to each utterance. I didn't know that before. Spamming one utterance allows you just switch gears into another utterance once you top out. Once you put even simple effort into making your checks, you can do so a lot each day. I suppose the fact that the truename check took over the save line in a lot of the effects didn't hurt (but I obviously didn't want to nerf that).
I thought (before today) that truenamers optimize their checks so that they have basically a bunch of spell slots. Now I realize that they have all the spell slots they want (up to the point where they stop effecting their enemies and allies, of course). So that's when I reran the numbers to see what would happen if instead of keeping track of 29 different 'pools' for the Law of Resistance, you only had to keep track of 1.
It doesn't work without a whole heap of other changes to the class and I prefer elegance in my fixes. I just didn't need them. I needed the utterance fixes (what ToM errata?), I needed the duration buffs, and I needed to tone down the Law of Sequence. I didn't need the rest (but the rider affects are cool, ammiright?)
ConclusionSo it looks like DMs are just going to have to be okay with truenamers spamming their abilities all adventuring day whilst still being able to effect Gold Great Wyrms without a truenaming roll. What? You don't believe me? Okay I'll post the straight forward build in a few days if anyone cares. It doesn't go all out or anything
