I'm willing to admit that maybe it's just going over my head and my eyes are spinning because I'm one of those people who starts making a characters, starts going down all the different lines of options for the build, then I look at the clock and its *checks* yeah, 5:15AM and I gotta be up for work in an hour and a half, good work. Maybe I'm just tired and not getting it.
Our campaign starts at 5 so my Lv.5 Sha'ir can qualify for War Weaver at next level, and I like the idea of it on paper. I've even worked it into the character's backstory, was going to spend a feat on Invisible Needle so I have something to DPS with at all times in a way that works with the in-game requirements of the class as the needles would be tools for weaving. It's great! And every time I've tried to take up buff spells, I spend half the turns givingf them out one at a time and felt like I never did any thing. This is going to be fun!
And then I read a bit more and I don't even know if the class is worth it. I get the turn economy aspect of it, but looking at a pair of handbooks for it (
here and
here), they're like "yeah, you combine bouncing the war weaver spells with using Celerity to cast another spell and another spell with another spell all in one turn, then you get to cast 4 5th level spells + 6 4th level spells + 4 1st level spells this turn and four 4th level spells + 4 1st level spells next turn"
Like man I was happy pre-casting 4 spells I didn't know casting 22 spells in two turns was even possible. I've been playing all my spellcasters wrong!
I don't mind looking at handbooks and such to pare down the infinite options down to a smaller selection to pick from, then poke around to see what I like from there. BUt it's one thing to narrow down my options a little and another if I'm using it to find some meta cheesy thing that's just gonna tick the DM off or lead to having to rulemonger, y'know? I'm not really sure I get some of the suggestions. I think both guides mention getting Persist metamagic -- that's +6 to the spell level which makes the spell invalid for weaving, doesn't it?
And if you're not doing, y'k,know, 11 spells per turn, what are you doing? The animal stat buffs all get a "mass" version at 6th level and at some point they fall off due to magical items. And as someone who doesn't do a *ton* of buffing, other than Haste, I don't really know all the options off the top of my head. I can see some really neat little niche uses (Levitate/Fly the whole party as needed!) but I don't know how it's going play for multiple full sessions at the table. If I need to Levitate the entire party, I have to empty the spells already weaved in, so now we'll Levitate up the cliff right into combat, and my cool 4-spells-on-turn-0 trick isn't prepped. Now what do I do?
I dunno, maybe it's one of the things where it would make sense if I watched someone else play it, but seeing it in abstract and in writing just isn't clicking in my head.