Damage

[Rejakor]

Sup.  You know that game design philosophy of 'hey, I want combats to last more than one round, TIME TO ADD SOME MORE HP TO EVERYTHING'?  Yeah, that.  I've got a frenzied berserker/bloodstorm blade with various attack-generating bullshit and he's not actually doing enough damage.  I'm hitting for over 1000 per round at level 10 without any cleave/boomerang ricochet goodness and it's not enough to one-round all the monsters we're fighting.

And this isn't some 'roleplaying' 'go with what the DM wants' issue, this is a semi-pvp dungeon crawl madness style of game where boffing monsters as fast as possible is kind of the point and optimization is expected and explicitly not discouraged.

Now.  I don't need advice for the berserker.  I know where i'm going with him.  And it's straight into damage town, with a side of damage, and some 'fuck you I kill whole planets because bloodstorm blade 5' as a garnish.

But I do have another character.  5 levels to play with initially.  Ultimately I want to be using ardent and telflammar shadowlord to be multipouncing EVERYTHING, but for now i'm just going to be using lesser fey'ri, otherworldly, and dwarf ancestor to lol my way through fights.  At around level 10 i'll pick up the Pathfinder vampire template (which i'll immediately upgrade to Vampire Lord) for +2 LA and use the Wightblade feat to add some neg levels to all my attacks.  Fighting style has to be, for fluff reasons, two axes.  Build at level 10 is looking best to be Ardent 4/Bard 1/Telflammar Shadowlord 4/Sublime Chord 1, or Ardent 4/Bard 1/Spelldancer 1/Telflammar Shadowlord 4 going into sublime chord and then cerebremancer (with practiced manifester to fill the ML gap and Magic Mantle to allow spelldancer to also be a powerdancer).

But the problem is kind of becoming damage.  Unless I rely on vampire lord neg levels for damage and focus on no. of attacks to deliver said neg levels, even with a few sources of cha-to-damage and a decent starting strength (that gets built on by vampire), i'm having trouble topping 50 damage per attack at level 10 without relying on ubercharging crap that I really don't want on the character.

So what are some good sources of bonus damage?  I'm heavily overspent on class levels as it is, but there are sources of bonus feats in the game so even with how many feats i'm already spending on stuff I could theoretically afford a few.

All faerun books are open, the completes, spell compendium, and magic item compendium.  For the cost of a feat (and keep in mind you can get bonus feats in this game, max of one bonus feat per level after 5th for a cost in hp) you can open up one section (classes, feats, spells, magic items) of ANY PUBLISHED D20 BOOK.  So, y'know, iron kingdoms starship troopers d20 star wars d20 etc all good choices.  I'd prefer to keep to dnd books but if there is something amazing that I must be doing I would consider it.  Obviously though, don't want to spend a feat on opening a book if the option presented is sub par.

So yeah, come at me.

[BearsAreBrown]

Craven. With Shadowpouncing and shit it's easy to get 'em flatfooted all the time.

Another option is to go Ardent 10 and go full nova and multi-pounce one hundred times.

Kalashtar Power Shards lets you, 3/day, triple your ML and gives the pp for free. Hyperconscious introduces Persist Power or maybe your Magic Mantle is going full bullshit interpretation and lets you use Metamagic. Or go Dragon 313 and mind Mind-Mage is break the game in fucking half with spell slots/pp conversion rates. But I guess this stuff isn't directly about damage. And my last two suggestions were about class levels.

[Rejakor]

I thought long and hard about Ardent 10 with Dominant Time Mantle.  Long and hard.  But in the end, I was just like 'this lets me nova harder, and more often, potentially in every fight due to how fucking cheap it is to Twin Synchronicity 4 or 5 times, but ultimately if I really need to nova I can Temporal Acceleration and Delay Power for a similar, if much less efficient, dealio'.  And I want Sublime Chord casting for the cha based buff spells and Bite of the Blah and everything else wizards do better than psions.

Given that vampires are undead and therefore immune to fear, well, I guess I could take Craven before level 10.  That gives me my level in damage versus sneak attackable targets.  It's kind of.. hm.  Eh.  It's alright I guess.  Kind of against the fluff of the character, but who cares about that.

Unless mindmage is in one of the dragon compendiums, it's off the table.  Published d20 books, not magazines.

Quori shards are a definite, with good ol' UMD to activate them 'me?  i'm definitely a kalashatar, buddy'.  They've been a favourite of mine ever since I made Spirit of the River for docmartin's monkfight.

I'm probably going Full Bullshit with the magic mantle, but if not, meh.  There's honestly not many powers you actually want to persist if you have access to arcane spells.  I mean, there's a few good ones, but mostly it's relatively situational or stuff that's relatively utility like the teleportey stuff.

Kind of leaning towards shadowpouncing with this character because of how brutally awesome my wizard//ardent gish was with Anticipatory Strike - being able to interrupt with a full turn of 'fuck you right up mate' was just so beautifully golden, and being able to do that to an entire room full of people (multipouncing) would be so amazing.

[sirpercival]

You're doing DFI, I assume?  Since you have bard?  Because that's one of the easiest sources of extra damage.  Arcane Strike could also give you more dice.

[Amechra]

Spend a bonus feat to get into Libris Mortis.

There are a pair of feats in there.

One of them increases the amount of HP reduction (and THP you get) for every negative level you inflict by you Charisma modifier, while the other gives you a stacking +1 on pretty much everything for each negative level you inflict. These bonus last for a minute.

Also, Necrotic Reserve, plus some source of doing things as a move action is hilarious, since it stops you from dying from damage, though you are restricted to standard/move until you heal up past 0 hp (and if that standard isn't used to heal? You disintegrate.)

[Rejakor]

I was planning to open Libris Mortis so I could have a creator who was a Corpse Crafter regardless.

But both of those feats sound good.  HP reduction especially, as with Vampire Lord and a small slew of attacks I could be doing actually pointful numbers of negative levels on a shadowpounce (and negative levels + shadowpouncing = thematic!).  Since i'm going to be trying to go Cha-SAD as much as possible for buffs X to Y etc, doing 15 or so hp reduction per neg level would be sweeeeeet.

@sirpercival - i'm doing bardic music lite, as I probably won't have the feats to open dragon magic and get dragontouched + DFI (although it's definitely on my wishlist) so just basic inspire courage + inspirational boost + masterwork horn/war drums + that medallion thing so I can net a +4/+4 that i'll keep up all adventuring day long.  Although I might make it dance rather than mwork horn just for roleplaying reasons.

[BearsAreBrown]

If you open up Hyperconscious anyways there are some serious buff powers IIRC. Just make sure you persist the Presci/Precogs or something like that after Shard'd.

[Rejakor]

Hm actually yes I see what you mean.

There aren't many good arcane buffs that scale with CL.  Whereas a ML 31 Offensive Prescience gives +12 to all damage all day long.  +12 insight damage, which is hard to beat.  Also it says 'damage rolls' - so this works on absolutely anything where you roll dice (or would be, such as via maximize).

I was gonna try to avoid relying on feat leach, but, whelp.  Looks like i'm gonna have to.

Fuck both of these characters are so cool in my head.  Raging orc barbarian in an antimagic field who is so angry he's impervious to any mental trickery, and fire, and ice, throws hammer right through walls can't die to hp damage and doesn't afraid of anything.  Ethereal swarming vampire bard pouncing from the shadows like a dervish on crack with axes that are a tide of ice and negative energy, attacking, fading through the walls and coming from improbable angles, countering any attacks or strategems with blinding speed.

Yeah, with 10 power link shards (30k gp), and an extended persist for each, even using the hyperconsciousness persist, you can grab a cheap and easy +9 AC, +10 damage, and +9 to hit by persisting all three level 1 clairsentience powers.  Thicken Skin would be another great choice to persist, as with power link shards it scales better than spiderskin or whatever.

Slightly off this topic, but if i'm polymorphing for natural armour solely to cast Scintillating Scales, what's the best choice?

[sirpercival]

If you can open Magic of Incarnum, Soul Crystals are boss.  And cheap.

[ShubNiggurath]

Dwarf ancestor is a favorite to pump NA

A while ago... I think it was Ithamar... he created a cat void disciple that was inflicting a boatload of negative levels/round. It might be worthwhile to look into it if you can get Ithamar to post here.

About your build... negative levels should let you kill everything in sight with the exception of undead. You should have a plan on how to kill undead...DFI works for that

[Rejakor]

Yeah, but thing is, everything has more HD.  And there's more things than normal.  Dungeon madness, etc.

So at say level 10, i'm looking at having to deal 32-48ish negative levels to kill something, and there'll be like 5 somethings  (or worse, 20 24-hd ones).  So that's not insurmountable, but for things without huge con scores basic damage is probably faster (although that feat that makes a neg level do 5+cha mod hp loss is very helpful for this).  Also when undead appear, it'll be as a group, so not being able to kill undead would be kind of unforgivable.

A pimped no words of creation (all the R18+ books are banned, which includes BoED) DFI gives something like 6d6, which averages to 18 damage.  Now, that's not inconsiderable, but it's not super amazing.  Plus, energy damage.  So DFI is on my list, but not essential.

Dwarf Ancestor is alright, but surely there are polymorph options with more than +18 NA?  A Jiarlith from MMIII has 10 HD and 24 NA, and that's just off the top of my head.

What buff powers are good from hyperconscious/untapped potential?  I've had a read through, but none really jump out at me.

Soul crystals are a great trick for high level psionic stuff.  I'm actually thinking about maybe going spell to power erudite instead of the ardent/sublime chord option.. power points and feats just get very tight around level 10 without it.  Still dunno though.

[Amechra]

Remember that negative levels give penalties to pretty much everything, as well.

Watch their AC, attack rolls, and saves drop like flies!

[Rejakor]

Yeah, but the idea is to kill everything as fast as possible, which ideally is in one round.  Or less.  A single action would be the best.

Good point, though, if my first attack connects their AC drops by 4, and so on, and so forth, so I only have to worry about to-hit for the first few attacks.

[Empirate]

How about going a different route: not HP damage, but ability damage/penalties. Even very powerful mobs with a bunch of HD will have a weak ability score or three for you to exploit. Metamagic that Shivering Touch, there's not much that will stand in your way. Hell, even metamagicking up a Ray of Enfeeblement will give surprisingly good results!

[BearsAreBrown]

Obviously you're going to persist Wraithstrike right? Is there any way to Power Attack with your two axes?

[Rejakor]

Well, I probably will persist wraithstrike.  Not huge on my list because it's looking like my AB is going to be huge already and the problem is HP, not high enemy AC.  I could power attack for 1:1 damage although I did want to avoid ubercharger stuff, so 1:1 isn't great with my crappy BAB.  There's ways to make a 1h weapon count as 2h for power attack, but from memory they are all class level based.

I'm actually looking at some ToB stuff at the moment.  If I nova in terms of shadowpouncing, blood in the water + something to make my axes keen could help.  What might actually help is Stormguard warrior.  I could do a couple of full attacks as touch attacks to gain +80 or so electrical damage on each attack in the next round, from inside the ground so enemies wouldn't even necessarily know I was there, and then the next turn nova and do 6-7 full attacks with the +80 damage per attack.  Might be a nice tactic against enemies immune to neg levels.

Ability damage - I want to be hitting things with my axes.  So how do we put ability damage on an axe, other than Wounding or Spell-Storing?  I briefly considered Scorpion's Grasp or Improved Grab + high grapple score to grab-pin-drink blood multiple times per round with shadowpouncing, but eh.

[BearsAreBrown]

Poison but immunities are eh. You have Sneak Attack die right? You can trade those for Str or Dex damage IIRC. Consider Hunter's Eye for a load of extra SA. And there is a swift action spell to SA undead.

[Rebel7284]

As opposed to killing your opponents in one round, you may consider taking away their actions for next round.  Sudden stunning is amazing, but requires a swift action to use, so probably bad, but I am sure there is some sort of a stun/daze/etc effect that you can trigger reliably by attacking a lot.

[Rejakor]

With Aptitude, I could certainly Boomerang Daze, although i'd still prefer to just murder things.  It ties up too much time at the table and combats that go on for 3 or 4 rounds with all that save-rolling against stunning and whatnot.. so meh.

I don't have sneak attack dice.  I also don't actually have a good way of getting sneak attack dice.  Hunter's Eye is mostly out because i'm not an archivist.  Also sneak attack dice can be traded for dex penalty, or with 10 levels of rogue and crippling strike you can do 2 str damage per hit.  Neither of which is super exciting.

Poison is indeed meh.  Also rolling saving throws would take far too long.  As is i'm going to have to streamline asking the DM for acs for attacks as much as possible (ask for first attack and then have it worked out automatically what else hits and what damage is done, i.e. superb prerolling)so as not to hold the game up while having my X full attacks per turn.

Graft Weapon on the axes and then stuff to increase their effective size?  Hm.

[Rebel7284]

If your DM is already known for boosting monster HP, adding a linear amount of extra HP damage is unlikely to be the best solution, a more multi-dimensional approach is probably optimal to attack the problem from many angles.

- Minor creation is pretty good at creating poisons if you DO chose to include that.
- Stacking fear effects can be effective.
- Unseelee fey template can give you an aura of lowering enemy saves.
- Slow burst is only 5000gp

I do like the  Stormguard warrior idea for increasing the damage though.