RavenStarver |
So a good few years back I joined my current group midway through the campaign, and went through three characters before I found my niche.
I'm mostly curious if anyone knows if the Paladin build I used is legit or not.
We were level 15 or so, I had written into my characters story that he had a Holy Avenger Bastard Sword, I then picked up a few other items(I joined around level 13 so I had my starting budget to spend), magic mithral full plate, and a Sun Blade.
It says the Sun Blade can be treated as a short sword so I used it in my off hand while two-weapon fighting, so with all three two-weapon feats I was getting a ton of attacks a round.
The DM allowed it but regretted it when I took the final boss almost single-handed and killed him in three rounds. Smite, and the Sun Blade does double damage to evil outsiders so I was shelling out around 300 damage a round.
Does that build actually work?
Kazaan |
I did indeed have the exotic weapon feat.
As for the boss, he was a High Priest of the big religion who used a bunch of dark artifacts to turn himself into a huge sized, demon creature made of black sand.
Demons don't count; they're from the Abyss (one of the outer planes). Creatures from the NEP will list Environment: Negative Energy Plane in their entry. So if this priest actually turned himself into a Demon, Devil, or other "fiendish" outsider from an outer plane, or even a denizen from the Shadow plane, you shouldn't have gotten the extra damage beyond the +4 enhancement bonus from the target being Evil. Nightshades are examples of creatures from the NEP.
Regarding "stupid but effective" tactics, Sunblades count as Shortswords which are light weapons. You can wield a Huge sized light weapon as a two-handed weapon, albeit at -4 attack penalty. So if you get your hands on a Huge Sunblade... which would be about 16' long... you can swing it around with nearly the ease with which you'd swing a Greatsword. Then you can spike out your hair and get all angsty and wear an outfit that looks like it was designed on an etch-a-sketch and then fed through a threshing machine.
Eridan |
From RAW side it sound legal. The paladin is very good against evil, you have veeerrrry good equipment and an effective build.
Maybe this together was too much for your GM. Maybe the 'powerlevel' of your group is lover than yours so that the group is not longer balanced. That can happen when a high level PC joins a group that play since lvl1. Maybe your GM is unexperienced and never has a powerfull paladin in his group. ...
Talk with your GM and find an arrangement for the group. RAW cannot help here.
-edit-
The 'Smite' extra damage only works for your first successful attack! I overread this fact and that caused a lot of trouble (was an NPC antipaladin) :)
Kwauss |
From RAW side it sound legal. The paladin is very good against evil, you have veeerrrry good equipment and an effective build.
-edit-
The 'Smite' extra damage only works for your first successful attack! I overread this fact and that caused a lot of trouble (was an NPC antipaladin) :)
What makes you think smite only works once - it should work until the smite target dies, or the paladin rests...
The smite evil effect remains until the target of the smite is dead or the next time the paladin rests and regains her uses of this ability.
Dead Phoenix |
The extra damage Eridan was refering too is the double damage to evil outsiders/undead/dragons. That on works on the first hit of the smite, after that you only do normal smite damage(which is still plenty).
If the target of smite evil is an outsider with the evil subtype, an evil-aligned dragon, or an undead creature, the bonus to damage on the first successful attack increases to 2 points of damage per level the paladin possesses.
Xexyz |
I actually created an NPC paladin for my game that also duel-wields a Holy Avenger bastard sword with an offhand Sun Blade. I can confirm that the damage potential is comedically obscene; I ran the character's stats trough a DPR calculator and when he smites a generically evil creature (let alone an undead creature) he does something like 600dpr - and that includes the round spent casting a buff and moving into melee range.