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We finished Gallowspire a few month ago I'd like to add to your excellent post some of the way I dealt with your frustrations.

Protection from evil/Death ward is easily dealt with by use of targeted dispel from the tyrants whispers haunt. I recall this may have even been a suggestion in the book for Renchurch. It annoyed my players but they accepted it as part of the locale's power.

Stone Golems: I added 2 statues identical to the stone golems at the front of the room and I made the DC to realize the back 2 weren't just statues without specifically investigating them fairly significant. The party was very cautious about the 2 regular statues, but after nobody got attacked and destroying one revealed it to be mundane they relaxed. I waited for the party to walk right between the golems and opened up with a surprise round.

Halfway thru Renchurch I replaced all of the cultists. They were just annoying and posed no threat to the party or their resources. Instead I littered the floor with advanced ghosts, shadows, and things form the random encounter table.

I started out from the edge of the forest that any use of flight magic would summon the storms from the back of the book.

Each time they attempted to use it I rolled a d4 for rounds to effect and described the gathering magic storm. After 2 triggering they got the idea and wont use flight for more than 2 rounds at a time.

Part of the challenge to harrow stone is that a low level party is not well equipped for incorporeal creatures. It forces them to get creative with using holy water and magic weapons they aren't specialized for.

Think about playing Doom or your favorite horror game. Part of the setting is a shortage of effective resources. It adds to the story.

If you use more random encounters instead of beefing the existing encounters your going to have a lot of boring fights. You need appropriate CR encounters to challenge the party.

I would strongly advise against starving the party of wealth as a means to increase the difficultly of encounters. Character wealth is core to character progression and development in pathfinder.

I am currently at the end of Wake of the Watcher and have run a 5 person party that is heavy magic all the way.

The 5th player trivializes a lot of the encounters that involve a single foe. The action economy and hit points of the party are just too much. I have taken to enhancing almost every single creature encounter by adding 2-3 class levels or giving it a +2 or 3 CR template.

For group encounters I typically add 25% - 33% more foes so that their battlefield control isn't diminished.

I had the same issue. I didn't have the beast tell them. I changed it so that Aureen Vrood's name appeared as the most recent in the ledger at Vorkstag and Grine's as selling them the flesh golem hound. When the judge asked them to investigate the beasts origin they followed the trail for how V&G got a flesh golem. After investigating Vrood in town they found out he and some compatriots were believed to be traveling to the count's when they left.

Add a WW cultist left behind to clean things up at the schloss. This guy or gal is sadistic and is taking great pleasure in torturing the count and his servants. The cultist has not finished their tasks yet as the PCs arrive and save Alpon.

This idea makes some sense to me but I might flip flop it. Instead I would say a cultist stayed behind to finish up business with Caramarc. With less persons watching Caramarc was able to order Waxwood to release the creature to slay the cultist and free him. The creature killed the cultist but will not free Caramarc who is too weak to command it by this time. The creature has to eat or destroy at least the head of the cultist to prevent speak with dead on him.

I can foresee that my players are going to have a problem when they reach the end of Trial of the Beast.

In HoH when the whispering way had a witness who didn't really know what they had done they took great care to eliminate him and even crush his skull so that speak with dead wouldn't function.

In ToB the whispering way leave a leave a witness who knows exactly what they did and even knows their names alive. Yes they expect him to suffer a slow death. Even if his servant didn't keep him alive the PCs could still speak with dead.

If they speak with dead the guards or engineers I can say they were slain from stealth with no clues to leave behind, but Caramarc is a problem.

When my players encounter this they are going to roast me over the inconsistency. I'm considering modifying the end such that they do leave no survivors who can speak. I can have Waxwood give them Vrood's name but I still need a way to send them to the next AP. That seems complex for Waxwood.

My barbarian has 18 AC at lvl 11 in our Rotrl game.

Its never once been a liability. With some resonable tactics like not charging foes and getting full attacked most things are dead before they can full attack me.

Taking full attack out of the equation the first hit of any foe at this level is still going to hit if I had 5-6 more ac so Im not lsing anything.

Doing 2d6+25 damage while power attacking with attacks at +20, 15, and 10 even the stone giants we face are no match for me. Add in the usual haste and bard song going its worse for the enemy.

Since there no such thing as divine spell failure percent from any armor or conditions I've always assumed it was a matter of intent to do the somantic actions or that divine somantic actions were not very complicated like arcane.

The poster about one hand is right by the rules you can cast 100% fine with your other hand.

More importantly your DM is a dick, don't play with him if he won't see why hes making the game no fun. Remind him the DM wins when the story is fun not when the NPCs hurt/kill the players.

One big part of balancing this equation that I failed to account for when I house ruled an improvement to non tin can AC was wealth.

Characters sink significant portions of thier wealth into armor. If feats allow them to bypass that they can potentially buy magic items that are more powerfull than the feats they gave up for no armor feats.

Grasshopper thanks for reminding me of some of the rules for magic weapons particularly about energy damage being half before hardness is applied.

I'm having the item built for a 10th level character so Im not looking to build anything epic here. Just something effective.

In our game we encountered a young dragon and my barbarian was able to single handedly defeat it(ran with <30 hp). In the fight I made use of a net to temporarily disable the beast. However the flimsy net was disentigrated by the breath weapon.

Now my character wants to have a new net made that can withstand a large sized dragon. I looked into the rules for adamantine, mitheral, and went thru the old magic item compendium. The problem is we aren't sure of the resulting price, wieght, and usability of the new net.

The GM suggested that a net made from a metal would probably have the same mass as a chain shirt for a starting point. Ideas?

Some formian workers or drones could work very nicely as well.

My wifes character has been toting around a bloody Skeleton Ogre which has very comparable stats, it is quite a nice tool but its not made her anywhere close to outpowering the sorc or barbarian. Also its size sometimes keeps it or someone else out of combat.

DR5 and Fast heal 5 are not comparable to DR 10. The fast heal removes 5 hp once. With iterative attacks or multiple foes that is not applied mutliple times like DR would be.

Ask yourself is the bloodied skeleton actually that much better in combat than the regular skeleton.

20HP(from cha)
5 fast healing
4 channel resist
Deathless has no benifit in combat

the 20hp and fast heal 5 is usually only going to buy it an extra round of life agianst an enncounter balanced for 6th level players.

The huge benifit is you pay twice as much for it in onyx and then it will come back after it gets beaten down most the time.

The easiest way to deal with twf rogues is to stop them from getting sneak attack damage when full attacking.

Why is your NPC standing there taking the beating, why is he letting himself get flanked(this is a bad idea even when your not fighing rogues).

If your NPCs are just standing around in a fight you are allowing the rogue to dominate the game.

If your players are using tactics that control the position of the NPC to allow the rogue to be within 5ft of your npc at the start of his turn they should be having to do a lot of movement and work for it as a party. The rogue isn't unbalanced then he's just a tool the party is utilizing.

Rogues are glass cannons as people pointed out if hes not using spring attack the NPC hes hurting and all the other NPCs around should be punihsing him for not taking them seriosuly.

Being chased up a ladder by an enemy when reaching the top a sorcerer summons a donkey 5 ft in front of him over the open pit.

My wife did this with a cleric 3/Bard 4.

By focusing on utility with additional healing from the bard combined with devoting her cleric spells and bard songs to buffing the physical beaters made it quite bearable to the party. Also countersong and the use of command undead to provide meat bag zombies and eventually a shadow helped a lot too.

Taking the focus off of damaging spells the only thing we have missed sorely is dispell magic.

Now shes taking MT levels and because she has been focued on utility the damage spells are just icing.

The save for channel energy is based on cleric level and cha mod. The effect is determined by cleric level. The command undead feat allows a use of channel energy to create the effect of the spell control undead. Command undead allows the undead a save based on clerics caster level and cha mod. The effect of how many hit dice may be controlled is based on cleric level. It seems that there is an inconsistancy with the save DC for the feat command undead being based on caster level instead of cleric level.

The amount of damage dealt or healed is equal to 1d6 points of damage plus 1d6 points of damage for every two cleric levels beyond 1st (2d6 at 3rd, 3d6 at 5th, and so on). Creatures that take damage from channeled energy receive a Will save to halve the damage. The DC of this save is equal to 10 + 1/2 the cleric's level + the cleric's Charisma modifier.

As a standard action, you can use one of your uses of channel negative energy to enslave undead within 30 feet. Undead receive a Will save to negate the effect. The DC for this Will save is equal to 10 + 1/2 your caster level + your Charisma modifier.
...
You can control any number of undead, so long as their total Hit Dice do not exceed your cleric level.

This is not the forum for discussing conversions. The post is to bring attention to an inconsistancy in the DCs for two uses of channel energy in the Pathfinder Core Rulebook.

Please take your discussion on cleric feats from 3.5 sourcebooks elsewhere so hopefully the original topic can be addressed.

Fireball doesnt have a feat you can take to not hit allies in the radius(Comparing to negative channel).

Fireball is also a spell that requires defsive casting or an AAO if you want to cast it while next to an opponent, channel does not provoke.

This is all off the topic and irrelevent to whether an error was made in the save DC calculation for those abilities.

Actually the arguement that command undead says caster level because of the necromancer(wizard) is not working because of this from the command undead feat description:

You can control any number of undead, so long
as their total Hit Dice do not exceed your cleric level.

Something is definatly in error between these abilities.

One could just as easily write the feat to reference levels of the class that granted you channel energy, or write the necromancer to say in the case of channel energy use the wizard level as the cleric level. So that the save DCs remain the same.

The cleric channel energy allows a save to reduce damage done by it. The save is based on cleric level and cha mod. The command undead feat allows a use of channel energy to create the effect of the spell control undead. Command undead allows the undead a save based on clerics caster level and cha mod. My wifes multi class cleric has a higher caster level in cleric than levels in cleric. It seems that the save DC for both of these abilities should be the same but its not.

From Core:

Creatures that take damage from
channeled energy receive a Will save to halve the damage.
The DC of this save is equal to 10 + 1/2 the cleric’s level
+ the cleric’s Charisma modifier.

As a standard action, you can use one of your
uses of channel negative energy to enslave undead within 30
feet. Undead receive a Will save to negate the effect. The DC
for this Will save is equal to 10 + 1/2 your caster level + your
Charisma modifier.