Narouna's page

Narouna wrote:

The Cleric VM is highly situational, as someone pointed out earlier, it's good for Wizards and other prepared casters since now you have spontaneous casting, and can learn any Wizard spell in the game, since you would still keep the Wizard's spells known.

Cleric VMC only allows spontaneous casting if the spell is already on your list. So no to Wizards, but yes to Witches.

Ah, damn. Still that's pretty good. Situational still, but really good for witches.

I like certain VMC's and use them when my GM allows. Fighter, Barbarian, and Wizard (Divination) are excellent choices depending on your class and what your shooting for and generally well worth the feats your giving up. Rogue, Witch, Druid, Magus and some Oracles are also pretty good IMO.

I agree that Gunslingr and Monk are generally prob not worth it to take. I also don't like the Cleric and Ranger VMC's much.

I think fighter would be good if it allowed you to qualify for fighter feats. Cause if it did, with the weapon focus line and the 3.5 feat that adds to that line, you're looking at a nice +6 to damage and to hit vs the +2 to hit and damage. Though even then, that would be pretty much the only feats you could grab unless you're doing a variant of gestalt.

The Cleric VM is highly situational, as someone pointed out earlier, it's good for Wizards and other prepared casters since now you have spontaneous casting, and can learn any Wizard spell in the game, since you would still keep the Wizard's spells known. But yeah, I gotta agree that the Ranger VM isn't that great. It's not as bad as Monk, cause it's at least usable, but it's still pretty meh compared to other VMs.

Edit: I totally overlooked the fact that the Monk's VM is a dodge bonus to ac, IE, stackable with other dodge bonuses to ac. I could see a fighter taking the Monk VM since they have a lot of bonus feats anyways and that extra ac and evasion is nice, plus having the unarmed with a reach weapon is also nice.

greetings folks - i'm looking for some guidance from some folks who have investigated VMC more than me (I discovered it yesterday)

I have an idea for a character i'd like to play - a creepy tengu cultist type. Not sure if what I'm thinking is even legal in terms of game mechanics, or if it is viable whether it would be any benefit to do it.

I came up with the idea of multiclassing a soulbolt with a zen archer to add the level scaling weapon creation ability of the soulbolt to the zen archer's wisdom based awesomeness. I think both of these classes would probably be fairly heavily nerfed by splitting level progression between the two over time (we're probably starting from lev 1 or 2 after having played previous characters up to 18) I'm not sure which i should use as the primary and which should be the secondary class.

can anyone help me get a better idea of the way those two are likely to interact on VMC? I'm feeling like I'm really not understanding things. I'm particularly interested in how the first few levels would play out for abilities.

would really appreciate some help.

Well, sadly Soulknife is in Ultimate Psionics which is sadly not official paizo. So I doubt they'd ever make rules for a VM version of it, in addition to the fact that both Zen Archer and Soulbolt are archetypes for the class. So the easiest bet is to shelve that build and try it out in a gestalt campaign (just make sure to grab Emulate Ranged Weapon asap). It's also probably easier to just shelve it for a gestalt campaign because some of the VM versions of classes are kinda... meh. Some are gold but others just make you question everything. Like the fighter one where by the end you get a +2 to attack and damage of a specific weapon group and -2 armour check penalties and +2 to the max amount of dex. So worth losing half your feats for!

Anyways, one thing I also wanted to bring up was a build I came up with using this system that I'll be using in a future campaign. Dual cursed oracle with the Wood mystery and then the VM sorcerer to go into the Verdant Bloodline, grab thematic casting for fluff to base your spells around plants and bam! It's not the most effective thing in the world to do, but it's a fun build that has a lot of flavor.
I don't feel as bad about taking things like thematic casting for this campaign cause we are planning on having it be a very mini gestalt, where instead of losing half your feats to get a little extra flavor or versatility, you instead just gain it without sacrificing anything.

I do gotta say that I do like this system for the sake of a softer gestalt, since the main reason why my friend and I played gestalt a lot was because we wanted a bit more versatility, but with gestalt it's way to easy to break the game. At least with this you have very limited choices and don't gain all that much unless you're really digging for gold.