Sir Cirdan's page

I'm making NPCs to inhabit a campaign I'm working on, and the standard soldiers are level 3 Fighter (Phalanx Specialist) With Longspears and Tower Shields. I'm planning on giving them the Shake it Off and Shield Wall feats to make them more resilient.

My concept for the army is that the front rank of soldiers use their tower shields for total cover while the second rank attack, meanwhile archers shoot over their heads and cavalry hit the stalled opposing army in the flank.

My question is this: would it be justifiable to give the phalanx, being a virtual wall of tower shields, either a bonus to reflex saves, evasion, or some other boon vs. blast spells like fireball?

Apart from a battle herald or feats like iron will to boost saves or dedicated counter-spellers, are there any other ways to provide mass defense against AoE spells?

Is this Arcane Discovery as powerful as it seems to be?

It would allow basically any 4th level or lower spell on the Wizard/Sorcerer Spell List to be viable in a wand. For blast spells, a simple Wand of Scorching Ray as used by a caster with this discovery would do 12d6 fire damage, instead of 4d6. A Wand of Fireball would do 10d6, instead of 5d6.

For spells with durations, the duration will be (assuming at lvl 13) more than doubled for 3rd level spells, more than quadrupled for 2nd level spells, and x13 for 1st level spells.

For spells with DCs, the DC will probably be at least 5 higher.

A reminder, and for any who don't know, an Arcane Discovery can be taken in place of a feat or a bonus feat by wizard. Staff-Like Wand allows the wizard to use his caster level and ability mod to DCs as if the wand were a staff, when using a charge from a wand. The requirements are Wizard lvl 11, and Craft Staff. To get the most bang for your buck, it would seem like Craft Wand would be good too.

Considering that a wand is roughly the price of a pearl of power for the same spell level, this seems like an incredible deal from an economic standpoint alone, even before halving the cost with the Craft Wand feat.

I wondered what other people's thoughts were on this though, especially the reactions of any who have actually used it in a campaign. I'm not very experienced with primary spell-casters, especially in Pathfinder, but Treantmonk's guide to God Wizards has really made me interested in playing one now, when I get the chance.

I was looking at a module for 3.5 that I've been converting to Pathfinder and it had a Venerable age Rogue 10 that was CR 8. For 3.5, I figure he should have been CR 10 given 3.5 CR reckoning...so I was wondering if there were rules in 3.5 and/or Pathfinder concerning aging and CR for NPCs? Anybody know if there are rules to use for this?

It would seem like a caster would either be the same power level or stronger, but a combat class, especially a barbarian or fighter, would be significantly weaker the more they aged.