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So, I was just reading in sorceress recently and came across the arcane bloodline, specifically about the familiar. A read:
Arcane Bond (Su): At 1st level, you gain an arcane bond, as a wizard equal to your sorcerer level. Your sorcerer levels stack with any wizard levels you possess when determining the powers of your familiar or bonded object. This ability does not allow you to have both a familiar and a bonded item. Once per day, your bond item allows you to cast any one of our spells known (unlike a wizard's bonded item, which allows him to cast any one spell in his spellbook).
Now, if I WAS a wizard with a familiar, and got the Eldritch Heritage:Arcane feat which reads:
Benefit: Select one sorcerer bloodline. You must have Skill focus in the class skill that bloodline grants to a sorcerer at 1st level (for example, Heal for the celestial bloodline). This bloodline cannot be a bloodline you already have. You gain the first-level bloodline power for the selected bloodline. For purposes of using that power, treat your sorcerer level as equal to your character level – 2, even if you have levels in sorcerer. You do not gain any of the other bloodline abilities.
Would the levels from my "feat" gained sorceress familiar levels stack with my wizard levels? Now, that might not be... great, unless you expanded the chart showing wizard levels and familiar benefits. A level 20 wizard with this would have 38 levels in his familiar, meaning...
+19 natural armor, 23 intelligence.
Limited, and bends the rules by expanding a graph in the pattern it had established, but for lower levels, would they stack like that? Would a tenth level wizard have a familiar who has as much natural armor and intelligence as a level 18th wizard? Let me know what you guys think!
Just for giggles I plugged in that scenario to herolab. It did stack the bonuses @ wizard level 10 w/o eldritch heritage my pig familiar had a 10 INT and a +6 natural armor. When I added the feat it jumped to INT 14, and NA +10.
Anyway, take that with a grain of salt. HL is not an official rules source, but they do take great pains to get things right. Especially stacking things.
That's... incredible! Looking at the rules, I don't see any problems with it. I'm not the most rule-savvy person in the world, but... as a person who LOVES familiars, I am definitely checking back in in a bit to see what others say.
While it sounds abusive of the rules, there really doesn't seem to be anything against it...I'm going to stick around and consider whether I should do this for the wizard I'm building (although I doubt my GM would allow it).
From what you've quoted here is sounds like it does stack from a RAW point of view..
But would it have been intended to stack like that? I Doubt it. I also doubt many GMs would allow it to stack either.
But if you're not going to let it stack, what do you do, give the character two familiars??
Can you have 2 arcane bonds?
A wizard starts at level 1 with an arcane bond. This feat lets you get the Arcane Bond feature of the arcana blooded sorcerer.
So you'd effectively get Arcane Bond (from wizard) and Arcane Bond (from sorcerer).
Is this allowed?
-Nearyn
You can only have have one arcane bond, but the ability description from arcane bloodline tells you how to handle it if you already have a familiar from the wizard class ability. It tells you to stack your sorcerer level with your wizard level to determine the power of the familiar. Now, you don't actually have any sorcerer levels but the feat that grants you this ability tells you to use character level -2. So a level 10 wizard with eldritch heritage feat (arcane bloodline) would have a familiar as though they were 18th level wizard.
Raw seems pretty clear here, but rai I don't think eldritch heritage was mwant to grant a class feature the character already had access to.
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True, I think it's a fair trade though.
Almost double your familiar class levels (for natural armor, intelligence, and if you look, spell resistance is based off of master levels too) for the cost of two feats.
You can compare it to familiar evolution, which for 1 feat grants you 2 natural armor. So your familiar gets pretty darn hard to hit, but other than that, not much.