It's its own specific Touch Attack so I would say no. If it was anytime they touched someone I would allow it, but it's a specific attack they can only do once per round.
Depending on the lichs' BAB, the Vital Strike feats and Ability Focus can ramp their touch attack up to something respectable.
In combination with Vital Strike et al I'd recommend Arcane Blast for the arcane caster liches. "Boss, our debuffs et al have failed us for [clever clever player antics reasons]."
"Let them eat RAY!" *mass zappage ensues*
Conductive weapon + Magus would work to deliver their touch and calcific touch in the same round.
Awesome ideas!
Max out initiative. Take the "Beyond Morality" Mythic Path Ability to get around Protection from Evil.
Swift Action: Wild Arcana -> Geas/Quest.
Standard Action: Activate whatever Wizard school power, Hex, etc, then use Coupled Arcana to use Wild Arcana -> Geas/Quest as a Free Action.
Move Action: If you can find an eligible ability that works as a Move Action, you can get a third Wild Arcana -> Geas/Quest per Lich as another Free Action via Coupled Arcana.
Wow! I love that!
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We do want a full account on how many pcs you stomp the s!@@ out of.
Etheric Shards. A room full of invisible borderline undodgeable razor wire makes for quite the unfair battlefield. Unless the whole party has See Invisibility, it's auto-damage.
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I believe they FAQ'ed Wild Arcana to be a standard action, and only usable with spells with casting time of standard or less... Would be amazing though.
It might be reproducible through the Legislation Subdomain from specifically the Rune Domain. If you could lace the Prohibition domain power with Geas/Quest and state to the Wizard: "You may not use magic", and the wizard does it anyway, he immediately gets Geas/Quested.
If it is not reproducible this way, you could still lace it with something like Plane Shift and tell the Barbarian that he shouldn't attack if he knew what was good for him.
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Murderous Command.....hit the Paladin/good cleric, and watch their face as they realize they killed their own allies ;)
I think that FAQ from 2013 was only ever a "proposed errata". If that doesn't work you can always do basically the same thing with your spell of choice:
- Be Wizard, with the Divination/Foresight school for all that initiative
- Have an Improved Familiar capable of using wands, and give it a Wand of Ill Omen
- Get the Void school via Flexible School archmage ability, and Coupled Arcana
Round goes like this:
- Familiar uses Wand of Ill Omen on target
- Use Amazing Initiative for a free Standard Action that isn't a spell
- Use Reveal Weakness on the target, will be worth about a -8 to AC and saves at this level
- Cast a spell as a free action via Coupled Arcana -> Wild Arcana
- Cast a spell as a Standard Action
- Cast a Quickened spell as a Swift Action
Use Time Stop or the Time Stutter discovery for more rounds of buffing, summoning, etc. Have Outsider minions on hand via True Name. The possibilities are really endless.
Wall of Thorns (Mythic) to trap them
Transmute Rock to Mud at their feet
pound the area with Sirocco to make them Exhausted and possibly Prone.
Transmute Mud to Rock...
They are entombed in solid rock (Pinned), Exhausted and suffocating, barring Earth Glide of course. Even if they are petrified but able to breathe, they're still helpless for Coup'de'Grace until someone can chisel them out.
Remember to be careful of spells with a partial save. Unless each lich is mythic (I don't think you said either way), mythic saves will make these less relevant.
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Welp
This thread makes me stressed XD
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I know we're looking for spells, but if we're open to making liches with specialties, consider an Overwhelming Soul Void kineticist. Can heal the other liches with it's negative energy, great battlefield control, including reverse gravity AT WILL and lots of hp, as the key stat is also what a lich uses for hp. If you want to make it melee to really mess with the backline, Overwhelming Soul and Kintetic Knight only overlap in the changing of class skills, which as a GM you could handwave in the name of awesomeness. You'd give up a decent portion of the AoE control that Void brings, but could be worth it.
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I will forever regret changing the kinetic knight's class skills. -_-
That said, I 100% support houseruling it to function, especially in cases where there's no real conflict (both adding the same skills, changing different skills, etc.)
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Out of the nine liches, only about 3 will by Mythic (the leaders of the cabal) so Mythic abilities will come into play. But I've gotten so many great ideas from my query that I doubt I'll even need them to be present at the battle. I think I could take out my party of 8 with about 4 of the non-Mythic ones.
Thanks, everyone!
I know we're looking for spells, but if we're open to making liches with specialties, consider an Overwhelming Soul Void kineticist. Can heal the other liches with it's negative energy, great battlefield control, including reverse gravity AT WILL and lots of hp, as the key stat is also what a lich uses for hp. If you want to make it melee to really mess with the backline, Overwhelming Soul and Kintetic Knight only overlap in the changing of class skills, which as a GM you could handwave in the name of awesomeness. You'd give up a decent portion of the AoE control that Void brings, but could be worth it.
That sounds really interesting, but to be honest I don't fully understand the Kineticist. I don't process information as well as I once did (I won't go into the reasons why) and it just confuses me to try and figure out how to make it work correctly.
Since I allow 3.5 stuff in my games on a case by case basis, I found this spell:
Then there's this equally horrifying spell:
Well noted! Thanks!
Well if 3.5 Is an option.
All is in book libris mortis.
I'll dig my copy out right away.
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Invisibility works in objects. Walls are objects. Permanently invisible prismatic wall at the main entrance starts things off ugly. Forceful Hand keeps the party going.
All the Liches should have wand wielding familiars with wands of Ill Omen and Arcane Concordance.
Heightened Accursed Glare plus an Ill Omen from a familiar is a nasty combo. It's duration is days.
Make sure the liches are smart. Their Phylactoies should be nowhere nearby, carefully hidden with layers of anti-divination spells, in protected places full of backup spellbooks and gear. If they are defeated, they're coming back, and they are going to do a lot of scrying and planning before coming after the PCs again.
Take a look at the Necrocraft rules. Take the nastiest undead you can find and make it worse.
Fill the room with traps triggered by proximity to living things. Have mechanical ones that auto-reset and go off every round doing annoying things to the PCs. Also have single use magical ones that do harmful things to the living and helpful things to undead (circle of death comes to mind). With access to a Wish the liches could even break the rule about no resetting magic traps. A negative energy burst every round would give your rogue a job during the fight. Make it a hard to find, hard to disarm trap.
More to come. Gotta run.
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Make one of the coven leaders a dracolich. Have it spend most of its time in human form so it doesn't stand out compared to the others when the fight starts.
A troll in a box with a bunch of ring piercings. They correspond with some kind of jewelry the liches wear. Together each pair of piercings and jewelry create a permant Friemd Sheild effect. Now, any time the liches take damage the troll takes half. It will quickly go into negatives by the hundreds, but it wond be dead so they don't care. It's an eternal HP sponge until the PCs find it and put it out of its misery.
Feat Mother cyst allows rather special spells but the most vicious as the tittle asks is Necrotic termination
What makes it nasty one is "If the subject fails her saving throw, the cyst expands beyond control, killing the subject and digesting her soul.
Raise dead, resurrection, true resurrection, wish, and miracle cannot return life to the subject once her soul is digested—
she is gone forever."
I know the topic of this thread is "nastiest spells", but I think this one is going a bit too far. Yes, Pathfinder has options to keep someone from resurrecting, too (Trap the Soul and Soul Bind come to mind), but those can always be reversed simply by destroying the gem holding the soul. It will give the players a huge scare, but if they play their cards right, they can fix that.
Making resurrection permanently and irreversibly impossible is a huge kick in the teeth to players of level 17 characters in Pathfinder, in my opinion. I know you want to "keep them humble", but bringing in stuff from other systems just to make sure they can never play this character again seems more likely to piss them off.
Consider making one of the Liches a Hag, or giving the group a Coven Collar. Here's the Coven rules. All it would take is for three of them to take Coven Hex.
It grants a separate Animate Dead pool at the highest caster level among them, which is worth the price of entry alone. Also, note the last sentence of the Coven rules. A coven of Mythic Liches might have some serious extra abilities.
Feat Mother cyst allows rather special spells but the most vicious as the tittle asks is Necrotic termination
What makes it nasty one is "If the subject fails her saving throw, the cyst expands beyond control, killing the subject and digesting her soul.
Raise dead, resurrection, true resurrection, wish, and miracle cannot return life to the subject once her soul is digested—
she is gone forever."I know the topic of this thread is "nastiest spells", but I think this one is going a bit too far. Yes, Pathfinder has options to keep someone from resurrecting, too (Trap the Soul and Soul Bind come to mind), but those can always be reversed simply by destroying the gem holding the soul. It will give the players a huge scare, but if they play their cards right, they can fix that.
Making resurrection permanently and irreversibly impossible is a huge kick in the teeth to players of level 17 characters in Pathfinder, in my opinion. I know you want to "keep them humble", but bringing in stuff from other systems just to make sure they can never play this character again seems more likely to piss them off.
That's a good point, to be sure. But they've been asking for harder and harder encounters. They have a way to completely destroy the phylacteries of the liches if they can just get a chance to do it (they have two artifacts they have to destroy by using them). So it's not like they don't have any offensive power themselves. A lot depends on who gets to go first in the Initiative Round.
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There are Mythic Spells. Deathless is a particularly fun one. Throw in Extend Spell for extra fun. The players are going to have to get really creative to take down a bunch of liches who are immune to HP damage.
Mythic Severance cast by a hyper focused Enchanter is a lot of fun, and can be an entire side-quest on it's own to remove (since it's a permanent duration).
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One thing to keep in mind when introducing spells that the players don't know are available is that they now know that they exist. Be sure you don't want them using deathless or anything else presuming that they survive the encounter(s).
Here's your Coven leader. He's not even really there. He wears a Harbinger demon as a fleshsuit and has a few spares ready to go.
Also, he absolutely will go first. And he isn't even mythic yet.
One thing to keep in mind when introducing spells that the players don't know are available is that they now know that they exist. Be sure you don't want them using deathless or anything else presuming that they survive the encounter(s).
Only of of the spellcasters can cast that spell and she's the cleric. The bard can't use it and neither can the psionicist. The cleric is played by the psionicist's 11 year old daughter, so he might think to tell her to add it to her repertoire. She's already a better player than the guy who plays the bard, who's been playing D&D and Pathfinder a combined 30 years. He doesn't use the bard to its full effect by a long shot, only buffing the party and almost never using spells.
One thing to keep in mind when introducing spells that the players don't know are available is that they now know that they exist. Be sure you don't want them using deathless or anything else presuming that they survive the encounter(s).
Researching a Mythic spell is a pretty big deal. It isn't something the PCs would just pick up. It should probably be a big plot point, and might involve doing some nasty stuff given that it's a mythic Necromancy effect.
I may drop a hint to the player's dad to help her out. I'm not looking for a TPK, but the possibility is definitely there. I want to give them that major challenge they've been begging for, but I also want to give them an out. The entire goal of this campaign was to get the players to 20th level (it'll be the first campaign where I've had this happen in my 30+ years of gaming), so while I plan to be pretty harsh on them I do want to give them an option or two. The psionicist has a way to come back to life after one day due to a very convoluted use of several psionic powers (I don't remember the details) so he may be the one who saves their bacon.
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Here's your Coven leader. He's not even really there. He wears a Harbinger demon as a fleshsuit and has a few spares ready to go.
Also, he absolutely will go first. And he isn't even mythic yet.
The major problem is blood money abuse, as usual. Given its point of origin in Golarion, this spell is reasonably subject to GM discretion. Most characters should never ever have access to this spell.
That the spell is PFS Legal is utterly baffling.
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Grim revenge from the Book of Vile Darkness is low level but it rips the target's hand off and beats them with it.
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Grim revenge from the Book of Vile Darkness is low level but it rips the target's hand off and beats them with it.
That's hilarious!
Here's your Coven leader. He's not even really there. He wears a Harbinger demon as a fleshsuit and has a few spares ready to go.
Also, he absolutely will go first. And he isn't even mythic yet.
The major problem is blood money abuse, as usual. Given its point of origin in Golarion, this spell is reasonably subject to GM discretion. Most characters should never ever have access to this spell.
That the spell is PFS Legal is utterly baffling.
I don't tend to play games in Golarion.
I've used Blood Money extensively as a player and as a GM. I've never had a problem with it. I don't really get what the fuss is about.
I didn't know it was PFS legal, but that indicates to me that the PFS organizers and I agree that it isn't a problem.
Here's your Coven leader. He's not even really there. He wears a Harbinger demon as a fleshsuit and has a few spares ready to go.
Also, he absolutely will go first. And he isn't even mythic yet.
The major problem is blood money abuse, as usual. Given its point of origin in Golarion, this spell is reasonably subject to GM discretion. Most characters should never ever have access to this spell.
That the spell is PFS Legal is utterly baffling.
I don't tend to play games in Golarion.
I've used Blood Money extensively as a player and as a GM. I've never had a problem with it. I don't really get what the fuss is about.
I didn't know it was PFS legal, but that indicates to me that the PFS organizers and I agree that it isn't a problem.
A harbinger daemon is a unique creature, not something found running about on Abaddon by the thousands-to-millions. This is my problem with every single example like this I've seen: they rely entirely on making copies of something they almost certainly have never encountered. The likelyhood of a good enough description of what this unique CR 21 entity can do, its appearance and its exact capabilities are is so low ... you'd probably win a Mega Millions jackpot before you found one.
And this particular creature has worshippers. The gods help the character that starts running about in its form as they WILL attract a great deal of very powerful attention. The kind that can crowbar his silly butt out of his demiplane and perma-death the character with overwhelming force.
Vile Dog Transformation. I mean, there's being evil, and then there's just being wasteful.
A harbinger daemon is a unique creature, not something found running about on Abaddon by the thousands-to-millions. This is my problem with every single example like this I've seen: they rely entirely on making copies of something they almost certainly have never encountered. The likelyhood of a good enough description of what this unique CR 21 entity can do, its appearance and its exact capabilities are is so low ... you'd probably win a Mega Millions jackpot before you found one.
And this particular creature has worshippers. The gods help the character that starts running about in its form as they WILL attract a great deal of very powerful attention. The kind that can crowbar his silly butt out of his demiplane and perma-death the character with overwhelming force.
If it's a unique creature, why is it a harbinger daemon instead of the harbinger daemon?
That's just silly.
Probably because the Daemon boss critters only feel the need to unleash one at a time to burn lots of things to cinders. ;)
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I didn't know it was PFS legal, but that indicates to me that the PFS organizers and I agree that it isn't a problem.
Except that, after being legal for several years, it was removed from PFS legality - one of only a few mechanics to suffer that fate.
It appears that, after vigorous field testing, they reached a different conclusion.
If it's a unique creature, why is it a harbinger daemon instead of the harbinger daemon?
That's just silly.
I'm guessing that this is another case of d20pfsrd stripping the product identity from the statblock, making it confusing for anyone who doesn't have the real statblock. Since the only "harbinger daemon" in print thus far is Zelishkar of the Bitter Flame, it's probably his statblock you're actually looking at.
The worst thing about that example is that they burned inherent bonuses and strapped 200k gp magic items on a simulacrum. Those bonuses don't transfer to possessed bodies boys and girls. So right out of the box, presuming the GM was inattentive for something so powerful, the Strength score is 11 points too high. And that Strength score is what powers the otherwise feeble character's high-cost abuses of blood money.
Far smarter from the standpoint of simulating pure Strength is to make a snow-copy of something that is *relatively* common, especially by comparison to a unique daemonic harbinger of fiery death: a run-of-the-mill Pit Fiend or Balor have higher native Strength scores (37 and 35 respectively). Titans are even better and fit the targeted Strength score of mid-40s+ (45 or so for the Elysian Titan, 49 for the Thanatonic Titan).
All four of these have been seen at least once or twice during published campaigns and they are not unique entities.
... it only has half of the real creature's levels or HD (and the appropriate hit points, feats, skill ranks, and special abilities for a creature of that level or HD).
Guess what you're losing first? G'wan guess. All of the highest end abilities go away. You're not farming anything above a 5th or 6th level ability from these snow-copies.
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Anything involving simulacrum is so deep into rules ambiguity that it requires the direct involvement of the GM. Trying to make pronouncements like that is just begging for a massive derail.
Anything involving simulacrum is so deep into rules ambiguity that it requires the direct involvement of the GM. Trying to make pronouncements like that is just begging for a massive derail.
aye, fair enough :)