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Post by Slayer on Aug 21, 2004 3:11:03 GMT
Personally, I would think that if your items melded you would just become the same character with a different physical form. Not very unique to me. May as well just stay your best form them, since the items would all be the same.
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Post by Lokison on Aug 23, 2004 4:00:37 GMT
Ok, personally I like the way it works currently because if you think of it... when was the last time you saw a dragon wearing a shield/sword/plate etc. ... it dosent "fuse" into your form.. thats rediculus. The key here is its not that the items magically tuen into new shapes to fit your forms. What happens is that the shifters brand of magic is extremely subtle. Essensially what it does is takes the magic embedded in the items and as the items meld into the new forms it causes the magic to separate temporarily from the item and merge into the hide of the creature you turn into. Thumb through some descriptions of polymorphing and shapechanging and you will see that most items will merge with vcarious forms and break down and become part of the body mass only to reform when the effect ends. Not to strong though seeing as if a shifter turns into madusa and has high enough ab they can solo just about any boss.. Not quite in actuallity the shifters dependece on only druid weapons( can be fixed with feats i know) takes a lot out of the damage potential. Also note that a lot of the more powerful items are class specific making it hard for a shifter to use what they do manage to get ahold of. And Its not as easy as it sounds. On average the shifter will spend maybe thirty mind running away and turning to gaze while taking masive amounts of damage due to thier lowered ac. Lets take my character. In normal form i have an ac of 71. If i shift on average my ac drops to about 40. And A shifter NEVER has a base attack bonus to match a fighter. A fighter can max out at a bab of about 54 due to strength boosting feats and [naked except for a +5 weapon] whatnot. a shifter must boost his wisdom to gain [EARN] his forms through feats. Currently i top out at 40/35/30 in my normal form {due to a munchkiny set of items i spent a lot of time aquireing note that its still 14 below a fighter who using the items i have could jump up to +60 at least} that drops by at least +10 in shifted forms due to items not properly merging. if shifters become to strong like if your items "merge" into the form, they will be much to strong IMO. unless you limit the equipment they can use further. And if we just make new claws/skins for them you would have to script it so they, maby, EARN they skin/claw? I wouldent like to script it but sounds nice .thats just my bit of Input See the reasons above Shifters are supposed to be lower-mid range fighters who change form to match thier enemies. They already suffer from many equipment limitations. And they earn thier skins/claws due to high ability score requirements. If the changes where made they would not become over powerful just powerful enough that thier forms would not be totaly useless in a fight. As it is most shifters stay in thier regular forms and only change in rare instances when they need some obscure thing. (like a wyrmlings fire immunity)
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Post by Rastan on Aug 23, 2004 13:16:22 GMT
When in a shifter form your AC can lower by 40+ points, this means you get hit 95% of all attacks. Shifters also recieve the base attack upgrades of a mage (every other level).
Dragon Shape requires 30 points of wisdom, an increbily high amount. In simpler terms if you have a starting wisdom of 14 and you want to get every form, all your epic feats must be used to get either great wisdom or a form.
Shifters are quite limited to weapons they can use. Since being a lvl5 Druid is required, most shifters specialize in Scimitars becuase Druids cannot take simple of martial weapon profecencies
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Post by Lokison on Aug 23, 2004 13:54:41 GMT
and the best scimitar is a weapons master only blade. It is possible to work around these limitations but it requires a lot of careful attention to your build
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Post by Rastan on Aug 23, 2004 19:08:41 GMT
yes, a Shifter/WM would have many issues since almost all 30 stat points would be required.
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