Pale Master Familiars And Other Palemaster Suggestions

With the necromatic familiars book floating around, I had a thought about how, it's great for dabblers in the PM levels, but as a PM goes epic, the base class they're based on falls farther and farther behind, and in this instance, the familiar. While the familiars aren't supposed to be great meatshields, the eyeball (which is required for the book's appearance change to work), can be a great asset in combat still, especially if buffed up with the elemental familiar books. Aurora's eyeball familiar can be very useful against many creatures. But for my palemaster Auger, who's going full tilt on the PM thing.. 30 PM means piddly familiar.

While this isn't something to fix the caster-level issue of Palemasters in NWN, it would be great to have familiars as a Palemaster ability, allowing palemaster levels to work as 'master levels' for familiars. It takes a simple line added to the palemaster's feat 2da to add the summon function to pale master levels, although I've yet found the particulars required to edit in the actual master level functionality and ability to select familiar types on pale master levels... then again, I just started toying with this in a test module 10 minutes ago).

Wouldn't address the other PM issues as mentioned, but it would be cool... and slide serious PM focus back towards caster-stuff from it's current melee focus, even if it's just a very minor thing.

Actually....i cant remember how heatstroke our server host did it...but i think he just tagged the line in tlk file to accept pm levels as wiz levels when computing overall wizard level.

Hrmm, been toying around with this more. A few aspects of familiars seem to be hard coded from what I've read, and it seems to be a rather big pain in the ass to work around.

There was a method in which palemaster. harper scout, and red dragon disciple could add their levels to familiar level, as well as to the spell you can cast (but not learn) too!

I use it in an override I downloaded from the neverwinter vault.
The override was made to make the game use 3.5 rules, and I use it for many things.

Personally, I wouldn't mind both palemasters and red dragon disciples getting their spells and their familiars boosted at the same time, it would be wonderful!

Anthroplayer wrote:There was a method in which palemaster. harper scout, and red dragon disciple could add their levels to familiar level, as well as to the spell you can cast (but not learn) too!

I use it in an override I downloaded from the neverwinter vault.
The override was made to make the game use 3.5 rules, and I use it for many things.

Personally, I wouldn't mind both palemasters and red dragon disciples getting their spells and their familiars boosted at the same time, it would be wonderful!

agreed.

A few other PM suggestions...

Spell focuses. Palemasters cannot take spell focus feats... and that's just damn odd considering their a caster class. Adding the feats to their class list would be great (particularly of the suggestion for conjuration focuses boosting summons gets used! which leads to another PM suggestions...)

The PM summons.... These could use some meat to them, particularly the later epic PM ones. At level 33, Auger's lich summon is underwhelming to put it mildly (doesn't help that the lich is a caster, and caster AI stinks, but it shouldn't suck more than the mummydust summon which can be gotten 10 levels earlier).

And lastly... spell power. PM's getting the 1/2 caster level from their PM class levels as per PnP rules would rock. It would greatly benefit characters who go epic PM, and even those that just go 10PM for the crit immunity would benefit from 5 more caster levels for their spells.

MannyJabrielle wrote:...

And lastly... spell power. PM's getting the 1/2 caster level from their PM class levels as per PnP rules would rock. It would greatly benefit characters who go epic PM, and even those that just go 10PM for the crit immunity would benefit from 5 more caster levels for their spells.

I would love for this to happen, and represents my strongest suggestion.

Svair wrote:

MannyJabrielle wrote:...

And lastly... spell power. PM's getting the 1/2 caster level from their PM class levels as per PnP rules would rock. It would greatly benefit characters who go epic PM, and even those that just go 10PM for the crit immunity would benefit from 5 more caster levels for their spells.

I would love for this to happen, and represents my strongest suggestion.

Me too; the biggest reason I haven't done the PM thing is that I'd want to go all the way with it, and at 40th level I'd only be a 10th level caster. Granted, it looks like it'd be really nifty to have a demilich to order around, but that's pretty much all I'd have since neither spell casting nor innate PM abilities seem to improve with levels.

The arm abilities improve slightly. The DC's will cap out at 27 for deathless touch and 29 for undead graft, and you'll get up to 14 uses for graft/day. But yeah, they're a bit meh.

Another quick suggestions....

Add the "Epic Magic" feat to PM's at level 15, so whenever the new epic magic system goes live, PMs will still have access to epic magic like they do currently at class level 15+

Now that the new epic magic system is in....

PM's *really* need an upgrade to their epic bonus feat list, which is rather scant. If I'm correct in assuming that the epic spells as feats will be removed as choices for characters at some point, the epic PM bonus feat list will become even more scant, and anyone going the full PM route will be taking multiple epic energy resistance feats unless they work in some of the auto-meta feats.

I would suggest adding in great intelligence and great charisma (for both PMs with wizard as their base class, and those with sorc/bard as their base class), as well as spell focus/greater spell focus necromancy. Spell penetration/greater spell penetration could be good additions as well.

The spell focus/greater spell focuses would be unique in that no other class has them in their epic bonus feat lists, but I think it fits thematically for palemasters.... and between the great X feats and those two, it would allow a LOT more flexibility in epic bonus feat selections for PM heavy builds.

Bump for the caster level suggestion in regards to the magic overhaul