Heavy multiclassing

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[For Crucis' sake, if you are not a powergamer or at least able to think like a powergamer you are not allowed to read this thread.]

If you're going to multi-class heavily enough to get an XP penalty, you might as well do it with most party members so that the dynamic levelling system catches you right back up again. This thread is for posting any ideas you have for USEFUL multi-class builds that would incur heavy experience penalties. You might have a sorc who doesn't multi-class in order to be 50% higher-level than anyone else, but most of the party should take penalties together.

One obvious one is to take JUPP's high-AC Monk1/Dreadmaster20/IllusionistX, and slap on yet another mix-in of Rogue so you can wear Swing From the Masts, giving you more margin to reserve your AC buff spells for big fights and a 40% experience penalty. A level of Fighter lets you wear the Little Giant's belt for a permanent Blur effect and a cool 60% experience penalty.

Another: I like having a Bard11 in my party, but it's hard to figure out what to do with the other levels. Why not turn it into yet another damage specialist: Bard11/Paladin1/Fighter4/Cleric7, with all level-up points going to STR and using Big Death. If you ever get to Cleric7 (level 23) you can use Holy Power, but even with only Cleric4 you'll be at 5 attacks per round thanks to your warrior-level BAB and Rapid Shot. Meanwhile you're racking up a cool 60% penalty to experience earned. Your bard levels give you plenty of defense (Mirror Image, Blink, Improved Invis) should you care to wade into melee.

Obviously a SorcX benefits from having Pal1 mixed in, for the STR and the saving throws, which is a 20% penalty if you pick a Drow instead of an Aasimar. Once you hit Sorc20 you might choose opt for some Fighter levels for weapon specialization and a 40% penalty. If you're not planning on HoF mode you might instead take a Monk level so you can bombard your own positions with impunity. In addition, taking Bard4 gives you yet another 20% penalty, helps your BAB relative to pure Sorc levels, and doubles the number of bonus Mirror Images that you get from your presumably-massive CHA.

It's tempting to propose a mixin of Barbarian for someone for the speed boost, but I've never actually played a Barbarian so I don't know how worthwhile the boost is.

-Max

 

For crucis' sake sounds like an insult...
I consider myself a powergamer, but I never liked the idea of XP penalties.
If you're heavily multiclassed, and your entire party incurs high XP penalties, then don't make the mistake of thinking you'll 'catch right up again', or even close.
Sure, high level monsters will net you more XP than normal, but that's only because you're severely behind in levels. It will be a serious handicap to your party, or a challenge, depending on your perspaective.

Try to mix in classes that don't give you penalties, and try to keep the main (casting) class relatively pure at the start...

 

Nah, just a friendly jab at the local non-powergamer....

XP penalties exist because the designers of 3e clearly didn't want people simply taking a little of this and a little of that ad infinitum. It seems pretty clear that the idea is that 3e should somewhat emulate the old 2e style of multi and dual classing where you are committed to your 2 or possibly 3 classes, and not simply taking a little of every class.

It's not a problem for me because I rarely multiclass, except perhaps for taking the occasional ftr-4 for a rogue or a pally of helm. The heavy multiclassing used by powergamers is entirely too cheesey for my taste. I don't think that I've every taken a pal 1 for any sorc or a ranger 1 for any character. Too cheesey. Heck, I don't even think that you should get the pally stat reward after the Lost Followers fight unless you have a minimum number of paladin levels to prevent such cheesie-ness. (For much the same reason that I set the stat minimums for the LOS version of Cera Sumat just high enough to prevent dilettante pallies from being able to use it.)


Anyways, it's pretty clear that the XP penalties exist to "encourage" a certain type of character building behavior, and prevent a style of multiclassing that abuses the intent of the 3e rules' designers... or at least make it too painful to consider doing.

I think that it might depend on just how aggressively you are multiclassing. If it's just a single character in a party of 6, it probably isn't a big deal. OTOH, if you do this with all 6 characters, I suppose that it could be rather painful, since you'd be throwing away a huge pile of XP.

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I don't see how you're going to have enough stat points to make that build work. Obviously, you're going to have a max WIS for the cleric, and possibly a fair number of points in DEX, since the point of a monk mix-in is to not wear armor. But where do you get enough points for a useful enough Illusionist? Besides, is an Illusionist going to get enough levels to cast any useful spells that have useful enough effects and durations?

I'm not so sure that the last statement is all that true for HOF. If you're limiting your bard to only 11 levels, the durations on those spells isn't going to be exactly stellar. Oh, your singing will be fine, but I wouldn't get your hopes up on the buffing spells that have durations measured in 1 rnd/level. Ditto for Holy Power from the cleric 7 portion of this build. Wow, you can cast Holy Power for a whole 7 rounds. I'm soooo impressed.

Honestly, this is a problem with being too aggressive with multiclassing of spellcasting classes. Just because you can cast a spell doesn't mean that it's worth anything if it doesn't have enough levels backing it up to give it a good duration or enough dice of damage, or whatever.

I can see doing something like a Bard 11/Pal 1(or2)/Ftr 4 (or more), since the benefits of the pally and ftr levels aren't going to be of limited duration or power. Beyond this with this mix, I'd probably just stick with bard or ftr levels, or perhaps take nothing but sorc levels the rest of the way.

While I understand the reason for the monk level, I'm not sure how valuable it would be unless you have enough of a DEX to support the Reflex Save roll, though I suppose that with a Pal 1 level mixed in, you would get to add the CHA bonus to the Evasion die roll.

The problem I see here is that monk mix-ins don't seem particularly wise unless it's with a cleric or druid where you know that you'll have a high WIS to help provide some AC, since you wouldn't be able to wear armor. I don't see how a sorcerer is going to have enough stat points to have a decent enough AC.

Personally, I think that you're over-multiclassing this one. I could see adding in bard levels, since the synergy between bard and sorcerer is solid, and a small number of bard levels will still support some nice singing and use of bard instruments.

Personally, not really sure that it's worth it. First of all, remember that any character taking a monk level is going to be getting a speed bonus. Secondly, I personally don't find all that much value from having a character being faster than the others, except for a scout (or possibly a decoy). (It can be nice to amp up the speed of a small race character so that they don't lag behind the party, if the rest of the party is composed of tall races.)

Also, I'm not sure that the value of 1 barb rage per day is worth all that much, particularly once you get into HOF where you would probably have items that had STR bonuses almost as high as rage's STR bonus, which is an important consideration, since they don't stack.


Anyways, given that I've (obviously) never played such a party, you might want to test the premise that having every character be taking heavy XP penalties being able to take advantage of the dynamic XP system. I really have no clue if you'd be far behind as Coin suggests, or you might actually be able to stay close to normal.

 

Actually, with the way XP decay accelerates past average level 19, your entire party could have a 40% XP penalty and expect to be only slightly less than 2 levels behind a non-penalized party. The question is, are there any builds for which you gain more value from the extra 2 classes than you lose from the 1.8 levels? I think there are some.

-Max

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Call it "insurance." Only powergamers are reading this thread, so it will stay on-target talking about what works and cannot degenerate into an argument about playstyle and whether we're misleading newbies into thinking powergaming is the One True Way.

Adding Rogue to the canonical Dreadmaster decoy doesn't cost you any extra stat points, so that's a non-issue. Int 13 is plenty, and you need it anyway for Expertise. The whole reason you want the Rogue mix-ins is precisely to make duration less of an issue without requiring you to get all the way to Illusionist 8. A Shield spell from an Illusionist3 lasts for only 15 rounds, basically one combat, but if you've got Crow's Nest becaues of your Rogue mixins you have exactly the same AC *all the time*, using Mage Armor. (Not to mention Spirit Armor.) Duration on Mirror Image shouldn't be much of an issue, since in situations where you actually need it it gets depleted long before the duration would run out anyway.

Mirror Image from a level 11 bard will last plenty long. I speak from experience with a Illusionist8 decoy. Improved Invisibility (1 minute/level, ostensibly) is also fine, especially since you will typically only cast it when you're heavily engaged in order to simultaneously lose aggro and improve defense. (If you're not already engaged you'd rather have the sorc cast it for longer duration.) Blink is more problematic, especially because it hurts your attack capability as well as not lasting very long. I'd probably only use that when I was expecting to get really swarmed, or for big fights.

Holy Power is ALWAYS a fairly short-term buff, and in fact I almost never use it even with a high-level cleric because it's a lot of hassle. However, sometimes you feel the need to burn through big DR or big HP (the Guardian, golems) and in that case having 35 attacks worth of +4 damage (on a x3 crit weapon) could be worthwhile. Notice that I've placed Cleric as last priority, though, precisely because Holy Power is inferior to weapon specialization from an operational efficiency standpoint (as opposed to a performance standpoint). You could leave Cleric off of this build altogether without compromising effectiveness much, except that it would reduce your XP penalty and thereby shift unwanted levels onto a character who is not an offensive spellcaster.

I'm planning to try this XP penalty-heavy type of party on my next playthrough, and I'll know better at that point how much it hurts levels compared to the baselines Sir Rechet has been collecting lately.

-Max

 

It was no big deal for me, Max. Also, let's remember that you started the thread wanting to talk about powergaming, as opposed to a self-proclaimed newbie looking for newbie advice. I don't think that any veteran here is going to confuse you with a newbie.

Well, I don't know what a "canonical Dreadmaster decoy" is. But if it's got plenty of DEX, then adding in Rogue 2 or Monk 1 to get Evasion should work out fine. My point was only that the Evasion ability doesn't work in a vacuum. You need a good DEX to provide for a good Reflex roll to "power" it. And cleric levels are only going to provide half (?) the Reflex save adds that a monk or rogue level would. Of course, this can be improved by taking Lightning Reflex feat, and/or wearing the reflex save enhancing Dragon Belt (IIRC).

Yeah, any spell that has a duration of something like 1 min/level or 1 hr/level is going to be fairly immune to duration issues, at least for combat purposes. My concern would only be for spells with 1 round/level durations.

Also remember that most summoning spells (not all, but most) have durations of about 1 rnd/level, so you might want your summoner to not be so heavily MC'd that this feels like a problem ... or just stick with Animate Dead summons...

I've never used Holy Power much, even though I think it looks like a good buff. I just never remember to use it. it has the benefit of not being a STR enhancer so I'm thinking that it should stack with any STR bonus. And it is a 1 rnd/level spell, so its duration can be pretty decent.

And BTW, it's been suggested that Holy Power can actually be a good spell to use for cleric-archer builds, since it isn't a STR enhancer, but a damage enhancer that isn't limited to certain weapon types.

 

I can understand where you got this idea (less levels -> more kill exp) but you failed to realize WHY it works that way. In order to counterbalance an exp penalty, you need to be low enough in level so that it covers the penalty for kills AND for quest exp.

Given that an average 6-man party gets roughly same amounts of quest exp and kill exp during its journey, this is bad. Really bad. You need to be at least two levels behind the exp curve to cover just the 20% party-wide penalty, and once you start nearing 80% mark, you're looking at being roughly 8-10* levels behind. As much as it's fun sniping freebies from level 1 perks, it just won't pay off if you're to live with exp penalties for any significant periods of time. It's fine using it on mule characters that are DESIGNED to be "complete" at lower total levels, but that's another story.

* = Having done analysis on the MONCRATE.2DA file, it can be roughly estimated that the kill exp for a given monster doubles (or halves) every two to four levels. Since 80% penalty means you need to score ten times as much from kills to cover the quest exp penalties as well, that's double exp upon double exp more than three times over.

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Came to think of an extension to this idea..

I already glanced the subject in JUPP in that you might actually opt to give certain characters some mix-in classes just BECAUSE it causes an exp penalty. Idea being that your OTHER characters can thus enjoy the benefits of having a low(er) level mule.

However, I never really expanded on this idea much. I just came to realize that you could concievably skip the somewhat counter-intuitive process of starting with only a few characters and adding the rest later on. Why not let the exp penalties sort the desired exp level differences out?

This way you would actually consider going Paladin(1)/Fighter(4)/Cleric(x) for your battleclerics, instead of Paladin(3)... It's not like you need the two extra levels in paladin for anything once you've reached 5 attacks/round, so why not just suppress them with an exp penalty so that the non-penalized get freebie levels?

 

I don't know about the whole party being heavily multiclassed. I would think that with some of the party incurring the heavy XP penalty, it would simply drop the average party level down. This would make non MC characters advance a little faster. While the heavy MC will be behind, they may still not be at such a big disadvantage either.

 

Skipping to the end...

That's actually the point. You don't have to start off from the beginning with a 60% XP penalty, it's just that once you're in HoF and trying to get one or two characters up to Sorc27Pal1 for Gelugons it's a lot easier if the other characters aren't sucking up unneeded levels at the same time[1]. QuestXP isn't an issue because it's fairly minimal in HoF anyway. The only thing is, you WILL take a level hit on the guys you are multi-classing so you need combinations where the extra power from multi-classing outweighs the levels you lose.

Another one I thought of: instead of the classical female drow Pal1/ClericX (all points to STR), which has zero level penalty, do a half-orc Pal1/Fighter4/ClericX. You lose one or maybe even two ST points for not making level 28, but you get them right back from being a half-orc. (You also get them earlier, and thus are doing more damage for a longer portion of the game.) You get weapon specialization for an extra +2 as a bonus. You lose some BAB but not enough to drop you below 5 attacks/round. Overall I think you're not losing out except for the lack of spell resistance, and you reserve the hard-to-earn endgame levels for your important offensive spellcasters.

-Max

[1] The scary thing about adding a Monk level to a Dreadmaster, for instance, is that he now has a 20% experience penalty which will put him behind everyone else permanently. For a Deep Gnome with ECL 3 already that's problematic because XP is so hard to gain as everyone else's levels rise. It's NOT a problem if you have enough ballast to slow everyone else down by at least 20% at the same time. In my current playthrough I expect I'll probably have a 20% XP penalty on most characters by the end of normal mode and a 40-60% as soon as everyone hits level 22--except of course on the characters who are intended to reach level 28+, who will have 0% penalty.

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Log(5) in base two is 2.3, so if all XP came from monsters an 80% penalty would put you 4.6 levels behind once you're past level 19. At that point you gain XP five times slower from multi-classing, but you gain it five times faster from being under-level.

-Max

 

Yes, but that's just for the kill exp. You'll receive only 20% of the quest exp as well so you need to compensate for that as well to maintain balance.

 

On the subject of what 3.0 designers intended multiclassing penalties to accomplish: if they had really wanted to prevent people from taking a little of this and a little of that, they would have done better to redesign classes like monk and paladin that give a ton of benefits at level 1... which is exactly what they did in 3.5.

I'll note that a 1/1/1/1/1/3 should stop gaining experience entirely at level 8. It's like xp muling, except with a little more deniablity and a little less benefit. With a bow and the right stats and feats he should do OK in normal mode. In HOF he'll be entirely useless, like any level 8 character.

As for an actual HOF useful build, Cleric X(until you have as many heals and raise deads as you want)/Monk 1/Fighter 1/Rogue 1/Ranger 1/Paladin 1 and done. You can take some of the chaff levels earlier if you want to help the other characters out a little more.

 

75% of the experience you gain in HoF is monster experience anyway, so there's not all that much to compensate for. (BOTE says: "JUPP gives about 50,000 XP per char for cumulative quest experience for a playthough. Typically you might plan to gain 10 levels during HoF, starting from level 16. 325K - 120K = 205K, so 50K is 25% of that total.) It's non-trivial especially for your absurd 80% figure, but it's not going to put you 10 levels behind.

Another quick calculation says log(5*4/3) = 2.7, so including quest experience you'll be 5.4 levels behind with an 80% penalty.

-Max