The Glade 4.0

The Spellthief is actually fairly close to the spellbreaker.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

"I want to make a Spellbreaker," is kind of what I'm going for with this. People should have a general sense what different sorts of character archetypes exist in Warcraft. I have specifically avoided giving a starting level to facilitate ideas. Starting level will depend largely on what people want to play. I'm looking to start off at a fairly low level, while maintaining the mechanical identity of everyone's character concepts.

Books are here:
http://71.4.8.177/~cbeasley/Warcraft/

As is the case with any third party product, there was not a huge amount of playtesting done. There are a number of things that will have to be houseruled. Most notably the way in which racial levels interact with spellcasting. Ironforge dwarves and night elves sort of get shafted in that regard. As such, those two races will add towards divine spellcasting like nearly every other race does. Moreover, instead of merely advancing caster level, racial levels will add towards spell progression as well. The high elf level 2 ability will remain simply an increase in caster level. Do note this applies to racial levels, not to "creature classes."

The reason for this is that spellcasting is a big deal for people playing those classes. It's such a big deal that anything which inhibits their spellcasting advancement is avoided. However, I want people to decide to pick levels in their race. I want night elves to be able to shadowmeld. I want regenerating trolls. I want tauren to be big and burly, and clobber people with totem poles.

Speaking of trolls, they're on the cleric table for BAB advancement like every other race. It's sort of an inverse of the ironforge dwarf and night elf ruling.

Night elf resistances might need to be changed. Having it at 2 + 1/4 character level seems a bit lackluster. I'm looking at a target of having 10 energy resistance at level 20, so I'd probably go with 1/2 character level and cap it at 10.

I'm contemplating replacing Improved Tauren Charge with Powerful Build.

There are some classes that have screwed up advancement tables. Most notably the Night Elf Warden in the Alliance Player's Guide, which has all poor saves. Every PC class I have ever seen in any book by any publisher has at least one good save (including the previous version of Night Elf Warden in Magic & Mayhem, which operated under an earlier edition of the rules).

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Is there a specific time period you're shooting for? Not that it should be terribly relevant for the most part, but, for instance, putting it post WC3 but pre WoW means no draenei, for example, outside of the Broken, who arguably aren't draenei, given what parts of WoW you believe.

I'm not over sure on what I want to play. I am thinking heavy type maybe paladin if its party compatible.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

I'm of the mindset that, like L5R after the Day of Thunder, Blizzard screwed up a lot of Warcraft's story in order to push PvP and move expansions. For instance, the Forsaken joining the Horde makes little sense. Night Elves joining the Alliance was likewise problematic, as they still have beef with the High Elves. Then you have space goats, uncorrupted orcs whose leader somehow goes on a furious bloodthirsty rampage despite never drinking the blood of Mannoroth, Deathwing suddenly breaking the world apart, and so on. These things are cool if you're looking for big monsters to kill in a raid, but from a tabletop perspective it's more like apocalypse of the week.

I'm planning on sending you guys into the Emerald Dream. That's the only definite plan. Everything else is pretty flexible, depending on what people want to play. I'd prefer not to worry about the Draenei, but I'm not opposed to the idea. If everyone decides they want to be a Night Elf, I could set it during the era shortly after the War of the Ancients. Otherwise, by default, I'm probably looking at post Third War. I am explicitly ignoring the WoW factionalization.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

In order to kind of manufacture the Spellbreaker concept, I can fit into a variety of roles in the group, since I'd essentially just be playing the classic Fighter/Mage. Assuming that both of those roles are filled, in the sense of "frontline dude" and "arcane spellcaster," then I could go more into pure spell denial.

I think at the bare minimum, I'd want to be around level 3 (which would probably be High Elf 1/Warrior 2), but above and beyond that, I can be exceptionally flexible with the idea, either going with the spellcaster that can occasionally whack someone, or the fighter that can occasionally zot someone.

Most of the "spellbreakerish" concepts can be just done with feat selections, though it might involve occasionally finding feats in other material that make sense.

I would prefer to limit selection of material to the Warcraft supplements as much as possible. While I'm sure a lot of character types in WoW and WC3 can be made in more mechanically optimal manner using the plethora of third edition D&D material that's been published, much of the point of this is to use the Warcraft books.

Spellbreaker is one where it looks like you might have to go to outside material. Taly mentions a Spellthief prestige class elsewhere, but that's more of a rogue prestige class, where I seem to recall the Spellbreaker was more of a heavy armored character. The actual Spellbreaker feat just blows up spell slots. I'm having trouble finding a way to jack buff spells off of people and put them on your allies.

One thing I would point out regarding the high elf racial levels is that it does not give you arcane spellcasting ability by itself, rather it increases what you already have. Although High Elf itself does give you a limited selection of spell-like abilities. Although, when you do start taking levels of Mage, your high elf levels will give you a boost to your spellcasting.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Spellthief is actually a base class in Complete Adventurer, and has a lot of abilities that look appropriate to Spellbreaker. However, as Coro points out, it's more roguish and less frontline fighter.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

I wasn't particularly focusing on the "stealing buffs" portion of the spellbreaker as much as the "magic immunity." But, since the idea is to create a class out of nothing, more or less, there's a bunch of different ways to take it. I'm viewing it more as a stereotypical fighter/mage at the moment, with a heavy emphasis on utility and countermagic/dispels, rather than trying to match the spellbreaker from WC3 perfectly.

The only reason I mention going outside the printed WoW material is to find various feats which can represent that immunity to magic. Going outside that material in order to get a complete class is basically turning it into pure D&D, and despite my tendency to play something that is decidedly not like anyone else, I don't particularly want to get too far outside the box.

The real effectiveness of the spellbreaker builds in WC3 was the capacity to Blizzard and Flame Strike over the 'breakers themselves, and the fact that the previous "power" build was a Sorceress/Priest Polymorph/Slow/Bless build, which the spellbreaker pretty much shuts down entirely, primarily because they can't be slowed or sheeped. Ultimately, I have more of a focus on representing magic immunity than on stealing buffs, and given the not-quite-true-to-game representations of a lot of things, I don't think the idea has to be perfectly represented to be valid, or fun.

The magic immunity is probably best represented with spell resistance. Outright immunity to magic can be a bit of a problem, although dryads do have immunity to any spell with a SR check.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Well, yes, I don't expect to be standing in Fireballs and not caring. Hence "representing," rather than just getting spell immunity.

At any rate, like I said, there's lots of ways to go with the idea. Obviously, just taking High Elf levels doesn't represent spellcasting, but if the group needs someone to be pure frontline, then just taking the low level spells out of High Elf is enough (High Elf 1/Warrior X). Otherwise, at, say, level 8, it'd look more like High Elf 2/Arcanist 3/Warrior 3, or similar.

How do the racial levels work out as far as multiclassing? Are they all considered racial favored classes?

Basically, yes. You don't factor racial levels for multiclassing. They are meant to get around a level adjustment, and allow you to be the same level as the rest of the PCs. Races that had a level adjustment of +1 had a number of their racial abilities spread out over three levels for which they would get BAB, saves, skill points, and hit points. This also gives PCs more control over how much of their racial abilities they develop.

It behooves someone making a character to check out all of the faction books. There are feats, spells, and such that have equivalents among the other factions. Basically, the publisher is still trying to sell books, so they tried to make the Alliance Player's Guide useful in a Horde campaign, and vice versa. A lot of the classes have variants on them, and some variants are race-specific. For instance, there is a paladin variant that dispenses with spellcasting but allows you to have an aura active at all times. There are variants for both shaman and druids that put them on the fighter BAB table. There is a hunter variant that favors melee over ranged attacks.

There are no race/class restrictions. However, not every race is going to to have an easy time of becoming every class. To be a shaman, you would have to be trained by a race that has shaman and follows the shamanistic religion. It is conceivable, for instance, that a night elf might have learned the ways of the shaman from the tauren once they start training tauren to be druids. They could have also learned it from the furbolg. A human shaman would have to be living in Orgrimmar, perhaps a soldier from Theramore who was making his last stand at Mount Hyjal and got rescued by some orcs.

Also, abilities that give companions are sort of wacky. The druid animal companion is copied over as is. The hunter animal companion does advance with the hunter, but it seems to encourage continually finding bigger and better animals. This may or may not be a problem later on. It's kind of hard to tell. Warlock fel companions are just poorly explained in general. If you're planning to play a class with an animal companion, we might have to do some work.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Are you allowing multiple variants? For example, could you make a High Elf Focused Mage?

Yes. The variants have to be compatible, however. You can replace a class feature once, so you can't get the level 1 ability for both variants.

As an aside, I found a web supplement for spellbreaker. It's a little onerous. You essentially have to take ten levels of mage to qualify.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

I didn't really perceive it as being that difficult to achieve, but then, I think a lot of fan-designed material tends to go way overboard in trying to specifically and correctly represent certain things that I'm more than happy to just gloss over. Mostly, I just see making a spellbreaker as a Fighter/Mage with Counterspell variants, and a few random buffs and debuffs, as well as dispels and the like. I don't need to have a literal representation of the spellbreaker magic immunity or Spellsteal in order to make it work.

I'm not sure if it's a fan designed prestige class or a web supplement. The reason I mention it's rather onerous is that it delays entry into the class until later levels. Now, three levels of high elf, two levels of mage, and a level of fighter would get you in. Your caster level would be 6, which might give you trouble using any of the class features that involve wacky hijinx with dispel magic.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

I'd say outright "I'm playing a druid" except I already have a druid in a pbp game right now... which won't necessarily stop me, but I'm not sure.

I don't like the hunter class in the book, at all, or I'd be all over it. There's a mounted combat prc that looks nice though that adds some possibilities...

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Remove the "if the target is within 30ft." restriction from the Trueshot Aura spells.

Hunters should have the Tracking feat as a bonus feat. I am inclined to add the standard ranger's archery combat style to their progression.

Rori might want to take a look at the Auradin variant on the paladin that's located in the Alliance Player's Guide.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

The idea of a human, hammer wielding, permanently auraed paladin is growing on me. Especially if I can name him Johan Von Henrich

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Do note that the permanent aura variant loses turn undead, lay on hands, all spellcasting, and the hit die drops to a d8. Of course, the fast healing aura gained at level 9 basically guarantees that you and your companions always heal to full after battle. You can also take the human paladin variant if you want (since you mention hammers), although I have to pay attention to everyone's religion. The replacement for aura of retribution demolishes undead and demons.

For everyone else's benefit, Aura of Might is a +1 to damage. The human variant replaces it with Aura of Faith, which is +1 to hit and damage, but only for followers of the Holy Light.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

So I don't have to take the human variant if I am human?

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

You do not have to.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

I recommend Night Elf, just because you can do that in tabletop, but not in WoW.

While possible, night elves do not have paladins on their own. A night elf paladin would need some ties to humans or dwarves.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

My brother's a dwarf.