So I'm currently playing a dwarf cleric 20/heirophant 2/contemplative 1 in a campaign that's been going for just shy of 2 years. Our last fight got us enough XP to go from 23 to 25 (won a fight we were supposed to run from), and now I'm having a hard time deciding what direction I want to take this character in. Unfortunately I hadn't even heard of optimization until level 15 or so, so my first several feats were almost literally set on fire. I mean, seriously, I thought Combat Casting, Tower Shield Proficiency, Eschew Materials, and RUN were good feat picks, and my DM is vehemently opposed to retraining
. So my options for prestige classes are pretty slim.
I was thinking of one of 3 main directions to go from here. The first option was to take 1-2 levels of Barbarian, then back in to epic cleric. This gets me Pounce and probably Improved Trip (Lion and Wolf totem variants), along with access to martial weapons (wheeee!). Unfortunately the DM vetoed Whirling Frenzy because both of us looked at it and thought
Why on earth would you pick anything else? The downside to this is that it steps heavily on the toes of the party beatstick, a Fighter/Barb/
Whirling Reaper. It also delays getting my Epic Cleric feats by a level or two, and epic feats are niiiice.
Second option is to just go more cleric. The upside to this is more epic feats. I already have Epic Spellcasting and unfortunately I don't qualify for auto-quicken or improved metamagic yet (I only have 28 ranks in spellcraft, need 30
). The downside is that until I actually GET 30 ranks in spellcraft, I don't know what feats to take.
Final option is to go more levels in Heirophant. I took Divine Reach (at the time, it was to compensate for my poor speed so that I could heal people before they died, but now I realize it means persisting touch spells
) for my first special ability and Persistent Spell as a bonus MM feat for my second, and I'm thinking Chain Spell and possibly Twin Spell would be put to good use as my special abilities from more Heirophant. Pro is being able to persistent chain buff the party, Con is fewer epic feats and doesn't advance rebuking (not that I really care at this point, having already lost 3 levels of it).
Something I should probably mention: the DM gave me something akin to Divine Metamagic, in that I get 3 * my Wis Mod in free metamagic levels per day. And being an Epic character, my wis mod is somewhere in the neighborhood of +13, so this is not insignificant.
So, what do you guys think? Is one of these significantly better than the others? Or is there some other option that I'm completely missing that's better still? Any advice is appreciated.