You only need one of those, all of them will have the warlock or adept crying in the corner. Well maybe not the adept.
So a Truenamer should not be playable straight out of the box?
50% shot is what the designers were shooting at, for some reason or another, so that means the class works as it was designed with fairly minimal effort. With that said, targeting your self will be at 5 or higher the first time. Gate is at 45, so you need to roll one or higher. Solid Fog is 40, and tons of magic armor and weapons have caster levels that are fairly low. +5 weapons are CL 15 I believe.
You realize what you're saying here, don't you? Imagine if a fighter had a 50% chance to hit with his first attack each day. Or a rogue had a 50% chance of sneak attacking someone the first time he tried it each day. And those chances decreased. Yep, seems perfectly balanced to me.
This is at level 20 when it gets gate, with the master work tool it gets 2 gates a day as a spell like ability, which doesn't cost experience, after which it will need to roll two higher than one for each additional gate it casts. Even at 50/50 I would say that Gate is worth it. It also has 5 uses of solid fog, or 10 uses of a burst trip effect. At 15 it should be succeeding on 3s if it has a luck stone. There is also the option of a self buff of +5 for 5 rounds and skill shards for when it faces a creature of a higher CR.
The Healer also gets Gate. Three levels before the Truenamer. More notably, the Healer doesn't have to make a fairly difficult roll to use Gate. And there are ways around the XP cost. Dweomerkeeper, for example.
Oh darn its not at tier one power, some how I will have to continue on. It is for the most part only the last 5 and levels that are like this, assuming a true speak item at 3.
You're damned right, it's not at Tier 1 power. Neither is it at Tier 2. Or 3. Because last I checked, none of those classes needed such significant investment to use
a primary class feature.
Unless he just started at 20, he should have realized how his checks were sliding and invested a little bit more.
I cannot believe I'm doing this, but let me point to the Fighter as an example of better mechanical design.
The rolls he cares about most, attack rolls, improve at each level. So does the Truenamer's skill check. (Of course, the Fighter doesn't have to spend skill points to increase his attack roll, but we'll ignore that.) Now, AC generally goes up each CR. So does the Truespeech DC. The problem is, AC does not scale as fast as CR does. The tarrasque? CR 20, Truespeech check with DC 55. Armor Class? 35. Pit fiends! Also a DC 55 check, but with an AC of 40. More to the point, the enemy's AC does not rise after every successful attack. Sure, your iteratives will have lower bonuses, but they reset the next round. Still an AC of 40 versus a Truespeech check of 55--oh, wait, I'm sorry, Tommy! You now have to roll a 57. Assuming you made your roll last round. And assuming you're still alive, since you've been spending gold on your primary class feature and not as much of the other nifty things that other classes get.
It is a strong suggestion not a rule, and your right on the greater amulet. I looked at the price to make on it. I consider the item very high priority, and it needs to be picked up ASAP.
Of course the amulet is a high priority item. It's a crutch to bring you closer to something approaching balanced.
JaronK is correct here, and I'm not saying that you aren't either, lans--it is entirely possible to optimize a Truenamer to competent levels--but that takes a fair degree of optimization skill. Taken straight from Tome of Magic, the Truenamer is quite weak, if not altogether broken.
