PrC suggestions for a Binder

[TheWyrmDude]

In a game I'm currently in, I'm playing a Binder. My DM has allowed me to use prestige classes that progress caster level as ones that progress Soul Binding, with the level of vestige counting as spell level. Stuff like going Anima Mage/Tenebrous Apostate to double speed my progression would probably be frowned upon, so I'm going to try to avoid that if possible.

We're loosely using the Midnight campaign setting (1st ed), and I have the Sunderborn Heroic Path, which gives me Rage (half power, but without the AC penalty, and turns into base power rage, minus the AC penalty at level 13), Summon Monster 1/day per version up to 7 at level 19, plus some other goodies (strength increase, see invisibility, bonus to cha skills against outsiders). The DM saw the updated version and thought it was lame, so he had me keep the earlier version.

Anyways, I'm fairly melee oriented (I just got Andras and have pretty much stayed bound to him since I snagged him), though I've been doubling as the party face with Naberius when needed. I am planning on going KotSS, so 5 levels are spoken for in the build. Would anyone have any suggestions for a good PrC to supplement this? I'm trying to keep with a theme of a shadowy figure who is secretly of a noble lineage (in the 'related to eastern European-style vampire aristocracy' sense) and in-game no one has seen my full face, as either I've been covered in robes and rags, or disguised while bound to Naberius. Though this will change if I reveal my identity, because what's the fun of a big reveal if you don't flaunt it?

Psionics aren't allowed (no misconceptions about the power level of it, the DM just doesn't like the feel), but aside from that, everything else is open.

Thanks in advance.

[InnaBinder]

Knight of the Sacred Seal is the default melee Binder PrC.

For binding Naberius, Hellreaver has appeal, and is "shadowy."

Given the "progresses caster level" houserule in play, I'd seriously consider a Warlock dip to go Hellfire Warlock, thanks to Naberius.

[PhaedrusXY]

Shadowcraft Mage seems thematically appropriate, but I'm unsure how you'd interpret some of its abilities...

Unseen Seer could be a solid choice.

[TheWyrmDude]

I do plan on going KotSS 5 at some point in the near future, and I was looking at the Hellreaver, but I'm trying to keep as much binding progression as possible. The ones that pop out at me are Bone Knight and Ruby Knight Vindicator, mostly the RKV. Unfortunately they require Turn/Rebuke Undead, and I don't know if the DM would houserule the vestige-granted abilities as viable for prereqs (though honestly, my DM has a policy that basically boils down to 'if it sounds cool and doesn't disrupt the game, go for it', so that may end up being an option.)

I guess to make it a clearer picture of what I'm looking for, are there any more prestige classes that would fit the bill of "Dark Knight" that progress caster level?

[JohnnyMayHymn]

You might look at PrC's that give you a domain, that could get you turning or even just a cool domain power...

[Cagemarrow]

Knight of the Sacred Seal is very nice, but I'd hold off on that until you can start binding Zceryll. If bloodlines are allowed I would recommend those to give faster progression through your Effective Binder Level. Being able to use Summon Monster at will, 1/5 rounds, is incredibly powerful as my DM found out again last night.

Our Party got ambushed by a group of 20 legion devils, 4 metal covered devils (had a discordant aura that disrupted spell casting don't know their names), and 4 Orthos devils (big spear wielders that when killed exploded into a burst of maggots). My DM swears this was supposed to be a slightly tougher then standard CR 14 fight I don't think he took all of our party's handicaps into account. We'd already faced 4 or 5 even CR fights that day, as well as had a large group of commoners, 30 or so, we rescued in tow down in a mine looking for an exit to get them out. We hadn't had time since our last encounter to fully heal back up and were running low on healing outside my summons. I felt the group of devils coming with enough time to send my currently summoned earth elemental to charge into their ranks to buy us some time, 12 rounds, while we had the commoners hide back in the mine tunnels and we tried to prepare and ambush of our own.

Poor tactics in the opening round by our archer lead to him getting surrounded by the legion devils right off the bat. Our Swift Hunter Archer, Sorcerer, and Monk/Kensai all got smacked hard in the first two rounds of combat and ended up having to flee or teleport away to avoid getting swarmed under by the legion devils.

My Binder Jacob had no such options being weighed down by Full plate and having Naberious, Orthos, and Zceryll bound at the time. Instead I backed up against a wall and let loose with my breath weapon, suggestions, and summons while hoping that my AC 30 and displacement, 50% miss chance, kept me alive long enough to get my summons off. The Celestial Triceratops with its dc 28 trample ability proved to be particularly effect against the group that was surrounding my character. After a long fight and turning one of the Orthos devils against the others Jacob stood wounded, 25 hp remaining, but alive.

I definitely need to get him some different DR as DR 10/magic has proven mostly useless against appropriately difficult CRs.

[Chilastra022]

Alternatively, you could always still go Tenebrous Apostate, after picking up a level of Ur-Priest or something (nothing says 'mysterious shadowy figure' like one that can hijack a god's divine powers for his own purposes without them even knowing) perhaps even urban druid. Plenty of divine spells from both classes that would benefit a melee oriented binder, with the added utility of non-melee oriented spells Likewise you can use anima mage to further their progression. I agree with Cage that you should wait till you can bind Zceryll before going knight of the sacred seal (unless you can talk your GM into allowing you to switch vestiges at a later date after you qualify to bind Zceryll). Zceryll is one of -the- most powerful vestiges a binder has access to and adds a whole new level of flexibility to the binder from just that vestige alone, so its certainly worth waiting for.

[JohnnyMayHymn]

Why wouldn't he be able to take Koss and bind zercyll?

(unless you can talk your GM into allowing you to switch vestiges at a later date after you qualify to bind Zceryll).

what are you talking about?

[rot42]

Why wouldn't he be able to take Koss and bind zercyll?

(unless you can talk your GM into allowing you to switch vestiges at a later date after you qualify to bind Zceryll).

what are you talking about?

Knight of the Sacred Seal requires you to select a patron vestige and ties all your class abilities to binding that. You can still switch your other vestiges as normal.

[Gnomeo]

Why wouldn't he be able to take Koss and bind zercyll?

(unless you can talk your GM into allowing you to switch vestiges at a later date after you qualify to bind Zceryll).

what are you talking about?

I think it has to do with choosing Zceryll as the patron vestige for the Knight of the Sacred Seal.  You have to have bound the vestige at last once before taking the prestige class to choose the vestige as your patron vestige; which would delay your entry into KoSS if you want Zceryll (EBL 12 for a 6th level vestige, EBL 10 with Improved Binding).

A Binder could choose a different patron vestige and bind Zceryll separately later.  Most of the abilities of the KoSS have nothing to do with your patron vestige at all.  The capstone ability, however, does.  It would allow you to summon two monsters at once, once per day for example.  Useful maybe, but perhaps not worth waiting for.

edit: 

[Chilastra022]

Yep sorry, should have been more clear, i had just woken up when i wrote that xD

A Binder could choose a different patron vestige and bind Zceryll separately later.  Most of the abilities of the KoSS have nothing to do with your patron vestige at all.  The capstone ability, however, does.  It would allow you to summon two monsters at once, once per day for example.  Useful maybe, but perhaps not worth waiting for.

And that entirely depends on how the GM reads that monster summoning ability 

[Gnomeo]

If you go by the designer's clarification (the link is in the Binder handbook) each use of the ability allows you to summon a single creature each with their own duration.  When you can first bind Zceryll (EBL 10 with Improved Binding) you can summon something from Summon Monster 5 and the summon lasts 10 rounds.  Five rounds after the first summon you could summon another.

[JohnnyMayHymn]

Ok i'm following now...

@Chilastra: does that smirk indicate a more broken interpretation?
if so i'm all ears!

EDIT: IIRC a round is 6 seconds, so assuming you are in a place that has 24 hour days and you don't need to eat or sleep or whatever, you can use Zceryll's summon ability 14,400 times a day.
By waiting to take KoSS until you can bind Zceryll, you can bump that up to 14,401 times a day.
My best guess at the other interpretation is allowing the 1d3 or 1d4+1 from lower level lists?

[Chilastra022]

@JohnnyMayHymn - Correct

It depends on how your GM interprets the ability in the end. It states you summon 'a monster' from the summon monsters spell list (which increases to higher level versions according to your effective binder level, and thus gain access to a larger variety of creatures to summon). However while it says you can summon monsters from the list like a sorcerer would, it remains silent about an important aspect of the summon monster # spells, and that is summoning multiple monsters from a lower level list in lieu of summoning a single high level monster from highest level list you have access to. So for a long time people who bind Zercyll (and probably still do today ;p ;p ) take advantage of that aspect and summon multiple monsters from a lower level list 1/5 rounds, as opposed to 1 monster per use 1/5 rounds.

After learning about how it was being interpreted, the designer made a post (on his blog or something, im not 100% certain) that that wasn't how it was intended to work and that you were at all times only able to get 1 monster per summon). However the online document was never edited to reflect the intents of the design, so it remains open to interpretation and to your DM how it works or not, as well as up to the player (if they're of the shady sort) to not reveal that little fact about the dev's intended function of the ability On the other hand, im pretty sure the various developers didn't intend for a lot of the ambiguous things in D&D to function the way players interpret them to function, such as bloodlines, various loopholes with spells, feats and class features etc. But thats the fun thing about D&D, half of it is open to interpretation and much of the content available to players can be RAW (read as written) yet function entirely different than how it was intended to function. So in the end, it comes down to the GM and the players to interpret the ability as intended, or as written. For the most part, when it comes to optimization, people here opt for the 'as written' interpretation if you haven't noticed xD.

Edit: On another note, someone outside of this forum brought up an interesting point. While the fact that you can use this ability once per 5 rounds infinitely might seem too powerful if interpreted in the broken fashion, it matters most in combat situations. And when it comes to combat situations, a caster specializing in summons, such as a malconvoker or druid with ashbound and/or greenbound feats, is always going to outperform and out-summon a binder even using the broken interpretation, despite the fact that theyre limited by spells per day. Mostly because they are not limited by the 'once per 5 rounds' limitation. So thats another thing to take into consideration, casters specializing in summoning creatures can very easily swarm enemies with summons, while a binder is limited to the once per 5 rounds. A Binder's summon -does- have the added benefit of having truestrike, but alternatively, druids also have conjure ice beast spells and greenbound (and no im not implying theyre used together, thats not possible, but they do make for powerful summons);p so i wouldnt hold truestrike too highly in that case.

[JohnnyMayHymn]

Cheers!

Ok so maybe a malconvoker if it can apply to Zceryll summons...

[PhaedrusXY]

Bah, that's a stupid, unnecessary nerf to the binder's summoning ability. I don't even know why it wouldn't work like a normal summon monster spell (allowing you to summon more numbers of lower level creatures)... I'd never even heard about that before this, either. So some guy posted it somewhere on a message board? Who cares?

[Chilastra022]

Cheers!

Ok so maybe a malconvoker if it can apply to Zceryll summons...

Im not sure i follow, the Zceryll summoning ability is a supernatural ability, im not sure it would interact in any way with the malconvoker, but hell, anythings possible with a few diplomacy rolls with the GM xD.

Bah, that's a stupid, unnecessary nerf to the binder's summoning ability. I don't even know why it wouldn't work like a normal summon monster spell (allowing you to summon more numbers of lower level creatures)... I'd never even heard about that before this, either. So some guy posted it somewhere on a message board? Who cares?

I'd tend to agree, it is an unnecessary nerf, turns a particularly useful ability into something thats sorta 'meh'.

[JohnnyMayHymn]

...Ok so maybe a malconvoker if it can apply to Zceryll summons...

Im not sure i follow, the Zceryll summoning ability is a supernatural ability, im not sure it would interact in any way with the malconvoker...

The premise of this thread is to suggest PrCs that normally progress caster level; which, contribute to the "shadowy theme" of the presented character.  The overall attitude toward houserules that was implied by the OP, led me to believe that such a flavorful modification would not be off the table.

[Chilastra022]

Ah okay, wasn't immediately clear thats what you meant by mentioning malconvoker hehe ^_^.

[spacemonkey555]

Bah, that's a stupid, unnecessary nerf to the binder's summoning ability. I don't even know why it wouldn't work like a normal summon monster spell (allowing you to summon more numbers of lower level creatures)... I'd never even heard about that before this, either. So some guy posted it somewhere on a message board? Who cares?

The ability says you summon a creature from the summon monster list that a sorceror of your level could summon. No mention of functioning like the spell, control, duration, summoning or calling, etc. I think most people make a reasonable assumption and have it act as the summon monster spell without even considering it. The alternatives are mostly broken, like getting to permanently add a new pet to your army every 5 rounds, or summoning a monster that isn't under your control.