The Warmind

[Ubernoob]

Quick question: why are we continuing to focus on the War Hulk on a thread on the War Mind?

That is a very good question...

[Sinfire Titan]

This is BG. We derail ourselves regularly for the sake of arguing and making jokes at the expense of others.

[fil kearney]

Has anyone here got experience with a War Hulk as a PC ?

back when gesalt was young and CW was new, we had a guy playing weretiger8/warhulk10//ranger(i think)18.
tiger hybrid qualifies for warhulk.  full bab + multiattack. was pretty top of the mountain at the time.
he could use smart skills when human size, and get all hulky when hybrid shifting.
great for crowd control.  especially these days.

is it the lack of cheese that folks like so much about warmind?  I mean, estalt aside, warhulk still u dominates, as uber spelled out. 

wouldn't a chaintripping psiwarrior outperform warmind with both better combat AND psionics?
what am I missing?

I also contest the "open ended PP scaling" for a maxed out PrC... if you take, say, telflamar shadowlord 6/abchamp5... you are getting nothing from the abchamp levels, because the ts has no room left to grow, since its it's own progression.  you can't just "get" 4th level ts spell "slots' because your int is massive.
same for psionic minicasters.  once you hit 10 levels, there are no more "levels" to gain in the PrC.. so you can't get more pp from THAT class... you can take any OTHER psi class, and continue gaining bonus pp by their rules, but you can't make the warmind "go to 11".  in any means.  that has always been a hard line.  nothing "goes to 11".
but hey, show me how I'm wrong..

[GawainBS]

Sinfire was right in his explanation to me: as long as you increase your manifester level, the benefit of your WIS increases.

[fil kearney]

Sinfire was right in his explanation to me: as long as you increase your manifester level, the benefit of your WIS increases.

sinfire is misquoting from memory.

your manifester level for the chosen manifesting class increases by four.

Bonus Power Points (by Class Level)

class level and manifester level are not the same, just like wizard10 and caster level 14 are not the same.  once you hit warmind10, you're done. The increased PP by class level stops.

was there errata that changed "by class level" to "by manifester level" on the chart?  if so, sinfire is correct; but I can't find it, so a reference would be nice.

edit:

manifester level ׽. Table: Ability Modifiers and Bonus Power Points shows these calculations for class levels 1st through 20th and key ability scores from 10 to 41.

the chart says class, but the text says both class level and manifester level
I think "manifester" is the typo here.  if all you did was memroize the formula, and skip the rest, I can see why sinfire would make his cliam...

do we have any official clarification on this?  which trumps... text or chart? what do we do when text contradicts ITSELF?

[AndyJames]

Text trumps tables, which leaves us with contradictory text...

[Stratovarius]

If there's class in both text and table, and manifester in only the text, go with class. It makes more sense as well, and ties in better with vancian and other casting mechanic behaviours. 

[fil kearney]

There is the issue of PrC's like cerebromancer...

I take wilder10/cerebromancer10, and at level 11, I have to "start over" gaining pp as a 1st level class... while the straight wilder is earning pp hand over fist in comparison.

It's sloppy mechanics, and I see why sinfire would say RAI is manifester level.. but then we abuse the "unanticipated" minicasters like warmind that get abused by unsynergized mechanics like practiced manifester.

The only sensible answer, IMO, is:
Minicasters use pp by CASTER level.
Full casters/advancing PrCs use pp by MANIFESTER level.



I would argue (separately, not as an ammendment) that practiced manifester is NEVER supposed to award additional pp... practiced spellcaster doesn't award additional spells per level.  Neither should this. 
Also, a 40 int doesn't award shadowlord 4th level spells... neither should high stats award extra pp beyond it's last CLASS level. 
These are both consistent with vancian spellcasting rules.