Author Topic: CO CHALLENGE: Lurkers Unite!  (Read 5097 times)

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amalcon

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Re: CO CHALLENGE: Lurkers Unite!
« Reply #20 on: May 19, 2008, 06:43:22 PM »
The Lurk has some ridiculous nova capabilities with the augments.  It's unfortunately a swift action to activate an augment, basically prohibiting it from applying more than once in a round, but there are ways around that...

Synad
Lurk 5/War Mind 5/Lurk +10
Abilities: St 10, Dx 16, Con 14, In 16, Ws 12, Ch 8

Feats:
(1) Weapon Finesse
(3) Two Weapon Fighting
(6) Enhanced Synad Multitask
(9) Two Weapon Pounce
(12) Two Weapon Rend
(15) ?
(18) ?

Equipment:
You know, I can never be bothered to work out the entire WBL for a character.  This character just needs the essentials (flight and stuff), maximal chances of hitting, and survivability.  Damage isn't really dependent on any gear:  his offense comes from within.

Tactics:
The goal is to burn a whole bunch of PPs on two Lurk Augments.  The Mental Assault augment is probably the best one to use in most cases:  mental ability damage is not all that easy to come by.  That augment is stupid-good against animals (simply activating the augment, with no PPs spent, will one-shot an animal), and still very effective against most other things.  A Synad can activate two augments in a round once a day (twice with Enhanced Synad Multitask).  This lets you not only get the initial bonus twice, but spend twice as many PPs on the attack.

The coolest part comes in at level 10, with Sweeping Strike:  if two enemies are adjacent, your one Mental Assault can hit both of them.

So, the ability damage totals.  At level 5 (when the trick first starts working), a few times in a day, you can do a modest 4 points of Intelligence or Wisdom damage.  At level 10, twice a day, you can do eight to two adjacent opponents with a two weapon pounce.  That will drop a wide variety of magical beasts and monstrous humanoids, a big part of what you're fighting at this level.

The crown jewel is at level 20:  twice a day, you can do a two weapon pounce for 18 Intelligence or Wisdom damage.  To put that in perspective, it takes an Old red dragon to survive one of those (CR 20) -- and you can always do nine more next round.  In an ideal case, you'd have a decent chance at dropping a pair of Black Wyrms in one round.

Adaptations:
- Lose or delay War Mind:  War Mind gives the handy ability to hit two enemies at once.  It conserves your resources against groups of enemies, and makes the overall numbers in the spike much bigger.  Still, it stunts damage growth early on because your Lurk augment capabilities are determined by Lurk level.  It may be worth delaying War Mind by one or more levels in order to get single-target damage up quickly.
- Lion Totem Barbarian:  I'd considered Lion Totem Barbarian, because Pounce is a bit better than Two Weapon Pounce.  It costs a Lurk level, though, which are pretty valuable.  The main trick only depends on two attacks, and doing them with two weapons (to get a high attack bonus on the low attack) is probably a good idea anyway.
- Natural Weapon pouncer:  This would be done best by fixing a way to bind the Sphinx Claws soulmeld to the hands (Psionic open chakra?), and either also binding them to the totem or manifesting Claws of the Beast.  This gives the highest attack bonus, as the -2 two-weapon penalty is gone.  It's a bit more work to set up, though, and it doesn't significantly hurt the numbers.

Callix

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Re: CO CHALLENGE: Lurkers Unite!
« Reply #21 on: May 19, 2008, 06:51:29 PM »
Remember, Lurk augments care about your Lurk class level. It's bizarre, but ML and character level don't affect it. So the War Mind build loses two points of damage. Also, you can't Sweeping Strike if you move more than 10 ft in the round, so Sweeping Strike + Pounce is a little odd.
I know gameology-fu.

amalcon

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Re: CO CHALLENGE: Lurkers Unite!
« Reply #22 on: May 19, 2008, 07:08:50 PM »
Yeah, I realize it's losing some damage (actually, 6 from a pounce:  level 15 allows 7*2 pps, level 20 allows 10*2, and it gets applied twice).  From what I could tell, there's just not that much stuff with more than 18 int, but less than 25.  Though it might be worthwhile, in some games:  it can one-shot somewhat bigger dragons, titans, that sort of thing.  Certainly, if you don't think Sweeping Strike will get much play, lose it in exchange for more damage.

Lawful_stupid

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Re: CO CHALLENGE: Lurkers Unite!
« Reply #23 on: May 19, 2008, 07:48:16 PM »
Unfortunately our group doesn't use Psionics. So I'm out

LS

Elephant Jack

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Re: CO CHALLENGE: Lurkers Unite!
« Reply #24 on: May 19, 2008, 09:21:22 PM »
Lurch the universal lurker
Black-clad Sneak (4), Nice flavor (3), Using PP for fun and profit (2), Works with other weak classes (2)
Hook CPsi-dependant!

Yup. This could work.

EJ

Ubernoob

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Re: CO CHALLENGE: Lurkers Unite!
« Reply #25 on: May 19, 2008, 09:55:49 PM »
Kalashtar is twice as good pp as a +2 int race.
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