First, make sure to max out Discipline as much as possible, definitely over your Fighter levels and whenever you can spare a few into it at later levels. Once you hit level 22 and go all out sorcerer, concentrate on Spellcraft and Concentration. Lore is good too, and by the time do hit 22, your Intelligence will be 16, giving you a nice number of points to work with each level.
Other:
I would recommend going with a Human as your race for this template. The extra feat is pretty much calculated in, to use any other race you'll have to start dropping feats.
The downside to this template is the lack of Auto-Still feats, which no matter what I was unable to calculate them in and still get 4 attacks per round.
The upshot is the huge amount of attacks, the nice critical range on a keen scimitar, which ends up being 10-20/x3! Combined with Whirlwind, this is a crazy amount of attacks and damage, plus the fact that you get access to 9th level spells, as opposed to the Whirling Death's level 6. I'm not exactly sure what the benefit of Improved Whirlwind is, since any enemy you can hit will be within 5 feet (scimitar/rapier isn't longer than that) anyways, plus you save eight (8) stat points from being dumped into Dexterity, which allows Charisma to be increased to make your caster side much more formidable.
The other option here is to dispense with the Whirlwind feat (and its Pre-Reqs) and instead fill in those slots with more metamagic feats, such as Empower, Extend and Maximize. The way this build is currently setup, you could also swap out Epic Spell Penetration for Auto-Still I, allowing up to 3rd level spells to be cast (sling a bunch of fireballs for example before clashing arms) while in armor, but I'd rather have a +2 DC across the board. If you're going to PvP with this build (and why not, you'll have all the nice spells, plus will be nasty in combat), I'd recommend keeping Epic Warding at level 39, that is one heck of a good spell!
Other Other:
I realize that perhaps the two-weapon focus combined with Devastating Critical down the road might be considered either overkill or simply stupid, but I do have a logical rationale for that. Put simply, its all the Crit Immune types out there, like the Pale Masters and other powerful Undead. If you're fighting an undead boss, you can WW his minions, then go to town on him with 4+2 attacks per round! I guess the main focus of this build/idea is versatility, and I'm pretty sure I acheived that goal. Comments welcome!
Well, that's it for now, any comments or suggestions can be posted here, especially if you can improve upon this build.
Edited By Darshue on 03/13/04 00:27:57
Edited By Cinnabar Din on 02/27/08 02:43
Comments by CrispyCritter:
Ok, I guess I'll comment on this one. From what you posted, it looks like you're going Fighter 8/ Sorc 22/RDD 10. You're taking 8 Fighter, 8 RDD, and 4 Sorc lvls pre-epic for a pre-epic BAB of +17. With all that Cha I'd almost recommend going Paladin or CoT rather than fighter, but of course if you go Paladin you lose all your fighter bonus feats, and if you go CoT you lose 2 points of pre-epic BAB, meaning you only get 3 attacks per round with your primary hand. However, if you take Blackguard, it is possible to get +16 pre-epic BAB, thus getting 4 attacks per round with the primary hand.
The build would look something like this:
6 Sorc +3 BAB 4 RDD +3 BAB 10 BG +10 BAB
Of course, if you take 10 lvls of RDD and 10 lvls of BG, you won't be able to get past lvl 20 as a sorc, so you might not be able to get access to any Epic spells. However, according to the manual, it seems like if you get into epic levels with one of your prestige classes that your base classes become epic as well. I'm not sure on this one, but if you got to lvl 11 as a Blackguard or RDD, you MIGHT still be able to get epic spells on your 18th or 19th lvl of Sorc, as I have heard (not sure) that a pre-req for getting epic spells is the ability to cast 9th lvl spells.
Of course, if you take BG rather than Fighter, you lose 5 bonus feats that you could otherwise have had. You gain a bonus to saving throws equal to your Cha. modifier, as well as Smite Good, 3d6 Sneak attacks, and some other spells. In my opinion, the best way to save feats is to get rid of all the 2-weapon fighting feats. This will save you 3 feats. In addition, I'd probably get rid of Great Charisma, since you don't really need 26 Cha. for anything, and maybe Epic Spell Penetration or Epic Warding. One thing about Epic Warding is that I'm not sure the armor bonuses stack with other armor bonuses of the same type, which means that if you already had a good set of Armor and Items that gave you good armor bonuses, Epic Warding might not have all that much effect on your AC.
Assuming you want to get rid of the 2-weapon fighting feats, I would choose a weapon other than Scimitar. Since you're not taking exotic weapon prof., you'll probably want to take a martial weapon instead. I would recommend greatsword. You get a base damage of 2d6, +50% Str bonus, and with keen and Imp. Crit. you can get a threat range of 15-20. BTW in order to get a threat range of 10-20 with a Scimitar you need to take weapon master. Without WM the best you can get is 12-20, meaning that you would have a 45% chance of threatening a critical hit on each round, as opposed to a 30% chance with greatsword. Of course, if you want to wield a scimitar, that's fine, but I would go sword-and-board rather than dual-wielding. You suffer a -4 penalty to AB when dual-wielding medium weapons anyway.
As for stats, I would change them a little. I would take 1 point out of Dex. and 2 points out of Str. and put the remaining points into Con. This should give you 14 Con. to start with, which will be 16 once you take your 7th lvl of RDD. You may also want to consider taking Toughness if you want more health. Int is fine since all your classes are low on skill credits, and you don't really need Wis either, unless you want to be able to cast BG spells (or are they innate abilities? - not sure). Since you'll be taking 2 points out of Str at creation, I would take a few points out of Cha. post-creation and put them into Str. instead. Please remember that while you need 25+ base Str. for Dev. Crit., you don't really need an Uber-high Cha. for anything. Ok, so if you decide to try my suggestions your stats would look like this:
Starting:
Str 14 (18+8) Dex 14 Con 14 (+2) Wis 8 Int 14 (+2) Cha 14 (22+2)
Ending:
Str 26 Dex 14 Con 16 Wis 8 Int 16 Cha 24
In my mind that's a little more solid than what you had before.
If you choose to go BG, make sure you meet the prereqs:
* Alignment: Any evil * Base Attack: +6 * Skill: Hide 5 Ranks * Feats: Cleave
Anyway, that's what I would recommend. Hope that helps, and I gotta admit, with those tweaks, that looks like a pretty badass build. WOOT!