Dragon Disciple rant.
Swarmkeeper109
Member Posts: 57
Hello friends, I feel the need to rant about how mad this makes me. I was on the the dragon disciple wiki page to look at how much bonus constitution they got, and I saw one of the comments being:'Dragon Disciple is a class kit you choose when you feel like Sorcerer is too good and you want some kind of a penalty while using it.' In what way is getting 5 ac, IMMUNITY from fire, with admittedly not that useful con bonuses and a nice breath weapon FOR FREE a 'penalty'. 'But-but you lose ONE spell per day' somebody may be saying, and yeah it is a downside of course there would be one, but in my opinion the benefits heavily outweigh the negatives. Thanks for coming to my ted talk.
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Comments
- AC barely matters to a high-level mage. When played well, you don't get targeted very often. And you've got Stoneskin up for any stray hits. And absolute defense spells like PFMW for when that's not enough.
- Immunity to Fire? Protection from Fire grants that for a level 3 spell slot. With a pretty serious duration.
- Breath Weapon? OK, that's a nice spell. About as powerful as a Fireball in general, but with some situational differences. So that's equivalent to one of the spell slots you gave up. The rest are still there.
So I can see where they're coming from. But I disagree.
I've done a full run with a Dragon Disciple protagonist. The theme was "Kill It With Fire". A full fire-immune party, with none of that dispellable. Well, it was only half the party in BG1. And then I throw fireballs and fire storms and incendiary clouds into melee, with absolutely no worries about hitting my own people. It worked. Extremely well. It was the most powerful party I've ever built, capable of taking on even absurd challenges like the SCS Ust Natha defenses (if you don't leave after the ritual, the drow come after you).
That would not have worked with an unkitted sorcerer. You don't want to worry about getting your fire immunity dispelled when you're self-targeting triple Incendiary Cloud chain contingencies.
As for the other bonuses like AC ... by the end of the game, I was keeping a suite of buffs including Spirit Armor up on the entire party. That Dragon Disciple actually had enough AC to be effective against high-level threats, especially when I put up the extra buffs like Mass Invisibility and Blur for big fights.
And the downside? Fewer spell slots only matter when you actually run out. Which I didn't, once the Project Image/Wish engine came on line.
so. The AC change, IMO, does not matter that much; some enemies are so powerful that they slice
through the AC quickly and casters with low HP just die quickly. I don't know how much damage the
ability does; so I may loosely agree that the boosts are too much. But what would be a balanced change
according to Swarmkeeper?
I'm not sure what a good balance would be as I'm awful at trying to balance things, but I just remembered the biggest benefit being their hit die is D6 instead of D4.