Arelith

malcolm_mountainslayer wrote: Thu Feb 17, 2022 1:46 pm Regular bull str and bg bull str are supposed to stack. Please make a bug report.

toftdal wrote: Thu Feb 17, 2022 1:47 pm It sounds a bit like you (near) -have- to go PDK or WM for Blackguard to shine?

Hunter548 wrote: Fri Feb 18, 2022 4:29 am Honestly yeah, I think summoner BG is a trap nowadays.

Epic Fiendish Servant is as solid as any long term summon, which is to say it's not bad but that you're a very sad boy when it gets removed from the field (Also it's hilariously and outrageously outclassed by Planar Conduit like literally every other summon spell now).

Corrupt Weapon is useful, but you probably could have UMD'd a +4 weapon with minimal trouble even assuming you didn't have native access. The UMD books have really made 30 UMD something you want regardless, and you're a charisma class. It does scale significantly less aggressively than Bless Weapon; in essence, paladin can get a long-term +5 weapon without sacrificing much they need to function. Blackguard is stuck at +4 unless they give up quite a bit from epic dips of rogue/fighter/whatever.

Aura of Despair is a joke. You have no meaningful way to take advantage of that -2 saves as a level 20 blackguard, either personally or through your summon. It's not even permanent; you have to spend actions to reactivate it, and it can fall off in the middle of a fight.

The various smite/divine synergy bonuses they get from 17-19 are clearly placed where they are to avoid buffing the pdk/blackguard build (4 rogue/10 pdk/16 blackguard). That's probably not a bad idea, given that this is basically the strongest and most popular BG build at the moment. The problem with it, however, is that pdk/bg is also basically the only viable deep BG build, for reasons divine synergy/smite bonuses don't really change.

Consider something like 8 fighter/4 rogue/18 BG. Sure, he gets divine synergy and extra smiting for free. But in doing so, he's given up the various PDK clickables and thus his effective AB has fallen from a fairly good 50-54 ab (Depending on what kind of PDK he was, if he's a race that can double up on +2 strength, etc.) to 45-46 (24 base AB, 13-14 strength modifier, 3 epic weapon focus, +4 weapon, 1 prowess). This is, in my opinion, the biggest reason that PDK/BG is the best version of BG; summon guarding is nice for grinding, the various party support elements make you popular even when you can't fit the fiend in a Maur/Illithid/RDI hallway, but the fact that it takes you from very sad AB to actually competative AB is the biggest draw of PDK for this kind of build.

BG ultimately does not give you much benefit as a melee chassis. Your two main class features are the summon, and slow sneak progression (5d6 sneaks, for most builds). Without PDK, your effectiveness as a melee character (absent the fiend, who as we mentioned above isn't that hard to remove) is in the same realm as things like pre-update spellsword. There are builds on arelith that are 15 or more levels of 3/4th AB classes that get 4-5 more AB than a non-pdk BG gets.

Compare them to paladin, who (by virtue of the recent paladin update and their ability to self-cast things like aid) sits at a very comfortable 50-53 ab, again depending on race and what kind of oath he took. A hypothetical fight between a paladin and something like that fighter/rogue/BG I mentioned above is not something the BG has much chance of winning barring misplays, and it's not going to be close either.

That's not to say that paladin and BG should be mirrors of each other, but blackguard is very similar to a pre-buff paladin without divine favor or holy sword. They not very threatening melee characters, and they aren't great as a pet class either - both rangers and anything that has access to Planar Conduit (Battle Clerics/FS, for example) has a pet significantly nastier than the epic fiend. Both those builds get more AB than non-PDK BGs do as well.

If BG isn't going to be a pure pet/minion style class (As I think would be healthy, and the small nerf to divine might/shield synergy with summons seems to indicate) then they need to get some actually useful melee bonuses. Absent that, no amount of abilities at 17-19 BG is going to make non-PDK BGs terribly viable, and that's completely ignoring the various issues of the usefulness of BG smite vs the usefulness of LG smites.