Builds that don't suck - Arcane Trickster

One of the regular features I am planning to institute here is the “Characters that don’t suck” suggestions.

Characters that don’t suck is going to be devoted to finding those interesting 3.5 builds that might not be the most powerful, but are still a hell of a lot of fun to play.

Today’s discussion – The Arcane trickster

Flavor – An arcane caster with rogue tendencies and a talent for sneak attacking with ray and touch spells. A great concept for combining a rogue with a ray-casting caster.

Books needed – Core only (complete scoundrel for optional builds)

Cheese meter – None with core build, some with optional variants

Best Variant – Taking 5 levels of spell warp sniper from complete scoundrel fits the flavor perfectly, adds neat abilities, and with only mild cheese of stacking sudden spell strike with sneak attack allows you to only have to lose 1 caster level.

Role – This character can easily fill the skill-monkey and/or “batman” wizard and/or blaster wizard slot

Pros – Full progression sneak attack and spell casting with a few other perks

Cons – Low skill points for a skill-monkey build and the loss of 3 caster levels (only 1 with optional builds)

The skinny - The arcane trickster is widely considered underpowered because at best you must have rogue 3 / wizard 5 to enter into it. Depending on which class you covet more this either means losing 5 levels worth of skills and sneak attack or losing 3 levels of spell progression. You also only have 4+int skills while in the prestige class and don’t have access to nearly as many skills.

Concept - First let’s discuss why you should be an Arcane Trickster. The flavor is pretty neat. While it’s built more around being a caster, I love the seamless combination of the arcane and the stealthily arts. Let’s face it, there’s a lot of great rogue-type spells in the arcane casters arsenal that really make a rogue shine.

Break down –

First to address the damage concerns. At high levels the arcane trickster actually out damages the pure mage ONLY with ray and touch spells and ONLY while sneak attacking. (however an arcane caster of level 17 should have no trouble sneak attacking)

Disintegrate (ranged touch 2d6 damage per level) as a level 20 character

As a pure wizard it would be 20 X 2d6 damage per level comes to a nice even 40d6 damage. Ouch.

However, now the arcane trickster. 17 X 2d6 damage + 7d6 sneak comes to 41d6 damage. Ouch again! It’s not quite as much damage, and the player must be sneak attacking, but its close.

Polar ray (ranged touch 1d6 per level) at level 20

Pure wizard 20 X 1d6 = 20d6 damage

Arcane trickster 17 X 1d6 + 7d6 sneak = 24d6

Again the trickster out damages.

Build –

I recommend wizard rogue. The int synergizes nicely and it is the quickest way into arcane trickster or any of the variants I will suggest. For optimization choose rogue first for the skill points and hit points.

Rouge 1, followed by any combination of rogue and wizard until you hit rogue 3 / Wizard 5.

You also might find that as a ray caster, you won’t need to jack your int up very high for saves purposes, as you have many options for damaging no-save ray spells.

Variant builds –

Spell Warp Sniper (complete scoundrel) – This great prestige class fits the concept perfectly. It allows you to turn any damaging spell into a ray spell, deal precision damage from 60 feat and more. In addition, getting your dm to allow sneak attack and sudden ray strike to stack for prestige class requirements isn’t exactly a stretch.

For this build rogue 1, followed by wiz for 5, then spell warp for 5 and then arcane trickster.

I enjoy this variant so much that I am sad you can only do spellwarp for 5 levels

Feats - You are most likely going ot be focusing on damaging ray spells with some stealth utility

• Weapon focus ray - who doesn't like +1 to hit
• Spell penetration 1 and 2 - I always advocate these for a damage-dealing spell caster
• extend spell - nice for those improved invis's
• maximize + empower - a great way to get ranged touch spells for those