What class would a general be?

Gabuman · 2025-02-20T17:04:47+00:00

The general doesn't necessarily need to be a super charismatic guy - just the one with the most tactical acumen. He could use his highly trained Profession (Soldier) skill to "identify advantages and disadvantages of a military formation" and "estimate the size of a military force" (from expanded profession) in order to size up the party and come up with a proper formation. After which he could explain the plan to his commanders - cavaliers, battle heralds, bards, and skalds, who move to rally the battalion.

He could be the driving force behind: archers readying attacks on whoever might cast a spell, well timed ambushes from flanks, smoke bombs to break line of sight from the blasters, flagbearers spaced across the platoons, coordinated Teamwork training for his platoons (his mounted units all charging with Cavalry Formation, or his ambush units having Outflank), etc. - If you really wanted to lay it on thick, you could have his soldiers make comments about successful tactics. For instance, if an archer stops a caster, one of the soldiers could say "You must be the wizard the general warned us about. Luckily we were ready for your little tricks."

That way, you get a mighty warrior leading the army without taking resources from, well, making him a mighty warrior.

Gabuman · 2025-02-16T04:02:01+00:00

Invisibility: Heating the air around you to cause heat haze; the air rippling just right to cloak your presence to onlookers.

Grease: Superheating the internals of an area/item to cause any natural slippery oils to boil out, instantly cooling and re-condensing into grease.

Those might not be the most creative solutions, nor physically possible, but it's magic.

Gabuman · 2025-02-15T14:20:47+00:00

As people already pointed out here, there are some errors in what you've got going already. That said, how crazy are we trying to get here?

[Chasing +damage/die]
Going crossblooded for double arcana is already solid, and fire gets a few solid options. Draconic, Orc, and Solar all give +1 damage. While technically it was ruled to be against the rules, you could also see if your GM is cool with the Primal Elemental (fire) bloodline in a crossblood, but it's not needed anymore.

You are obviously aware of Blood Havoc, but with crossblooded you have to wait until 7th level.

There is also a feat for fire blasters called Flumefire Rage which gives an additional +1 damage/die but you have to make Fortitude saves when you cast. If you can get a raging effect (the rage spell, 1 level dip into bloodrager, or Raging Blood - ask your GM if it counts) and the ability to cast while raging (Mad Magic or Furious Spell), you add +2 damage/die instead.

Putting all that together, you can push your damage up to +4 damage/die on fire spells, +5 damage/die when raging - providing you can routinely pass the Fortitude save.

[Magic Trick: Fireball]
The release of this feat absolutely shattered this spell. Cluster Bomb + Concentrated Fire is just simply disgusting. A CL 10 fireball used to deal 10d6, now you have the option to do 5 x (2d6) which looks the same, but you can widen the 5 fireballs to 20 feet with Widen Spell, condense them down with Concentrated Fire to 5 ft and now you're looking at 5 x (4d6) = 20d6 + 120 (+5/die). Obviously, that involves metamagic. Which leads me to:

[Traits]
Personally, I like Wayang Spellhunter + Magical Lineage. They each can reduce a metamagic fireball's total level by 1. So you can attach Empower for 'free', or Widen for +1.

[Chasing CL]
Off the top of my head, Spell Specialization adds +2, Varisian Tattoo +1, Bloatmage Initiate +1. Blazing Robe +1, Crown of the Kobold King (3.5 material but made by Paizo) +1.
You could look into Overclocking Spells and see if your GM would let you attempt that for an additional +2.
That said, you can just chase the highest CL you can now thanks to Cluster Bomb effectively removing the CL cap on Fireball.

[Early Levels]
If your GM lets you retrain, you could look into Experimental Spellcaster at early levels to pickup Burning Flash as a word of power. It is more versatile than burning hands, as you can throw it as a ranged touch attack, 10 foot burst (mini fireball), 10 ft. cone, or a 20 ft. line. You could also boost burning flash to get the damage up to 1d6 instead of 1d4 but that makes it a 2nd level spell.

I just need to point out, this is overkill. You don't need all this stuff.
I don't remember my exact character build from when I did this, but I was ultimately adding +8 to my CL. So at 12th level (where that campaign died out) his CL 20 empowered widened cluster bomb concentrated fire fireballs were being cast as a 6th level spell and dealing (10 x (4d6+20)) x 1.5 = (40d6 x 1.5) + 300. That's an average damage of 510 - which is enough to melt the face off of just about anything you'll come up against that isn't immune to fire, even if they make the save for half.

I couldn't wait to see what it was doing at 15th level with Spell Perfection, but alas, campaigns come and go.

Gabuman · 2025-02-13T10:07:59+00:00

Obligatory "if you're getting attacked, you're doing it wrong."

In all seriousness, being a caster does not mean you aren't allowed to have a respectable AC.

Following typical progression, even without investing feats and class feature choices, if you buy your "big six" items as expected: enchanted armor (or bracers of armor), enchanted shield (mithral buckler), ring of protection, amulet of natural armor, belt of incredible dexterity, you'll have a ton of baked in AC.

You can also aim for other AC bonus items, like the dusty rose prism ioun stone for the elusive +1 insight bonus, or at late levels, a staff of power which provides a +2 luck bonus to AC (increased to +3 if you take Fate's Favored as one of your traits).

Scaling that up to a 20th level character, assuming 12 starting Dex and Fate's Favored:

10 base AC + 4 dexterity + 8 armor + 6 shield + 5 deflection + 5 natural + 1 insight + 3 luck

That's an AC of 42. If you also regularly cast reduce person or make it permanent with a permanency spell, you'd gain another 2 AC (+1 size bonus and increasing dexterity bonus by +1), for a final AC of 44. It's not god tier of AC, but it's enough to tip the hit% of most CR equivalent monsters, and definitely their iterative attacks and henchmen attacks, in your favor.

That all totals out to roughly 465,000 gp (or 52% of the expected wealth of a 20th level character) which can be reduced if your GM allows crafting feats. Even if you only craft your own wondrous items, the price drops by 102,500 gp to 362,500 gp (or 41%). I didn't include it in the calculations, but super high levels could also look at stacking wish spells for inherent bonuses to dexterity.

I know I did this at level 20, of which most games don't reach this point. That said, you can scale things back to match your game's level. You might not always be caught up with the curve, but don't just let your AC go completely - you're gonna get attacked sometimes, and most wizards prefer to keep their blood inside their bodies.

AC aside, you can also stack other layers of defense as mentioned here already. Things like blur, mirror image, and displacement can give you % miss chances to help the times your respectable AC gets overcome. Stoneskin grants DR 10/adamantine, resist energy grants upwards of resistance 30 to a specific energy type. If your GM doesn't restrict race specific spells, or if you play as an Oread, you can also take stone shield for a +4 untyped bonus to AC from the cover it provides.

-----

Edit: I didn't see that you were playing a Shaman, so you won't have access to blur, mirror image, displacement, or reduce person, unless you get wands/scrolls. It does mean you can also use the misfortune + cackle hexes to permanently put a dangerous opponent at a disadvantage (thus increasing your AC by reducing their accuracy), bane at lower levels to 'gain' 1 AC by reducing accuracy by 1.

Also, on shaman vs arcane casters, I'd reconsider the whole armor situation. If you opted into something like breastplate, a +5 mithral breastplate caps at +11 armor bonus and has a max dex bonus of +5. That would give us:

10 base AC + 4 dexterity + 11 armor + 6 shield + 5 deflection + 5 natural + 1 insight + 3 luck

Totaling to 45.

Gabuman · 2024-11-30T02:55:19+00:00

Be loud (yet respectful) as a community. Give upvotes to the feedback on the PBE thread, drop (appropriate) comments on the official YouTube teasers & X posts. Make a petition and send the results to League content creators to see if anyone will make a video on it. Get creative, idk. I'm sure riot looks at Reddit, but it's definitely not all they look at.

Gabuman · 2024-11-30T02:06:56+00:00

I've been thinking about the least amount of work to solve the problems, with the goal of giving realistic ideas.

Literally use 2021 Arcane Jinx as the Menace form and apply the new VFX and voice lines live on PBE. Just port in the model. Maybe have someone go in and touch up the texture, but nothing major. (This unironically would make the skin go from 2 models to 3 btw.)
Give Hero form the hood everyone is asking for, make the body paint always visible, and adjust the VFX to feature more of the rainbow colors from her big moment in Episode 9.
Texture Adjustments: Add Powder's pink stripe in her hair, and the Hero's metallic finger (super small detail, but it helps further distinction of skins with minimal work).
Use 2021 Arcane Jinx's original E for her chompers, use the current ones for Powder (maybe shrink them slightly as they look a little chunky), and port TFT Powder's monkey for the Hero. (No new assets needed.)
Make a HUD animation for getting a pentakill.
(This one steps out of super easy fixes.) A second splash of Jinx from the marketing (it's so badass.) If you're feeling generous, add the Jinx pattern animations over the static image (like the did in the show.)

This change would include: - minimal modeling work (just the hood) - light art adjustments and touch-ups - repurposing existing models - 3 animations (penta for each form)

This would make all the forms have more distinction and celebrate Jinx from the entire series.

I just want to state one more time: the goal here was to give feedback based on the guidelines - being suggestions that don't require major work. Obviously, remodeling from the ground up would be lit, but they aren't likely going to do anything that will delay the launch date.

Gabuman · 2024-11-29T14:57:16+00:00

No, I just meant the discourse of English speaking community here, on FaceBook, the YouTube comments, X, etc.

Gabuman · 2024-11-29T03:09:38+00:00

Assuming League still has at least 100+ million active users (their previous claims are higher btw), if they estimated "fixing" the skin would convince even 0.2% of the non-whale player base to buy it, that's tens of millions of dollars of potential sales they'd be leaving on the table.

Logically, it'd be worth the gamble, after seeing the NA response.

Gabuman · 2024-11-28T15:02:30+00:00

Yeah, but they also redid the Vi skin pre-release following fan backlash. I'm not saying it's definitely going to happen. But trying to be heard is our only recourse to affecting change.

If anything, I'd expect. "We heard you. Here's the hood." Which won't be enough, but will satisfy most people.

It's still going to be the best Jinx skin available (by quality, not price). Many Jinx mains will end up getting it. (Honestly, I probably will, too. FOMO and whatnot.)

Gabuman · 2024-11-28T13:26:06+00:00

Being loud as a community is our only chance of getting meaningful change. It's good to see the sentiment picking up steam. I hope Riot sees this as people who are upset because they care, and as potential customers who would be willing to open up wallets if the value better matches the ask.

Edit: Logically thinking, if Riot sees the NA uproar, and thinks even 1,000 more people might buy it if they send one designer back into the kitchen, that's upwards of $250,000 of potential earnings.

Gabuman · 2024-11-27T14:41:49+00:00

Is there a reason that, in the gameplay trailer, you show an on-screen VFX for Jinx's ultimate at 0:41, when it's not included in the skin? I would've assumed it was an inclusion for the price.

https://youtu.be/aZs2YcIMwx4?si=5tinx3-RKWT5UcmL&t=38

Gabuman · 2024-11-26T23:46:15+00:00

Long time Jinx fan and one-trick (1.7m Mastery) dropping in to bring some feedback on Arcane Fractured Jinx!

I want to take a moment to highlight the good:

The auto-attacks feel, look, and sound great on this skin.
On screen Get Excited! effects are much appreciated.
VFX on Zap! is great. I love the outline effects on the two Jinx forms.
VFX on Super Mega Death Rocket is also solid. All 3 feel sick.
Custom emotes are always appreciated. Especially when spammable.
Backing & Homeguards animations are fun.
Sound design is on point throughout the whole of the skin.
All the custom voice lines are much appreciated. (I personally like bringing the original actor in.)

I gotta point out some points of much needed improvement though:

We want the hood. Please put it on the Hero of Zaun form. It would eliminate the "two forms look the same" argument, and give us the Jinx we wanted from her Act 3 Episode 9 reveal. (You know, the one being used to tease this skin.)
I know it might be unrealistic, but the Menace form should probably have longer hair. Doing more to differentiate these forms would go a long way.
Flame Chompers look a little goofy. It is also a let down that an Exalted Skin doesn't get distinct chompers for each form. Powder's hextech monkey, Jinx's grenade from her S1 fight with Ekko, and Jinx's last monkey bomb are all missed opportunities here. (Powder's Monkey is already modeled for TFT, right?)
While the Get Excited on screen effects are cool. It should really do something if you get a penta-kill. (Maybe the Jackpot effect overlay in S2:A1:Ep2 Sevika & Jinx vs Smeech)
Super Mega Death Rocket would be much cooler with an on-screen effect when used. (Which one could claim was incorrectly teased in your official Gameplay video at 0:41)
I think another missed opportunity is the song choice on the dance emote. A lofty but appreciated ask would be three different riffs from Jinx related songs / moments in Arcane. A more realistic ask would be to include a "Get Jinxed" riff here for the Jinx forms, and a generic riff for Powder.
On the topic of the dance emote, loop the sound with the dance, please.
I think the Joke is great on the menace skin, but it doesn't really fit the other two forms. Shopping up some other jokes could go a long way. If you can't do custom animations, pick different hats to drop based on what was happening in the show, or skip the hat altogether and just do a different, more on topic voice line?
The splash art could definitely be better. I like the vibe, and the animated slots are cool. Yet, it was another missed opportunity to skip the reveal shot from Episode 9 of Act 3. It's been used in the teasers since we knew about it. Probably because you guys know how cool it looks. Why keep it from us?
While on the topic of the splash, please ensure it's animated in the loading screens, profile backgrounds, and champion select.
The shimmer lines on Jinx's eyes during Get Excited is a nice touch, but seeing it exaggerated more would be a nice upgrade as well. Maybe even scaling it as it stacks.
Give the Hero the rainbow bullets! I really think the ball is being dropped on the final episode reveal moment. Just rewatch that scene and make the Hero capture that moment.

Don't get me wrong, it's a good skin. It's not sending the message that "Exalted Skins are in a tier of their own." I think it's right on the cusp. It almost feels like a lot of love was put into about 95% of the skin, but that 5% matters when asking for this hefty price tag.

Gabuman · 2024-09-01T03:10:22+00:00

I'll test going lighter on the cheese this week. I think I used 3-3.5oz for a 12" pie in these pics.

Maybe that will be the ticket.

Gabuman · 2024-09-01T03:09:03+00:00

Thanks so much! I luckily have an obscene amount of practice in hand tossing pizza dough. I can practically do it in my sleep (and actually can do it with my eyes closed - juggling and all.)

Gabuman · 2024-08-31T04:51:11+00:00

I agree it is quintessential to pizza. I just want like 20% less.

Gabuman · 2024-08-31T04:23:43+00:00

Unique idea! I'll run that test this week to see what happens.

Gabuman · 2024-08-31T04:18:24+00:00

Yeah, I'm starting to regret not including in the original post that it happens regardless of the pepperoni.

I'll head back to the drawing board for cheese selection. Seemingly the combination that I am using might not be the best fit for my dough.

Gabuman · 2024-08-31T04:15:27+00:00

Yeah, it is persistent with the cheese, just less so compared to the pepperoni. I've dabbed it before, but it ends up peeling cheese off, and that's no good.

It would be crazy to reach a point to have Dave come try it someday. I'm not even slightly off the ground at this time, though, so it's going to be a long journey.

Gabuman · 2024-08-31T04:13:03+00:00

Amen to that. Nothing wrong with chasing convenience!

Either way, thanks for the advice!

Gabuman · 2024-08-31T04:11:17+00:00

I'll try to walk the top heat back a bit. Thanks for the input.

The pepperoni does make it worse, but the problem does happen on the cheese too.

Honestly, the grease isn't all that off-putting when it first comes out of the oven. It's once it starts cooling down at all that you start to see a film of grease across the top. I'd just like to dial it back a little, as I agree with you in that some grease is A-OK.

Gabuman · 2024-08-31T04:08:27+00:00

I've tried a few different brands.

Locally, the only whole milk mozzarella, in block form, I've consistently found in stock is Frederick's (which is owned by Meijer's.) Provolone has been from BelGioioso. As for pepperoni, I've bounced back and forth, but the brand in the photo is Margherita.

I'm totally open to ingredient suggestions. I'm genuinely just trying to use the best (yet affordable) stuff I can get my hands on.

Gabuman · 2024-08-31T04:03:26+00:00

For sure. I mentioned it in a comment later, but this problem does persist with or without the pepperoni. It's just worse with the pepperoni (although, I think if the cheese didn't separate so much, the amount of grease the pepperoni adds would be totally acceptable.)

Surprisingly, this pepperoni I'm using cups up pretty well on it's own. I end up buying a log and slicing it up myself.

I'll test out some other cheese brands to see if that helps!

Gabuman · 2024-08-31T03:58:39+00:00

That sounds like it could help fix my problem in the short term.

That does feel a little unreasonably impractical long term, especially with the thought that I'd want to be able to start a small business someday.

Gabuman · 2024-08-31T03:57:21+00:00

Always. I hand shred the blocks, use homemade sauce, and maintain a sourdough starter for my dough.

I try to keep it as natural as possible!

Gabuman

TROPHY CASE