Dark Apostate currently falls a bit short of really feeling as great as it could.
Personally I like the themes and what it's trying to do as a debuffer/neg/evil caster and imbue support for warpriest but it currently misses the mark.
General suggestions that impact the state of DA
Inflict Spells: The single target inflict spells need to be moved off touch range and not require facing - they are borderline unusable offensively due to how much enemies tend to move and even worse to use to heal allied undead.
Alignment Spells: Cleric and Favored Soul spellbooks just completely forget about alignment spells after fourth level and what few Light spells that exist 5th to 9th level are all undertuned releative to spells at the same level in other elements - the divine spellbook could really do with more options to use spells that are actually divine in nature and not just fire spells.
Dark Apostate's enhancements and how I would propose improving them
Cores:
Dark Apostate: Each Core Ability you take in this tree, including this one, grants you +5 Negative Healing Amplification and +5 Negative, Light, and Alignment Spell Power and increase the damage of your Pray for Mercy effect by 1 per caster level.
Overall this is just one part of the changes I'd make to Pray for Mercy.
Enhanced Shadowform II: Your Shadow Shrouding gains an additional +5% Incorporeality and Concealment (for a total of 15% each). Your Bestow Curse, Doom, and Bane spells no longer have a saving throw and bypass spell resistance.
The spells Bless, Bane and Prayer are all subject to spell resistance, spell resistance also blocks the triggered damage of Pray For Mercy as a result, as Pray for Mercy is pretty much meant to be your answer to enemies being immune to negative spells it leaves you with very little option when facing enemies such as Golems.
Master of Shadows: Your Shadow Shrouding gains an additional +5% Incorporeality and Concealment (for a total of 25% each). Passive: +4 Wisdom, +1 bonus Imbue Dice. Rend the Soul is added to your spellbook as a 9th level spell.
Right now Dark Apostates and Clerics in general lack a 9th level damage spell option for Negative energy, Rend the Soul is a thematic fit for a debuffer.
The Apostate's Curse line: 2AP per imbue dice is pretty established as overcosted at this point, the enhancements could really stand to be reduced to 1 AP each, alternatively the enhancements could gain an additional caster beneficial effect to warrant their cost and make picking up the imbue dice more rewarding for the caster side of DA.
If giving the enhancements caster elements I would suggest
Enhanced Curse II: Your Deity's Favored Weapon is now an Implement in your hands. +1 bonus Imbue Dice and Darkfire (as the racial Drow SLA) is added to your spellbook as a first level spell.
Enhanced Curse III: Your Apostate's Curse gains: On crit, you apply the effects of the Curse spell. +1 bonus Imbue Dice your Darkfire fires an additional bolt and also applies the Bestow Curse effect.
Ultimate Heresy(Caster): Your Apostate's Curse gains: On crit, you apply 1d3 stacks of Vulnerability. +2 bonus Imbue Dice your Darkfire fires an additional bolt and gains 1 damage per caster level per 3 imbue dice.
This would both make these enhancements more rewarding and revitalize an existing spell which is pretty unused.
Pray for Mercy: Your Prayer-like spells (Bless, Bane, Prayer) now resonate with Evil energies, dealing 1d6+(1 per core) Evil damage per Caster Level to all enemies.This damage is doubled against enemies that are Cursed.
This ability is at interesting but underperforming, the damage is absolutely undertuned at 1d4 per caster level and even when doubled against cursed enemies it's underwhelming, I genuinely suggest scrapping the doubled damage vs cursed enemies aspect of the effect in favor of giving Pray For Mercy decent damage.
Enhanced Turning: +[2/4/6] uses of Turn Undead per rest, You count as [0/1/2] levels higher when turning undead. This increases the maximum level of creature you can turn and also increases the total number of hit dice you can turn.
In addition, you add an additional [0/2/4] to the number of hit dice you can turn.
This is mostly to smooth the turning gap between regular cleric and dark apostate, enhanced turning is a lot weaker than improved turning as enhancements go.
Dark Judgement: When you use Turn Undead, you and your allies gain +[3/6/10] Temporary HP per bonus Imbue Dice doubled for undead.
Leaning into the undead supportive elements DA could stand to have.
The Tier 5s
Benediction: (merged with Necromantic devotion) Your Harm spells now benefits from 200% Spell Power scaling and may now kill enemies. +1 DC with Necromancy and Evocation spells.
As cool as benediction is it is actually just propping up a spell that's underwhelming compared to mass inflicts even with the 200% spell power scaling.
Ward of Shadow: Grants temporary immunity to multiple targets to all forms of alignment-based energy (good, evil, law, chaos, and light) for 1 minute per caster level or until 12 points of energy per caster level (max 120) for each energy type has been absorbed. Rename the spell Protection from Alignments, add it to the regular spellbook and remove this enhancement, it is incredibly underwhelming for a t5 enhancement and doesn't really scale at all into epics without Primal Avatar which does not suit a DA t5 build.
Shadows of Death: You gain +5% Negative, Light, and Alignment Spell Critical Chance. Pray for Mercy is upgraded to deal an additional +1 Evil damage per caster level
A more appropriate effect for the proposed changes to Pray for Mercy
Deathshadow Curse (replaces Ward of Shadow): Your curse effects apply 20% vulnerability to Evil and Negative Energy damage.
The recent monk revamp removed a negative energy vulnerability effect from the game because it wasn't exactly useful for monks themselves, Dark Apostate would be a suitable class for such an effect to be reintroduced on.
Apostate's Desecration (replaces Necromantic Devotion): Channel Divinity: You defile the area beneath your feet, creating an area of shadows and death. Every 3 seconds enemies in the area take d3 negative and d3 evil damage per character level and allied undead are healed for 1 negative energy per character level. (Honestly I just think this would be cool.) And when you expend a turn attempt for any purpose all nearby cursed enemies are afflicted with Death Mark Curse for 20 seconds, removing immunities to negative energy and dispelling death wards.
Ultimate Heresy: Split into a multiselector between Ultimate Heresy(Caster) (posted earlier) and Ultimate Heresy(Martial): Your Apostate's Curse gains: On crit, you apply 1d3 stacks of Vulnerability. +2 bonus Imbue Dice, +20% competence HP and 20 melee power.
Personally I like the themes and what it's trying to do as a debuffer/neg/evil caster and imbue support for warpriest but it currently misses the mark.
General suggestions that impact the state of DA
Inflict Spells: The single target inflict spells need to be moved off touch range and not require facing - they are borderline unusable offensively due to how much enemies tend to move and even worse to use to heal allied undead.
Alignment Spells: Cleric and Favored Soul spellbooks just completely forget about alignment spells after fourth level and what few Light spells that exist 5th to 9th level are all undertuned releative to spells at the same level in other elements - the divine spellbook could really do with more options to use spells that are actually divine in nature and not just fire spells.
Dark Apostate's enhancements and how I would propose improving them
Cores:
Dark Apostate: Each Core Ability you take in this tree, including this one, grants you +5 Negative Healing Amplification and +5 Negative, Light, and Alignment Spell Power and increase the damage of your Pray for Mercy effect by 1 per caster level.
Overall this is just one part of the changes I'd make to Pray for Mercy.
Enhanced Shadowform II: Your Shadow Shrouding gains an additional +5% Incorporeality and Concealment (for a total of 15% each). Your Bestow Curse, Doom, and Bane spells no longer have a saving throw and bypass spell resistance.
The spells Bless, Bane and Prayer are all subject to spell resistance, spell resistance also blocks the triggered damage of Pray For Mercy as a result, as Pray for Mercy is pretty much meant to be your answer to enemies being immune to negative spells it leaves you with very little option when facing enemies such as Golems.
Master of Shadows: Your Shadow Shrouding gains an additional +5% Incorporeality and Concealment (for a total of 25% each). Passive: +4 Wisdom, +1 bonus Imbue Dice. Rend the Soul is added to your spellbook as a 9th level spell.
Right now Dark Apostates and Clerics in general lack a 9th level damage spell option for Negative energy, Rend the Soul is a thematic fit for a debuffer.
The Apostate's Curse line: 2AP per imbue dice is pretty established as overcosted at this point, the enhancements could really stand to be reduced to 1 AP each, alternatively the enhancements could gain an additional caster beneficial effect to warrant their cost and make picking up the imbue dice more rewarding for the caster side of DA.
If giving the enhancements caster elements I would suggest
Enhanced Curse II: Your Deity's Favored Weapon is now an Implement in your hands. +1 bonus Imbue Dice and Darkfire (as the racial Drow SLA) is added to your spellbook as a first level spell.
Enhanced Curse III: Your Apostate's Curse gains: On crit, you apply the effects of the Curse spell. +1 bonus Imbue Dice your Darkfire fires an additional bolt and also applies the Bestow Curse effect.
Ultimate Heresy(Caster): Your Apostate's Curse gains: On crit, you apply 1d3 stacks of Vulnerability. +2 bonus Imbue Dice your Darkfire fires an additional bolt and gains 1 damage per caster level per 3 imbue dice.
This would both make these enhancements more rewarding and revitalize an existing spell which is pretty unused.
Pray for Mercy: Your Prayer-like spells (Bless, Bane, Prayer) now resonate with Evil energies, dealing 1d6+(1 per core) Evil damage per Caster Level to all enemies.
This ability is at interesting but underperforming, the damage is absolutely undertuned at 1d4 per caster level and even when doubled against cursed enemies it's underwhelming, I genuinely suggest scrapping the doubled damage vs cursed enemies aspect of the effect in favor of giving Pray For Mercy decent damage.
Enhanced Turning: +[2/4/6] uses of Turn Undead per rest, You count as [0/1/2] levels higher when turning undead. This increases the maximum level of creature you can turn and also increases the total number of hit dice you can turn.
In addition, you add an additional [0/2/4] to the number of hit dice you can turn.
This is mostly to smooth the turning gap between regular cleric and dark apostate, enhanced turning is a lot weaker than improved turning as enhancements go.
Dark Judgement: When you use Turn Undead, you and your allies gain +[3/6/10] Temporary HP per bonus Imbue Dice doubled for undead.
Leaning into the undead supportive elements DA could stand to have.
The Tier 5s
Benediction: (merged with Necromantic devotion) Your Harm spells now benefits from 200% Spell Power scaling and may now kill enemies. +1 DC with Necromancy and Evocation spells.
As cool as benediction is it is actually just propping up a spell that's underwhelming compared to mass inflicts even with the 200% spell power scaling.
Shadows of Death: You gain +5% Negative, Light, and Alignment Spell Critical Chance. Pray for Mercy is upgraded to deal an additional +1 Evil damage per caster level
A more appropriate effect for the proposed changes to Pray for Mercy
Deathshadow Curse (replaces Ward of Shadow): Your curse effects apply 20% vulnerability to Evil and Negative Energy damage.
The recent monk revamp removed a negative energy vulnerability effect from the game because it wasn't exactly useful for monks themselves, Dark Apostate would be a suitable class for such an effect to be reintroduced on.
Apostate's Desecration (replaces Necromantic Devotion): Channel Divinity: You defile the area beneath your feet, creating an area of shadows and death. Every 3 seconds enemies in the area take d3 negative and d3 evil damage per character level and allied undead are healed for 1 negative energy per character level. (Honestly I just think this would be cool.) And when you expend a turn attempt for any purpose all nearby cursed enemies are afflicted with Death Mark Curse for 20 seconds, removing immunities to negative energy and dispelling death wards.
Ultimate Heresy: Split into a multiselector between Ultimate Heresy(Caster) (posted earlier) and Ultimate Heresy(Martial): Your Apostate's Curse gains: On crit, you apply 1d3 stacks of Vulnerability. +2 bonus Imbue Dice, +20% competence HP and 20 melee power.
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