The Warlock - a massive rewrite [3.5 Base Class WIP]

[Anachronity]

In the face of 3.5/Pathfinder's horribly mismatched saving throw math, I would say there's absolutely no problem with things having no save or punishing people worse for ~making~ their save. After all, +5 weapons exist to counter +5 armors, so why is there no +5 wand of casting to counter the +5 cloaks of resistance?

Armor Class and Attack bonus directly counter each other. A fighter can't generally choose to target Will saves unless it's an intimitank. The other 'direct combat' option is combat maneuvers, which are hard to resist but equally hard to boost resistance to. It can be difficult to present a threat to both types of defense at once.

There are three saving throws, of which the average character will only have 1 or 2 good saves. Meanwhile the average caster can force any one of the three (and often combat maneuvers or touch attacks to boot). This leaves the caster the option of selecting the weakest defense, unlike the martial character who can only target armor class or CMD/opposed rolls or sometimes both. Attribute bonuses alone don't do much, since only 3 of the 6 attributes you might boost will give you a save bonus, and even then they give a bonus to only 1 save. Meanwhile casters will always boost their casting stat, which will always boost the DC of any type of save they target (or combat maneuver they make using spells).

The mechanics are different in each case, and cloaks of resistance exist to take away some of the advantage that casters have in being able to select which save to target. The fact also remains that there are many items which boost save DCs, they just don't do so according to an enhancement bonus.

Saying that "yes, casters should also be able to target inverse saves" breaks that system completely. If that mechanic becomes widespread then the result makes no sense: the best wizards are the dumbest ones, the most powerful warlocks are the ones that are nearly comatose, etc. The system exists in the first place to reward investments into offensive options and reasonable character decisions. What Perilous Veil does is allow the keen-minded monk to be defeated more easily by a warlock with a low primary attribute than by one with a high primary attribute, all other factors the same. That being the case, what's the point of a primary attribute?