Quote Originally Posted by danielxcutter View Post
Hmm... if you make the check, isn't Greater Knight's Puissance(+5 untyped) + Speak unto the Masses slightly better than Inspire Courage(+4 morale)? Also, the party members with Power Attack can take an additional -5 penalty, for a total of +15 per hit. Depends on how heavily buffed the party is, of course, but still...
It's mostly just a matter of whether the utterance is really on par with other level-appropriate options and whether it's worth your time and your actions. Especially given that without custom items or the dreaded item familiar, you've probably already picked most or all of the low-hanging fruit for boosting your TS check by the time level 6 LEM utterances come online, so your bonus might start being a little bit less beefy compared to your target DCs (relative to where you might have been in, say, the ECL 12-15ish range). Though that will vary by game.

A +5/+5 to hit and damage isn't completely useless, but I don't think it's automatically so powerful that it's appropriate to make it as high level as it is. As stated in the guide itself, I'm not convinced that a relative increase of +3 hit and +5 damage is seventeen character levels more powerful than the level 1 version, you know?

The comparison with Inspire Courage is kind of interesting. If it's not obvious by now, it's very difficult to gauge "equivalent optimization levels" between a Truenamer (especially a high-level Truenamer) and most other classes simply because of all of the extra work you have to put in to making the 'namer functional in the first place. They don't have a baseline level of competence to compare to, because an out-of-the-box 'namer with mundane gear and nothing specific like Paragnostic Assembly bonuses simply can't use their powers reliably (or, after a certain level, really at all). In contrast, basically every other class in the game has a "zero optimization" basepoint where you can get a rough idea of what they can do with just their basic class features and minimal/no item support, feat support, etc. No one really plays in those zero-op games, but it's just kind of a baseline rather than an actual expected power level. But we all know that player > build > class when it comes to gauging effectiveness, so we're trying to minimize the "player" and "build" variables, right? Right.

Anyway, where I'm going with this is that a zero-op Bard will only be doing +4 morale hit/damage with IC, that's true. On the other hand, the zero-op Bard can simply do that with no chance of failure, while I absolutely do not trust a zero-op 'namer to pull off a Speak Unto the Masses utterance at the same ECL. Once you give the 'namer the resources necessary to reliably succeed, you have to ask how much effort you've put in and how much return on investment the Bard could get for the same amount of build currency (including, but not limited to, actual gold pieces).

IC +4 at level 20 is totally unoptimized. Bare-bones stuff. Requires no input. It's not using any of the kajillion options you have to make IC into an absolute beast of a buff (DFI, Words of Creation, Inspirational Boost, Song of the Heart, all the other crazy nickel-and-dime bonuses that can be cheaply added, etc.), a fuller discussion of which can be easily found in the various Bard threads out there. If you're investing gold and feat support and stuff, you're going to be doing an awful lot more with IC than just +4 hit/damage. So you have to ask if it's really fair to compare Greater Knight's Puissance to IC +4. I feel like it kind of isn't. IC +4 costs less than GKP, and equalizing the costs gives IC a lot of room to get way beyond +4.

My stance on GKP is a bit softer than it once was. The fact that you must have Speak Unto the Masses changes the calculus a bit, and a lot of the value of GKP is determined by what your table's actual dynamics look like, which is an enormous variable at the level range in question. Do attack rolls still really matter at this level range? They might or they might not, and that really depends on what kinds of baddies you're up against and what kinds of builds your fightin'-men (or equivalent folks who have decided to rely on making attack rolls) are rocking. I mean, by default, AC doesn't even really scale with level. WotC liked to slap natural armor on plenty of monsters, but there isn't really an inherent mechanic for armor to scale, and it's not universal. For the majority of PCs and characters/opponents whose strength comes from class levels rather than from piles of RHD, scaling AC is almost entirely a function of gold rather than anything else, you know?

Again looking at that unrealistic but still useful zero-op baseline, take two identical Fighters with mundane gear at level 1 and at level 20. AC at level 1 is going to be approximately what, 16-19ish depending on DEX and on shield usage, versus a to-hit bonus of something on the order of +4ish to maybe +6ish depending on STR and feat choice. Scale up to 20 before making any magic item choices, and their respective to-hit bonuses will each have increased by a bare minimum of 19 points from BAB alone, while their AC bonuses will have, um, maybe gone up a point or two from DEX increases, bumping up from splint mail to full plate, and that's about it. Gold can be spent to increase AC, but gold spent on AC is gold not spent on, well, other stuff, including attacking-related bonuses.

The point is that to-hit scales naturally while to-be-not-hit does no such thing, so there are some styles of play in which high-level warrior-types can safely just be assumed to hit with at least two of their attacks in a given round. Giving them another +5 to hit might be noticeable, but it's not a game-changer the way it would be in, say, 4e—in 4e, both to-hit and AC are pretty strictly governed by level, so a PC who isn't actively de-optimized fighting an at-level monster should still almost always have a to-hit score where getting a +5 to hit really drastically changes how likely they are to matter on a given turn.

And you know what, it's possible to have a 3.5 environment where that's true as well! It's totally possible. But it's far from guaranteed. It kind of has to be a choice made by both the players and the GM to build characters and challenges that end up with attack and defense totals that are within shouting distance of each other.

It's honestly really hard, maybe impossible, to say in a vacuum whether an ECL 18 party is going to, on average, need a +5 to hit more than they need, well, whatever else you'd spend your action on. Hitting is always better than missing, but when the numbers are so wild at high levels, whether your buff is really meaningful over the course of the battle is honestly hard to predict when I don't know what your party and your foes look like. Which is why the discussion in the guide proper ended up going the way it did. +5 might be really meaningful to you, but it might not, and I'm not super convinced that it's level-appropriate. If you really do have a party with lots of people who make attack rolls and many of those attack rolls are close enough to the target number that a +5 will noticeably increase your effectiveness, then yeah, GKP is actually probably one of your better choices at this level. If your fightin'-men (and women and other) are basically autohitting anyway, then it's not likely to be interesting enough to be worth your actions. The point about PA is well-taken, but we still have to ask if GKP is your best action. It might be. It might not be.

I admit that the high-level utterances were discussed almost as much from the perspective of "do you care enough about these effects to make the necessary investment in Truenamer in order to access them?" as from the perspective of "you're already here, so here's what choices you need to make this level." (I did aim at both, but the feeling is stronger with the high-level utterances than with the low-level ones.) Because to kind of reiterate what I said in the guide, relatively few of these utterances are so bad that you'd never take them for free. But they aren't free. They cost levels in Truenamer (and of course their own opportunity cost of not picking other powers, but whatever). It's necessary to discuss both which utterances are best to pick when you're already taking that 12th or 15th or 18th level of Truenamer and whether these utterances are enough to make you want to take that 18th level.

That is, I freely concede, hard to succinctly convey in a single guide of this format, and perhaps I'll see what I can do about making that more explicit the next time I have the free time to do a semi-major revision. But a lot of the reason why I tend to be kind of harsh on the high-level utterances isn't because they're bad on their own. It's because they're bad when compared to what a lot of other classes who aren't pure mundane non-initiating brutes/martials can bring to the table at the same ECL (again considering the level of legwork necessary to make a 'namer functional) and because the utterances strike me as being, well, not always on par with the challenges implied by the monsters that populate the relevant CR bracket.

I think I said way more on this topic than you asked for, so I'll break off for now. To conclude, it's not likely to be terrible for you to take GKP, and there are situations where it's a perfectly respectable utterance. I just still don't think that it's guaranteed to be relevant, and I don't think that it's necessarily as strong as its level implies.