Is vaarsuvius epic?

[Colmarr]

its called sarcasm

Saving throw vs. Pedantry failed:

Actually, it's called hyperbole.

[BlueWizard]

Vaarsuvius is uber-epic now!

[Estrosiath]

V at the moment is (as far as magic goes... who knows if he also got the hit points, feats and the rest) a 15th level evoker/21+ level conjurer/21+ level necromancer/21+ sorcerer/archmage.

His CL still is rather low. He's not going to cast at level 78.

[Felyndiira]

We don't know how the soul-splicing works, though. For all intents and purposes, an evoker, necromancer, and conjurer are all wizards, so he might effectively be:

57+ Wizard / 21+ Sorcerer / Archmage

The archmage could potentially be applied to wizard to increase his wizard level further. Furthermore, his ECL would be 77+, and assuming that the soul splice counts as multi-classing, his Class Level should be 77+ as well. Casting level might be lower, but those usually matter very little beyond, well, 20.

I wonder what the soul splicing does to his spellcrafting ranks, though =o.

[Estrosiath]

We don't indeed know how it precisely works. However, such a large casting level is totally moot unless you also have access to the epic feats for someone of that level (which V would not, since even if you aggregated all three casters, it is highly likely they have duplicate feats - and assuming they are not "too epic", V would be left with some low level epic feats and no access to the real stuff - like Improved Metamagic, Intensify Spell, Automatic ... Spell, Enhance Spell) and unless you have access to the cumulated Spellcraft ranks of the four casters as far as epic spells go.

Most of the spells to be found in manuals scale up to level 20, and you need Enhance Spell to make them somehow scale. And you need to be at least level 27 to pick the Enhance Spell feat... So there.

[Ganurath]

Quickened Disintegrate is impossible below Epic without some serious cheese.

Sudden Quicken isn't serious cheese, it's just non-core. But yeah, these three probably died before the 3.5 update, so it'd have to be Epic.

[Felyndiira]

There's also little reason to assume that none of the three souls are level 30+. They are, after all, considered to be some of the best in the world, so it wouldn't be illogical to think that they would have, you know, feats like improved meta and enhance spell (I don't see a level 27 prerequisite for either of them, BTW)

Also, V can now cast epic spells. Assuming that the classes stack as multi-classing does, s/he will have a spellcraft level that is well above 83, allowing hir to pull off a few multi-hit dice epic spells without too much trouble and jack up their save DCs at the same time.

[Estrosiath]

You need 30 ranks in Spellcraft to qualify for Enhance Spell. That means it's a solid level 27 requirement disguised as a skill requirement - since ranks do not equate bonuses to the Skill (ie - even though you might have a +72 to your Spellcraft skill because you have a magic item which bestows a bonus of 30 to your spellcraft skill, you have skill focus spellcraft and a +10 intelligence bonus at level 26, you still would not qualify for the feat until you hit level 27 and actually had 30 ranks of it).

[Porthos]

His CL still is rather low. He's not going to cast at level 78.

The fact that he thought (correctly as it turns out) that a Disjunction would take out the Ancient Black Dragon's Antimagic Field might suggest that V does have a rather high CL.

http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/magesDisjunction.htm

You also have a 1% chance per caster level of destroying an antimagic field.

While we can't say for certain I would think that V would only use that spell as an opening gambit if he was pretty darn sure it would work. Especially since he's got Epic Spells which have a very good chance of breaking through, anyway. So let's say, 50% chance min, and probably much closer to 75-95% chance.

If not higher.

[tyckspoon]

Sudden Quicken isn't serious cheese, it's just non-core. But yeah, these three probably died before the 3.5 update, so it'd have to be Epic.

Sudden Quicken does have ridiculous requirements, however (6 feats- Quicken plus all the other Sudden Metamagics), which means you're not likely to bother getting it at all unless you have at least a slightly cheesy way to bypass the requirements. I think the easiest one is Warmage- if you already have one of the Sudden Metamagic feats it gets as a bonus feat, you can pick any other Sudden Metamagic feat instead. It forgets to specify that you have to qualify for it, so you can pick up Sudden Empower before level 7 and grab Sudden Quicken as the level 7 bonus feat. Of course, you have to spend seven levels being a Warmage doing that, so it's not really big cheese in the overall picture.

[magic9mushroom]

Sudden Quicken does have ridiculous requirements, however (6 feats- Quicken plus all the other Sudden Metamagics), which means you're not likely to bother getting it at all unless you have at least a slightly cheesy way to bypass the requirements. I think the easiest one is Warmage- if you already have one of the Sudden Metamagic feats it gets as a bonus feat, you can pick any other Sudden Metamagic feat instead. It forgets to specify that you have to qualify for it, so you can pick up Sudden Empower before level 7 and grab Sudden Quicken as the level 7 bonus feat. Of course, you have to spend seven levels being a Warmage doing that, so it's not really big cheese in the overall picture.

Doesn't work.

You can't do it if you don't meet the prerequisites, even if you have the feat. The PHB says so when defining feats.

V at the moment is (as far as magic goes... who knows if he also got the hit points, feats and the rest) a 15th level evoker/21+ level conjurer/21+ level necromancer/21+ sorcerer/archmage.

His CL still is rather low. He's not going to cast at level 78.

The fiends' rhetoric seems to rule this out.

[Felyndiira]

You need 30 ranks in Spellcraft to qualify for Enhance Spell. That means it's a solid level 27 requirement disguised as a skill requirement - since ranks do not equate bonuses to the Skill (ie - even though you might have a +72 to your Spellcraft skill because you have a magic item which bestows a bonus of 30 to your spellcraft skill, you have skill focus spellcraft and a +10 intelligence bonus at level 26, you still would not qualify for the feat until you hit level 27 and actually had 30 ranks of it).

That goes back to us not knowing how the soul-splicing works. If the classes stack on top of each other as if V gained that many multi-classed levels, then the minimum rank for his spellcraft would be 80 (I'd assume that all of the classes would at least want to max spellcraft) - realistically more than enough for any epic feat that involves magic. It's what I assumed when I argued the epic spell spellcraft to overcome DC - there's no way that soul splicing would suddenly give V access to epic items to boost hir spellcraft by that much.

On the other hand, if they are separate...well, there's still the very viable assumption that the three, individually, have ranks in enhance spell, as not taking it would be rather foolish. Since it's not unreasonable that they are individually 30+, it also stands to reason that they should have enough spellcraft - stacked or not - to get any epic feat that V might end up needing.

[tcrudisi]

V at the moment is (as far as magic goes... who knows if he also got the hit points, feats and the rest) a 15th level evoker/21+ level conjurer/21+ level necromancer/21+ sorcerer/archmage.

His CL still is rather low. He's not going to cast at level 78.

Please think about what you have posted. You've effectively capped V's power-level when he was given the most powerful LE, CE, and NE arcane casters that ever lived as soul-spliced onto hir. What level were they? Well, we have no idea. Things might have been different eons ago: perhaps it was a culture of nothing but wizards, all of them vieing for power. In their eternal struggle, they all managed to work their way up to level 5,000,000 which would put V's level somewhere between five million and fifteen million, depending on how his levels are handled.

Is that ridiculous? Of course. But the point is that we don't know the limits to V's power. Without those limits, there is no way to put a hard-cap on the maximum level that V could have. And honestly, unless someone actually says something, we are highly unlikely to ever know. After all, just because we do not see what V can and can not do does not mean that (s)he can't do it.

Heck, we don't even know exactly how the soul splice works. It was a soul splice, right? Not a body splice? So there's a chance that V can cast 77 billionth level spells, but does not have the time to cast them. V could have more than a few instant spells prepared, but those generally do some sort of backlash, and without having the 77 billion class levels worth of hit points, V would not want to cast a level 21 epic spell with backlash.

Yeah, I went to an extreme. But I had to do so in order to make a point. Anything is possible right now because we do not know the limits to V's power.

[hamishspence]

given that in both Faerun and Greyhwk, truly legendary casters rarely exceed 30th level significantly, I'd be a little surpised if any of these three do.

Larloch the Ultra-lich of Netheril? 27th level. Iggwilv the Witch Queen of Perrenland? 30th level (according to Dungeon) Etc.

Doesn't mean its impossible, it it does suggest that a level much in excess of 40 would be a bit OTT