Suggestion - Dragon Disciple

[Deragnost]

Hello!

So I was giving a look to the Dragon Disciple Prestige Class, and I noticed that the breath weapon of the Prestige Class is... reeeally not adequate. I have made some calculations, and it seems that it would do 72 average damage if the opponent doesn't pass the saving throw. 36 average damage if they do. I was thinking that, perhaps, improving the damage output of their breath weapon would be beneficial.

Specifically, I was thinking something like 5d12 at 3rd level, 10d12 at 7th level, 15d12 at 10th level.

It can be worked and adjusted a bit, but I think a 9d12 maximum at 10th level, for a prestige class that has a focus on breath weapon and making you become a half-dragon, aside the obviously good RP flavor, it would also be nice to be able to do some damage, aside the spells coming from sorcerer or bard. (which, by the way, bard is even more penalized because it has no songs progression and the spells aren't as powerful as the sorcerers - but I'm not going into that. I'm speaking mostly about the breath weapon, even if it would be nice to see a 5/10 bard songs progression!)

[DaloLorn]

On the one hand, most DDs will have considerably more daily uses of Breath Weapon (because of using their CHA modifier instead of a fixed charge count like Dragon Warrior), and they've got AC boosts, spell progression, and a bunch of pseudo-racial ability score increases. If there's a breath weapon PRC, I'd say it's probably Dragon Warrior.

On the other hand, assuming equal CON (which feels somewhat unlikely given that one is a caster while the other is a martial), the DD's breath DC is 5 points lower than the DW's, and the DW breath weapon scales up to 20d12+30d3 damage, or nearly twice the DD's probable daily breath output (assuming all save outcomes are identical, and no breaths are negated by Evasion). With this in mind, I might not be opposed to giving the DD's breath weapon caster level scaling, like Pathfinder: d6 per caster level, optionally capping at 30d6.

[Deragnost]

I'd be fine with that.

[Izsu]

I feel I should preface everything I'm about to say with this; one of my characters is a bard dragon disciple. Thus it's possibly going to sound a bit self-serving no matter how I swing things. However, in my three plus years on the server I have not ever seen a single other player using this combination of classes and I've become painfully aware of why. You turn into a worse bard than if you'd just stuck to the core class, with effects gained that you could've just buffed yourself with via UMD or spells anyway.

I pretty much forget that I have the breathattack due to how utterly useless it is in actual gameplay on the server. Straight up autoattacking yields better results. The breathattack being altered would be a nice change and all but in my opinion it's hardly where the main issue with the class (for bard) lies. I'd like point towards another angle that Deragnost mentioned, namely the bard side of things - which is greatly lacking compared to how it is for Sorcerers.

10 levels of no song progression at all is a huge blow to any bard's build. Especially so since you get no useful feats save for Blind Fight, and then a few sprinkled tertiary attributes here and there alongside a total of 3 nat AC which you could just eat a Tortoise Shell for. It gets Low BAB on top of it all, when Feytouched for example has Medium BAB, also feels a bit off. Counterproductive even, considering it gets claw and bite damage for unarmed. What's the point of getting a natural weapon if you can't hit stuff with it?

It all gives the feeling that Bard wasn't really considered at all when the balancing of the PRC happened, that when picking half-dragon for a bard PC for RP reasons one has consigned oneself to having a build with 10 levels that are effectively useless to the main archetype of the character. A Sorcerer can pick Bloodmage or Supersecretsharran to make up for the loss of spellcasting progression - but a Bard can't do a thing to make up for loss of song progression. Their spellcasting was already lesser when compared to Wizard and Sorcerer, getting that snipped a bit doesn't hurt remotely as much as the complete denial of progression for their core mechanic.

And this is without getting into the loss of skills from diverging from Bard as well. Though granted, Feytouched has the same amount of skillpoints gained. Dissonant Chord and Stormsinger, however, are at 6+int and 4+int respectively.

PRCs are meant to act as specializations, while this one in particular doesn't seem to further anything a bard could ever want. Instead what's given is something that has far too much sacrifice of important abilities for far too little. It could use some tipping of the scales.

I would wholeheartedly throw my vote in with the suggestion to grant the class 5/10 song progression. My wish for Medium BAB for the class might be a tougher thing to chew on for some, but I truly feel like it's needed when so much good stuff from PRCs like Dissonant Chord/Stormsinger is passed by. In an ideal world I'd want a half-dragon PRC that's more combat oriented than magic focused, to go alongside the existing Dragon Disciple. Had that been around I probably wouldn't have picked Bard at all. But we are where we are.