Core & Complete Hulking Hurler (40 million damage/round) - Downloaded from the Wizards Community, all coding removed by Solauren

Core & Complete Hulking Hurler (40 million damage/round)

Post/Author/DateTime Post
#1
17flyingaxes
Sep 28, 2010 15:04:31 So, I've been trying to create the most powerful character I can using only Core + Complete books (as part of a challenge among friends), and decided to try creating a Hulking Hurler build using only Core and Complete:

Race: Orc
Template: Half-Dragon
Levels: Barbarian 1/Wu-Jen 7 (CAr)/Blood Magus 1 (CAr)/Hulking Hurler 2 (CW)/Paragnostic Apostle 5 (CC)/Cleric 1 (ECL 20)
Cleric Domains: Animal, one other
Base Ability Scores: 34, 8, 10, 15, 6, 8 (before racial modifiers: 18, 8, 8, 15, 8, 8 --> a 24-point buy)
Abilities + Modifiers: 105, 5, 28, 17, 6, 8

Feats*: Practiced Spellcaster (Wu-Jen) (CAr), Ape's Fury (CC), Point Blank Shot, Power Attack, Weapon Focus (Javelin), Empower Spell (Wu-Jen bonus feat), Sudden Empower (CAr), Metamagic Vigor (CM)

*I know Hulking Hurler has been Errata'd, but it still req.s the same number of feats.

Necessary Skills: Knowledge (Religion) 5, Knowledge (Arcana) 5, Knowledge (Nature) 10, Concentration 4

Important class-derived abilities: Really Throw Anything (Hulking Hurler), Overburdened Heave (Hulking Hurler), Mind over Body x2 (Paragnostic Apostle), Mortal Coil x3 (Paragnostic Apostle), Spell Secret (Wu-Jen) (Extend Spell: Giant Size)

Important Spells: Giant Size (Wu-Jen 7)

Important Items: Belt of Giant Strength +6 (36,000 gp), Hammer of Thunderbolts (Artifact), Gauntlets of Ogre Strength (4,000 gp), Manual of Gainful Exercise +5 (137,500 gp), Headband of Intellect +2 (4,000 gp), Vanguard of Kord (350 gp), Horizon Goggles (8,000 gp)
The artifact is a bit of a stretch, but as far as artifacts go it's not that rare and we're waaaay under the starting gold for a lvl 20 character

Also Has: Permanency + Enlarge Person (This allows qualification for hulking hurler, although its bonuses get overwritten by those of Giant Size)

Max. Medium Load: 559,240,533 lbs

How does it Work?
The Hulking Hurler ability Overburdened Heave allows the Hulking Hurler to throw a medium load, dealing 1d6 damage for every 200 lbs listed; thus, a hurler's power depends on his carrying capacity. The best hulking hurler build I've found online (based on the War Hulk class) can throw up to 117,504 lbs... but I figured it shouldn't be too hard to beat a million pounds, even restricting myself to core+complete.

The important part of this build is the Wu-Jen spell Giant Size, which gives a whopping +32 to STR and Colossal Size (x16 carrying capacity). Together with Sudden Empower (which boosts it to +48 STR), that's over 4,000 times as much weight liftable as before the spell! With metamagic secret, giant size lasts a whopping 38 minutes/day. Since we start with 15 int, we need a headband of int +2 to cast this spell.

Obviously, any levels put into Wu-Jen to get this spell cannot be used to boost STR through other means, so we would like to put as few levels there as possible. 13 levels are sufficient to cast the 7th-level spell Giant Size, but we need a caster level of 19 to reach colossal size. Practiced spellcaster gives +4 CL on wu-jen spells, up to our maximum HD (we have 17 HD), and then shunt five levels of wu-jen into the prC Paragnostic Apostle, which lest us take 5 "Knowledge is Power" abilities. We choose Mind over Body (+1 CL on transmutation spells granting bonuses or penalties to stats) twice, and Mortal Coil (+1 CL on spells that change a subject's form or size) three times. This boosts CL to 18 with only wu-jen 8/apostle 5. To get the last +1 CL necessary, we can use the Metamagic Vigor feat. First, we cast a weak spell, empowered by Empower Spell; while the second spell cast (Giant Size) is modified by Sudden Empower, Sudden Empower "applies the effects of Empower Spell to..." which allows Metamagic Vigor to treat it as the same feat, giving +1 CL.

This gives us 7 levels to play with; or 5, after the two levels we must cede to hulking hurler. The highest strength race (without a massive LA) in core is Orc with +4, and the best strength-boosting template is half-dragon (+8 STR, +3 LA).

Assuming we start out with 18 STR, we get +12 from our race and template. Then we add +4 points on leveling up, for a base strength of 34.

Hammer of Thunderbolts lets us add the bonuses from our gauntlets and belt, for +8 STR; our manual gives a +5 insight bonus to strength. From our items, we're up to 47. Now +48 for Sudden Empowered giant size, and +4 for raging gets us up to 99 STR. Ape's Fury gives us another +6 Sacred/Profane bonus, and we're up to 105.

Now... a medium character with 15 STR has a maximum heavy load of 200 lbs. At colossal size, it's x16 to 3,200 lbs. For +90 STR, we multiply by 4^9 (x262,144) to get 838,860,800 lbs—just under a billion pounds. (for reference, that's approximately 2,000 blue whales, and slightly more than the weight of the empire state building).

This makes a maximum medium load 559,240,533 lbs, which, when thrown, deals 2,796,202d6+47 damage (an average of 9,786,756 points per thrown object). Of course, hitting your opponents isn't easy, unless you find a way to gain the effects of Brutal Throw, which applies STR bonus to thrown attacks. (If you want to do this without sacrificing STR, you could turn the half-dragon level adjustment into two levels of kensai and one level of fighter, although the kensai's str bonus only lasts one round).

But wait... what if you just, like, picked up the huge object on someone's head? You'd literally be dropping a village... anything within a radius of several hundred feet would take 4,194,304d6 points of unavoidable crushing damage. Hmm. Of course, since we can throw FOUR medium loads per round, that's the higher damage output option.

Also, you could just jump off a small hill onto your enemies. An orc scaled to colossal size weighs about 866,000 lbs; if you fall 20 feet onto someone, you take 2d6 damage and they take 4,300d6 (again, this is uncrushable damage, here spread out over a 30' wide square).

As for 400,000 ton objects... using the Wu-jen lvl 6 spell move earth, it should be possible to channel out a flat plane of dirt near the top of a mountain so that the peak is loosened enough to be picked up and thrown. The maximum carrying capacity corresponds to about 7,000,000 cu ft, or a 200 x 200 x 200 ft cube of earth.

I'm probably missing something... anyone know of a way to increase the damage output further, or an easier place to find 400,000 ton objects?
#2
hsien
Sep 28, 2010 17:18:51
Check rules for Stacking.
Normally, benefits from the same source, providing same benefit, do not stack.
That could affect the Paragnostic Apostle abilities...unless those individual abilities indicate they can be taken multiple times and stack. I'm afb's.

There's used to be a build for Hulking Hurler on CharOp, basically destroying the moon/planet or some such crazy damage. May be worth searching for.
#3
17flyingaxes
Sep 28, 2010 23:46:47
Check rules for Stacking.
Normally, benefits from the same source, providing same benefit, do not stack.
That could affect the Paragnostic Apostle abilities...unless those individual abilities indicate they can be taken multiple times and stack. I'm afb's.

Oh, don't worry, I did the research. Paragnostic Apostle abilities specifically state that they can be taken multiple times and stack. As for the STR bonus:

The hammer, gloves, and belt work together to give a +8 Enhancement bonus
Manual of gainful exercise is +5 Inherent
Barbarian's Rage is +4 Morale
Ape's Fury is +6 Sacred/Profane
Giant Size is +48 Size

So yes, none of the bonuses overlap.

There's used to be a build for Hulking Hurler on CharOp, basically destroying the moon/planet or some such crazy damage. May be worth searching for.

I believe you're talking about this, which I've read much of:

community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/758...

While a lot of great stuff is discussed on that thread, the actual build listed doesn't incorporate much of it, and only makes it up to about 20,000 damage/round. The best specific build I can find on the forum is a link to this:

www.dandwiki.com/wiki/War_Hulking_Hurler...(3.5e_Optimized_Character_Build)

which only hits 400,000 damage/round.

That's not so great, and I wanted to try making a Hulking Hurler build based on Empowered Giant Size; this both makes for an incredible damage boost, allowing this build to far outpace anything I've seen, and also to stay within the relatively unobscure and allowed-by-most-GMs world of Core+Complete
#4
hsien
Sep 29, 2010 10:42:42
Sorry but I checked last night and actually those abilities do not stack.
The Paragnostic Apostle indicates that some abilities can be taken multiple times, if the description of ability indicates that it can.

Those abilities do not indicate that in there text and therefore cannot be taken more then once.

The abilities that can be taken multiple times seemed to all have multiple sub-categories, similar to the Energy Substitution feat, where a different energy type can be selected each time.
#5
17flyingaxes
Sep 29, 2010 15:08:57 Oh dang, you're right about that. There are other ways to get the caster level boost, but so much for what I thought was the easy one.
#6
awaken_D_M_golem
Sep 29, 2010 16:52:28 Hulking Hurler wasn't my thing, but
iirc about half way through the original thread
the numbers starting going toward Trillions.

I suppose at this point in time,
it'd be difficult to get a group together
to hash out any ideas that have happened since.

Getting a Loop going, that ends up stopping at some point,
way up in the A.H. range, would work.
The concept is still solid ... Throw Big Weight on doom.
#7
spitewrathhatred
Sep 30, 2010 4:55:11 Plus, I dont think you can empower Giant Size. (IIRC). I think it only works on variable (i.e. dice-rolled) effects.
#8
awaken_D_M_golem
Oct 01, 2010 15:09:15 Hulk Less Hurler - by Tempest Stormwind ... it's quite old
community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/758...

EDIT - Huh? That weird. It's not even Hulk less.
Ahh well, lots of links have gotten screwed multiple times.
#9
steelblue
Oct 24, 2010 1:06:26
Hulking Hurler wasn't my thing, but
iirc about half way through the original thread
the numbers starting going toward Trillions.

I suppose at this point in time,
it'd be difficult to get a group together
to hash out any ideas that have happened since.

Getting a Loop going, that ends up stopping at some point,
way up in the A.H. range, would work.
The concept is still solid ... Throw Big Weight on doom.

Yeah, they started hitting the ridiculous numbers once someone found a template (I think Tauric?) to add an NI number of other STR boosting templates at no LA cost... I remember the key template merged two creatures and used combined HD +2 LA, but didn't add additional LA for any LA from templates on the second creature... but you could still use the stats from the second one. Someone went through and piled on all the non-HD +STR templates and anything else they could legally add onto a monster, merged it with a character with class levels etc., and came up with a big old string of numbers with a d6 on the end... somewhere in the neighborhood of a couple hundred trillion, I think.

I remember because we thought Chuck could beat HH for damage in a round while naked, and Tempest popped our bubble and made us kit Chuck out because he was only dealing several hundred billion d6 naked and HH had climbed to a couple hundred trillion without anyone noticing.
#10
aelryinth
Oct 24, 2010 18:22:03 Also, I believe you only get the Str bonus when USING the Hammer of Thunderbolts.
I don't know if you aren't better off starting off half-ogre for the +8 str, then applying half-dragon. (hey, they did it in Order of the Stick!)> YMMV.

Yeah, Empower doesn't work on Giant Size, either.

Don't you need a 17 Int to cast Giant Size, too? Not sure on your stat layout.

==Aelryinth

Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 17flyingaxes Sep 28, 2010 15:04:31	So, I've been trying to create the most powerful character I can using only Core + Complete books (as part of a challenge among friends), and decided to try creating a Hulking Hurler build using only Core and Complete: Race: Orc Template: Half-Dragon Levels: Barbarian 1/Wu-Jen 7 (CAr)/Blood Magus 1 (CAr)/Hulking Hurler 2 (CW)/Paragnostic Apostle 5 (CC)/Cleric 1 (ECL 20) Cleric Domains: Animal, one other Base Ability Scores: 34, 8, 10, 15, 6, 8 (before racial modifiers: 18, 8, 8, 15, 8, 8 --> a 24-point buy) Abilities + Modifiers: 105, 5, 28, 17, 6, 8 Feats: Practiced Spellcaster (Wu-Jen) (CAr), Ape's Fury (CC), Point Blank Shot, Power Attack, Weapon Focus (Javelin), Empower Spell (Wu-Jen bonus feat), Sudden Empower (CAr), Metamagic Vigor (CM) I know Hulking Hurler has been Errata'd, but it still req.s the same number of feats. Necessary Skills: Knowledge (Religion) 5, Knowledge (Arcana) 5, Knowledge (Nature) 10, Concentration 4 Important class-derived abilities: Really Throw Anything (Hulking Hurler), Overburdened Heave (Hulking Hurler), Mind over Body x2 (Paragnostic Apostle), Mortal Coil x3 (Paragnostic Apostle), Spell Secret (Wu-Jen) (Extend Spell: Giant Size) Important Spells: Giant Size (Wu-Jen 7) Important Items: Belt of Giant Strength +6 (36,000 gp), Hammer of Thunderbolts (Artifact), Gauntlets of Ogre Strength (4,000 gp), Manual of Gainful Exercise +5 (137,500 gp), Headband of Intellect +2 (4,000 gp), Vanguard of Kord (350 gp), Horizon Goggles (8,000 gp) The artifact is a bit of a stretch, but as far as artifacts go it's not that rare and we're waaaay under the starting gold for a lvl 20 character Also Has: Permanency + Enlarge Person (This allows qualification for hulking hurler, although its bonuses get overwritten by those of Giant Size) Max. Medium Load: 559,240,533 lbs How does it Work? The Hulking Hurler ability Overburdened Heave allows the Hulking Hurler to throw a medium load, dealing 1d6 damage for every 200 lbs listed; thus, a hurler's power depends on his carrying capacity. The best hulking hurler build I've found online (based on the War Hulk class) can throw up to 117,504 lbs... but I figured it shouldn't be too hard to beat a million pounds, even restricting myself to core+complete. The important part of this build is the Wu-Jen spell Giant Size, which gives a whopping +32 to STR and Colossal Size (x16 carrying capacity). Together with Sudden Empower (which boosts it to +48 STR), that's over 4,000 times as much weight liftable as before the spell! With metamagic secret, giant size lasts a whopping 38 minutes/day. Since we start with 15 int, we need a headband of int +2 to cast this spell. Obviously, any levels put into Wu-Jen to get this spell cannot be used to boost STR through other means, so we would like to put as few levels there as possible. 13 levels are sufficient to cast the 7th-level spell Giant Size, but we need a caster level of 19 to reach colossal size. Practiced spellcaster gives +4 CL on wu-jen spells, up to our maximum HD (we have 17 HD), and then shunt five levels of wu-jen into the prC Paragnostic Apostle, which lest us take 5 "Knowledge is Power" abilities. We choose Mind over Body (+1 CL on transmutation spells granting bonuses or penalties to stats) twice, and Mortal Coil (+1 CL on spells that change a subject's form or size) three times. This boosts CL to 18 with only wu-jen 8/apostle 5. To get the last +1 CL necessary, we can use the Metamagic Vigor feat. First, we cast a weak spell, empowered by Empower Spell; while the second spell cast (Giant Size) is modified by Sudden Empower, Sudden Empower "applies the effects of Empower Spell to..." which allows Metamagic Vigor to treat it as the same feat, giving +1 CL. This gives us 7 levels to play with; or 5, after the two levels we must cede to hulking hurler. The highest strength race (without a massive LA) in core is Orc with +4, and the best strength-boosting template is half-dragon (+8 STR, +3 LA). Assuming we start out with 18 STR, we get +12 from our race and template. Then we add +4 points on leveling up, for a base strength of 34. Hammer of Thunderbolts lets us add the bonuses from our gauntlets and belt, for +8 STR; our manual gives a +5 insight bonus to strength. From our items, we're up to 47. Now +48 for Sudden Empowered giant size, and +4 for raging gets us up to 99 STR. Ape's Fury gives us another +6 Sacred/Profane bonus, and we're up to 105. Now... a medium character with 15 STR has a maximum heavy load of 200 lbs. At colossal size, it's x16 to 3,200 lbs. For +90 STR, we multiply by 4^9 (x262,144) to get 838,860,800 lbs—just under a billion pounds. (for reference, that's approximately 2,000 blue whales, and slightly more than the weight of the empire state building). This makes a maximum medium load 559,240,533 lbs, which, when thrown, deals 2,796,202d6+47 damage (an average of 9,786,756 points per thrown object). Of course, hitting your opponents isn't easy, unless you find a way to gain the effects of Brutal Throw, which applies STR bonus to thrown attacks. (If you want to do this without sacrificing STR, you could turn the half-dragon level adjustment into two levels of kensai and one level of fighter, although the kensai's str bonus only lasts one round). But wait... what if you just, like, picked up the huge object on someone's head? You'd literally be dropping a village... anything within a radius of several hundred feet would take 4,194,304d6 points of unavoidable crushing damage. Hmm. Of course, since we can throw FOUR medium loads per round, that's the higher damage output option. Also, you could just jump off a small hill onto your enemies. An orc scaled to colossal size weighs about 866,000 lbs; if you fall 20 feet onto someone, you take 2d6 damage and they take 4,300d6 (again, this is uncrushable damage, here spread out over a 30' wide square). As for 400,000 ton objects... using the Wu-jen lvl 6 spell move earth, it should be possible to channel out a flat plane of dirt near the top of a mountain so that the peak is loosened enough to be picked up and thrown. The maximum carrying capacity corresponds to about 7,000,000 cu ft, or a 200 x 200 x 200 ft cube of earth. I'm probably missing something... anyone know of a way to increase the damage output further, or an easier place to find 400,000 ton objects?
#2 hsien Sep 28, 2010 17:18:51	Check rules for Stacking. Normally, benefits from the same source, providing same benefit, do not stack. That could affect the Paragnostic Apostle abilities...unless those individual abilities indicate they can be taken multiple times and stack. I'm afb's. There's used to be a build for Hulking Hurler on CharOp, basically destroying the moon/planet or some such crazy damage. May be worth searching for.
#3 17flyingaxes Sep 28, 2010 23:46:47	Check rules for Stacking. Normally, benefits from the same source, providing same benefit, do not stack. That could affect the Paragnostic Apostle abilities...unless those individual abilities indicate they can be taken multiple times and stack. I'm afb's. Oh, don't worry, I did the research. Paragnostic Apostle abilities specifically state that they can be taken multiple times and stack. As for the STR bonus: The hammer, gloves, and belt work together to give a +8 Enhancement bonus Manual of gainful exercise is +5 Inherent Barbarian's Rage is +4 Morale Ape's Fury is +6 Sacred/Profane Giant Size is +48 Size So yes, none of the bonuses overlap. There's used to be a build for Hulking Hurler on CharOp, basically destroying the moon/planet or some such crazy damage. May be worth searching for. I believe you're talking about this, which I've read much of: community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/758... While a lot of great stuff is discussed on that thread, the actual build listed doesn't incorporate much of it, and only makes it up to about 20,000 damage/round. The best specific build I can find on the forum is a link to this: www.dandwiki.com/wiki/War_Hulking_Hurler...(3.5e_Optimized_Character_Build) which only hits 400,000 damage/round. That's not so great, and I wanted to try making a Hulking Hurler build based on Empowered Giant Size; this both makes for an incredible damage boost, allowing this build to far outpace anything I've seen, and also to stay within the relatively unobscure and allowed-by-most-GMs world of Core+Complete
#4 hsien Sep 29, 2010 10:42:42	Sorry but I checked last night and actually those abilities do not stack. The Paragnostic Apostle indicates that some abilities can be taken multiple times, if the description of ability indicates that it can. Those abilities do not indicate that in there text and therefore cannot be taken more then once. The abilities that can be taken multiple times seemed to all have multiple sub-categories, similar to the Energy Substitution feat, where a different energy type can be selected each time.
#5 17flyingaxes Sep 29, 2010 15:08:57	Oh dang, you're right about that. There are other ways to get the caster level boost, but so much for what I thought was the easy one.
#6 awaken_D_M_golem Sep 29, 2010 16:52:28	Hulking Hurler wasn't my thing, but iirc about half way through the original thread the numbers starting going toward Trillions. I suppose at this point in time, it'd be difficult to get a group together to hash out any ideas that have happened since. Getting a Loop going, that ends up stopping at some point, way up in the A.H. range, would work. The concept is still solid ... Throw Big Weight on doom.
#7 spitewrathhatred Sep 30, 2010 4:55:11	Plus, I dont think you can empower Giant Size. (IIRC). I think it only works on variable (i.e. dice-rolled) effects.
#8 awaken_D_M_golem Oct 01, 2010 15:09:15	Hulk Less Hurler - by Tempest Stormwind ... it's quite old community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/758... EDIT - Huh? That weird. It's not even Hulk less. Ahh well, lots of links have gotten screwed multiple times.
#9 steelblue Oct 24, 2010 1:06:26	Hulking Hurler wasn't my thing, but iirc about half way through the original thread the numbers starting going toward Trillions. I suppose at this point in time, it'd be difficult to get a group together to hash out any ideas that have happened since. Getting a Loop going, that ends up stopping at some point, way up in the A.H. range, would work. The concept is still solid ... Throw Big Weight on doom. Yeah, they started hitting the ridiculous numbers once someone found a template (I think Tauric?) to add an NI number of other STR boosting templates at no LA cost... I remember the key template merged two creatures and used combined HD +2 LA, but didn't add additional LA for any LA from templates on the second creature... but you could still use the stats from the second one. Someone went through and piled on all the non-HD +STR templates and anything else they could legally add onto a monster, merged it with a character with class levels etc., and came up with a big old string of numbers with a d6 on the end... somewhere in the neighborhood of a couple hundred trillion, I think. I remember because we thought Chuck could beat HH for damage in a round while naked, and Tempest popped our bubble and made us kit Chuck out because he was only dealing several hundred billion d6 naked and HH had climbed to a couple hundred trillion without anyone noticing.
#10 aelryinth Oct 24, 2010 18:22:03	Also, I believe you only get the Str bonus when USING the Hammer of Thunderbolts. I don't know if you aren't better off starting off half-ogre for the +8 str, then applying half-dragon. (hey, they did it in Order of the Stick!)> YMMV. Yeah, Empower doesn't work on Giant Size, either. Don't you need a 17 Int to cast Giant Size, too? Not sure on your stat layout. ==Aelryinth