No cheese, no weird stuff, just a few levels in (martial!) classes, some good choices and (ok) some rather optimal conditions.
Character lvl 4, max damage will over 1400 and still some options left to add in nice things.
Relevant info
Classes: warblade 1, binder 3 (paimon bound)
Race: human
Feats: rapid assault, improved binding (3), one open
Stance: punishing stance
Equipment: glaive +1, potion of fly, potion of invisibility
Relevant stat: assume strength 18
Attack: 3 (bab) + 4 (str) + 1 (magic weapon) + 1 higher ground = + 9, damage 1d10 + 1d6 (+1d6 first round) + 7
Encounter: Presumption is that the goblin king has it’s army of hundreds and hundres of goblins lined up. Character flies to the beginning of a phalanx. With the reach weapon, he can target 21 enemies (5x5 squares, minus the corners because the lack of reach.
Character uses dance of death (move up to you speed, make a single attack against any creature you move past), takes move (fly 60 feet), move by 12 x 5 creatures, + 8 from the starting square and 8 for the square where it ends. Attacked 76 creatures, for average 19.5 damage, max 1482.
One feat open: power attack, for (much) more damage potential, law devotion for more hits, death devotion for max 76 negative levels. Krym minotaur (or other race with +4 str) is an option. With flaws: huge damage increase.
How many times / day can you pull this off?
But the vestige Paimon also grants whirlwind attack, so with a similar tactic, it's also easy to make in the round betweens 10-15 attacks as well
- edit: actually, main reason for my posting wasn't the "AAAA see you all how much damage I can do", cause in practice it'll never get close, obviously... but I did want to bring this tactic under the attention.
I played a character with fly speed and above mentioned classes/features some time back, and it worked great.
- with a reach weapon and fly speed, you can reach about 21 squares on the ground: many many damage, great increase in effectiveness of whirlwind attack and the dance of death
- fly speed and reach weapon means in the outdoor and big caverns & rooms indoor, virtually untouchable for many medium sized opponents. Throw in tumble and fly by attack, and you're untouchable for creatures without a fly speed.
- in the latter case, you can be a great 'one punch mickey' if you use martial strikes or arcane channeling
- easily optimizable with size/reach increases, for many more attacks
A character I'm currently playing uses sort of the same tactic, without the binder. And even without that, it's pretty good: build is half fey (2), warblade 1 duskblade 1. With single attack it deals
1d10+1d6+4 damage, with the steel wind strike it can attack 2 targets, which mostly are in reach since it's hoovering above everybody and has a reach weapon. Compared with other 4th level characters, damage output is good, as is flexibility and mobility.
Just wanted to share this with you, more input on how to make this work better, as well as other comments, are more then welcome!
The char in the op could only do it once, since he only has 1 fly potion and 1 invisbility potion. At the cost of two feats though, you could apply that trick to something like druid 20 or another spellcaster with shapechange. Imagine a flying T-rex or something even worse doing that.
(1) re: flight: the "Unseelie Fey" template from Dragon Magazine (Compendium, Volume I);
(2) re: invisibility: the Half-Giant psionic racial class from "Complete Psionic" + the "Primordial Giant" template from Eberron's "Secrets of Xen'drik";
(3) option 1 + multi-class option 2 = LA +0.
(4) Probably violates "no cheese, no weird stuff".
(5) your last suggestion reminds me of this.
does an reach weapons "reach" incress with size as well as it damage...exp.spiked chain 2d4 10 reach become 2d6 15' reach??