Talk:Dragon Aspirant (3.5e Prestige Class)

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Author's Notes

This class is influenced heavily by the Conduit of the Lower Planes from the Tome of Fiends. Obviously it uses the same Spheres mechanic, and it also has a similar life path of transitioning you out to other PrCs by granting Sorcerer casting. Honestly, you could refigure it to be a base class pretty easily (though in that case you'd want to give it Magical Training as a capstone, rather than have it advance Sorcerer casting). Compared to the Conduit, you get slightly more spheres, but with a much tighter focus (and less use of low-level SLAs). Since the class features are overall stronger, I think it works out okay. Especially because you're expected to have sunk four levels into Fighter or Barbarian or something.

The basic idea of the class is that it transitions you from being a fighter-type to being something more caster-ish. Your spheres give you level-appropriate abilities, and you get casting that's hopefully good enough to fill in some gaps. You also get a full Dragon-equivalent chassis, which might be a bit much. It's possible the class should get knocked down somewhere (probably d10 Hit Die and bad Reflex saves).

There are a variety of different entry paths available. Straight martial is obviously the default, but you can also get in with Gish builds (the pre-reqs are specifically designed to work with Battle Sorcerer, because Battle Sorcerer deserves a leg up). The one thing I'm not sure about is the fact that you can get in as a Sorcerer 8 or similar if you can swing a martial weapon proficiency. Hopefully the fact that doing so delays your progression by a lot mitigates that.