Divine Ward + Chain Spell = Abusable?

[pfooti]

I was thinking about a buffing cleric last night (making D&D characters in my head is one trick I have to help me fall asleep, since normally I fret about work or something), and came to a strange point of analysis.

Chain Spell^CA works on a spell that has a single target and a range greater than touch. As such, it's somewhat limited in how it works, especially for the really juicy buffs you'd like to chain. People fiddle around with arcane reach trickery, but I don't particularly like that, primarily because I'm of the school of thought that believes you can't chain rays.

But, Divine Ward^PHBII seems to fit the bill nicely, for a certain class of feats. Wouldn't work with magic vestment, but any touch-range buff that targets a person could be chained to the entire party by feeding it through Divine Ward. Better yet, running it through the Ward only costs a turn attempt. With DMM:Chain, that means 5 turns nets you a (say) chained Heal, Spell Resistance, Superior Resistance, etc. That's not too shabby.

[aund]

not so sure about that being abuseable since you also have to expend a turn attempt for every creature beyond 1st when casting it. If you want to chain-buff your party of 5 people (including you), that would be 3 attempts just for creating the bond. Then, when casting, you have to spend another attempt so you may pull this off several times but depending on your party size, this can severely limit your DMM/Devotion/... abilities.
I thought about going this route but I just don't have the turn attempts to do it since my other abilities are already quite turn-hungry ^^

[pfooti]

The first ward connection is free, and then it costs 1 turn to cast the spell through the ward. But you don't have to feed other turns to the Ward to chain the spell, just to DMM(Chain). Five turns to chain a touch spell isn't terrible, and it seems to clearly work, rather than the rule-bending you have to (IMO) do to get reach spell to work that way. Chaining a Reach spell is more expensive to boot - 6 turns to make it work.

[Akalsaris]

Strangely enough, D&D characters running through my mind is one of the things that keeps me awake at night, because I can't stop thinking about it sometimes.

Divine Ward seems as though it would work, though it's a big feat investment.  You'd need a metamagic feat (any), Chain Spell, Divine Ward, DMM: Chain Spell, and Extra Turning (or a Cha of 20, more likely) all just for 1 chained touch-range spell/day unless you spend your gold to get more attempts (which might not be possible in a campaign starting at lower levels). 

Let's see...
Jozan the Chain-buffing fool

Human Cleric (Domains: Planning for Extend Spell and Undeath for Extra Turning)
Feats:
1st domain: Extend Spell
1st domain: Extra Turning
1st human: Chain Spell
1st character: DMM: Chain Spell
3rd char: Divine Ward

Assuming the character starts at 3rd level and has a charisma of 16, he could purchase a holy phylactery from the MIC for 1,000g, giving him 3+3+4+2 turn attempts, or enough to do this 2/day to one additional person each time, or 1/day to do this to seven additional people.

[aund]

that's a good start for a lvl 3 character *thumbs up*
Hm I thought of doing this in higher lvls via hierophant w divine reach and chain spell which would save you the initial turn attempts since you can reach as an (su) with dmm being the only thing that needs turn atempts.

[pfooti]

See, the funny thing is, the way I read the rules in this matter is that you pay 1 turn attempt to change a touch-range spell into a close-range spell. Chain Spell takes care of the rest. So it only costs 5 turn attempts to chain-buff: 1 for Divine Ward, and 4 for DMM:Chain. That's the same if there's 2 or 20 people in your party (subject to the 1 target per CL limitation of chain spell).

It's definitely a heavy investment to support, but the tricks for getting lots of turn attempts are pretty well known. People do the same thing with with DMM:Persist. I also generally like getting Divine Ward anyway, if you can spare the feat - clerics tend to be slow-movers, and sometimes you really do need to heal someone in combat, but you're on the other side of the fight. Not always, but enough to warrant the investment. That's neither here nor there, though.

Divine Reach would do it, but requires a loss of a spellcasting level (although not caster level) and only becomes available at level 14.

A reasonable number of turn attempts by level 10 would be somewhere around 12: 3 (base) + 4 (extra turning) + 3 (reliquary holy symbol) + 2 (charisma). Two chained buffs and 2 more turns for other uses.

Actually, all this said, I'm not entirely convinced this is a good idea anyway. I'd have to comb all the spell lists to see if there were spells that were worth this kind of investment. That's the key, since it still will take a standard action to fire off at the start of combat. A persist-abuser does all that investing because it allows you to just start fighting, without wasting time buffing.

[Omen of Peace]

You can only use 1 Divine feat per turn so no, it's not very abusable.

Also note that unlike Reach Spell, Arcane Reach does not change the spell into a ray. It just has effective range 30ft and you must make a ranged attack. (It's still not clear whether it qualifies for Chain Spell unfortunately.)