Complete A..

Illus. by M. Cavottaore than the power of spells themselves, themethodology of spellcasting is the most importantpart of a caster’s arsenal of arcanepower. By employing feats to improve someelement of spellcasting, a savvy caster can produce resultsfar greater than the actual power of the spells beingemployed.INVOCATIONS ANDSPELL-LIKE ABILITIESMany feats useful for spellcasters are equally useful forcharacters or creatures that employ invocations or spell-likeabilities instead of spells. Spell-like abilities represent aninnate magical talent that is part of a creature’s essentialnature, an expression of will or a mental action thatresembles a spell in almost all ways.Learning to wield a spell-like ability requires the samelevel of training or effort required to learn a physical tasksuch as swimming, and is easy enough that any characteror creature with a spell-like ability is assumed to have completelymastered the skill as soon as the spell-like ability isacquired. Using a spell-like ability requires concentration(possibly provoking attacks of opportunity), and, in the caseof spell-like abilities that can be used only a certain numbermagical power that must be replenished before it can usedagain.Invocations are also spell-like abilities. The onlydifference between invocations and other spell-likeabilities is that invocations require somatic gesturesand are therefore subject to arcane spell failure (seethe warlock class in Chapter 1).Warlocks and other creatures with spell-like abilitiesmight find the following feats useful.Combat Casting: This feat works equally well withspells, invocations, or spell-like abilities.Spell Penetration: Spell Penetration and GreaterSpell Penetration have the same effect on invocationsand spell-like abilities that they do on normalspells.Weaponlike Spell Feats: A character who usesinvocations or spell-like abilities might be able totake advantage of feats such as Weapon Focus orPrecise Shot, as described under Feats and WeaponlikeSpells, below. (The warlock’s eldritch blastis weaponlike.)Sudden Metamagic Feats: These metamagicfeats don’t require modified spell slots, and so theywork as well with spell-like abilities or invocationsas they do with spells (though because spell-likeabilities don’t have verbal or somatic components,of times per day, requires the user to tap into a reservoir of71