darthvictorbr: Well said. You are right for melee users. My plan is to let enemy hit me and then take damage from Mestil's acid sheath and elemental shield, so in order to do damage to magic immune enemies with this strategy, i need take damage, and if he have a +6 weapon, he can bypass my damage reduction(except with epic spells)
Trading DC and CL is bad for casters. Melee users are ok with low DC progression and subpar CL, since DC do not required to cast buffs and CL only used against dispell which not everyone have. If you are an offensive caster, you should NOT have CL lower then your character level minus one, max minus two. You can clearly see that on the video, where dedicated spellcasters kill SR enemies with little problems. Thats why for non-gish damaging shields are waste of spell slot
Shapechange is generally bad choise, especially in HotU, where its increadibly easy to get permahaste weapon, which would not be merged into a balor form. As well as balor loosing all other effects from equipment. Best shapeshifter is still, well, shifter. You can try somewhat like druid8/shifter 21/monk1 with around 30 wisdom to see how nerfed balor is when compared to dragonshape(which merge armor, helmet and shield) with 20d10 breath weapon, aura of fear and 40/+6 DR. And if you drop monk and take one more druid, you get 24d10 breath.Shapechange doesn't even work as good "Oh shit" button, since you can timestop which is exactly same level and can be cast after wearing heavy armor(which would be provided by cleric)
A sorc with ICE and Divine shield can get AC similar to a fighter while having high caster level. After that all this junk like shapechange becomes useless, since you can cast in melee range, and ignore that pesky weapon attacks