Quote Originally Posted by liquidformat View Post
Moving on, so you get the incorporeal subtype and nothing else, not even the ability to manifest or possession or any of those fun bells and whistles the ghost template gives you so you are left up to what feats to take from Ghost walk. Unless you are in an extremely niche game that means this template is a straight up -0 on anything that isn't a caster. If I am understanding incorporeal correctly even as a caster, besides positive energy, negative energy, force effects (and ghost touched weapons) any damaging spell you use has a 50% chance to be ignored. Also since you are incapable of speech that means all spells with Verbal components are out? So you have to cherry pick spells with no verbal components, and no material components, or use silent spell and Eschew Materials. This seems like enough negatives that +0* LA seems about right, I would be open to increasing that but I haven't seen any arguments as to why it should be higher yet.
Well, no. Incorporeal can't be affected by lots of things, but an incorporeal creature is on the material plane, its spells (or whatever other effects it creates) are fully felt by its opponents. And the Verbal components are only a problem if you go spellcaster. Warlocks exist, psionic classes too, dragonfire adepts, and even bards who can fulfill verbal components with music, all will enjoy the full versatility, utility and defensive benefits of being incorporeal and unaffected by everything anything below ECL 7 throws at them, while losing none of their important abilities. As I said higher, this is worse than a ghost, but being incorporeal is still extremely good, and should warrant LA +2* in my opinion. Incorporeal creatures can basically always have concealment, infiltrate any castle or camp, stave off any restraints or entanglements, and beat any number of mooks. A ghost touch gauntlet will allow the spirit to manipulate items for 4k gp. That's a problem, but really not that much of one, especially if you compensate with spells.

That said, I agree that except for a specific challenge, I don't see any creature who would really benefit from losing its standard, even if it becomes incorporeal afterwards. LA-0