...as a non-tabletopper I feel kind of lost. But it's fun to watch you guys argue Back to topic (kind of...), why does Gestalt mean in English/tabletop? I'm always interested in the meanings German words get in English
Gestalt really just means "The entirety of a system that is perceived as synergistic." It's essentially the concrete-object form of the conceptual noun 'Synergy'. D&D turned the generic word Gestalt into a technical term as described above.
You can actually optimize this one a little more (the DM will kill you for all the early entry shenanigans + backstory you need) Archivist 1 | Beholder Mage 1 {early entry Shenanigans} Mystic Theurge 10 | Beholder Mage 2 / Arcane Heirophant 5 / 3 blood line levels Arcane Heirophant 2 | Legacy Champion 2 Legacy Champion 4 | 3 Arcane Heirophant / 1 Uncanny Trickster Beholder Mage 4 | 2 Uncanny Trickster / 2 Archivist So, sum total is: 33 archivist caster levels, 37 Beholder Mage caster levels, and a very pissed off DM. You actually have 9th level spells at level 11 for Archivist, and level 5 for beholder mage.
It reminds me of that time when I killed a nigh-invulnerable character with a character who was, until that point, seen as the weakest member of the team. Though the GM wasn't pissed - his reaction was more along the lines of "can anyone tell me what the hell just happened?".
Well, the short version is that the guy was nigh-invulnerable because he had enough health to avoid being one-shot by anything (by anything we had - specialised weaponry would've been able to make him keel over, but we only had an archer, two swordsmen, and my character who was a failure combat-wise) and a regeneration factor which completely healed him every combat round (this one actually had an in-story justification, and if the player has an in-story reason it's possible to use that sort of character in regular play, though most people wouldn't spend enough points on regeneration to make it work like that [but it is possible, it's just that with that many points there likely are better things to get]). And he really annoyed (this was after the encounter where my character had to spend 27 combat rounds finding creative ways to disarm their traps with his magic while all the other guys fought) my character who was the team "mage" ("essence controller" in this setting). It also happened that "magic" (called "essence control" in this game, and being more of a low-level reality warping rather than the usual "magic with spells") wasn't suited for offensive for the most part (because trying to get through innate resistance living beings had increased the strain from using said "magic" and to work at all it required constant focus) and my character didn't really have any offensive spells worth of note. But it so happened that my character specialised in shielding and movement spells, with some additional stuff with "healing" magic (which wasn't really "healing" but merely "increasing natural regeneration to ridiculous levels", so it had its own downsides, like causing pain and thus also penalties to dice throws to the healed one), so he launched himself along with the guy in question to about 4.000 feet in the air (not with just one spell, it was a whole cavalcade of them, but specialising meant that for as long as I wasn't hit I could use these all day, and the guy couldn't hit me because he was too busy being flung in the air), after which he accelerated their fall. I had "luck points" (known in other games as either "luck points", "divine favour", "destiny points", or by any other name) to stop my character from dying, but the guy in question didn't. It still incapacitated my character with him almost dying, in a place where his team and the guy's team were fighting, but the other team left after they saw the "weakest" member of our team kill their "immortal" leader. And the moral of the story is: "Don't let the guy who plays with numbers play a seemingly-useless character."
