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Swashbuckler11/MoMS1
Str 7
Dex 26
Con 14
Int 13
Wis 20
Cha 7
AC 33 (touch 29, flat-footed 33) AC 37 Fighting Defensively
Saves Fort +10, Ref +20, Will +13; +2 vs fear
HP 110
+2 Agile Rapier +24/+19/+14 1d6+23 or Combat Expertise +21/+16/+11 1d6+23
Feats: Weapon Finesse (B), Improved Unarmed Strike (B), Improved Critical (B), Combat Expertise, Extra Panache, Dodge, Crane Style, Crane Wing, Crane Riposte (B), Snake Style, Snake Fang (B), Weapon Focus (rapier), Combat Reflexes, Signature Deed (Bleeding Wound)
Items: +2 Agile Rapier, Dusty Rose Prism Ioun Stone, Ring of Protection +1, Agile Amulet of Mighty Fists, Belt of Dex +6, Headband of Wisdom +4, +3 Cloak of Resistance, Expendables
So in Kingmaker just before the playtest, cohort and royal bodyguard with nerves of steel Rhiana Flynn (an Aldori Swordlord10/Master of Many Styles2) decided to take a somewhat-arrogant risk and enter a combat against unknown monsters that was run by a rakshasa, wherein she won if she survived 20 rounds, but beating the monsters was worth extra style points. If she lost, she lost all her equipment. She decided to go in there and fight the monsters, and came up against two Adult Black Dragons, which are CR 11 each and pretty nasty for their CR. She proceeded to hand them their tails. I decided to alter Rhiana slightly to Swashbuckler11/MoMS1 and present her the same challenge. Of course, in so doing I wound up having to remove five feats from Rhiana (she's down three feats overall, but I also took Extra Panache and Signature Deed)! I decided to completely eliminate her offensive feats as a baseline, as you can see above. I even took Combat Expertise. I believe that she is slightly under-WBL as well.
Playtest results:
In Kingmaker, Rhiana had up a series of buffs from the other characters, but for this version, she'll have to rely on nothing more than a potion of mage armor, a potion of barkskin and a potion of fly as prebuffs (rather than having a 12th level druid cast barkskin on her). So this new Rhiana started the battle by winning initiative. Seeing the two dragons, she drew and downed a potion of enlarge person. This actually lowered her AC by 2 and to-hit by 2. Damage dice increased but static bonus damage decreased. But she knew she needed to have the same reach as these guys, so she did it.
The dragons had prebuffed mage armor. They both breathed acid, but she had a 90% chance to make the save, her Swashbuckler Evasion came through, and she took no damage. They flew such that she had to charge if she wanted to attack and they could both full attack her if she did.
Rhiana could have been a coward and just waited them out, since the contest was to survive 2 minutes in there, but she wanted to show off, so she charged fighting defensively with Combat Expertise and spending one panache to double her Precise Strike damage. Fortune favored the bold and she managed to land a critical hit for slightly below-average damage (52 damage). As a free action with no panache cost, Rhiana gave the dragon 7 bleed damage. The crit recovered one of her panache. At this point, her AC was 38 due to fighting defensively and combat expertise and charging.
The dragons grinned a wicked grin, stepped into a flank against her, and started to attack. Because of 11th Swashbuckler, this version of Rhiana had Improved Uncanny Dodge (which nicely cancelled original Rhiana's Steel Net ability). The dragons knew that Rhiana was a Mivonese Swordlord and would be tough to hit, so they didn't Power Attack. They landed an above average claw hit and an above average wing hit for 19 total damage. However, Rhiana bit back. making one Crane Riposte rapier hit on the more injured dragon, four Snake Fangs on that dragon, and remaining three Snake Fangs until she ran out of AoOs from her lower enlarged Dex on the uninjured one. Despite having an accuracy boost over the other Rhiana on the Snake Fangs (they apply Swashbuckler Training but not the Weapon Training Rhiana had chosen), most of the AoOs missed AC 32 (in Kingmaker, she had a prebuffed heroism that I didn't give her here that would have made two of the misses into hits). The good news is that the high rolls were pretty high, so the sword critted and even one of the unarmed strikes threatened a crit (but failed to confirm). This led to a total of one sword crit and one unarmed hit versus the injured dragon for 43 and 19 (the 19 would have been 24 but didn't penetrate DR) and two unarmed hits versus the other for 17 and 20(she gave it Str bleed and 7 bleed for 1 panache and 0 panache). They both took 7 bleed damage and the less injured one also lost 1 Str.
The dragons were no longer grinning, and Rhiana took her chance. She cancelled Combat Expertise but continued fighting defensively, putting all her effort into making sure she dropped the more injured dragon, spending one panache to add damage. Due to all rolls 10 or below in her three attacks, she only hit with the first attack, and she didn't recover panache from that, but a 41 damage hit dropped the dragon, which recovered 1 panache.
The last dragon considered its options. It could probably use obscuring mist to make a retreat, but with the arena's size, Rhiana could follow it anywhere in the bounds with a double move, so that was at best a stalling tactic and the rakshasa demanded action, since Rhiana won if the fight went to 2 minutes. Breath attacks seemed pointless. It could try to sunder or disarm the weapon, but it knew that Mivonese Swordlords were Swashbucklers and that Rhiana was probably immune. It could try a grapple, but without Improved Grapple, if she hit the AoO, that was going to fail hard for certain, and even without the AoO, +22 CMB did not have a sure shot (the dragon didn't have access to all her stats, but she was looking at 38 CMD thanks to the Fighting Defensively bonus). But a full attack could get it spanked up to 6 times. What would you do as the dragon? We decided to do both viable options (the full attack and the grapple attempt) and split the fight into two alternate universes.
Universe 1: The dragon full attacked and rolled EXTREMELY well on the Bite/Claw/Claw (rolled 16, nat 20, and 15, though the last missed, but it confirmed the crit). It was even savvier than you might expect, and just didn't bother on the secondary attacks because they were too risky with too low of payoff. So she used up her riposte on the bite and thus took the crit for 27 damage (ouch!). Crane Riposte hit for 24 and the one Snake Fang missed. She spent a point to give the poor guy some Con bleed, and he wound up bleeding again for Str, Con, and 7 damage.
Universe A: Rhiana's AoO hit and foiled the Grapple even though the Grapple was a natural 16 (which would have barely succeeded if not for the AoO). She hit for 24 plus Con bleed, and he wound up bleeding again for Str, Con, and 7 damage.
Rhiana made another non-Combat Expertise full attack. A 10 hit and a natural 20 failed to confirm. Due to profligate use of bleed damage, she didn't have enough Panache to add 11 extra damage, so the two hits did 49 together.
Rakshasa mind control or not, the dragon was at seriously trouble at this point because it had taken 124 damage and the Con bleed + the 7 was going to be a pain. The dragon used a Heal check on itself to stop the bleed damage, and the rakshasa called the fight with Rhiana as the winner to protect her investment.
Analysis below!
Rhiana the Swashbuckler was actually pretty similar to the original Rhiana agaisnt these guys. The -2 to hit with rapier definitely hurt her. However, the big thing that stood out was the Snake Fangs actually hurt a lot. Original Rhiana was doing essentially 13 less damage with those Snake Fangs. Even though she hit a bit more with that added +1 to hit from , thanks to the 5 DR that she wasn't penetrating, 13 less damage cut the damage down by more than 2/3s. Also, adding Swashbuckler Training to the unarmed strikes (Rhiana the Swordlord picked blades) made them actually more accurate for Swashbuckler Rhiana as well. Especially with the bleed damage, this Rhiana was offensively better than the original.
Defense-wise, Nimble + Improved Uncanny Dodge more than made up for Steel Net, so AC was higher. Reflex was way higher, which was useful against the breath attacks. Will was one lower due to the original having 2 monk levels, but they would be equal at level 13. Fort was several points lower and is really the only part of this build that wasn't a strict improvement.
So it looks like Swashbuckler Rhiana is even scarier, and she's definitely already a bodyguard to be reckoned with in Kingmaker.
That was exciting to read!
Seems that classes like the gunslinger tend to attract playtests where they solo dragons.
That was exciting to read!
Seems that classes like the gunslinger tend to attract playtests where they solo dragons.
Well, no touch ACs involved here! This event randomly happened in our Kingmaker game during our regular play, with our twinked out, all sources allowed cohort friend Rhiana. Everyone else, including the level 14 falchion fighter PC General, was too afraid to enter this contest due to the unknown, but Rhiana styles herself invincible anyway, so she tried it. This was one level 12 character versus two CR 11 dragons.
So what if Rhiana lost agile? She can lower her Wisdom by 2 to get 11 Strength. She loses 1 AC and Will saves but gains pure enhancement on her weapons instead of agile (so +1 AoMF and +3 rapier). All attacks get +1 to hit. Rapier attacks get -5 net to damage (lose 7 Dex when enlarged, gain 1 from Str and 1 enhancement) and unarmed attacks actually lose nothing to damage (lose 7 Dex, gain 1 Str 1 enhancement and avoid 5 DR). One more of her unarmed attacks would have hit the more injured dragon when they both full attacked--I rolled out the damage and got 20, but I lost 25 from 2 crits and one hit with the rapier. So the really really injured dragon would have been conscious for one more round until it went out from bleeding damage (unless it used a Heal check on itself, in which case it wasn't relevantly participating anyway).
Using all the same d20 rolls, the dragons turned out to have never missed by exactly 1, so the lowered AC didn't matter. She still easily made both Frightful Presence saves (I realize I didn't mention them up top).
So she actually didn't need agile to dominate these guys.
By request--Rhiana Flynn versus any type of elder elemental (I've selected earth). Also known as "Rhiana's long day". Once Rhiana flies up into the air, in theory she can just stay there and win a waiting game, but we'll assume she also wants to drive the elementals away so she has up her buffs from last time except a freedom of movement instead of being big.
When fighting defensively using Combat Expertise and in the air, the elementals have trouble hitting Rhiana because of earth mastery. Meanwhile, she's hitting for 1d6+2 after DR due to Precise Strike not working. It took her exactly 32 hits to drop the first elemental. During the requisite time to make that many hits, the elementals did not get more than one hit in the same round, so she riposted all the hits. Then she killed the other one in 31 hits (some of those hits already happened due to ripostes during the first bit of the fight). This actually takes tens of rounds to happen, but it is clearly safe, since Rhiana can leave at any time.
The same thing would have happened with fire elementals (they have lower to-hit which nearly cancels out the whole earth mastery thing). Water elementals are even worse off than the other two. Air elementals have that whirlwind form, which might have been able to do something if she failed a Reflex save, they have the best to-hit of the bunch after masteries are considered, and they have Flyby Attack with solid reach. They would present the biggest threat to Rhiana of any of these guys and would probably win with her listed build.
The original Rhiana wouldn't have fared much better against those elementals. Since she didn't use panache feats randomly on bleeding attacks and such, she had Weapon Specialization, which would be 2 more damage. Even Swash Rhiana could also easily have it--there are numerous feats that are pretty vestigial or fluffy in her build (like the Signature Bleeding, which was just for fun and to try out that deed). So really these elementals were already an equal pain for the existing Aldori Swordlord version of Rhiana; Swashbuckler remains a nearly-full upgrade for her.
You are a monster.
Baby Rhiana versus the oozes:
Baby Rhiana is the level 8 version of Rhiana who loses Signature Deed and the Snake Style feats as well as some gear. Suddenly, she faces off against two black puddings.
She easily won initiative and puts some alchemical bladeguard on her sword while backing up.
Being mindles creatures, the oozes constantly tried to slam, grab, cosntrict on her until they either killed her or died. They took their first turn to run up to her.
Rhiana's first priority was to avoid Grab, which could spell her end, so she started by splitting one of the oozes into two medium and one large ooze. The four oozes attacked and missed her with all attacks.
Rhiana then pommel-slammed one medium ooze, split it into two small oozes, and killed one of the small oozes with a stab (due to the pommel slam, it was below 10 so it didn't split) to regain her panache.
The four oozes missed her on every attack.
Rhiana then did the same to the other medium ooze, killing one of the small oozes she split off this one as well.
The four oozes missed her on every attack.
Rhiana killed both the small oozes.
The two oozes missed her on every attack.
She split the large ooze, pommel-slammed one of the mediums, and then split the medium.
The four oozes missed her on every attack.
She pommeled the other medium and killed both smalls.
The two oozes missed her on every attack.
She split the medium into two smalls and rolled a natural 1 so failed to kill either of them.
One of the four oozes (a small) hit, so she countered the attack with Crane Riposte and killed it.
She killed the other small, then split the huge into two larges.
The two oozes missed with their attacks.
She split one large into mediums, bashed one medium, then split it into smalls.
The four oozes missed with every attack.
She killed both smalls.
The two oozes missed with every attack.
She bashed the medium, split it into smalls, and killed one small.
The large hit her, got Crane Winged and Crane Riposted, and she split it into two mediums.
She bashed one of the mediums, killed the small, and split the bashed medium.
One of the smalls hit her, got Crane Winged and Crane Riposted, and died.
She missed again with another natural 1 but still managed to kill the small and bash the last medium.
The two oozes missed her again.
She split the medium and killed one small.
The other small missed.
She killed it.
Another flawless victory for Rhiana. Swashbuckler here didn't help her compared to Swordlord much (got training faster since Swordlord trades out first weapon training), but it still wasn't weaker even without the precision damage.