Advice for an optimum build. Please help!

[Whos_That]

I have been playing DnD for the better part of twenty years and we have fallen in LOVE with pathfinder! Have been playing for around three years now. We came back to a game we stopped and are currently 16th level, almost 17th now. It is meshing forgotten realms and pathfinder, and is a powerful game. All PC's begin with straight 18s and Templates are open from 3.5 as well as feats and prestige classes from a multitude of sources.

We currently have:
A monk/rogue(dealing 2d10 base with 16d10 sneak attack)

A Stalker/mage killer(Path of War) who is melee/anti caster

A straight fighter with roll with it(feat) x6 giving him dr 12/-(the tank)

And a whojimawhatsit. Level dip 1-2 levels 8 times a skill whore whom has several templates and is close to nigh-invulnerable.

I am needing a character idea to come in with. I have ideas for a nightcrawler esk character(bipedal blink dog/shade with telflammar shadowlord. Full attacking several times a round with flurry as a monk)
My problem is that I absolutely LOVE melee dex based characters and that seems to be all I end up playing because I know them soo well.

I am looking for a powerful(even broken) idea to compete with other players<I do not want to be left in the dust> I saw the harrower for example and LOVE the flavor, but only 10/day and only 3 cards per draw seems....weak to put it bluntly
If it was a full harrow(9 cards) it would be awesome. Shoot me with your awesome ideas left and right, regardless of how rediculous or broken they may be!

[B.A. Ironskull]

Summoner gets you the blink-dog thing over there, so long as you choose your evolutions and spells appropriately. Should fit in nicely with the rest of the crew.

[Whos_That]

I was mainly looking for other ideas for characters outside of the two I had mentioned. I had contemplated amalguming(advanced bestiary) a Dregoloth and a decanter goblin for some unknown reason

[laarddrym]

any archer build is stupid powerful at level 17, whether you go fighter, monk zen archer or ranger.

if you want to go with a nightcrawler type, i'd recommend 12 levels of monk for abundant step, take endurance in there to qualify for horizon walker, take 3 levels of horizon walker (astral plane terrain dominance) and you'll get dim door 3+wis mod times per day JUST from horizon walker, let alone blowing ki points for abundant step from monk. from level 12 onward spend your feats on the dimensional agility/assault/dervish/etc line. go all out wisdom with a Guided monk weapon (or amulet of might fists w/ guided property) and you'll also get to add your wisdom bonus to your to-hit and damage rolls.

that way, even if your wis is "only" +6, you'd get 9/day dim door from horizon walker, plus 6/day abundant step (i.e. dim door) from spending monk ki points. take Medusa's Wrath as your monk bonus feat at level 10, and you get an extra 2 attacks/round with no prerequisites when you successfully stunning fist an NPC on your first hit. (heck, just to make sure Medusa's Wrath works, take weapon focus unarmed strike along with mantis style and mantis wisdom feats)

[Whos_That]

Alot of people seem to like the nightcrawler aspect. Shade template gives d door as a move action every other round so I was debating monk 9, telflammar shadow lord 5 shade. I also just read up on the warpriest. Using 4 feats from AEG FEATS it would give my favored weapon(also my sacred weapon) +4 keen, mighty cleaving, icy/flaming/shocking burst, thundering, and holy that STACKS with everything else(including enhancement bonuses.) that combined with the fact that you are considered full BaB with that weapon and allows for 6th level spells is just angry

[Corvino]

The party doesn't seem to have a full caster, from what I can see. I know you prefer Dex-based melee, but not having a God wizard could hurt. With straight 18s you could make nasty use of a Cleric or Druid as a joint caster and melee powerhouse, or an early-entry Mystic Theurge for a huge breadth of casting power.

[Goddanttillus]

use my monk idea hungry ghost and master of many styles with qinggong and monk vows these arch types stack up legitly and u want to get dragon style with ur monk bonus feat and crane style with ur level one character feat if ur a human get deflect arrow or dodge. then at second level ur bonus monk feat is dragon ferocity letting u qualify for elemental fist as a four wind monk third level character feat is tiger style. fifth level feat is tiger claws and six level bonus monk feat is one of the elemental fist style feats whatever one u want to be doing ur 7th level character feat is elemental fist and the one ability u get to change slow fall and jump can be switched for a Ki arrow and deny death at 7th level ur ki arrow is gonna hit like a hammer and ur double first strike for dragon tiger style is gonna be totaling 2d8 plus 40ish depending on how high ur strength gets 22 is perfect giving u a 2d8 plus 36 take heavy hitter trait for one more damage and indomitable faith for the will save bonus After that when ur level 14 or 17 ur gonna be using 4 styles at once crane dragon tiger and snapping turtle so with a 25 point character u can have average ac fighting defensively round 26 to 28 depending on ur wisdom and dex. Plus there a lot of decent spells the monks qinggong archtype opens up. Ur not running outta Ki every kill ur steal ki and life with the hungry ghost so u have staying power. That elemental fist is gonna be 4 or 5d6 of ur chose of element and ur gonna get a little breath weapon with those style feats. No prestige classing needed. Though dragon disciple is open since u can cast spontaneous level 1 spells. horizon walker is also open depending on ur feat selection and so will shadow dancer those are the top 3 to pick from i lean hard to the horizon walker grants u a lot of good resistances when u master the terrain on them.

Good luck friend see how they handle a hard hitting monk.

[Magda Luckbender]

If you want to be a martial combatant I second the archer suggestion. Any martial type will do outrageous ranged damage. By 17th level Zen Archer is probably the most powerful. I wonder at what level a Zen Archer is first able to complete Beastmass? 16th?

Your group is utterly lacking any kind of full caster. If you want to really power-up your game you need a Wizard, Sorcerer, Cleric, or Druid. Note that such reality-shifting abilities will dramatically boost the other PCs as well. A 17th level Wizard gets 9th level arcane spells, which are the epitome of power in Pathfinder ...

Finally, your group seems to also be missing a support & damage mitigation specialist. An archery bard would inflict big archery damage and also buff everyone else's martial attacks ...

[Deadmanwalking]

Full-caster is solid.

For the Nightcrawler thing, the Dimensional Dervish feat-line is very solid, as is the Magus class, IMO...though if really going Blink-Dog as a race, you could manage it as any Class.

[Scott Wilhelm]

Be a Thri Kreen from the Expanded Psionic Handbook: natural attack 4 claws 1d4! If you start with straight 18s, your stats will be

ST 20; Mod +5
In 16; 3
Wis 20; 5
Dex 22; 6
Con 18; 4
Cr 14; 2

Take levels in Monk. Take Feral Combat Training. Take Monastic Legacy. Take Improved Natural Attack. If you take 4 levels in Monk, by level 12, your unarmed damage will be 1d10, raised by INA to 2d8.

If you take Improved Natural Attack by taking 2 levels in Ranger, you can use wands with ranger spells. Look at Strong Jaw, which will make you do damage as if you are 2 sizes bigger. Once size really, because it will sadly not stack with INA. Look at Lockjaw, which will give you the Grab Ability. If you wear armor with spikes, you will do an extra 1d6 + bonuses for 13 of your attacks every round!

Be a Master of Many Styles. Take Snake Style, Snake Fang, and Combat Reflexes. You will then have an attack of opportunity build with 7 AoOs/round!

Take a level (or more) in Fighter with the Unarmed Archetype. Take Panther Claw, and you can get an additional 5 free-action attacks. Since you get those attacks by provoking attacks of opportunity, it will make sense to take Dodge and Mobility to give yourself an extra +5 to AC, expecially since it will stack with Snake Fang which will grant you an unarmed AoO every time an attack misses.

If you already have Mobility, Take Elusive Target from the 3.5 book The Complete Warrior. Every time an opponent misses his AoO provoked by your moving out of a threatened square, you may take a free trip attempt. If you are allowed to take the 3.5 version of Improved Trip, you get another free action attack with every successful trip. Carry a tripping weapon with you so you can avoid being tripped by a catastrophic roll in your own trip attempt. I like sickles and kamas, because they are small and cheap. You can carry a lot of them, and you lose 1 or 2 of them without missing them. Also, it's even awesomer when you are flanked. Look for it.

[Whos_That]

So I have suggestions for a monk an am archer, and alot of people saying god wizard, is that a specific build? Not knowing casters that well puts me at a disadvantage for playing one. Any suggestions for good stuff to take? Take note we used to have a spell warp sniper with an aoe twinned chained repeating scorching ray dealing 10d10 extra sneak attack damage. And he got toasted.

[Gregory Connolly]

An elf wizard with teleportation subscool and bloatmage would be really nasty. Wizard 7/ Bloatmage 10 gives level 9 spells for Time Stop. Form of the Dragon spells give you a nice natural attacking form. Your party has no casters and not filling the hole is gonna have consequences. As others have suggested Cleric and Druid are solid choices as well.

[Whos_That]

My wife seems to think a non melee caster would benefit me as well and has suggested cleric. Are there any good build suggestions or prestige classes I should be aware of? No heal bots, I can sluff for those.

[Scott Wilhelm]

There is not a lot of advice necessary for being a optimized and awesome wizard and cleric. Those are the 2 easiest classes to play over a campaign.

I recommend being a Mystic Theurge, a Cerebromancer, or maybe even both. If you start at level 1 as a Tiefling Cleric with the Trickery Domain, you already can cast a level 2 cleric spell, Mirror Image and a level 2 wizard spell, Darkness. You may become a Level 1 Cleric/2 Wizard/1 Mystic Theurge.

At level 1 Cleric/2 Wizard, you will be casting Darkness as a level 3 Tiefling and will qualify for the Arcane Armor Training Feat, which will allow you to wear armor with up to a 10% Arcane Failure Rate with a 0% chance of failure. The best 2 armors you can wear without suffering any AF chance will then be Mithril Kikko Armor and Darkleaf Cloth Lamellar Leather armor.

I've been playing a lot of PFS lately, so I haven't been looking at psionics for a while, so I don't know how any FAQs written in the last several years interact with quickly becoming a Cerebromancer Wizard/Psion. At the time, I didn't think it paid off to become a Mystic Theurge/Cerebromancer, but it might now. It is an intoxicating idea though.

[Scott Wilhelm]

Whos_That wrote:

So I have suggestions for a monk an am archer, and alot of people saying god wizard, is that a specific build? Not knowing casters that well puts me at a disadvantage for playing one. Any suggestions for good stuff to take? Take note we used to have a spell warp sniper with an aoe twinned chained repeating scorching ray dealing 10d10 extra sneak attack damage. And he got toasted.

I wouldn't worry too much about not being experienced with playing casters. I think Clerics are the easiest classes to play and wizards are the 2nd easiest. I'm the only one I know with this opinion, but hear me out.

The basis of a fighter's power is assembling special combinations of a small number of feats and class abilities to devastating effect, and once you choose what levels you take in what and which feats you select this time, you can't undo any of your choices.

The basis of a cleric's power is a huge list of spells that he can change his mind about every day. A wizard has to learn every individual spell before he can use it, but there is no upper limit for how many spells he can learn, so a wizard will have an enormous list of spells to shop from every day, too.

You will be able to learn as you go with your cleric or wizard, and mistakes you make will be minor and/or easily fixable.

[Gregory Connolly]

The prepared casters are generally regarded as the best roughly in the order Wizard, Cleric, Druid, Witch; but it is a specific play style. I find the easiest characters to play depend on preference. Some people want the character to have lots of versatility while others want the most effective one trick pony they can build.

[Scott Wilhelm]

My ThriKreen build advice, pt2

If you take 5 levels in Inquisitor, you can Bane all your claws and do an extra 2d6/claw. You also can get Solo Tactics and a Teamwork Feat. And if you pick the wrong Teamwork Feat, as an Inquisitor, you can change it. Teamwork feats can be devastating. You can take Broken Wing Gambit and give yourself an extra Attack of Opportunity that will stack against the same opponents you are using Snake Fang and Panther Claw on. You can give yourself precision damage.

Also, you are an experienced melee character who is thinking of developing some spellcasting ability. This lets you do both.

In Pathfinder, it's been FAQed that gauntlets are Light Weapons and can't be enchanted in a way that stacks with Unarmed damage. In 3.5, that's not the case. Ask your DM about enchanted gauntlets. Take Master Craftsman or Ancestral Relic (Book of Exalted Deeds). Get Adamantine +1 Shatterspike Gauntlets of the Titans. Do triple damage against inanimate objects. Then take Great Sunder, and the residual +21 tripled damage goes to the opponent. The 3.0 version of Improved Sunder lets you do double damage against your opponents' weapons. That will semi stack with 'of the Titans, quadruple damage, not hextuple, but better than triple. Deadly Concussion lets you damage your opponent simultaneously with his shield. So that makes it Octuple damage. Take Combat Brute (Complete Warrior), and get a free attack every time you destroy your enemy's thing. That could raise your attacks/round from 16 to 32.

Take Knockdown, from Sword and Fist. With every attack that does more than 10 points of damage, you will get a free Trip attempt. That will raise your attacks/round from 32 to 48. Take Pushback, which gives you a free Bull Rush with every hit. Take Greater Bull Rush and give everybody an attack of opportunity with every bull rush. Take Paired Opportunist and you get the AoO, too. Take Shock Trooper. Whenever you bull rush 1 opponent into another, you get a free trip attempt against both. I'm not sure, but I think we're up to 80 attacks/round that each do at least 8(3d8+3d6+5).

If you take 4 levels in Alchemist, you will gain access to an extract called Alchemal Allocation. That lets you use any potion without actually consuming it, effectively giving you access to every spell of every class that can be made into a potion! I like Shield Other. Use Shared Spells to have your familiar cast Alchemal Allocation and use a potion Shield Other on you. Now you and it will split half damage, and the Familiar enjoys Fast Healing 5, sort of effectively doubling your hit points. A Dex Mutagen will give you 2 more attacks of opportunity/round. A St mutagen will give you +2 damage/attack. You'll have some math to do.

So what's your DPR? Something like 18,000 well before level 16.

Developing Powerful Grappling is not expensive. Greater Grapple will let you Grapple and Tie Up your opponent in 1 Standard Action an 1 Move Action. 2 Levels in Cavalier will give you Expert Captor which will relieve you of the -10 to Tie Up an opponent without Pinning Him first. Take 1 level in Alchemist and cast True Strike on yourself as a Standard Action to give your first Grapple Check a +20. Take a 2nd level in Alchemist and give yourself a Tentacle with the Grab ability and a +4 on all checks. Take 4 levels in Quinngong Monk (Master of Many Styles) and give yourself True Strike as a Ki Power that can be activated as a Swift Action. At Level 4 Monk, you can get a King Crab Familiar and give yourself an extra +2 on all your Grapple Checks.

[Scott Wilhelm]

Deadmanwalking wrote:

Full-caster is solid.

For the Nightcrawler thing, the Dimensional Dervish feat-line is very solid, as is the Magus class, IMO...though if really going Blink-Dog as a race, you could manage it as any Class.

The cheapest route to effective Dimensional Dervishing I have found is to acquire an intelligent magic item with Dimension Door. It has been ruled in the FAQ that only the spellcaster is unable to act after DimDooring. Passengers are unaffected.

There is also the Ring of Transposition.

[Whos_That]

I have decided on going cleric, however I will be multiclassing wizard and going mystic theurge. Because of the lack of 10 levels, I will lose out on alot of channel. There is a phylactery that adds 2d6, question to you folks....would it stack? If I made the item in say, a glove slot, then a bracer? My gm said to ask because there is no spell required or emulated and it doesn't give a bonus type(deflection luck etc)

[Corvino]

Losing 10 levels of channeling will pretty much relegate it to something you do out of combat to top up HP pools. Trying to use Channel in combat with a Mystic Theurge is a hiding to nothing, items or not.

[Dennis Deadsky]

You requested an optimal build, so first impulse is to direct you away from Mystic Theurge. Multi-classing usually weakens a full caster. However, the newish 'early entry' approach to Mystic Theurge might be pretty optimal. Compare:

17th level Wizard - Cast the most powerful spells in the game. e.g. Time Stop.

17th level Cleric or Druid - Cast the most powerful divine spells in the game, and has a host of other abilities. Can be both an extremely effective martial combatant and a powerful caster.

17th level Sorcerer - Cast up through 8th level arcane spells, lots of spell slots, lots of spells known, and advanced bloodline powers are on line.

17th level 'early entry' Mystic Theurge (Wizard-6 / Cleric-1 / Mystic Theurge 10 ) - cast spells like a 16th level wizard, and also cast spells like an 11th level Cleric (Heal spell!).

17th level 'regular' mystic Theurge (Wizard-4/ Cleric-3/ Mystic Theurge 10) - Cast spells like a 14th level Wizard and an 11th level Cleric. Quite weak, for 17th level, except from the perspective of a party lacking any full casters.

With all that martial power in the party, Bardsong would be immensely helpful. Too bad it's not really an option.

[nate lange]

this is something that's being debated elsewhere on the forums, but a strong argument can be made for the following build (which, given everything you've said, i have to think your DM will allow):

17th level 'awesome' mystic theurge (wiz 2/cl 1/MT 4/evangelist 10)- cast spells like a 16th level wizard and also cast spells as a 15th level cleric, plus get divine boons and what not.

[Deadmanwalking]

nate lange wrote:

this is something that's being debated elsewhere on the forums, but a strong argument can be made for the following build (which, given everything you've said, i have to think your DM will allow):

17th level 'awesome' mystic theurge (wiz 2/cl 1/MT 4/evangelist 10)- cast spells like a 16th level wizard and also cast spells as a 15th level cleric, plus get divine boons and what not.

That's...really pretty clearly not allowed. Mystic Theurge has no levels above ten and the rules don't allow for extrapolating them, so you can't get more than 10 levels of dual casting.

Also, Evangelist loses a caster level, so you'd be casting at 15th/14th not 16th/15th, which is quite a bit worse, IMO.

[nate lange]

that is worse, and i had forgotten that- thanks for pointing it out.

regarding the issue of going over 10 levels... like i said, it is being debated. its a bit stickier than just "the rules don't allow for extrapolating them"- if you take 1 level of MT and then 10 of evangelist you haven't extrapolated anything; then if you resume taking MT levels the PrC is very clear that "When a new mystic theurge level is gained, the character gains new spells per day as if he had also gained a level in any one arcane spellcasting class he belonged to before he added the prestige class and any one divine spellcasting class he belonged to previously." you couldn't extrapolate anything else, but as long as your gaining MT levels your casting goes up.

is that RAI? no, I can't imagine it is.
is it RAW, for now? it seems (to me and some others) like it probably is.
is it pure cheese? yes, absolutely- but that seems to be kind of what the OP is looking for.