Druid / Ranger gestalt. Replace one with hunter?


Advice


Background: my character comes from a tribe of natives who all have wolf animal companions. The size of the wolf is a status symbol in among the tribe.

One of my characters is a Ranger/Druid gestalt character built around having multiple animal companions. Each class uses the extra animal companion archetype (packlord/beastmaster) and he has three wolves all with different skillsets (flanker, guardian, damage).

Outside of the animal companions he is a switch hitter type character. The druid side of the character isn't really being utilized. I was thinking of switching out druid entirely for hunter (likely packmaster). I'm not sure what I really gain for doing this though. What are the mechanical benefits of hunter in this situation?

How would you build this character?

I don't remember stats of the top of my head, but they are pretty high (rolled array for the whole campaign, lowest stat is likely 14). I know I've taken power attack, 3x boon companion (he is human). I wish I had the character sheet in front of me to give more details.

Grand Lodge

You'd have to check with your GM about how stacking AC levels for multiple ACs across different classes should work. I would assume that mutiple gestalt classes with the same ability wouldn't work.

But in principle, you're getting a pretty big buff to all of your ACs: an Animal Focus buff (+2 Str for example) and multiple teamwork feats. Giving your wolves Outflank, Coordinated Trip, and Escape Route at 6th for example. They can move directly into flanking from Escape Route, and roll twice on all their trip attempts. Paired Opportunists plus Snake Focus at 8th is +8 to AoOs when the enemy stands up.

Grand Lodge

Pathfinder PF Special Edition, Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber

Gestalt isn't covered by the rules at all. So it pretty much depends on how much you are going to try to sneak past your GM, and how much your GM is going to allow you to get away with it.

I would not allow two identical abilities to stack in most cases, I would rule them as overlapping.

I would strongly suggest that you simply stick with your Druid/Ranger gestalt which as it is, IS an extremely powerful and versatile build.


We ruled that both classes get their animal companion sense you could get an animal companion class and another pet class (like summoner). With the extra pet archetypes (beastmaster, packmaster, pack lord) you can get more pets. With the 2 archetypes we decided to add up the effective druid levels as a pool for dividing among the animal companions. At level 8 Druid/Ranger this is 13, or 3 4th level pets and a 1st level pet. After the 4 boon companion feats the 4th level pets are 8th level. I have 1 left over level I could use on a scout or something, but I haven't. -All of this will be the same if I switch to hunter

Hunter, the packmaster archetype, specifically says that the abilities can only buff one pet at a time (or 2 at a time counting against uses per day at 8th). So, one of the wolves will get the hunter's bonus.

Also instead of taking a teamwork feat (every three levels) I could increase the number of wolves that get the teamwork feats for free, effectively costing 2 of the bonus feats to effect all of the wolves.

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