I am looking at building a fighter that uses a spiked chain and wants to be more about battlefield control than just damage or tank. I was thinking of trying to do stuff with trip and opportunity attacks etc. Any thoughts or suggestions?
Here are some feats you should look at...
Felling Smash
Combat Patrol
Greater Trip
Cornugon Trip
1. Be a Half-Orc for the Chain-Fighter racial to obtain Spiked Chain proficiency.
2. Best archetype out there for combat maneuvers still is the Lore Warden, but for trip specifically I think you should go for Molthuni Defender as it allows you to "keep" armor training for Armor Mastery feats and the Advanced Armor Training feat.
3. Since you "have" Armor Training (via the non-replacement of the Molthuni Defender), you can take the Imposing Bearing/Poised Bearing feats to count as larger size so you can trip even larger creatures.
4. The Defender of Society trait is always a given, but you'd also enjoy from the Snowstride trait to count as even larger for trips. (Imposing Bearing makes you count as two sizes larger, Snowstride lets you trip enemies two sizes larger than you, which means you could trip COLOSSAL creatures. It may be a little bit of overkill though.
5. The Lore Warden archetype CAN take the Armor Mastery feats too by spending a feat on Armor Focus, which is not too bad. The downside is that it does shut you down from Advanced Armor Training, removes one point of Bravery (which is pretty good with the Armed Bravery option of Advanced Weapon Training), and loses medium/heavy armor proficiency.
6. Since you don't want to be useless against flying creatures, I recommend focusing on a second combat maneuver such as Dirty Trick to affect them.
Your going to want UMD for a few wands(enlarge person, grease, etc)
There was a classic 3.5 build for this. Should be able to google that for a few hints
Brawler works great as a class for martial control types. The ability to get the feats you need when necessary is nice and flat bonuses to combat maneuvers helps alot. Barbarians have a few rage powers worth looking at. Monk has an archetype specifically for combat maneuvers and many monk weapons have the trip attribute
Deugar get enlarge person once per day. Orcs get that lovely strength +4.
For magic armor Righteous/Titanic Armor, Gauntlet of Skilled Maneuvers, Mask of the Giants, and a few Anchoring Weapons
Make sure to up your CMD as well to hit acrobatics people
Enlarge is not needed for Fighters who can just pick up Poised/Imposing Bearing.
Where is molthuni fighter archtype located?
I think it's called Border Defender in d20pfsrd.
It's rather underwhelming, but a small bonus to CMB while keeping effective Armor Training (for Poised/Imposing Bearing) and Weapon Training (for all the cool AWT options) is probably the smartest this side of Lore Warden.
You mention Imposing Bearing and Poised Bearing, what source are they from and where are they hiding on d20pfsrd?
They are from Armor Master's Handbook, which doesn't appear to be on d20pfsrd at the moment.
There are some things from that book up there, but it seems like not everything. A little vexing...
Yea I tried looking for those feats too but couldn't find them on the d20 site, or on the archives of nethys
Poised Bearing (Armor Mastery)
Your armor’s weight gives you stable footing.
Prerequisites: Base attack bonus +6 or fighter level 4th, armor training class feature, proficiency with medium or heavy armor.
Benefit: You treat your size as one category larger for the purposes of determining the size of creatures against which you can attempt bull rush, drag, overrun, and trip combat maneuvers.
Imposing is the same but BAB +11 or Fighter 8th, and counts as two sizes.
Just a reminder because it's not always obvious if only relying on D20PFSRD for rules information: in order to benefit from the Armor Mastery feats gotta be wearing the type of armor listed in the proficiency prereqs, those that don't list a armor proficiency prereq can be used while wearing any armor. Need to wear medium or heavy for Poised Bearing and Imposing Bearing would need heavy armor.
Interesting. Now, those feats won't change your CMB/CMD, right? They just matter to that "You can do this to a creature one size bigger than you, or smaller" rule.
Thanks.
Yep, exactly. Planning to use them for my Siegebreaker Fighter if my Monk dies soon.
Are you sure imposed bearing and snowstrider stack?
Are you sure imposed bearing and snowstrider stack?
according to the wordings they should. poised bearing treats your size as one larger; snowstride increases the number of size categories larger than you that you can trip/bull rush from one to two.
Yeah, snowstride says "you may trip creatures that are up to two sizes larger than you" and bearing says "you count as one size larger"
Dipping a few levels of maneuver master monk (like 1-4 levels) might be worthwhile too. You can get an extra trip during a full attack and an unarmed strike so that you can stack vicious stomp with greater trip.
Also, I'm not sure what category snow stride is but bred for war is race trait (for humans) that's good for this too.