Divine Marksman Ranger and wands


Rules Questions


So I'm playing an inquisitor of Abadar using crossbows and I'm thinking of a single level dip into Ranger to get access to wands of Gravity Bow and Aspect of the Falcon.

I see the Divine Marksman archetype and it seems great (especially since I'm thinking of going down the Vital Strike chain of feats). But then I see that at level 4 the class loses all spellcasting! Does that mean it won't be able to use a wand of Gravity Bow without investing in UMD?

The rules for spell triggering say that as long as a class can cast the spell it can trigger the spell even if the character itself can't cast spells which leads me to believe that it's fine for a Divine Marksman ranger to carry around a wand of Gravity Bow and use it no problem. I'll run it past my GM of course but I wanted to get some feedback.


Dude you can activate wands without having the spell on your list, you just have to make a spellcraft check. Unless my brain is fartin hard that's how it works. If you really care about casting this one spell reliably, the skill focus (UMD) feat is less wasteful than delaying your already slow spell progression and cool inquisitor abilities.


Rule wise, if the archetype trades out spell then the archetype gets no free pass at activating wands and must UMD it.

Gravity bow is less buffing than divine favor. So I wouldn't try and do anything special for it


Nope, you can't use Wands without UMD check

Spell trigger items can be used by anyone whose class can cast the corresponding spell. This is the case even for a character who can't actually cast spells, such as a 3rd-level paladin.

If you don't get Spellcasting, you can't cast spell, therefore can't use Wands without UMD.


You can't use the wands without UMD, but the good news is that gravity bow is almost never worth it.

You spend a standard action to activate the wand and your damage goes from 1d8 to 1d10 (for an average increase of 1 damage).

If you have rapid shot and instead just made a full round attack you will cause 2d8 + modifiers in damage.

At higher levels when you have lots of damage bonuses about from bane, judgments, enhancement bonuses, multiple attacks from BAB, etc the slight damage bonus from gravity bow is rather worthless. It's only valuable if you know you're about to walk into a fight and can cast ahead of time, but doesn't last long enough that you could cast it at the start of dungeon.

Aspect of the Falcon is a good spell, but you're honestly much better off just casting Divine Favor or another buff spell on your Inquisitor list. While the increase crit range is attractive, spending an action in combat to do it still isn't worth it.

I will also go ahead and mention that using a bow would be a much better idea than using a crossbow, since crossbow requires you to get rapid reload just to fire it every round and doesn't qualify for use with Manyshot. That being said, I'm assuming you chose the crossbow for thematic reasons, which is ok. Just wanted to point out that it is worse from an optimization stand point.


Claxon wrote:
You spend a standard action to activate the wand and your damage goes from 1d8 to 1d10 (for an average increase of 1 damage).

Damage Dice Progression FAQ

1d8->2d6 (+2.5 average damage)

Divine Favor is still better, though.


Boo-urns.

Well one of the reasons I'm thinking of Gravity Bow is that I'm using a heavy crossbow and I'm planning on basically making one awesomely damaging ranged attack per round.

So with Gravity bow the 1d10 -> 2d8 which is a pretty nice bump

Then Vital Strike 2d8 -> 4d8

And 4d8 is mighty nice! Especially when I throw on Inquisitor buffs It's certainly not optimized (other than things like getting through DR) but it's very viable and it's cool to have one killer bolt per round.

Hell if I can get Enlarge Person on myself which might not be very hard AND use oversized bolts AND Vital Strike, then I'm getting into 6d8 territory!

Since I was going to be making one attack per round anyway Bullseye shot would have been a fairly useful bonus. Plus it seems like I'm in a humanoid heavy campaign and so favored enemy and a nice extra bump to BAB are all extras that make the dip attractive.

Maybe just go vanilla ranger unless there's another archetype?


Azih wrote:
Boo-urns.

I said boo-urns!


lv8 inquisitor vital striking 4d8+2+2d6, in two rounds.
lv8 Inquisitor full attacking after 1 round of buffing with bow is 1d8+2+2d6+str+2divine favor X2 on the first shot, same damage and attack on second, and 1 with same damage but at -5. If the first and another hit it's 3d8+12+6d6+3*str

Or my preferred route
lv8 full attacking r1 with bow is 1d8+2+2d6+str X2 on the first shot, same damage and attack on second, and 1 with same damage but at -5. If the first and another hit both times it's 6d8+12+12d6+6*str

so you're welcome to go this route, just know that this is the type of damage you're trading away.


Azih wrote:

Boo-urns.

Well one of the reasons I'm thinking of Gravity Bow is that I'm using a heavy crossbow and I'm planning on basically making one awesomely damaging ranged attack per round.

So with Gravity bow the 1d10 -> 2d8 which is a pretty nice bump

Then Vital Strike 2d8 -> 4d8

And 4d8 is mighty nice! Especially when I throw on Inquisitor buffs It's certainly not optimized (other than things like getting through DR) but it's very viable and it's cool to have one killer bolt per round.

Hell if I can get Enlarge Person on myself which might not be very hard AND use oversized bolts AND Vital Strike, then I'm getting into 6d8 territory!

Since I was going to be making one attack per round anyway Bullseye shot would have been a fairly useful bonus. Plus it seems like I'm in a humanoid heavy campaign and so favored enemy and a nice extra bump to BAB are all extras that make the dip attractive.

Maybe just go vanilla ranger unless there's another archetype?

This is a really terrible plan, no offense.

I know those big dice numbers seem like they're great, but 6d8 is only 27 damage on average. Now sure you'll have bane and judgement to add to that damage too, but consider that the person using a light crossbow will be able to make 2+ shots a round with bane and judgement. Bane along is 2d6, not even counting when it becomes Greater Bane. With Greater Bane and Rapid Shot you're looking at 3 attacks each attack having 4d6 extra damage. With a bow and Manyshot, thats 4 arrows for 16d6 damage from Greater Bane alone. Now add it Deadly Aim, that's +6 damage per arrow, for 24 damage. Add in enhancement bonus, lets say a +3 (but actually it's a +5 because bane adds to your enhancement), that's 20 damage. Lets add divine favor, +3 damage per attack, 12 damage. Inquisitors can add so much damage per attack its ridiculous.

The way you do a lot of damage with ranged attack is by having as many of them as humanly possible. Vital Strike and a Heavy Crossbow is really one of the worst builds possible from an optimization standpoint. Hell you need get Rapid Reload and Crossbow Mastery feats just to be able to shoot, move, reload. You could get by with just Rapid Reload if you want to only have 1 shot a round and want to always spend your move action on reloading.

Consider instead that if you just used a bow you don't need feats to improve reload speed, it's already a free action. And then you can get things like Manyshot, which give you more arrows for damage.

Liberty's Edge

Claxon wrote:
This is a really terrible plan, no offense.

It works fine at low levels when you'd only be getting one or two attacks anyway. However, it falls behind as the number of attacks goes up.

Still, I would eventually like to see an entire party with builds like this (and Startoss style, Great Cleave, et cetera) and a 12th level Sensei Monk of the Four Winds with plenty of ki recycling. Group 'Slow Time' for three standard actions would be a ludicrous amount of damage in a single round.

Though... how said party would survive from ~6th through 11th levels, I have no idea. :]


By the time a character reaches BAB 6, it's untenable compared to using a bow with rapid shot and many shot as you have 4 arrows worth of damage.

For an Inquisitor that's level 8. Even before that though, when you only have enough BAB for 1 attack and rapid shot you're still looking a string of modifiers where the damage is likely to be about same total damage.

Basically, I could see doing it if you knew the game would end at level 7, because you would be about as effective as a character built in another manner. After that you're effectiveness drops dramatically.


*sigh*, well it's more of a RP campaign than a numbers campaign so I think I'll go ahead with what I'm doing. The flavour of both the class and the god really really pushes towards a xbow wielder.

Plus if I do need to move and shoot than Vital Strike suddenly becomes amazing.

There doesn't seem to really be any other way of buffing xbows that wouldn't be better for bows anyway.


an extra 1d10 at lv 8+ doesn't sound amazing.
But good luck, I hope that you don't get frustrated with the xbow.

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