Viking build that does something better than a Barbarian?


Advice


I got excited seeing the Viking Archetype in Ultimate Wilderness, becoming really sad to learn it was a tiny errata to the 2013 People of the North book. Ultimate Wilderness errata'd the fighter Viking archetype very slightly, giving it full Barbarian level instead of level-3, also giving you rage at 5th instead of 4th.

Is there anything the Viking can do? You trade away all your class features for less HD, less skill points, same proficiency (losing heavy armor and tower shields), lose out on the Barbarians Fast Movement, Greater/Mighty Rage to eventually use Intimidate as a Move/Swift/Once per round free action, or gain feats instead of Rage Powers.

Consider this trades out everything except for your first three feats, I don't think any Fighter Archetypes are compatible with it. Cornugon Smash requires you to hit an enemy, but it is better than a Swift action at 10th and a Free at 18th.


So the deal is that you can add fighter feats to the barb, thus it's a barb build that has weapon focus, weapon specialization, and greater weapon focus while having beat totem and greater, superstition, reckless abandon, and spellsunder.

Though a barb 1 fighter X does make for a quite similar feel or raging fighter.


I keep forgetting about fighter specific feats. Barb 1 wouldn't give you rage powers, so barb 2/fighter might be needed.

Weapon focus gives me an idea. Is there anything other than fighting defensively, power attack, and combat expertise that a fighter can use to give minus to hit?


They can get AC bonuses from feats like shield focus, dodge, crane style or whatever. Upsetting shield or swordplay styles can give penalties to the enemy. They can intimidate enemies in various ways as noted above. Focusing too heavily on defence can make them ineffective however. What did you have in mind?


I wasn't focusing on defense, just ways to drop to hit. With rage and weapon focus, you could boost your to hit decently.

The idea was to was to trade feats for stats, getting good a.c. for a barbarian, better damage, and similar to hit.

After you get the same base 4-5 rage powers every barbarian gets, you have feats over rage powers.


1 person marked this as a favorite.

Hmm, a TWF Viking seems fun. You could do sword and board even with all the extra little finicky feats and it is appropriate for a viking.


Many of the stronger Rage Powers have minimum Class Level requirements, which Barb2/X multiclasses won't fulfill.
With the updated full level equivalence you can take those (and gain level-scaling Rage Power benefits) at same char level as full Barb.
A Fighter2/Barb will be delayed in that regard, and a Barb2/X is either buying Extra Rage Rounds or tightly rationing their usage of Rage,
which is more inconvenient to use round-by-round than typical rounds/day ability because of the Fatigue after-effect of Rage.

To the question posed: You forgot the scaling Shield AC bonus. This would work well with Unhindering Shield, which coincidentally benefits from Fighter early access (level 4).


SorrySleeping wrote:

I got excited seeing the Viking Archetype in Ultimate Wilderness, becoming really sad to learn it was a tiny errata to the 2013 People of the North book. Ultimate Wilderness errata'd the fighter Viking archetype very slightly, giving it full Barbarian level instead of level-3, also giving you rage at 5th instead of 4th.

Is there anything the Viking can do? You trade away all your class features for less HD, less skill points, same proficiency (losing heavy armor and tower shields), lose out on the Barbarians Fast Movement, Greater/Mighty Rage to eventually use Intimidate as a Move/Swift/Once per round free action, or gain feats instead of Rage Powers.

Consider this trades out everything except for your first three feats, I don't think any Fighter Archetypes are compatible with it. Cornugon Smash requires you to hit an enemy, but it is better than a Swift action at 10th and a Free at 18th.

There are really only two things they can get that Barbarians can't, and that's 1. Fighter Only Feats, and 2. A few bonus feats. Fighter Only feats are largely junk/number crunchers, and a Barbarian's only noteworthy feats are Power Attack and Raging Vitality (which can be done by 1st/3rd level). Anything else is icing on the cake.

You're really just better off being a vanilla Fighter with VMC Barbarian if you're going this route.

You still have plenty of feats to work with, you have a similar/better rage progression that starts earlier than the Viking's does, you maintain all of the typical Fighter goodies (such as proficiencies and armor/weapon training, advanced options), and so on. The only major downfalls is having no Fast Movement (shored up with wearing Heavy Armor without movement penalties), stuck with stupid Uncanny Dodge junk, and delaying Rage Powers all the way to 11th level (but you can still take Extra Rage Power as a feat, meaning Beast Totem and Spell Sunder stuff is still available for lategame shenanigans). You could even tack on a minor archetype (like Mutation Warrior) for even more added ridiculousness.

Community / Forums / Pathfinder / Pathfinder First Edition / Advice / Viking build that does something better than a Barbarian? All Messageboards

Want to post a reply? Sign in.