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So I'm quite saddened by the absence of Prestigious Spellcaster as an option not being legal in PFS outside of potentially some chronicle in the future and I'd like to take some time to think about the implications of Prestigious Spellcaster as a feat.

I really enjoyed it from a mechanical perspective, since it brings life to prestige classes which normally would not see any play. Normally, taking a prestige class with caster levels missing is very bad for spellcasting classes and shouldn't even be considered... So I'd like to see what kind of shinnanigans this feat inspires.

I'd like to keep this balanced and in perspective - I'm going to post comparison characters, one obvious Prestigious Spellcaster builds with and another few which are benchmark "baseline" characters. My contention is that this feat is potentially balanced - there is a real drawback for spending 2-3 feats keeping your caster level up. It costs you metamagic feats, or 2-4 spell DCs because you don't take Spell Focus / Greater Spell Focus.

The argument isn't, "Hey, look at all these broken characters, ban them all." it's rather, that if you maximize out Prestigious Spellcaster, you really don't get anything different than any other character that you try to min-max and therefore there is nothing to be really feared by Prestigious Spellcaster in particular.

To that end, I would like to focus on things which break the game or are un-fun with the feat, or ones which could significantly disrupt play in a PFS setting.

I'm going to start the ball rolling:
Sorc 5 / Dragon Disciple 7
- Takes 3 feats to regain 2 levels of missed spellcasting.
- Spends the first round of combat turning into a nasty monster - this is a drawback, since you start functioning on turn 2 if set upon. Not great inititive either.
- With Monsterous Physique 3, can be a huge creature and in mu build does 6x +22 / 2d6+20, which is 163 dmg if all hits.
- Lots of hitpoints (148)
- 22 AC - Low, for a frontliner, but can use Mirror Image. AC 26 with Shield is still low.
- 1 skill rank per level with dumped INT. In order to get good numbers, WIS and INT were dumped. Numbers will be much worse with more reasonable stats. Character is the poster child for Multi Attribute Dependent.
- Great utility. Can't take any wizard spells which allow a save, but takes other ones, like Dispel Magic, Overland Flight and the like.
- OK saves. Not great, just OK.
- Link to this character. Character shown WITH heroism, Mage Armor and Shield applied, although Shield would likely not be applied
- Did a silly Empower Spell + Additional Traits, metamagic thing with Snowball, but it is not central to the build Perhaps there are 2 better feats which could be taken.
- Can grab a creature, then die to that same creature's full round, since grabbing creatures does not prevent them from killing you with natural attacks
- Character shown at level 12, with 123k gold buy.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6Ug94GF4k-uSW9tRGdRRTA1ZFE/view?usp=shari ng
- I have the feeling that I could jostle something around and get around 65 damage with a quickened, intensified snowball - but I think the issue here is that the to-hit would be fairly bad, since the character has +1 dex mod. If the character gets engaged, it won't hit on -8.

Comparison Character:
Level 12 Warpriest:
- +23/+23/+23/+18 1d8+14 on turn 1 (swift action divine favor), which is 73 damage or so on all hits
- Turn 2, swift action Sacred Weapon on, then it's 1d8+14+2d6, which is around 100 damage on all hits
- Turn 3, Channel Vigor for +4 competence bonus to hit
- AC 28, 32 after Shield of Faith, 34 after sacred armor. Much better potential for late game armor, since he can cast spells in armor and therefore pouring money into armor is not bad. A different character who started as an archer would buy Celestial Armor.
- Can swift action summon Ankyosaurus to stun the enemy with DC 25 fort saves. Can do it again as a standard action.
- 99 hps, but can swift cast healing on himself..
- Saves: +18/+19+18, so a little better than the above.
- Since he's an archer, he does not need to be where the fighting is.
- Can Beacon of Luck as a swift actions for better saves.. Or Freedom of Movement.
- Also has 1 skill point per level.
- Character shown with 120.5k buy
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6Ug94GF4k-ua1MzMF9GbzB4SVk/view?usp=shari ng

Comparison Character:
Level 12 CRB Fighter Archer
- +23/+23/+23/+18/+12 (first shot is 2 arrows), at 1d8+23+2d6 vs evil. So best case 7 x 34 against some evil barbarian who I hit with all iteratives, (238 dmg, with no crits)
- Bad will save, OK other saves. Could buy some more stuff to help against Will
- No endgame against Grapples. Hopefully someone can help you out by Freedom of Movementing you
- Goes first a decent amount of the time.
- Didn't buy a Heartseeker enchant or a Cyclonic enchant, so damage is high, but ways around it abound.
- Damage is 100% walking around damage - no buffs except boots of speed, so you win inititive and the enemy is dead.
- Easy to bypass DR with clustered shots.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6Ug94GF4k-uOW9OVU8wZ1hfcFE/view?usp=shari ng

Comparison Character:
Level 12 Half-Orc Blight Druid of Urgothoa:
- +22 / +17, 2d4+28+2d6 = ~ 40 (with no haste), 120 hps / rd per hit hasted
- 38 AC, which is respectable with no wild tower shield since we're two-handing a weapon.
- 111 hps, which is OK, since you've got a massive number of hps coming from divine fighting techniques
- 9 levels of spellcasting for the class
- Can glide through the ground and gets tremorsense
- Good Will and Fort, meh Reflex.
- (PFS legal) - Uses Divine Fighting to get a tons of Temp HPs by hitting people with a scythe as a huge earth elemental, sometimes from underground.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6Ug94GF4k-uOVNpRS1fYmZVc28/view?usp=shari ng
- This character is a funny one, but CRB Druid is just fine and doesn't stack up entirely differently than this character... Just trying to add a little flavor. CRB just being a Lion with Pounce is pretty good, turns out.

Comparison Character:
Level 12 Alchemist (mindchemist)
- 18/18/18/13/13 with haste - as touch attacks. (before reduce person and / or Channel Vigor for +4 to hit)
- 46 AC before you Reduce Person on yourself, since Barkskin and Grand Cognotogen really boost it up there.
- 6d4 + 25 force damage per bomb, with targeted bomb admixture and the Cognotogen up - around 40 damage. Tumor familiar applies your admixture for you.
- Absolutely horrible will save, and there's nothing you can do about it.. Confusion ruins you and the rest of the party.
- 87 hps, Good reflex, fairly bad Fort and very terrible will.
- Limited resources (bombs) once you run out of Bombs, you'll be pretty useless. Good thing is that you have around 22x40 force damage per day, which is about 880, which should kill most things that need to get killed. Even more damage if you want to go fire.
- Great knowledge and lots of skills
- Shown with 122k buy.
- (unfortunately no sheet for this one, since Hero Lab won't recognize the Two Weapon Fighting and Imp Two weapon Fighting as working with Fast Bombs, despite FAQ)

Comparison Character:
- Diviner 12
- I did not do every dirty trick in existence, simply took the Foretelling school and mostly CRB items.
- Result is much the same with a CRB diviner
- Shown with ~123k buy.
- At +18 to init, goes first most of the time.
- Always acts in surprise rounds.
- Scrys on people ahead of time
- Saves are not great, but I think if I redid the character, I would not ban Enchantment because of Heroism and extend rods.
- Peristent DC 26 save on your worst save before you act.
- Backup Plan: Summon 1d4+1 Augmented Summoning creatures as a standard action. Maybe a herd of Ankylosauruses will change the fight? Haste them? Multiple DC25s to avoid being stunned?. I mean, I could also summon a Shadow Demon or a Succubus if that would help anything...
- Did not use any shinnanigans with Planar Binding that generally happens at higher levels
- Backup Backup Plan: D-Door away, think about a better plan, memorize different spells and try again later.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6Ug94GF4k-uOW9OVU8wZ1hfcFE/view?usp=shari ng

Comparisons between the characters:
Regarding the Dragon Disciple: I do not think that turning into a monster on the first round of combat and then proceeding to walk up to the enemy and murder it is disruptive, nor is getting engaged by the enemy, then turning into a monster, then beating it up is disruptive... It's comparatively more disruptive to be a Divination wizard, act in the surprise round, then make them all take a DC23 save-or-lose, or Black Tentacles over the baddies. Or winning initiative and putting 100 hps of arrows into the the spellcaster, then spellcaster goes, then doing it again and the fight is done. Or in the case of the fighter, putting 230 hps of damage a round out (or if no iteratives hit, close to 160).

In a situation where you are set upon before you can buff.. If you lose initiative, you basically go after the opponent has acted twice. If you win intuitive and your opponent is ranged, you have to walk to get to them on turn 2.

The character is level 12 and does not have pounce. The silliness with turning into a 6 attack monster happens at level 10 with Prestigious Spellcaster, since it requires Monsterous Physique 3. Before that point, it is nothing super crazy.

It's worth mentioning that Prestigious Spellcaster allows A LOT more builds than just the one which I have put forth - it can create new life into prestige classes which see little or no play. So keep in mind that if I can get some people to try to create the extreme examples of what Prestigious Spellcaster will enable it should function as a sort of stress test. The more people we can try to test the Prestigious Spellcaster feat, the better we will understand if there is actually anything to fear.

If there is nothing to fear, then I think it should be allowed since I would state that the comparative value the many, many creative uses of the feat to enable cool characters that DON'T break the game outweighs the potential downsides.

I look forward to constructive comments or people trying to build some level 12 character (or really any level) which breaks the game with Prestigious Spellcaster... Or arguments about particularly disruptive uses of the feat chain. Perhaps there are aspects to this which I have not considered.

I feel that with the magic specializations especially, they are pretty handicapped compared to other comparable classes.

If you take your spells at levels 4, 8, 12, ect that leaves you with extra talents at levels 2,6,10

This means that you functionally get 3 cool things during PFS play.

3 cool things is a lot worse than the other options that you could get.

Arcane Example:
EX: Bard vs Warlock (if you still care about the social)
OR Magus vs Warlock (if you're more combat oriented)

Bard just gets his spells and can use them in any form. Bard has mind affecting abilities, can buff the party AND has a bunch of skill points with 3/4 BAB.

By comparison, the Vigilante gets some social powers and 3 abilities that are a little better than feats.

Your best options are:
1. Concealed Casting - if I had a dime for every time I got into the 'I cast suggestion' and the GM says, 'Combat Begins, roll initiative', I would be rich. This makes it hard to argue that. I think it would be good to have a reminder of what happens when someone casts a save spell on a target from no known source - Does the target know? What does the target know? But this is a good power. It's a shame the save DC of your powers will be low.
2. Educated Defense - This is a pretty cool thing.
3. Bombs - even with less bombs per day and having to splash a level of Alchemist to get INTMOD damage, this is still a good option.

I think there needs to be a lot more on the table to justify giving up on 9 levels of spellcasting for 6 levels and 3/4 BAB. Bards beat you in the combat game by a fair margin.

Divine / Zealot Example:
Just look at a Knowledge Oracle. It's got 9 levels of magic to do whatever you wanted to do, only better.

A more linear example would be the Inquisitor - they get Domains, only they don't have to pay class resources for them. And they also have some social standing. And they have Judgements. And prolific archetypes doing whatever you wanted to do.

Let's exclude Life Bond from the discussion, since it has some potential - you could give every zealot talent for free to this class and it would be worse than an inquisitor in combat by a fair margin (Although, obviously you couldn't front load it or people would splash the class).

Last, this class's casting specializations are falling into a 3/4 BAB trap with the Arcane and Divine casters. If you're playing a spellcaster, you need INT or CHR because you cast your spells with it. You can sac the other, but will be bad at one of the better things about the class - the skill list.

If you're intending to physically interact with monsters, you will have to invest in physical stats which will make you MAD and you will need to dump something to be effective - which will most likely be INT, CHA, or WIS. Even with high STR, you have no inbuilt to-hit buffs, and you have 3/4 BAB with 6 levels of spellcasting as your only way to buff.

If you decide not to participate in smashing face with weapons, your DCs will be low like Bards. You don't get the raw number of spells to buff yourself heavily like an Oracle or Cleric would. You don't have the Inquisitor or Warpriest's side abilities to help with combat.

Since you don't get to hit abilities, you're either going to be unable to hit / deal damage in combat without buffing. When you buff, you'll end up where many classes start out which makes the 3/4 BAB pretty worthless. Which then forces you to play the buff / support game / save or die bot, which you do worse than other classes

You CAN be a very skilled character, but the issue with this is that while you can do 12 (6+INTMOD + hat + human) skills with INT as a primary stat, it's reasonable for another class to have around 8 (2+INTMOD + hat + human) and the other class may also be effective at those 8, which doesn't give you very much of a niche.

So, I'm wondering if I'm the only person here who would like to see these legalized in Pathfinder Society play - for Fighter's bonus feats only.

I know there are a lot of options. I know that some of them might be too good - although, I haven't stared at them enough to know which ones they might be.

But even if it was something like, "You have to take Combat Stamina as a Fighter Bonus Feat, and it only applies to Fighter Bonus Feats" would be really cool for Fighters and would require other classes to take a 2 level dip to do anything with Combat Stamina.

As for book-keeping, I don't think it has anything on prepared spellcasters, since you select your combat feats before you play.

I'd really like to see Fighters getting some love. It's like 22 pages of awesome content that I won't play outside a house game :-/

But we can always ban the options that turn out to be too good..

What do you guys think?

Just checking - Is the Druid Lion Shaman Archetype's Wildshape ability still broken / strictly worse than a normal Druid's since there is no Huge sized Lion to Wildshape into?

Alright, so I really want to try to make my Magus work... and I am noticing that Demons and several other common monster types are immune to shocking grasp.

Since I'm building magical lineage (shocking grasp) and my feats are stupidly tight with the Dervish build... I need a way to hold a rod and do my spellfighting... so that I can use an acid substitution rod.

I'm currently using a Bladebound Magus archetype so that I can use the +damage arcane ability AND not have to pay out of my earnings for a weapon.

But I'm wondering if you can combine the hexcrafter archetype with the Bladebound one and take the prehensile tail hex.

I'll be taking a million pearls of power to get back my Shocking Grasp... But it's going to be vexing if I don't have a way to get around reistances, since my DPR comes from melee AND spells... I get hit with Resistances and DR twice.

On the DR end I can take the Magus Arcana that lets you type your weapon as GOOD for 1 arcane point at level 12 :-/ and Versatile Weapon.

Any other thoughts of how I could accomplish the same thing easier? Tiefling isn't an option in PFS, right? I need an extra arm somehow... and I don't wanna multiclass.

I know this is a basic question... But are PFS characters allowed to purchase multiples of the same magic item?

For example.. I'd like to purchase a pretty decent number of lvl1 pearls of power for my intensified magical lineage shocking grasp based Magus. I could see a large number of them being really good... Since 4+ 10d6 shocking grasps per fight go a long way towards equalizing damage output between Magus and fighter