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Since shield fighting requires specialization on the side of the character, in general only thusly specialised characters will use shields and those will know and want to use Shield Block, locking them into sturdy shields and mostly leaving the other kinds of shields without potential users.
I find it a bit irritating that Pathfinder never bothered to correct the old 3E error of having bucklers not use a hand.
To make my irritation worse, larger shields, that you actually do strap to you arm allow you to much more easily grip and even use something else in you shield hand, since a leather strip is not very thick. It's all backwards and topsy turvy :(
Is there any advantage to fighting mounted? Am I missing anything? It seems that the rules on page 478 list only a disadvantage (-2 reflex). This may ewxplain the downfall of Taldor, though.
My prima facie impression is that shield block beyond the earliest levels in general means: lose your shield to prevent a little damage.
It is not overly difficult to get a familiar that can reliably use a wand. Invest in UMD, the Evolved Familiar feat or the Figment Familiar archetype to get the Skilled evolution. A wand of animal's ability costs 4500 GP. That's 500 GP more than a +2 belt or headband, but provides +4 right from the start. It lasts 3 minutes, thus at least one combat and your familiar can cast it on you, preserving your action economy. 50 charges should last you until you can afford a +4 or even +6 item. Comments? Am I missing anything?
Since there is a current discussion going on about Power Attack being a trap, I would like to offer some considerations on the common practice of DPR calculations and how the miss out on some important aspects. I shall assume that the reader is familiar with the common DPR formula and will discuss it in depth. tl;dr
General assumptions
Let's compared two extreme cases with similar DPR but different dsitribution of raw damage and accuracy.
1) The chance of doing nothing
With some rounding, we can read the data from one of many readily available tables The HD case: P(n,p=0.3,x=0)
The HA case: P(n,p=0.9,x=0)
As we can see, the difference shrinks, the longer the combat lasts, but is rather impressive for short fights. If over all combats are shorter rather than longer the case gets worse for HD. This is a jarring observation if you consider that shorter combats are generally considered desirable. 2: Accuracy kills faster
For HD the case is simple. It is identical to the "all misses" case above: 0.34, so roughly a third. For HA, instead of just wanting to know the probability of not hitting at all, we need the inverse probability of hitting three times out of three. This is simply 1-0.9*0.9*0.9=1-0.73=0.27, roughly a fourth. 3: The Advantage of Smaller Slices
I conclude: All else being equal, it is always preferable to have higher accuracy over higher damage. Furthermore, the experience of missing a lot makes playing HD over HA less enjoyable for many players, in particular because combat tends to be short and no one likes never hitting.
Caveat: This does not consider further factors, in particular damage reduction which affects HA much more strongly than HD or miss chance, which affects HD worse than HA.
This is just a rough sketch for a build that you may hopefully help make bloom. The idea is to bring as many figures onto the battlefield as is realistic and effective. The general approach is a Master Summoner with a Skill Monkey Eidolon. Add to this a Familiar gained via Eldritch Heritage (3 feat) and an Animal Companion gained via Animal Ally (2 feats, 3 to include boon companion). That's 4 sets of actions right there, plus the summoned monsters. The AC can function as a BBF. A build could look like this:
Hi, I'm looking to build a wildshape focused, mainly martial character. The obvious way to go is Druid & the Shaping Focus feat, taking up to 4 levels of non-druid, probably full bab classes to lose some spell casting and gain some martiality ;). The level 5 feat will be Shaping Focus, level 7 almost unavoidably natural spell and around 13th I'd want powerful shape. The obvious question is, which classes and when to take them? 1-2 levels of Barbarian seem like a good choice. Taking Barbarian as my first level will also give me a strong melee character right when that kind of character is king. 3 levels of the Savage Barbarian archetype will give +1 to all saves and +1 dodge bonus to AC while not wearing armor, e.g. while wildshaped. 4 levels of barbarian brings a second rage power and makes some rage powers a little better. Not very attractive, given that rage powers tend to rely a lot of class level. 2 levels of lore warden fighter give 3 bonus feats, and minimizes skill point loss 3 levels of Lore Warden Fighter gives +2 to combat maneuvers and combat maneuvers are nice for wildshapers. 1 level of unarmed fighter gives Improved Unarmed Strike and a style feat (Dragon Style, most likely). This opens up Dragon Ferocity, but to use this I'd need Weapon Focus and Feral Combat Training and even it works for only one type of natural attack. That's 5 feats on a feat starved build. Not a good option. 1 level of Ranger opens up the Shapeshifting Hunter Feat, which is nice and all, but only fully effective with 4 levels of ranger in the build and that seems excessive. Favored enemy is also highly campaign dependent and I don't like the guesswork 2 levels of Ranger gives a combat style feat, most likely power attack or rending claws. 1-2 levels of Monk, apart from being great for my saves, would give me 1-2 bonus feats, including improved grapple, which I'd like anyway. Make it Tetori Monk and I also get +1 CMB to grapple, though Stunning Pin is not a feat I want, so I'd be only one level of monk then. Also costs me a point of BAB, which is not that bad once Wildshape is my standard combat strategy. Will finally give me WIS to AC when unarmored. What else is there? What am I missing? Do you agree or disagree with my assessments?
Dragon Shout Monk Archetype Dragon Shout (Su)
Example:
Example: Fah, the dragon shout monk uses dragon shout against 3 goblins. He has both the stunning fist feat and the elemental fist feat. He decided to use both feats and expends one use each. He selects goblin 1 as the target of his stunning fist. He does not need to select targets for elemental fist. Goblin one make his save and suffers half damage and is not affected by either stunning fist or elemental fist. Goblins 2 and 3 both fail their saves. They suffer full damage and an addition 1d6 elemental damage from elemental fist. Unarmed Strike
Ki Pool
As longs as he has at least 1 point in his ki-pool,
By spending one point from his ki-pool as a swift action, a dragon shout monk can do one of the following:
This ability replaces Ki Pool and Purity of Body. Commentary: The reference to Skyrim should be obvious. The idea is to apply debuffs rather than do a lot of damage. I'm a bit worried that there are not enough ways to increase the damage, though. 1d10+Wis+2d6 with a save for half is very low at level 10.
A laser cleric is one focused on summoning Lantern Archons. Admittedly that is not much of a specialisation, but you it takes a few tweaks to make it really nice. The obvious approach is the evangelist cleric archetype, which adds inspire courage to your repertoire and provides some minor augmentation to your heavenly laser drones' laser drones as well as improving to hit. The feats Superior Summons and Sacred Summons are pretty obvious, too. The first gives you extra laser drones, the second standard action summons, allowing you to get off some inspirational sermoning right off the bat. But from here on out, it gets thin. Does Discordant Voice work? Probably not. It only works on "weapon attacks", which seems to exclude glorious laser rays. If you stay within 30 ft. of your target, you can use a destruction domain power, but that's a) quite close and b) good luck finding a lawful good deity with the destruction domain. There are some ways to increase to hit though: prayer/bless, the heroism aura from the glory domain. In any case, do you have ideas on how to improve on the performance of the little lantern laser drone squad?
It seems to me that BtDD can basically be dropped into any campaign almost "as is". Just replace the shard with some other McGuffin (or nothing at all) and add a hook. Am I mistaken in that conclusion? If so, what have I missed?
Hi,
1. Gain the Unarmed Strike class feature.
Here's what I've dug up in the section on character advancement: [...]Third, integrate all of the level's class abilities and then roll for additional hit points. Finally, add new skills and feats. This sounds like there are four distinct and sequential steps to leveling up. Step three is "integrate class abilities and roll for hit points". Step four is "select skills and feats". The question seems to come down to this: Do you select bones feats during the final step (selecting feats) or during the penultimate step (integrating class abilities)?Considerations: a) "Intergrate" is a strange choice of words that appears nowhere else in this context. Can I assume that this just instructs us to gain new abilities and update existing one or am I missing something important? b) "Class abilities" is another odd use of terminology. The expression used in class descriptions is "class features". Now, some of these features are abilities, as they have the marker for e.g. extraordinary of spell-like abilities. c) Bonus feats do not have such a marker. This suggests an interpretation whereby you do not pick bonus feats during step three but during step four, like non-bonus feats. d) Spells do not have such a marker either, which could, under a very strict reading of the quote section and the suggested interpretation, mean that no one ever gets spells beyond level 1, since "getting spells" is not a separate step during the level advancement procedure and spells are not marked as abilities. A clearly absurd conclusion. Any thoughts on the issue?
Well met, I've expanded a little treatise on the sylvan sorcerer and how it redeems polymorph spells into a full-blown guide on nice things you can do with an animal companion if you're not a druid. The guide is to be found here: https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1ucWfFId04lNYLrJTh_E_keRTk3X-Ouchgy SE--2udr4 And a pdf version can be obtained from https://dl.dropbox.com/u/24085032/AbusingAnimals.pdf Looking forward to comments, critique and improvements.
In my campaign, the party let Yarzoth escape and she killed and impersonated one of the shipwrecked npcs and hitched a ride back to Eleder. Once there, she stole many relevant parts of her notes and disappeared. The characters are not aware that this has happened. From here on, I want to replace most race to ruin with a "research race" in Eleder.
As a side note, Racing to Ruin is written in such a way as to suggest that the PCs are the first ones to the Pillars of Light and due to the nature of the whole thing, it seems highly unlikely that anyone but the first party there will ever get to us it. The crystals are easily stolen, dumped in a river or just destroyed. Not to mention the rest of the assemblage. So it seems to me that this part alone is sufficient to make the whole exploration competition of CoSS impossible. Anyway, the way to Saventh Yi will of course feature natives friendly and unfriendly, great beasts and tiny poisonous buggers.
Hence, a rival agent will stumble into the vaults of madness, pointing the PCs towards the underground without actually giving them the truth of what is conspiring beneath them.
Do you think that this would work? |
