Mikemad's page

Sorry if my previous post was a bit scattered. I'm kinda just throwing words down on a page and hoping somebody takes it somewhere.

I agree that people over-optimize sometimes (particularly for damage) but that wasn't actually the point. What I was trying to get at was something like this:

Many people have stated so far that the number of full-attacks you get depends on how quickly your party members kill the enemies; if your party shreds the encounter from a range in round 1, you're unlikely to get full-attacks for obvious reasons.

My questions is, from the standpoint of somebody trying to optimize a melee character, do you care about that fight? Do you feel worse about your character as a result?

I'd kind of argue you shouldn't because I don't think the strength of a character is really tested in those fights. I think the fights you should use to measure yourself are those tough enough to actually give your party a decent challenge, and I don't think those tend to end on round 1. That's purely anecdotal though.

Thanks guys, this is exactly the type of discussion I wanted.

Just a couple of my own thoughts:

I get that there are a billion variables and nobody can make an accurate prediction but I still think there's value in talking about it. I also think everybody does sort of have an idea in their head about how common full attacks are "in general". If they didn't nobody would have any idea how useful things like archery and pounce are. I think it's pretty clear from this discussion people highly value both of those things which tells me, at the very least, most people are expecting the percentage to be relatively low (over a large, varied set of games and encounters).

I brought this up in the first place because I was going back through a whole bunch of threads referencing that old "Benchpressing" thread that came up ages ago. In terms of all it's benchmarks for damage output it only cared about your full-attack damage and not other things (like archery and pounce) which allow you to connect with those full-attacks way more often. I found that weird and was wondering if the general populace was just assuming full-attacks all the time.

I also think it's worth asking where exactly is the value of optimization? If the encounter was easy enough that the enemies died in one round without the martial being able to get in at all, do we even care that we didn't do much damage? Should the casters have even bothered expending a spell slot? Maybe I'm thinking about this entirely wrong and your average number of full attacks in a campaign doesn't matter; only the average number of full attacks in the "encounters tough enough to actually challenge the party and make optimization useful".

Imagine for a moment the following circumstance:

1) You're a generic, bare-bones fighter with a greatsword.
2) You don't have pounce or vital strike.
3) Your party is not casting any spells or using any abilities to help position you, but they will cast fly on you if necessary.
4) The only thing you ever do in combat is attack.
5) You're in a campaign starting from level 6 (so you always have at least two attacks) and fighting a wide variety of different encounters from melee bruisers to archers to mages etc.
6) Assume you're not losing actions to enemy spells and abilities.

On average, what percentage of your turns do you think will be spent full-attacking?

And if so, how far? Just a thought that popped into my head while looking into something totally unrelated and I wanted to gather a bit of data.

If a build has to measure up to an archer MAC to be worth considering, you're gonna find this game becomes the opposite of fun real fast.

Honestly, cleric is only worse than warpriest as a martial combatant if you try to play it exactly like the warpriest.

Here are some martial things cleric has access to that warpriest doesn't:

1) Growth Domain: This is effectively 20 ft reach with no downside provided you use a reach weapon as a swift action. Normally enlarge person with reach weapons can kinda suck because you have a 10 ft donut you can't hit making it impossible for you to full attack an opponent who approached you. Since the ability is only active for one round at a time, however, you can shrink down to your normal size and fight as normal if this happens. It also comes online at level 1. This alone can make cleric a better martial combatant than warpriest from around levels 1-3. You also get barkskin, which is neat.

2) Animal Companions: This sorts speaks for itself. Yes a cleric alone won't do as much damage as a MAC warpriest. A cleric + a buffed tiger might though. Take feather domain + boon companion + improved share spells so you can cast divine favor on both you and the animal simultaneously.

3) Earlier access to Hour/level and 10 Min/level spells. Here are a couple to think about which can be either pre-buffed or cast without standard action:

Stone Shield (remember, warpriest uses most of its 1sts for DF)
Defending Bone
Second Wind
Magic Circle Against (alignment)
Magic Vestment (Use with bead of karma)
Greater Magic Weapon (Use with bead of karma)
Air Walk
Rags to Riches
Bit of Luck
Actual Quickened Divine Favor (using 5th level slot)
Hunter's Blessing
Invoke Deity
Eagle's Soul
Bloodsworn Retribution (this is massive)

What you definitely should NOT do is try to cast a bunch of standard action self-buffs in combat. Its a trap. Don't do it. People trying to do this is half the reason battle cleric has a bad reputation.

You can also think about worshipping a non-evil outer god and taking the Dreamed Secrets feat. It literally just gives you access to wizard spells for one feat. I dunno, just more options.

Give them a sinister leitmotif. Play it anytime they’re the center of attention.

The only decent way I ever get spell resistance is karma bead + (alchemical components that buff CL) + the spell titled “Spell Resistance”.

I like to do something similar to VoodistMonk’s bard, but using an evangelist cleric with animal companion and casting a sacred summon instead of haste.

Grand master performer, discordant voice, flagbearer, banner of the ancient kings, dervish sikke, 3 reasons to live, shoanti war paint. There are a ton of ways to buff bardic performance.

Can’t say my characters have favorite colors. They definitely have the other things though. My horse’s name is Bonzu lol.

Yeah this is mostly a reaction to a collection of small instances I’ve seen on these forums throughout the last few years where GMs seem to simultaneously

A) Take pride in creating extremely punishing campaigns and

B) Openly disdain character optimization

It was an extreme example, I’ve never played in anything quite that bad. However, I’ve definitely played in campaigns where my GM would ridicule powergaming but create a situation where it’s impossible NOT to powergame. Like I would happily create a suboptimal character if they didn’t instantly explode.

This was sarcasm if that wasn’t clear...

My table is the greatest table of all time. Every combat is against a APL + 6 invisible undead construct dragon vescavor swarm with lightning bolts shooting out of its eyes and takes place underwater in deeper darkness and an antimagic field but also flying! Furthermore, every player will need to have at least 8 skill points per level or you’re a useless murderhobo sack of s$&@ and will fail all of the instant death skill checks of which there are at least 4 per encounter day. After all, there is absolutely no room for any amount of character weaknesses at MY TABLE! There will be roughly 14 encounters per day in exactly 1 hour intervals to ensure all of your buffs wear off. You must be fully prepared for literally all possibilities at ALL TIMES or you are STUPID and don’t deserve to play at MY TABLE!

... Also I hate power gamers. If I see any amount of optimization, that player will be banned immediately.

I’m gonna go put my head in the microwave now.

Sorry, felt the need to vent again.

Yeah "best" is a really hard thing to nail down unless it's not even remotely close. In most cases, even if you could nail down a best build, it would depend on the GM, the campaign, the level range, and the rest of the party such that it couldn't be standard on forums like these.

I don't know what's RAW, but from a narrative perspective, I really hope the answer is for multiple AoO's. The visual of the enemy stepping in to smack the full attacker before/with each swing is kind of hilarious.

If both have feats allowing for responding AoO's, I can just imagine the characters falling into an old timey cartoon fight cloud.

Giant dust cloud, sounds of breaking pottery and banging pots and pans, cat screeching, occasionally a hand/head pops out of the cloud.

[*Druid glances up with a raised eyebrow. Snorts.*

Clerics and Druids perform only slightly worse than 6th casters or martials if they're statted for martial combat.

Druids aggressively push the envelope from level 1. If anyone in this thread thinks 4 MACPriests are wild, 4 Nature Fang Druids with a combination of Animal Companions or Druidic Herbalism is blasting through the stratosphere.

Yeah, cleric can do something similar with growth + animal domains.

I think it depends how you want to play them.

Yeah but people aren't just saying warpriest is a better beatstick; they're saying warpriest is better. There's a value judgement that the beatsticky-ness is more useful in most circumstances.

And if you knew you weren't going to play past level 13, it was kind of a strictly better cleric too. The cleric extra spell casting really just doesn't give enough umph (IMO) until you hit 8th and 9th level spells.

Regardless of whether or not I agree, this is actually a super interesting statement from a community meta-analysis standpoint; it's not the first time I've heard it either. Are we at a point where prepared 9th level casters are starting to get seen as overshadowed? It's seemed for a while like the community is starting to turn their backs on cleric. It's actually the main reason why I made this thread. I wanted to see if this would get addressed.

Yeah I always just assume it's your round 2 buff after divine favor. You get enough rounds that provided you cast it on round 2 its like 3-4 combats per day (unless its a really long combat). Although judging by your pearl of power comments it sounds like you're fighting about 9 combats per day which might explain why you don't like the duration.

A MAC Warpriest with active Divine Favor or (later) Divine Power has an equal or higher attack roll bonus from class than a Fighter at all levels

I've noticed most people don't include the swift action weapon enhancement buff that all warpriests get in their attack/damage calculations. Is there some reason for that I'm not aware of or is it just coincidence?

The year is 2030. Literally everyone is playing arsenal chaplain. Every party is 4 arsenal chaplains. Every problem is solved by throwing more arsenal chaplains at it. Every thread on the forums is arsenal chaplain. Every discussion serves only to praise arsenal chaplain's name with dry, rasping tongues. Praise be to the arsenal chaplain. Praise to the one true class.

...I dunno I just keep seeing arsenal chaplain get mentioned. It accounts for about 15-20% of the classes mentioned on these forums. In nearly every advice thread regarding classes at least one person mentions arsenal chaplain, regardless of the situation. I felt the need to post about it lol. Thank you for your time.

Also, if we are talking about buff spells- How many of the higher level cleric buff spells enlarge you and/or boost your Strength score? A strength build will just perform better in most scenarios IMO. Especially if you want to focus on buffs/support/summons.

Bull's Strength

Some may or may not be be more beneficial depending on circumstances.

I mean yeah, you can play whatever you want if you don't particularly worry about the benefits and are playing in relatively easy campaigns. Sorry, just the way you were talking earlier made it sound like you were playing hard-ball and we were supposed to be impressed. I dunno, I guess I expected...more.

As for owlcat games... they decided to make animate dead a standard action summoning spell for 1d4+2 roughly CR3 skeletons and made animal companions about 2-3 times their normal strength. I wouldn't exactly use them as the baseline.

Its fine....just wait!

Alternatively just go with Animal/Fur straight from the start!

Unfortunately it's not that simple.

If you wait till level 9 to grab boon companion you've missed the effective level range of basic animal companions. You're now fighting into things with DR10-ish which animal companions can't really do anything against unless you super-buff them with either evangelist-BotAK or improved share spells. Your sacred summons are actually going to run into a similar issue at high levels. Summoning works at high levels in large part because overstatted celestial pounce cats like the dire tiger smiting evil for +14 damage on 5 attacks. You can't use them with sacred summons, and have to opt for tankier but much lower damage outsiders which run into the DR/Really-High-Saves problem. You end up sort of just casting the world's most feat-intensive wall of stone.

On the other hand if you take animal domain at 1 you're gonna be really sad from levels 1-4 because, as a herald caller, you REALLY need that growth domain. You gave up medium armor (and thus your ability to reasonably take heavy armor) but you cant summon yet so you're stuck as a d8-hit-die light armor without high dex trying to frontline. With growth that isn't an issue because you can "frontline" from 20 feet away and anything which tries to approach gets AoO'ed.

Tbh, I'd suggest dropping Herald Caller archetype, and then going Vanilla Cleric or any Archetype that doesn't drop a domain, then choose Animal Domain and Destruction Domain if you're going to use Seize The Moment and Outflank. You get an AC at 4th lvl, and at 8th level, all crits auto-confirm with Destructive Aura.

I'd probably do evangelist archetype + flagbearer + banner of the ancient kings instead. I much prefer it to herald caller on summoning builds even if you never grab augmented/superior summons. This is especially true if the party contains two animal companions.

Edit: Just remembered were a dwarf so youre never gonna get the required charisma. Nvm.

You get yourself an Icon of Aspects and then at 4th level swap out the powers of Plant/growth domain for that of Animal - Feather/Fur.

You can't swap the second domain power until you have the level required to use it for both domains. So you can't do this till 6th level (and it's honestly not great till you pick up boon companion at 7th which then clashes with your dreamed secrets).

3 Paladins, a Cleric

DEUS VULT

SKELETON CREW

https://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/s/skeleton-crew/

*Blasts Pirate's Life*

I don't have any actual build advice, I just love that spell.

"Offensive spells" isn't the same as "damaging spells".

Command, Forbid Action and Murderous Command can all be incredible spells to control the battlefield. I completely took a Sorceress out of a battle with the Command spell by commanding her to "approach", she provoked 2 AoOs getting to me and it left her standing between 3 PCs.

Greater Command and Greater Forbid Action can shut down entire encounters.

An "Offensive" spell in this context is any spell that requires a saving throw. Clerics have plenty of those, and they're quite good.

If we're talking save-or-sucks cleric also has a few choice picks which do useful things even on a passed enemy save. Burst of Radiance at lower levels and Hallucinogenic Smoke at mid-high levels come to mind.

Whenever you're talking cleric optimization, you should ask your DM if retraining is allowed (PFS allows it). Unlike warpriests who gain power really linearly (about +1 attack/damage per level off class features), clerics gain power in huge spikes as their domain/archetype features come online.

For example, trickery domain is sick at levels 1-5 since it's main power comes online at 1, not that many attacks are getting thrown out per round and you don't need your move action to deal full damage since full-attacking isn't a thing. However, afterwards it becomes really lackluster.

Evangelist is sick at level 7+ when activating inspire courage is a move action and you can afford Banner of the Ancient Kings, but it actively hurts your build before then.

However, if you can retrain, you can swap archetypes/domains around as you level to take advantage of whatever is good at the moment. My personal favorite goes something like this:

Start as an Erastilian growth/separatist trickery cleric. At level 5, retrain your archetype down to base cleric, losing trickery domain and grabbing feather domain, take boon companion as your 5th level feat. At level 7-9 (whenever you can afford BotAK), retrain to evangelist, take flagbearer, retrain boon companion to sacred summons, grab banner of the ancient kings. You can now standard-summon a bunch of lantern archons into +5 attack and damage aura.

Otherwise you have to find something which levels well 1-wheneveryourcampaignends.

And one of my biggest goals in the past few years is to see if I can break rocket tag. Haha.

With some minor success, surprisingly. In some cases.

Yeah fair enough. I've found success in just having a truce between all the players and GM where everybody just agrees to build sub-optimally. If you can manage that, high levels can be super fun.

In all seriousness though, at the level 15+ range, this really isn't a build I'm too concerned about power-wise. It plays too fair to be broken at that range.

We're talking about a level range where even reasonably optimized summoning builds are doing quadruple-digit dpr consistently into 40+ AC and 15+ DR.

People are casting time stop in their timeless demiplanes to gain effectively infinite time and take a full 8 hour rest between combats with no consequence.

Coven + army across time + ring of tactical precision + emblem of greed is a thing. You can do arbitrarily large amounts of damage with it.

Unoptimized clerics are calling CR 20 outsiders for 20+ days at a time into the party bard's +10 bardic performance/flagbearer combo. The cost isn't that significant at this level.

This is not a remotely comprehensive list. Game balance sort of breaks down past level 13ish. It's a huge part of why PFS chooses to stop there. Most fights are decided by initiative rolls. That's why we call it rocket tag.

You're build here is using tactics I'd expect to see more in the 7-12ish range, which is fine tbh. That's where you spend most of your time playing in my experience.

...those are limited resources. When those are gone you are have no real offensive ability...This character would not survive in a campaign I run.

Your sorcerer shouldn't be relying on spells then I suppose.

Hi guys,

This item has recently been brought to my attention:

--------------------------------------------------
Cauldron of Overwhelming Allies

Source Pathfinder #67: The Snows of Summer pg. 60

Aura moderate conjuration; CL 8th

Slot none; Price 4,500 gp; Weight 5 lbs.

Description
The artistic scrawls on the dark surface of this small bronze cauldron depict an array of exotic animals, legendary beasts, leering fiends, and hosts of elementals. Once per day, if used as the focus or divine focus for a summon monster or summon nature’s ally spell, the cauldron automatically conjures 1d3 additional creatures of the same kind from the next lower level list. For example, if a user casts summon monster III to summon 1d3 wolves, he could also summon 1d3 additional wolves (or other creatures from the 2nd-level list).

Construction
Requirements Craft Wondrous Item, Spell Focus (conjuration), summon monster IV or summon nature’s ally IV; Cost 2,250 gp
--------------------------------------------------

I have a couple questions about it.

1) Does this require a hand?

2) Are the 1d3 extra summons affected by things like augmented summons/rod of giant summoning/metamagic.

3) If used with superior summons, can the extra summon be one of those summoned by the cauldron even if they are different from those summoned by the spell?

4) If used to summon animals, will they gain alignment templates based on your alignment or the alignment of the creator of the cauldron?

5) If it is not tied to your alignment in part 4, can a cleric use the cauldron to summon creatures opposed to their alignment?

Thanks

13-14 wisdom is fairly common on clerics. You don't really care about your spell DCs except on specific builds since most of your best spells don't interact with saves. You just need a headband of wisdom +2 before level 7, +4 before level 11, and +6 before level 15.

If you aren't already, consider a weapon with the guided enchantment. Otherwise all that reach/paired opportunists is losing a lot of utility by having 8 str.

It does not give Cha to damage, it gives hit dice to damage. Also pounce has text specifically stating you can make rake attacks, it says nothing about having to hit first.

You are correct though, the template doesn't specifically state it ignores dr like the paladin smite.

Edit: Oh, I see, you were thinking of rend, not rake.

Level 13 is when PF is breaking. Yes, you can run it; no, standard monsters don't stand a chance, especially on an open field. This is far from the only way for a couple of level 13 characters to destroy a CR 17 enemy with no risk.

Either you beef up enemies considerably, or you accept that the game's a walkover, or you let the game end and start a new one.

Fair enough, maybe I shouldn't have chosen level 13 for my example. Consider level 11 instead then, using dire lions and summon creature 6 against a CR15 (30 AC). They still deal around 250 DPR and one-round it.

Hey guys,

So I've been doing a bunch of research into summoning lately and have run into several guides/threads on these forums regarding the topic. Especially at high levels, people generally seem to rate summoned creatures with spellcasting abilities far higher than beat sticks. It is usually cited that at high levels, a typical summoned monster can't really keep up with the AC/DR of the opponents. Its gone so far that none of the guides I've seen have even mentioned the fact that summoned animals gain either the celestial or fiendish template depending on your alignment (you get to choose if you're neutral, so you can always pick the more beneficial one), and when people on here mention it, it's normally in terms of the DR gained.

But these things can smite.

Lets have a look at the dire tiger. It's a typical beat stick on the summon creature 6 list with 3 attacks plus pounce rake (meaning you'll get 5 attacks every time you charge). Note that it's attack bonus is about 5 higher than most of the other stuff on the list. It also has 14 hit dice.

Just for fun, let's set up a typical combat encounter. We are level 13 and have access to summon monster 7. Because we're a good summoning build, we have augmented/superior summons as well as a greater rod of giant summoning. There is a bard or evangelist cleric in the party granting everybody +3 attack and damage through bardic performance. Furthermore, this campaign is hard. The typical opponent we fight is CR 17. According to the monster creation table (http://legacy.aonprd.com/bestiary/monsterCreation.html), this means a typical opponent will have an AC of 32 and 270 HP. It's also likely going to have DR 15 or something but that bit isn't particularly important.

Turn one, combat begins, bardic performance goes up and we use summon monster 7 to call in 3 celestial dire tigers at +8 str and con. They all pounce/rake and smite evil at the same time. At this moment, they have an attack bonus of 27, a damage bonus of 29 and they ignore all DR of the smitten opponent.

They deal, on average,

drumroll please,

467.16 damage per round (hits 80% of attacks, 15 attacks total).

WHAT??!

Why is nobody talking about the smite ability?

This thing isn't just good its hilarious. It's better than basically everything on the summon monster 7 list and about half of the stuff on the summon monster 8 list. Yeah, they don't tank as well as most of the outsiders but who cares? A dead monster does no damage and even if they survive, if the DM is attacking your summons, you've basically already won.

I dunno, I've been weirdly frustrated by all the discussion of combat control and utility casting when this cat can vaporize an encounter 6 CR higher than you.

"But Mike, it has to compete with the shadow demon dealing 1d6 damage as a touch attack and casting shadow conjuration"

As Magda pointed out, reach cleric is sort of the spiritual successor of the battle cleric. It's better in almost every way. You don't feel like your melee ability is useless as you move towards higher levels since you're still getting free AoOs while casting spells.

I'm also fairly convinced it doesn't cost you that much to be decent in melee. Unless you're building for save-or-sucks/blasting, most of the best cleric spells don't allow saves. You don't actually need more than like a 13-14 in wisdom to be an effective spellcaster. That makes it fairly easy to make strength your primary stat without feeling like you've cheated your casting (a problem I've felt with druids). Further, you don't need to spend more than one round buffing. Take the fates favored trait and cast divine favor/power round one when you can't full attack anyway. That's it. Don't waste more time. Fates favored divine favor + greater magic weapon should more than compensate for your lower BaB/less feats (if you have a decent scout or, you know, you see charred dead bodies lying around, you can prebuff significantly more than that). If you spend two or more rounds buffing yourself, yeah you're gonna feel useless. At higher levels, divine favor is so low level that you can quicken it easily.

Learn to make use of a bead of karma (see strand of prayer beads), incense of meditation (use a ring of sustenance and burn while everyone else sleeps) and candles of invocation. Used properly, they can dramatically increase your casting ability, especially used alongside rods.

As others have mentioned, evangelist (the cleric archetype) is really good if you're campaign starts past level 6 (see flagbearer + banner of the ancient kings). However, it's almost strictly worse than base cleric before level 7 when inspire courage becomes a move action.

As a final note, growth domain is a hell of a drug. It get's better the more you look into it. First it's like "oh, a quickened spell at level one, nice". Then it's "oh, this lets you have 20 ft reach without the 10 ft vulnerability problem, nice". Then it's "holy sht, depending on which direction you enlarge/shrink, this gives you the equivalent of free extra 5-ft steps". Seriously, you can full attack somebody 30 ft away from you by 5-ft stepping towards them, enlarging in their direction, and using your 20-ft reach. Then if they approach, they get AoO'ed. On your following turn, you shrink down to a spot 5 ft away from them, full attack again and 5-ft step back. They now have to get AoO'ed AGAIN to approach. It's an unbelievably advantageous game.

Ever since I picked one up for the first time almost a decade ago, I have played exclusively cleric.

Mikemad wrote:

Coven/Army Across Time infinite caster level builds were banned fairly swiftly for me after trippling the radius of the world with a control water spell, killing everyone.

Even if you manage to convince your GM to go with the most lenient definition of "statistics", how would you get infinite caster levels?

I'm not gonna go into all the math, it's discussed in great depth in other threads, but heres the basic idea. First, get a ring of tactical precision to make coven give +2 (or +3 if your gm rules that the buff given by the copies who also have the ring counts as a separate source and thus stacks with the buff you receive; this is discussed elsewhere). Each casting of army across time buffs your caster level, causing the next casting to create more duplicates, and thus more caster levels. Theres a series involved, your first goal (by filling your entire spellbook with AAT and metamagics of it) is to get a high enough caster level that you can ring of sustenance rest for 2 hours, prepare spells, and then still have the last casting going and continue with fresh spells. Then you get a high enough CL that an extended version lasts over 24 hours. Then you can just keep resting and casting ad infinitum. There may or may not be pearls of power involved. There also might be more aid buffs involved. I don't really know. I wasn't the one to make the build. Its also limited by space.

Coven/Army Across Time infinite caster level builds were banned fairly swiftly for me after trippling the radius of the world with a control water spell, killing everyone.

I doubt you want to be an evil scythe wielder, but if you could find a way to make that work, the divine fighting technique "Way of Hunger" is really good for that.

Pretty much title. When a medium humanoid is hit with an enlarge person spell, they take up a 2x2 square. When the spell ends, how do you decide which of the four squares they shrink into? This mattered in one of our games as it decided whether or not one of the players was in reach of an enemy afterwards.

Im not saying you keep growth. Im saying use growth as a crutch till you get a better late level domain.

Hi guys,

A little while ago, user LordKailas made a post regarding this magic item:

Icon of Aspects:
Aura moderate evocation; CL 7th; Slot none; Price 5,500 gp; Weight 1 lb.
DESCRIPTION
When a cleric with an icon of aspects prepares spells, she may replace the granted powers of one of her domains with those of a different domain she doesn’t have but that is associated with her deity. This lasts until the next time she prepares spells. The cleric must meet the level requirements for both abilities. For example, a 6th-level cleric with the Good domain who swaps for the Healing domain can’t use healer’s blessing even though she meets the level requirement, because the holy lance power of the Good domain requires her to be 8th level. The icon affects only granted powers, not domain spells, bonus feats, or other benefits. The icon can affect only one person at a time.

This got me thinking about a possible way to make the transition from low level to mid-high level cleric much smoother.

It all revolves around the growth subdomain of plant domain, which gives toggleable swift action enlarge person from level 1, and the separatist archetype, which lets you have a domain your deity doesn't normally get, but at a penalty. Here are a couple of things to note:

1) Growth domain is extremely good at low levels, arguably the best domain at level 1.
2) It is almost completely unaffected by the penalty from separatist archetype, you just get one less use per day of the first domain power (the second power essentially doesn't matter).
3) You get the second domain power at level 6 rather than 8, which means separatist puts it exactly at 8, thus allowing you to use the icon of aspects effectively to get other domain powers.

Ya know all those domains which are super good starting at level 8ish but suck at low levels (Madness, Heroism, ect)? This gives us a nice way to get into those domains without suffering in the early game. Here's how it goes:

At low levels, with literally any deity, use separatist archetype to take growth domain. Have overpowered 20 ft reach longspear which you can turn on and off on a turn-by-turn basis (avoiding the usual 20 ft reach blindspot issue), as well as barkskin and enlarge person.

At level 8, you gain the second growth domain power (which is relatively bad). Ditch 5k gp on an icon of aspects, and from this point forward use it to swap out growth domain's powers for the desired late-game domain's powers. For your troubles, you also get to have enlarge person and barkskin for the rest of your life. Neet.

As an example, build an Iomedae reach cleric starting with Growth/Tactics and transitioning into Heroism/Tactics at level 8 when heroism comes online.

Hi guys,

I know that things like stat-boosting items let you qualify for feats provided you wear them for at least 24 hours, but does this apply to other items?

Specifically, does the bane baldric let you qualify for extended bane feat if worn for 24 hours?

I think you are correct, it doesn't stack with weapon enhancements. However it does scale approximately twice as fast as weapon enhancements, and from level 12 onward it's giving you bonuses you wouldn't normally get.

Fair enough. However, I'm not sure it's worth spending a domain in that case. I could just as easily separatist into growth domain (you don't lose much from it) and have toggleable 20 ft reach and a comparable damage buff (1d8 -> 2d6 and 16 -> 18 str) starting from level 1 for the same AC loss. Also means I wouldn't have to be evil.

Ignoring DR is interesting though. Not sure how to compare that to other things.