Mikemad's page

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Those percentages are accurate, but misleading, as the subsequent reductions are a higher percentage of a smaller amount.

Using your example, and saying that a hit would do 100 points, and only one attack a round (just to make the math easy) with no spells active you would expect to take an average of 50 points each round (of course it would actually be 100 or 0, but that doesn't matter for the explanation). We'll also continue to avoid any critical rolls.

After casting your first spell, you would now expect to take an average of 35 points each round, which is indeed 70% of 50, so 30% less. It is also 15 points less.

After the second spell, you would expect to take 20 points of damage each round. This is 57% of the previous 35 points, so your 43% less is also accurate. What is important though is that it is also 15 points less damage.

The first spell reduced your expected damage by 15 points. The second spell reduced it by 15 points. Together they reduced it by 30 points, not syngergizing at all.

This is because the d20 roll is a flat roll. Moving the target up by 1 will have the same mathematical reduction of damage regardless of whether you are changing the required target from a 5 to 6 or from a 15 to a 16.

If you want to measure "tankiness" by the average damage you take per swing of the opponent, then you are correct; there is no difference.

This is why every wizard player I talk to thinks AC is bad. They don't have enough base armor for buffing their AC to really matter. Everything is going to hit them regardless.

That's a tough fight! Pounce is very strong. The odds are against you. As you've likely deduced, your best option is to trip or otherwise prevent the Pounce from landing. Even with a good CMB and Tandem Trip feat the pounce will eventually get through. Pounce defeats reach tactics in much the same way that reach tactics defeat non-pouncing multi-attackers.

They have 4 legs and can fly. I don't think tripping is going to be a viable option. My hope is to use the tactics discussed in this thread to force a situation where they can't charge at all. If they try they just get hit with an AoO and then lose their action.

Holy sht, this blew up. Thanks for all the responses. If anyone is curious, the reason I asked about this is for countering pounce. Specifically synthesist pounce.

Im trying to find ways to avoid getting 1-rounded by multi attack pounce, which means I need a way to stop them from just charging every round. This gives me a viable option to play a sort of poke-game with a pouncer. Forcing them to trade hit-for-hit instead of 5+ hits vs my s#%*ty iteratives. I could never beat a well-built synth in a slugfest.

Evangelist by itself doesn't use much, true. Evangelist with Banner of the Ancient kings requires 15 Charisma, a feat, and an 18k gold investment. It also notably eats your spontaneous cures and limits your channeling ability.

Summoning doesn't use any attributes, true. However, doing it effectively as a cleric eats 4 feats (You cant take herald caller as an evangelist). This sort of infernal summoning also restricts you to Asmodeus, so my domain options are extremely limited.

You need at least 13-14 in wisdom in order to be able to eventually cast 9th level spells. I also hate running characters under 14 constitution.

All told, this build eats 5 feats, a domain, 18k cash, restricts my second domain, requires 14 wisdom, 15 charisma, 14 constitution, everything else goes to strength. It also means most of my higher level spells go to summoning, and im stuck in light armor or mithral breastplate.

You have the following resources to spend when making a build:

Attributes
Feats
Domains
Spell Slots
Gold

I don't have very much wiggle room, unfortunately. That said, I'm still playing with it.

And that is what Contingency is for, even if all it did was teleport away his corpse.

And lets not mention what other buffs this guy should of had up. A serious BBG should never be presented to the PCs in a weakened, unbuffed state unless the players WORKED to get that. A wind wall and a cloak of displacement would of guaranteed the party couldn't do enough to really challenge this guy. And it would of provided enough information about the BBG to face him later if you would of gotten that nasty surprise now.

You're level 9. Every BBG should have a challenging AC that stacks multiple defensive spells including Mirror Image. You're entire party should be sick of seeing Mirror Image and at level 9 most of the party should lack a method of overcoming it. Everything I'm saying here just puts the BBG at an APs standard level. This isn't even talking about making a boss tough enough to stand up to a heavily optimized group.

He had 32 AC, stoneskin and a cloak of displacement (which feels like a bad item to me, the version that gives blur seems better) when we fought him. The cloak takes a standard action to activate and only lasts 15 rounds per day, so he never got it up. Wind wall also only lasts rounds/level (although fickle winds might have worked). The bloodrager's greatsword is adamantine, the archer had clustered shots, so stoneskin did little. 32 AC wasn't particularly hard to hit.

I don't know why he didn't have mirror images or contingency. I understand no mirror images to a certain extent because it only lasts minutes/level and you cant expect to have it up all day. Dunno about the contingency.

It felt more like a mistake on his part than a "he doesn't care" sort of thing.

That said, this is all beside the point. I'm just wondering about spells. Whether the GM set things up properly is it's own debate. This was just me and some friends; none of us are particularly amazing GMs and there aren't any regulations or anything.

Edit: Actually, I think I might know what happened. We fought the wizard at the bottom of a tomb designed specifically to stop things from teleporting out (various horrible monsters imprisoned). Its possible he had a contingency teleport, and it fizzled upon activation due to the dungeon's properties.