(Sorry ahead of time for the long post)
Ok so i've been with this group a few months now and i am facing a rather alien concept to me atm. My last group i got kicked out because i couldn't keep up, my characters died like 5 min into each session and i would spend the rest of the session building a new character, i couldn't even figure out which die were which much less when to use them. Now i'm facing a situation where the group is upset because i'm "doing so much better than everyone else".
Now here's what happened. This group has become a good group of friends and i really enjoy playing with them, however one of the members decided to DM while the first DM fixed his campaign. The only caveat is that he has to finish his campaign this time. To top it off he supposedly runs really massive campaigns that take many months to complete. On the first night of his session we had a person die from a situation giving the party no other choice to make and no roll to survive, just an automatic he wanted to kill someone no ifs and buts just because he could. This alone told me we had a killer DM, not a typical killer DM where you can make choices or good rolls to survive but every night people are gona die and nothing can be done. So i figure i'd make myself an optimized build in an attempt to survive longer than half a night. I had insane AC, insane damage, and one free breath of life per day due to various feat combos and magic gear combos i picked up along the way. He got upset because he couldn't figure out ways around it even though there are many many ways around it. Just like there were ways around his style of DM there were ways around my style of play.
Well now he's upset and said i can't make powerful characters anymore because it isn't fair to other players. Now this i was confused about so i asked what he meant. Apparently me using the full selection of official Paizo books to hand build my character the old fashioned way on a sheet gave me an unfair advantage because everyone else was using the basic version of hero labs and didn't have all the books on hero labs. I explained the only reason i made optimized builds instead of the fun quirky characters i prefer (can you say paladin wielding a skillet)was because every night had many no option pointless deaths that i was attempting to survive partially because it takes time to build a character the old fashioned way. He told me i need to buy hero labs to make it fair to the other players. But frankly i don't have 30-100$ to spend, hell i'm still behind on rent and only eating every two days....
Now i like this group and they are good friends so i really don't want to leave and go search for a new group again. But i also don't wana hafta step out for 6+ months and wait for a new DM campaign. I have so far gone out of my way to make a pure support spell-caster that can't even deal more than 1d4 damage per every two turns, but it seems like he's getting upset about that to. Now frankly i can't take the DM's Fiance Feat to survive so i'm screwed. I was thinking i could instead make a blind cripple mute village idiot who's only weapon is flinging poo at the enemy and doesn't have a single stat above 6.... but that's rather extreme. Any suggestions out there?