Ymmijx's page

i saw a few people talking about this so here's a quick stats lesson.
dropping someone from 50% to 40% is more than a 10% drop in overall effectiveness. the target was only 50% likely to succeed originally and they are now 40% likely to succeed. for a simpler example imagine dropping them from 20% to 10% the action they performed was unlikely to succeed before but now it's half as likely to work. there were 4 of 20 success results but now there are 2 in 20. this is why tanks are a thing. stack 1 person's ac to the point that people never hit them and you'll get much better results than the same amount of ac spread across a whole party. +1 ac party wide is generally a lesser effect than +4-6 ac to one target.

this is a really common issue in how people think about statistics. it's easy to under or overvalue things when you only consider the isolated effect rather than its total impact on the outcome.

"Eyes of the Streets (Su) Once per day as a full-round action, you can summon a spirit rat, pigeon, or similar tiny creature to serve as your eyes on, above, and beneath the streets—this spirit serves as an arcane eye. At 10th level, you can summon multiple such spirits; this ability functions as prying eyes. At 15th level, this ability functions as greater prying eyes."

ok so two or three questions immediately come to mind. The first is duration limitations. The second is do your spirit buddies have physical forms? can they interact? arcane eye is intangible but prying eyes aren't. finally arcane eye has unlimited summoning range. does this ability similarly let me put it anywhere i can see?

There are a few but they are almost exclusively consumables. Spells in pathfinder do damage based on caster level so an easy way to set up such an item is “+1 caster level on evocation spells” there’s an ioun stone that grants +1 caster level straight up so you can back calc the market price of the item off that if you care.
Alternatively the consumables are things like liquid ice being used as an extra material component in cone of cold to add 1 dmg per die or acid being used in a number of spells to add a coupld points of acid damage(my favorite use here is acid+grease). I assume the character isn’t terribly specialized if you want to give him more damage but you can also play around with a custom item that boosts different elements in different ways. Make lightning bend to hit metal targets, make fire aoes bigger, add dots to acid or debuffs to cold. Most if that can actually be done with metamagic rods but having a single item that can do a lot of narrow stuff is fun

Protection/Magic Circle against X. It's so good and so underrated, at least at my table it is.

but... the bonuses are resistance and deflection so they don't stack with ANYTHING.

i realize this thread died a long time ago but for anyone who comes here looking for info on how best to animate dead:
1. play occultist. you dont get animate dead until lv 7 but you can control and animate 4 extra hit die per level you posses. now 1 casting gets you 6hd per level you have.
2. spell specialization raises your effective level by 2 for all aspects of a chosen spell. now you can raise 4 more hit die with each casting.
3. invest in a voidstick. it desecrates the area it is placed in. now you can animate a total of 8xlevel+8.
4. ask your dm if stacking templates falls under the same multiplying rules as other pathfinder mechanics such as crit multipliers.
if yes: you can animate a 16 hit die bloody burning skeletal champion at level 7
if no: you can animate a 16 hit die bloody skeletal champion at lv 7!!!
all you need is to somehow find a 14 hit die corpse or equivalent thereof.

it's also worth noting that pathfinder typically assumes that multiplier are additive. like if you charge with a lance that has it's crit multiplier set to x3(plenty of ways to do that) it won't do x6 but x4 damage. this isn't always the case but considering it takes x2 hit dice for each template it's really the only way to get 3+ templates on one undead short of playing an occultist. and honestly i think we'd all rather have a bloody frostfallen giant skeletal champion rather than a pile of generic bodies. easier to run and more badass.

poisonist archetype for alchemist gets a poison that can do a d6 of bleed. i'm planning to use the rules for milking poison to extract it from myself then use the concentrate poison discovery to up the save and duration then slap it on a snakebite dagger and basically have a dagger that can dish a disgusting poison dc.

caster level cheese is best spent on spells meant to scale well such as control winds(hit cl 15 and you make a tornado). if your dm allows 3.5 spells be a druid with an animal companion that has a poison attack and use venomfire

You can dip into sorcerer rakshasa bloodline for silvertongue and grab some spells like charm or hypnotize while your at it. I have a sorcerer/oracle at lv 2 that has +19 to bluff counting silvertongue.